Streeck, Jrgen, Goodwin, Charles, LeBaron, Curtis (Eds.), 2011a. Embodied Action. Language and Body in the Material World. CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge.

Streeck, Jrgen, Goodwin, Charles, LeBaron, Curtis, 2011b. Embodied interaction in the material world: an introduction. In: Streeck, J., Goodwin,C., LeBaron, C. (Eds.), Embodied Action. Language and Body in the Material World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1--28.

Tulbert, Eve, Goodwin, Marjorie H., 2011. Choreographies of attention: multimodality in a routine family activity. In: Streeck, J., Goodwin, C.,LeBaron, C. (Eds.), Embodied Action. Language and Body in the Material World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 79--92.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.09.016

Discussion note

Incarnation, sensation and ventriloquism: For a sensitive andconstitutive view of pragmatics

Franois CoorenUniversit de Montral, Canada

Received 29 July 2013

I would like to first thank Francesca Bargiela for inviting me to contribute to this mini-forum on sensory pragmatics. Thisnew field of study that she envisions proposes, as we know, to look beyond discursive pragmatics by exploring thequestions of embodiment, sensation and materiality. According to her, studying discourse (understood as language inaction) from a pragmatic perspective is not enough, marking the limits of the so-called discursive turn. This leads her torely on MerleauPontys philosophy by inviting us to center our reflections on the body conceived as constitutive ofexperiences and sensations.

In what follows, I propose to present an ontological position that I think could help us go beyond what she rightlyidentified as the limits of discursivity. As we will see, such a positioning goes against what most pragmatic studies tend totake for granted in the way they conceive of the functioning of language and communication. If I agree that embodiment,sensations and materialities should constitute key aspects of the way we study communication and language in general, Ialso think that some major reconceptualization needs to be done in order to develop an analytical vocabulary that can dojustice to the multi-modal character of interaction (Streeck et al., 2011).

So where should/could we begin? Echoing Alfred North Whitehead (1920), I believe that sensory pragmatics couldstart by questioning what this process philosopher denounced, almost one hundred years ago, as the bifurcation ofnature. The bifurcation of nature, according to him, consists of incorrectly dividing reality into two systems, which are thenconsidered to be disconnected or disjointed from each other: on one side, primary qualities (the physical properties of theworld, the realm of things) and, on the other side, secondary qualities (what human beings experience, the realm ofsensations and understandings).

Although it could be argued that pragmatism -- as exemplified, for instance, by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce(1955), William James (1950) or John Dewey (1916) -- precisely consists in an attempt to reconnect these qualities thatwere believed to be separated, it remains that pragmatics, as a sub-discipline of linguistics, still appears to implicitly orexplicitly disconnect or bifurcate the realm of things from the realm of experience, sensation and understanding.

Three examples could, at this point, be given: Grices (1957) famous distinction between natural meaning and non-natural meaning; Searles (1969, 1979) intentionalist perspective on speech act theory, or even what Garfinkel (2002)presents as his intentional misreading of phenomenology. Although I do not have enough space here to explain why (butsee Cooren, 2000, 2008a, 2009a, 2010), I would contend that these three authors, despite their undeniable contributionsto the study of language and interaction, implicitly reproduce this bifurcation that Whitehead (1920) denounced.

But what does it mean to rewire or recouple primary and secondary qualities? It means that analysts shouldacknowledge that human interactants are, paradoxically, not the only ones who should be systematically deemed ascommunicating, interacting or even saying things in a given situation (Cooren and Matte, 2010). In keeping with Nietzsche(2009 [1887]), Derrida (1982), Latour (1994) or Barad (2007), this amounts to asserting that there is no absolute origin to

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E-mail address: f.cooren@umontreal.ca.

action (Bencherki and Cooren, 2011) and that many different types of actors can be identified as participating in orcontributing to a given act or activity.

If people act (and I am, of course, not questioning that they, indeed, do!), it is because they are themselves animated ordriven by specific reasons/emotions/passions/concerns, which themselves connect the humans who experience themwith the so-called realm of things. Instead of separating the realm of primary qualities from the realm of secondaryqualities, we can show, on the contrary, that many things communicate or express themselves -- by proxy, so to speak -- ina given interaction. If pragmatics does need to develop a sensory agenda, it also needs to advance a constitutive one, i.e.,it needs to show that it has a lot to say about how our hybrid world (made of humans and non-humans) is constituted(Cooren and Matte, 2010; Taylor and Van Every, 2011).

Interestingly, we have mundane ways to express these hybrid forms of agency and it is by speaking figuratively ormetaphorically. For instance, saying Jealousy is striking again is a way to recognize that something -- here, anemotion called jealousy -- is apparently operating and can be felt and recognized as doing something in a givensituation. Jealousy is said to strike by leading the person who experience it to do things judged reprehensible or wrong.This is indeed a metaphorical or figurative way of speaking, but who said that metaphors and figures (of speech) did nothave anything to say about what happens in a given situation, i.e., about the reality of a situation (Lakoff and Johnson,1980)?

Saying something like jealousy is striking is a way to recognize and assert that humans are enthused, animated, orsometimes devastated by specific emotions, preoccupations or passions and that these latter can lead their bearers to actin specific ways. Although I acknowledge that this way of presenting the situation begs the question of responsibility, mypoint is not to say that there is just on way of (re-)presenting a given setting. On the contrary, there are many ways ofdescribing/analysing/representing what is taking place in a given situation (for instance, it is not only jealousy that might bestriking, but also, and unfortunately, a person with a knife. . .).

If some ways of defining or talking about a situation definitely tend to deresponsibilize human beings, this does notmean that these ways of describing what is happening do not have any veridictional character and should be just ignored.It just means that many things can be deemed as doing something in a given situation and that addressing the question ofresponsibility precisely consists of acknowledging this multiplicity of agencies (for more details, see Cooren, 2010,especially Chapter 5).

Recognizing that nature does not bifurcate thus consists of acknowledging that a series of translations take place from,for instance, a presumably lost handkerchief to the murder by Othello of its owner, Desdemona, through the jealousreaction this object triggered in the Moorish general of Venice. It also requires that we, as analysts, be more open toquestions related to causalities and effects. Thinking in terms of predispositions, emotions, realities and their effects onwhat is done or said does not mean that a given translation will always obtain. It means, however, that some specificcauses and effects can be prospectively anticipated and retrospectively identified. In other words, we need to recognize,for instance, that in the conjunction because there is the verb cause and that X being the reason for Y also meansthat X (at least partially) caused Y, whether X is presented as a reason, a situation, a preoccupation, a passion or anemotion (or all of them at the same time, which is possible).

But at this point, one could wonder about the relevance of this reflection to pragmatic studies, especially in connectionwith discursivity and language use. After all, pragmaticians tend to be mainly interested in how people do things withwords, or more generally, how people communicate with each other, whether through what they say or write, or throughtheir visible conduct. Fighting against the bifurcation of nature might be interesting from a philosophical viewpoint, but itremains to be shown what pragmaticians could learn from such an ontological position.

After all, process philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead, but also Gilles Deleuze (1998), Gabriel Tarde, 2010 [1898],or Gilbert Simondon (1989) are not particularly well known for their detailed study of conversations (and for good reasons,since they never really demonstrated any special interest in language studies!). One could even consider their writings tobe a blow against any linguistic or discursive turn whatsoever -- Deleuze (1998), for instance, did not hesitate to say, Forme, a text is merely a small cog in an extra-textual practice (p. xvi). In other words, what can we learn from scholarswhose respective ontologies (despite their disparities) seem in direct contradiction with pragmatic perspectives onlanguage and communication?

My response to this is that taking communication and language seriously (which, I easily concede, is not what processphilosophers are doing) precisely consists in showing, as announced before, that various things get communicated orcommunicate themselves in what is said or done in interaction. In order to grasp this reality, I have proposed elsewhere tospeak, metaphorically and figuratively, in terms of ventriloquism (Cooren, 2008b, 2010, 2012).

Echoing Bakhtins (1981, 1986) notions of ventriloquation, superaddressee (Bakhtin, 1994) and reported speech(Volosinov, 1986), this metaphor invites us to not only recognize the polyphonic character of speech acts, texts andturns of talks (Cooren, 2009b; Mey, 2000), but also to reconnect the realm of things with the realm of experience,sensations and understanding. How does it do that? Precisely by inviting us to start from what could be called anagnostic position regarding what or who is talking or expressing himself/herself/itself in a given situation. In other

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words, what or who is acting or doing something can never be a priori defined, but depends on how it is staged ininteraction.

To illustrate this point, let us consider the following interaction. Two colleagues A and B are meeting each other in ahallway. B looks concerned about something.

T1 A: How are you? You look worried.T2 B: My relationship with George as a colleague has really become difficult for the past few months.T3 A: But why dont you speak to him?T4 B: Oh no, I cant, I dont want to jeopardize our friendship.T5 A: But it is precisely because hes your friend that you owe him the truth.

At first sight, this interaction looks awfully local and circumscribed: A is speaking to B who replies to him, a response thatinitiates a brief discussion about a situation that B seems to be enduring regarding his relationship with his colleague andfriend, George. A priori, one can only discern two voices -- those of A and B -- that speak of a situation they co-construct byorienting to it in several ways. But let us look a little closer to what occurs in this interaction, and see if other voices couldnot be identified. To be as clear as possible in my demonstration, I will proceed turn by turn.

T1: A is asking B how he is doing and in doing so takes the opportunity to fish for information about what might cause orexplain what appears to be his interlocutors worried look. If we ask ourselves what leads A to say what he says to B, i.e.,what could make this turn of talk accountable, one could not but notice that it is Bs concerned look that aroused Ascuriosity and led this latter to mention this observation to B. In other words, ventriloquism is at stake when weretrospectively note that, ceteris paribus, it is Bs worried face that leads A to make this observation to B.

T2: in responding to As question, B explicitly accounts for what preoccupies him, i.e., a situation that seems to affect him:his relationship with his colleague George, which, he says, has become difficult over the past months. Note how a situation --Georges conduct -- translates itself into a concern, the one that B evokes, which translates itself into an account. In T2, B thusventriloquizes a situation that appears to concern, animate or inhabit him, marking the absence of rupture or disconnectionbetween the reality of this situation, as perceived by B, and what he says and express in his response.

T3: Here, A is asking B to explain the reasons that lead him not to speak with George about this problem. In asking thisquestion, A is therefore looking for the reasons that might drive or animate his interlocutor, that is, reasons that would justifyBs inclination to not talk about this issue with his colleague George. Ventriloquism is at stake in that A inquires to know whatleads B not to talk to George. In other words, what forms of attachment to certain principles or certain realities seem to holdhim in this situation? What is translated through this silence? What does it express? What does this communicate?

T4: We then see B responding by invoking his incapacity to talk about this problem with George (I cant), whichimplies that something actually seems to prevent him from discussing with his friend. That something (which he does notname yet and remains for now unclear) is implicitly presented as active in these circumstances. This is what is supposedto cause/justify/explain his silence. He then specifies that it is in the name of his friendship with George that he chose/decided not to speak with him. In keeping with William Jamess (1976) radical empiricism, one could indeed note thatfriendship, as a relation, definitely is something with its own mode of existence, as well as its rights and obligations(Souriau, 1956). It is these rights and obligations that B seems to recognize and especially feel in his decision not to speakof the problem he is experiencing with George. This link is, according to B, what seems to be active in him in thesecircumstances and this is what apparently leads him not to talk to his friend George.

T7: Here, we note that the same thing, the same figure, may be invoked/translated/staged to support two opposingactions. In this case, A appears to think that it is, on the contrary, in the name of their friendship that B should talk toGeorge. We thus see that there is, of course, no unilateral way to ventriloquize or interpret something like friendship. It canexpress itself by telling George that a problem exists or, on the contrary, by telling him nothing. Note also that A says, Butit is precisely because hes your friend that you owe him the truth, which means that, according to A, their friendship wouldsomehow compel B to speak out, a strong enough position. As already noted, a bond of friendship comes with its rights,but also and especially its obligations, which A reminds B of (even if this interpretation on As part is, of course,questionable, always questionable).

In conclusion, what does this short analysis show us? First, that multiple voices or figures can be heard in thisinteraction. These figures are -- and this list is, I might add, by no means exhaustive -- As curiosity, Bs worried look, A andBs friendship, Bs apprehension, but also a situation (the one that B has been enduring over the past months). The voicesof multiple figures can thus be recognized if we are willing to consider all the things that get communicated orcommunicate themselves in an interaction. This furthermore implies that we acknowledge the part of reality that any figureor metaphor potentially represents, i.e., its mode of existence.

Who could deny, indeed, that it is a specific situation -- the tension that B experiences in his relationship with George,and therefore the truth or reality of this tension -- that appears to be reflected, expressed, translated, embodied,

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ventriloquized here in the interaction we just analyzed? Or who would even deny that it is some form of fear andapprehension (and thus its truth, its reality) that gets expressed, embodied or ventriloquized in Bs refusal to talk toGeorge? As we see, there is no disconnection, no breakout, no bifurcation between situations and realities on the onehand, and concerns, discourse and turns of talk on the other hand. If I had to summarize my views in one sentence, I wouldeven say that every interaction, every conversation constitutes the dislocated locus where our universe (in some of itsincarnations) get to speak with itself.

But please dont make me say what I did not mean to say (though I obviously have little control over how I will beventriloquized!). This universe, if it does speak, it is every time in a certain way, according to a certain tonality, from acertain breath. If ventriloquism implies that specific figures be made to speak or say something (which is whatinterpretation is all about), it also implies the eventful character of this type of activity, i.e., its relative part ofindetermination.

As we see, my version of sensory pragmatics certainly comes with a price, as it enjoins us to relinquish our human-centered analyses to fully acknowledge the multiple things and beings that ventriloquize, express and incarnatethemselves in interaction. The body and what it says is unquestionably an important figure in this new equation. However,as I have tried to show, we need to be as open as possible about the multiplicity of figures that constitute our daily life.

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Embodied discursivity: Introducing sensory pragmaticsIntroductionWhy discourse is not enoughEnfleshing discourseCentralising the social bodySensory pragmatics: what prospects?References

Incarnation, sensation and ventriloquism: For a sensitive and constitutive view of pragmaticsReferences

Mead, Merleau-Ponty and embodied communicationReferences

Making semantics and pragmatics ``sensory''Sensory semanticsToward a sensory pragmaticsAcknowledgementsReferences