LECTURE #16: Collective Conversational Remembering

Middleton, D. & Edwards, D. (1990) Conversational remembering: a social psychological approach. In D. Middleton and D. Edwards (Eds.) Collective Remembering. London: Sage Publications Ltd, pp.23-45.

-             To study, not how conversational competence might be represented cognitively, but how cognition is represented conversationally.

-             To study how people 'jointly construct' versions of events when it is as if they are 'talking about them'.

-             The pragmatics of communication - the communicative uses to which people put their talk.

-             People are rarely concerned in their talk 'about the past' with dispassionate accuracy; once removed from the confines and requirements of special and formalized occasions and situations.

-             What in the past have been called distortions of recall can be seen as functional and sensible requirements of the occasion.

-             Everyday conversations relate to the working out of larger historical, political, and ideological themes.

-             Serial reproduction not social enough: joint remembering is exhibited when people are allowed to engage in conversation - they create together a joint version of remembered events.

Example: film ET.

-             Use of various discursive practices in establishing an agreed account - distinguishing between versions that were i) held jointly; ii) disputed, or iii) could be made joint through persuasion and agreement.

-             Use of specific linguistic devices in the joint task: i) tags (that signal or invite ratification - 'doesn't he?'); ii) overt agreements (yeh, that's it; I remember); iii) default continuity (such that each successive contribution was taken to build upon the previous ones); iv) ratification through repetition (of previous speakers contributions); v) overt requests for assistance ('and what happens then?'); vi) as well as metacognitive formulations of the process of remembering itself ('that's right I remember).

Context as shared understanding:

‒            The conversational context: “As any conversation proceeds, it does so on the basis of [in the context of - js] a continuously updated but contentious understanding of what has been said so far, what is understood, [and] what is yet to be resolved” (p.26).

‒            “Speakers can only act on what they understand and remember, and it is a concern to which they address themselves, just what that ‘context’ at any time should be. Part of this shared context is a continuous reworked collective memory” (p.26).

‒            Each 'event' added to the last by 'default continuity' until a disagreement forces a reformulation, a relocation, and a restart.

‒            Example (teacher: privileged 'position' as arbiter of a legitimate collective account): method 'elicitation'/'organization of turns at speaking'/'according contributions their place'/'correcting from position of superior (?) knowledge' - the creation of a collective account provides an occasion for the 'socialization of the children into scientific thought and practice' - use of 'lesson summaries' to make disorderly occurrences into an orderly occurrence.

Metacognitive formulations:

‒            Metacognitive formulations: “... the very notion of mind, of mental life, of memory and experience as objects of reflective awareness, is given shape and occasion by discursive practices in which versions are being compared, disputed, and conjoined” (p.28).

‒            Rather than as 'reflective understandings' or 'observations' about (?) the nature of their own mental processes, metacognitive accounts occur at points where the activity of remembering runs into trouble or difficulty (cf. Mills, 1940) - where a person's account provokes sudden recognition, or disputation, or puzzlement.

‒            The awareness of what it is to have a 'memory' is explored, and articulated, when a matter of not being able to remember something arises, or, of being suddenly reminded of something, or, of having something one 'the tip of one's tongue', etc.

‒            “In conversational remembering,... the talk is revealed as more than just a window on mental process and metacognitive conceptions. Conversations emerge as a significant environment in which such thoughts are formulated, justified, and socialized according to how other speakers talk about mental processes” (p.29).

‒            Conversation is a significant 'environment' in which what a 'thought' is, what a 'memory' is, is formulated and justified - it is also the environment in which new members (children) are socialized, and the socialization of old members (adults) is continually reproduced (they are 'reminded' as to what 'remembering' is).

‒            Metacognitive 'awareness' is thus not a matter of becoming conscious of one's own 'inner' processes, but of grasping how to make use of a certain vocabulary and discourse of mental life - a culturally shared discourse for making and justifying claims about (so-called) 'mental processes', i.e., for justifying, arguing about, accounting to others for what we claim to know.

The use of inference and argument in the construction of a joint version of events:

‒            Inference and argument in collective remembering: “One of the appealing features of studying conversational remembering is that we often find [people’s] processes of sense-making overtly expressed in the talk” (p.29).

‒            Much of the psychologically interesting stuff in conversation is not immediately visible in the 'data' of conversation; it has to be 'theorized' to make sense of the observed discrepancies between input and output, i.e., linked by the use of various 'theoretical instructions' to the culture's 'vocabulary and discourse of mental life'.

‒            Reference to 'mental processes' usually unnecessary in the ordinary flow of conversation; the existence and operation of 'schemas', 'scripts', 'mental representations' all have to be inferred by the analysts.

‒            When people 'make sense' together of past events, they articulate the grounds and the criteria for what is remembered - but, we can see that the criteria are contingent upon (as in a murder defence in a law court) the action towards which the talk is oriented (i.e., they are not general criteria).

-             Hence, something should be accepted, not solely because it represents a 'logical' order of events, but also because it fits in with the way of making sense of things which is currently being established within the group.

-             Inferences are sensitive to social considerations framed so as to dispute, or to forestall alternative accounts, in favor of the one being offered (Billig).

-             'Remembering events' is always the production of a 'version of events', which is accepted so far as it cannot be disputed (then) by anyone.

Discursive frames:

-             The effect of communicative requirements: the request for a 'narrative structure'.

-             Use of 'memorable event' expressions - always offered for 'reaction' (Bakhtin).

Text and talk:

-             People's performance occasioned by 'instructions' to talk in a particular way: oral response; written response.

-             Text is 'for the record'.

-             What Bartlett attributed to the working of 'memory' - condensations, additions, transformations - can be attributed to the need to produced at writing version, 'for the record' - the style of remembering as a function of the style of the discourse constituting it.

Versions of events:

-             No one version can be taken as representing precisely what a persons remembers as each version does different pragmatic and rhetorical work - accounts' designed' to accomplish particular 'pragmatic' functions: to 'acquit' oneself; to 'convince' another; to 'persuade' them to join, etc.

-             Summaries used, e.g., to reformulate a 'messy' sequence of events in terms of what 'ought' to have happened.

-             Neisser's paper on John Dean: verbatim (word-for-word) recall; repisodic (overall nature and implications) recall; gist (getting essential features right despite omissions and errors).

-             Versions constructed rhetorically, when difficulties had arisen.

Conversations with children:

-             Socialization of remembering: how to talk about the past, what kinds of things are memorable, and why.

-             Work done by the mother: setting scene, locating photograph in its context prompts child for an affective evaluation that includes its relevance both to present and future.

-             Emotional (affective) states are treated as essentially rational - they require explanations, motivational accounts for why they occur.

‒            “... conversations [around photographs] were used by parents as opportunities for marking past events as significant, recalling children’s reactions and relationships, cuing the children to remember them, providing descriptions in terms of which those rememberings could be couched and providing all sorts of contextual reminiscences, prompted by the pictures, but of things and events not included within them” (p.39).

-             Child's identity is constructed by mother: 'You were a right little misery then'.

-             If remembering is an occasioned activity, i.e., done for pragmatic purposes, to bring off certain achievements in certain social and conversational contexts, then there is a sense in which children are taught how to remember, or how to do remembering... e.g., make use of 'reminders', use 'justifications', use narrative frames, make use of shared references - the process of putting together 'common versions' of things.

Discourse and cognition:

-             The individual-cognitive approach conflates method with theory, i.e., the 'method' becomes the 'theory' as input is traced through 'stages of processing' to the 'output' - the 'problematic, constructed' nature of remembering is avoided by the method.

-             What we have for comparison is not a discourse and a 'memory' of it, but two discourses at two different times, for two different purposes.

-             Claims gain their authority by being adequate to an already intralinguistically constructed reality, rather than to the nature of an extralinguistic world - a 'reality' which is permitted by or allowed by that extralingusitic world but which is not determined by it.

-             Thus, no priority is being claimed for language over the world, or for the world over language - they are interdependent.