On the power of the impossible

Overt and covert meaning-breaking in interaction

Chiara Bassetti†‡, Emanuele Bottazzi†, Roberta Ferrario†

†ISTC-CNR, Trento; ‡Sociology Department, Trento

chiara.bassetti;bottazzi;roberta.ferrario@loa.istc.cnr.it

While interacting, forcing the other into an impossible situation is an exercise of power.

Such very simple statement on ordinary interaction is not usually accounted for by

ethnographers. Yet it constitutes an interesting problem for the order* (Garfinkel 1967,

2008) of everyday social life. An impossible situation, in fact, entails meaning-

breaking, and of a peculiar kind. On the one hand, the latter has been studied and

practiced by researchers, namely Harold Garfinkel and his students, through what have

come to be known as “breaching experiments” – i.e., “incongruity-inducing procedures”

(Garfinkel 1963) – to the end of specifying “the attitude of daily life” (Schütz 1962); on

the other hand, as far as we know, there is a lack of research concerning the ways in

which people in ordinary rather than experimental interaction may use and/or be

confronted with similar procedures.

In the present paper, with “impossible situations” we mean situations that bring

the interaction to an impasse, to a point where the coordination is lost and either the

interaction itself is interrupted, or has to be radically changed1. In Andersen's famous

tale, the emperor is beautifully clothed, yet naked. The imposition to support the former

claim is for the subjects impossible to follow and, at the same time, not to follow. One

has to admire what s/he cannot see. Garfinkel defines “the senselessness of a field of

game events” that situation in which the “player is without a frame of possibilities to

which the physical stimulus field may be decided to correspond” (1963: 196). In

Andersen’s story the game is overt, in a sense, as it originates in an imposition (given

the asymmetry of the considered interaction: emperor-subjects), but anyway difficult to

explain. This is because there is also some covertness involved here (the imposition is

implicit), that makes even more complicated the interaction among participants. In this

1 On radical change, that is, redefinition of social reality, cf. Garfinkel (1963: 218-19).

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paper we will try to characterize this complex intertwining of levels in order to fully

appreciate the deep structure that underlies both overt and covert mechanisms of

meaning-breaking.

In situations like the one just mentioned, people (the participants) show a

prominent tendency to try to keep the interaction alive, as if they were intimately

attracted to it. Very often this means that they can mutually agree on things that are

against their own interests or desires, against the rules of the specific activity through

which they are interacting, or that are simply false or contradictory. As a consequence,

what can happen is that the specific activity through which those interactants were

enacting the interaction, becomes impossible to be continued, exactly for having

accepted too much, just for the sake of the interaction per se. In the end, it is the will of

going on in the interaction that can put interaction itself at risk. And when interaction is

at risk, the interactant who is able to offer the best solution (and sometimes the only

viable one) for sustaining and thus preserving the ongoing interaction can exert a certain

power over the other/s.

As we will see, participants may covertly manipulate interactions, in order to

bring them in the face of an impossible situation, which they have a “solution” for, and

all this with the purpose of gaining power over the other interactants. Or, especially

when the relations holding among participants is asymmetric, one of them can exert an

overt violence to force the others to continue the interaction and/or towards a certain

end.

In the present paper, we are particularly interested in studying interaction as it

manifests in regulated and institutional environments. In fact, “[t]he more the setting is

institutionally regulated and routinized, the more” persons take for granted those

“features of their situations that persons, while unaware of, are nevertheless responsive

to as required features” (Garfinkel 1963: 216-17).

In a person’s situation of events such features are integral specification of these events, and

are essential to his[/her] recognition of an environment as consisting of real and

understandable events and for his[/her] recognition of rational and reasonable actions

occurring in and upon that environment. (ibi: 217)

This means that the answer to the interactional tacit – yet unavoidable – question “What

event are we in?” (or, in a more conversation analytical fashion, “What sequence are we

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in?”) – an answer that, usually, participants reciprocally confirm one to the other by

way of their actions-in-interaction – may be more easily mystified, so to speak, if one

intends to (strategically) do so, in institutional contexts. On the other hand, the latter as

such are environments where power relations are particularly – and more explicitly –

salient.

In what follows, we shall start from presenting our conceptualization of the

basic features of meaning-making in everyday interaction, that is, of the ordinary

(re)production of social order* that takes place during and through interpersonal

interaction. Such conceptualization is the result of an interdisciplinary effort drawing on

ethnomethodology and social ontology. On the basis of the epistemic-oriented account

of interpersonal interaction and the impasses it may face that we propose (Section 1),

we turn to focus on meaning-breaking, particularly in institutional settings, and the

possibility it opens for the realization of impossible situations (Section 2). We then

consider meaning-breaking in situated interaction – that is, when institutions and rules

are (re)produced and made alive by members – with particular attention to power

relationships and the exercise of power (Section 3). Finally, before drawing some

conclusion on cheating and power-oriented interactional work, we consider the role of

the attractive force of interaction in both overt and covert meaning-breaking situations,

and the place violence takes in them, both in general and in relation to pre-existing

power inequalities (Section 4).

1. The attractive force of interaction and the Recognized Epistemic Field as a

coordination device

Interaction is deeply related to (the avoidance of) impossible situations, since

interaction is an end per se – that is, sustaining itself (Goffman 1959, 1983) – and a

fundamental commitment. Interaction is endowed with a sort of attractive force,

interactants are, in a manner of speaking, gravitated in keeping on interacting. They

have a tendency to continue interacting and to avoid impasses, that is, impossible

situations where coordination is lost and there is no (or just one) apparent way to

recover it.

The existence of such attraction of interaction can be argued in different ways

(cf. also Bassetti et al. 2013), starting with the aristotelian zoon politikon, to the recent

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findings in cognitive neuroscience (Cacioppo et al. 2012; Gallese 2001; Freedberg,

Gallese 2007; Oullier et al. 2008; Richardson et al. 2005; Rizzolatti et al. 1995;

Tomasello 2009). Following Collins (2008: 27), we could resume this line of thought by

saying that people are “hard-wired to get caught in a mutual focus of intersubjective

attention, and to resonate emotions from one body to another […] to be hyper-attuned to

each other emotionally, and hence to be especially susceptible to the dynamics of

interactional situations”. For Collins it is in this entrainment the basic reason that

violence is very difficult for humans.

Humans are hard-wired for interactional entrainment and solidarity; and this is what makes

violence so difficult. Confrontational tension and fear [...] is not merely an individual’s

selfish fear of bodily harm; it is a tension that directly contravenes the tendency for

entrainment in each other’s emotions when there is a common focus of attention. (Ibid.)

Consider the following example, where the tendency for entrainment of which

Collins talks is presented in both all its force and all its ordinariness, everydayness. It is

an excerpt from Daniel Pennac’s epistolary novel, Diary of a body:

37 years, 7 days Monday, October 17th 1960

Tijo, to whom I tell my experiments on the propagation of yawning, says me that,

concerning mimetic contamination, since some time on he is intrigued by what he calls the

“variation of the complicit opinions”. Two hours later he gives me a demonstration at the

table of the restaurant where we have lunch with three interlocutors of Z. Addressing the

entire table, Tijo declares: Yesterday my wife (obviously he is not married) has brought me

to see Bergman’s last one, it is really… And here, instead of closing, he remains silent, and

gives his own face an expression of disapproval that borders on disgust (tight naris, mouth

like a chicken’s ass, frowned forehead, face that pulls back away etc.), expression that I

immediately see appearing on our commensals’ face. When it has well took root, Tijo

finishes the sentence by exclaiming, with a shining smile: It’s really a masterpiece, isn’t it?,

display of enthusiasm that instantly upsets the geography of the faces, suddenly open,

smiling, enlightened by the expression of a complete approval.2

As for what we may call the structure of interpersonal interaction, we think it

is possible to isolate two basic “orders” in interaction. The first order interaction (FOI)

is the interaction itself, the very fact of interacting with the other, and this is what

attracts interactants. However, in order to keep this level alive, we have to interact in

2 Translated by the author from: Pennac, D., Journal d’un corps, 2012, Gallimard.

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some specific way, for instance by talking, moving, gesturing and so on. These

elements are grouped in what we call interactional units (IUs), like playing football,

going to a restaurant or walking together. The second order interaction (SOI) is

constituted by such IUs. In order to grasp the concept of interactional unit, we introduce

an example.. Dan is standing in line waiting for his turn at the cash register; when he

approaches the cashier, Alex, he starts complaining, while Alex is scanning his items.

She then utters the price he has to pay. Dan gives her money and says goodbye. They

start when Dan approaches the counter and go through the following (subsequent and

co-occurrent) IUs: “the check out”, “the complaining”, “the goodbye”. It is not possible

to experience any interaction without having a unit for interacting: we interact by doing

specific things together. Therefore, a SOI can be composed by different units and, in

order to have a FOI, it is necessary to have a SOI, via at least one IU.

A SOI could be seen as a bundle of units; when all the units that are active at a

certain time fall into a local impasse, also the FOI does, i.e., interaction ceases to exist.

Here a global, true impasse occurs. If we want to keep two things together, we need

some kind of connector; in interpersonal interaction, we could use the metaphor of a

rope. The connection itself represents the FOI, the rope is the SOI, the braided plies

IUs; if all plies are cut, then the two things fall apart. Obviously, interaction is more

complicated: there is more than dyadic in interaction; IUs can be tied together in such a

way that the impasse on one of them can have cascade effects on the others; etc. The

tendency to avoid impasses, therefore, is, at different degrees, the tendency to avoid

breaking IUs in such a way that interaction is not possible anymore.

Furthermore, impasses are connected with the possibly different meanings

participants may ascribe to the situation (What event/sequence are we in?). From this

point of view we are interested in pointing out that there are interactional moves

(Goffman 1981) that are considered relevant by participants with respect to the ongoing

interaction, and are regarded as having been mutually recognized. In other words they

make scores (Brandom 1994: 181), or Reference Points (RPs). In the account we are

presenting, situated and co-constructed meaning-making has, among its basic elements,

such RPs. Dan’s putting an item on the counter coupled with Alex picking it up and

scanning creates a RP in their interaction. With this RP in force, so to speak, it would be

awkward if, for instance, Alex, right after, ran away instead of doing the checking out.

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When people create a RP by mutually recognizing it through moves and reply

moves, like in the above example, they mark a point in what we define Recognized

Epistemic Field (REF) – as it has been called en passant by Zizek (1988). That is, they

have reached an interpersonally valid definition of the situation (Garfinkel 2008). Fact

is that, sometimes, this definition is not that valid, and people may end up in impossible

situations.

We intend to further characterize the notion of REF. Interpersonal interaction

is a process involving subjects. Conceiving subjects entails, for us, considering them as

having an Epistemic Field (EF), i.e., an ensemble of attitudes: intending to go to the

movies, believing that it is raining, etc. When subjects are interacting, they regard the

other participants (as well as themselves) as having an EF, and assume that also the

others attribute one to them – and this is what, in a sense, allows interaction itself. That

is, we are higher-order intentional systems, since we are capable of ascribing to others

and to ourselves intentional states (Dennett 1987).

According to Brandom (1994) this amounts to say that we are interpreting

intentional systems, and this means that in interaction there is a dimension of

normativity and commitment that is difficult not to consider. This also contributes to the

fact that, among interactants, to have an EF is both a presupposition and a requirement.

Thus, each subject, once exposed to actions-in-interaction, has, as part of her/his EF,

projections of the content of the other interactants’ EFs. Perceiving someone as making

an interactional move triggers projections of: what the other means by such move, the

implicatures (Grice 1967; Goffman 1981) of that move, the inferences (Brandom 1994)

one can possibly draw from it, and the considerations regarding his/her own moves

about what is going on in interaction. All (counter)moves make scores (Ibid.: 181 ss.),

i.e., RP.

Among projections, there are some devoted to those moves that are

considered relevant by participants with respect to the ongoing interaction and are

regarded as having been mutually recognized: this amounts to say that situatedness and

sequentiality play a crucial role. Dan opens a conversation with Alex by saying “Hallo”.

His turn is “potentially” the first part of an adjacency pair, a greeting sequence. Alex

interprets as such Dan’s move and produces the second half of the pair: “Hi”. Dan takes

again the turn and begins another sequence. This means that: (a) Dan interprets Alex’s

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move as the completion of the greetings sequence and that, by now, (b) he knows that

his first move has been interpreted by Alex as a greeting, since she replied with a

greeting; on the other hand, (c) Alex knows that her interpretation of Dan’s first move

was correct, since he has accepted her move as appropriate as a follower of his own and

has prosecuted with interaction. By now, Dan and Alex are both convinced that they

have just finished a greeting pair and are going to continue their interaction, and that the

other shares the same conviction. They have marked an RP and the latter has entered the

REF. In Garfinkel’s (1967: 40) words:

In attending to the utterances as events-in-the-conversation each party made references to

the biography and prospect of the present interaction which each used and attributed to the

other as a common scheme of interpretation and expression. […] Each waited for

something more to be said in order to hear what had previously being talked about.

When people create an RP by mutually recognizing it through moves and

reply moves, they mark that point in the REF. That is, they have reached an

“interpersonally valid definition of the situation” (Garfinkel 2008). By an ongoing

confirmation through recognition, REF emerges as an interactional co-construction and

achievement. With this, we construct the boundaries of the events we are participating

to, that is, IUs. Finally, we “import” and thus make “valid” in an actual interaction

frame/work, rules, practices... that were not necessarily readily available. In this way we

identify different events as playing football, etc: “what makes a ‘group’ a ‘group for the

moment’ is that its members are committed to the same constitutive expectations or,

loosely speaking, ‘playing the same game’” (Rawls 2008: 707).

Once that a REF has been created and that some rules, procedures, practices,

shared meanings etc. have been (explicitly or implicitly) taken for valid in the

interaction frame/work, they create a kind of sense of “objectivity”; things that

constitute the frame/work are taken for granted and treated as if they were objective, at

least within the boundaries of the interaction.3 But, since such objectivity is only

alleged, since the REF is supposedly objective and shared, room is left for manipulation,

for misleading others, and to be misled by self-conviction – like, for instance, in

Andersen’s tale.

3 Of relevance, here, Schütz’s (1962, 1970) thesis of the reciprocity of perspectives. Cf. also Garfinkel (1963: 212).

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2. Impossible situations: rule breaking, rule entanglement and cheating

Obviously, RPs are not the only component of the interaction frame/work: people join

an interaction already endowed with a bunch of background information they can rely

on, and which includes social and institutional rules, and things agreed upon in previous

interactions. Agreements and rules could be seen as special kinds of RPs, which involve

an increasing level of commitment, which can be very low when it is tacit and only

emerges from the interactional moves, is higher when agents explicitly agree on

something and is at its highest when it is ratified by some institution, as is often the case

with formal rules, such as laws. All these elements contribute to establish coordination,

so when coordination is lost and the interaction enters in a deadlock (or impossible

situation), rules and agreements are those whose behaviour we have to analyse in order

to understand the origins and possible developments of such impossible situations.

Roughly, we call impasse, or impossible situation, a situation, which agents may

end up in, that prevents them from satisfying their (explicit and tacit) commitments,

relative to the interaction. There is no possible step that can be taken without loosing the

sense of the interactional unit(s) the agents are in, that has been built from their previous

agreements and is partly constituted by the constitutive rules of the situated interaction.

As a consequence, the agents feel that no further move is possible without loosing

coordination.

Impasses can be connected to two main kinds of causes: (i) either a mismatch

between rules and agreements on one side (how things should be done) and facts (how

things are actually done), or (ii) an internal contradiction among rules and/or

agreements. The former kind of impasse happens when people violate an agreement or a

rule. It can be due to a – willing or unwilling - bad execution of the activities that are in

the scope of the rule/agreement. The latter kind, instead, can occur even in cases where

agreements or rules of a certain institution are perfectly followed4. It is thus due to an

“internal” (with respect to the functioning of the system) incoherence such that, even

when commitments are perfectly respected, the result would nevertheless be an impasse

situation.

4 There is a lively debate in literature on what it means to follow a rule and on the different ways of following a rule. For the sake of brevity we won’t enter into the details in the present paper.

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In order to understand the effects that impossible situations may engender on

interactional units, let’s take the example of rules, and in particular constitutive rules.

Constitutive rules, according to the characterization provided by Searle (1969) and,

more specifically, Searle (1995), are those rules that create new kinds of behaviours, as

opposed to regulative rules, whose aim is that of regulating already existing behaviours.

While regulative rules are formulated like explicit obligations or prohibitions,

constitutive rules take a particular form, which Searle names “count as locution”: X

counts as Y in context C. A famous example of Searle’s is money: the bills (X) printed

at the mint count as money (Y) in a certain State (C). According to Searle, institutions

such as money, marriage, cocktail parties are defined by systems of constitutive rules.

Institutional facts exist only within systems of constitutive rules, through powers that

are conferred collectively via a mechanism of social acceptance. For such reason,

according to Searle, the overall meaning of an institution depends on such kind of rules.

The main problem with this view, from an interactionist perspective, is that

constitutive rules need to be considered in their dynamics. In this sense, Garfinkel’s

(1963) analysis of the role of constitutive rules in games as well as in “serious life” is

more accurate and comprehensive. By introducing notions such as basic rules,

constitutive event, constitutive order of events, and constitutive expectancies, he

achieves to account for the situated usage (and possible misuse: e.g. “breaching

experiments”) of constitutive rules of events, and the way in which such a concerted

usage realizes the order* of the event itself. In so doing, Garfinkel makes clear why

institutional activities should be regarded as situated and local: rules are not abstract

devices.

Moving from these considerations, we try to analyse the notion of constitutive

rule in relation to the REF in interaction. Constitutive rules are, in each interaction, (a)

imported in the REF by the participants by means of specific interactional moves, that

make explicit the reference frame/work of the interaction (“Do you speak English?”

“Let’s play football”), or, alternatively and more frequently, they are (b) directly

inferable, from the interactants’ moves (recall Brandom), and trigger appropriate

expectancies in the participants.

We turn now to rules’ violation. Usually, when an agent breaks a regulative rule,

he/she is sanctioned and the right functioning of the system is restored; sometimes rules

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are violated in the attempt of obtaining a better result in the activity being performed

(like when driving too fast); sometimes, especially in competitive games (like sports),

agents are forced to break rules by their opponents who take advantage from the other

being sanctioned. Sometimes agents break rules because incapable of following them

(like beginners in sports or in driving), or for ignorance of the rule. Other times rules are

strategically broken, like when a soccer player interrupts the other team’s action by

throwing the ball out of the game field or someone who breaks a law that he/she deems

unfair just to protest. In all these cases, the system of rules already anticipates the

possibility of the violation and the connected sanction, so the impact of violations of

this sort on the overall system has a controlled effect.

On the other hand, breaking a constitutive rule has different consequences, as it

implies going outside the logical space of the considered activity; for instance, moving

a pawn of three positions is not playing chess badly, it is not playing chess at all5. As

well explained by Frank Hindrinks (2009), constitutive rules establish kinds of

behaviors that come into existence exactly because we accept the definitions that

specify them6. It is the acceptance of the rules that makes the interactional unit of chess

“alive” or active, so to say. The sense of playing chess is given by constitutive rules,

which define, for each piece, the space of possible moves (similar to what Garfinkel

calls the constitutive order of events). In order to understand what a pawn is in the game

of chess we have to look at its constitutive rules: a pawn is something that can move

this way or this other, that can eat pieces in this way or this other, etc. When we decide

to play chess, it is, in a way, as if we make an agreement7, we could say that “omitting

to do something which one has formally acknowledged as required of one is rather like

contradicting oneself”8. In other terms, when one decides to play a particular game s/he

makes an implicit commitment to follow its constitutive rules and breaking them can be

seen, from a certain standpoint, as breaking also such commitment and not playing that

game anymore. Garfinkel (1963: 191) seems to share this view when he introduces the

notion of constitutive accent. The latter, characterizes those – and only those – possible

events in a game to which are assigned constitutive expectancies (i.e., those events that

5 Bottazzi and Ferrario (2010). 6 Hindrinks (2009). 7 As in Searle’s examples of making the hollandaise sauce (1990), of pushing a broken car together or dancing together (2010). 8 Cameron (1972): p. 319.

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constitute as a set the constitutive order of events). “The constitutive accent can be

removed from set of possible events and assigned to another. This operation produces a

new game.”

The same distinction applies to agreements: two or more agents can agree on the

fact that a certain action must or must not be executed and then one of the agents does

not respect the agreement. In this case the other agents can take countermeasures to

sanction such behaviour, but they can continue interacting without particular problems.

If, on the other hand, agents start an interaction in a particular context, they may seem to

implicitly accept to adopt the rules that characterize such context. In some cases agents

can break such implicit agreements (for instance by replying in Swahili after a long

conversation that has taken place in English, or by pretending not to understand the

meaning of each single word the other utters, as in Garfinkel’s breaching experiments)

and put the other agents in an impossible situation from which they don’t know how to

proceed. The REF has lost its sense.

We are now faced by a dilemma: if constitutive rules create the meaning of an

institution and, together with agreements and other RPs define a REF, how comes that

many institutions survive even though experiencing violations of their constitutive rules

and many interactions go on even when the sense of a IU is completely lost? This

dilemma displays the peculiar twofold nature of social reality, in which agreement can

take place at different levels: a surface level and a deep one. If such two levels are

(either covertly or overtly) contrasting, the kind of phenomenon at the center of this

work emerges: namely, power relationships within impasse situations. We will try to

show such double level of agreement with an example relative to cheating, which is a

typical case of agreement’s breaking.

An interesting account of cheating has been given by Green (2004: 144):

in order for us to say that X has cheated, X must (1) violate a fair and fairly enforced rule,

(2) with the intent to obtain an advantage over a party with whom she is in a cooperative,

rule-bound relationship.

Consider the following example. Ada and Beatrice are playing chess; at a certain point

Ada loses sight of the chessboard – something falls on the floor and she tries to recover

it. Let’s suppose it is Beatrice’s turn and, while Ada is not looking, Beatrice moves her

knight in a position that is not envisioned for that piece (for instance, she moves it as if

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it were a bishop) and Beatrice thinks that this benefits her more than what she could

have obtained without her knight performing that particular move. In this case we can

fairly say that Beatrice is cheating and specifically that she is cheating by breaking the

constitutive rules of the game of chess that both she and Ada had implicitly agreed upon

when they decided to play chess; moreover, she is cheating even according to Green’s

definition.

When we talk about the most common cases of cheating, like the one just

mentioned, which is a case of covert cheating9, what happens is that the irregular move

ends up to be perfectly legitimated (even if not voluntarily). In a world where Ada and

Beatrice play chess alone in a room and Beatrice cheats, is there genuinely a chess play

going on? The legitimation of the move stands against the rules, but also against Ada

who, not being aware of what happened, goes on playing despite the incorrect move and

acts as if implicitly declaring the move valid, even if in a weak sense. We could say that

the move has scored an RP in the REF, even if such REF has been built with a trick.

The move is valid and invalid at the same time. The issue here at stake is that, from a

pragmatic point of view, what counts is the surface level of agreement. On the deep

level, as long as she is not discovered, Beatrice has broken the rules of the game, is not

playing chess anymore and has, in a certain sense, brought the game and the specific

interaction to an impossible situation, a situation of impasse but, on the surface level,

she has performed no violation, and, for the sake of the present game and the present

interaction, it is all that matters – and this creates a power’s asymmetry between the two

players.

This does not mean that the deep level is completely irrelevant. On the contrary,

if Ada realizes, even a posteriori, Beatrice’s trick, she has good reasons to protest the

result of the chess game or, even, the very existence of their chess game (as a chess

game). It is not the case that the actual game is null as a direct consequence of Ada’s

discovery; pragmatically, it is necessary that Beatrice recognizes that her own acting

was outside the rules and must agree on the consequences that her acts had on the

9 According to Green (2004), covertness is often present in cheating, but is not essential to it. Someone who drives on the emergency line on a highway where all other cars are stuck in a queue can be said to be cheating.

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game10, but for sure the discovery of the trick re-balances the power relationships

holding between them.

That the chess game is institutionally null or that it must be re-played from the

stage in which Beatrice cheated, or that Ada be declared winner is to be decided. All we

can say here is that even if cheating weakens the game and endangers the interaction

from the point of view of the deep level, given the peculiarity of social reality, the

surface level is ontologically charged in a prominent way. An agent believing to share a

REF when there isn’t one (because the other agent has cheated and is aware of that)

creates an asymmetric power relation.

There is another phenomenon that brings interaction into impossible situations

and shows this double, ambiguous level of social reality; we call it “rule-entanglement”.

It takes place when the rules of a game or an institution have some “bug” that

determines the fact that at a certain point no legal or regular move is possible. Even

though apparently this should bring to the destruction of the game or institution at stake,

in practice we very often engage in games and institutions that live on their internal

incoherences. As Fogelin (2003: 42) points out:

In practice it is often quite reasonable to employ systems of rules with no guarantee that

they are consistent. This is a common situation: We employ systems of rules without being

able to establish their consistency, perhaps without having any idea of how one might go

about doing so. More radically, again following Wittgenstein, I hold that it is sometimes

legitimate to continue to use a system of rules even after its inconsistency has been

recognized. Inconsistency in a system of rules is sometimes debilitating, but not always.

Fogelin illustrates his position through an example taken from Wittgenstein’s

Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, where he talks about a competitive

intellectual skill game he calls Ludwig.

One day two novices playing foolishly (though making legal moves) stumble into a

position where two of the rules of the game come into conflict. […] Our novices somehow

work their way into a position where a particular move is both mandated and forbidden,

thus leaving no legal way to proceed. The game gets hung up, as computer programs

sometimes do. Because this possibility exists, we can say that Ludwig is inconsistent in the

following sense: a series of legal moves can lead to a situation where a further move is both

mandated and forbidden. [...] Finally, we can suppose that this feature of the rules – its

10 This was the case in which Ada and Beatrice were playing alone in a room, in official contests there is always an authority that is responsible to monitor the fair play and sanction incorrect moves.

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dilemma-proneness – has gone undetected for centuries because the moves that lead to it,

though legal, are wholly unmotivated. Nobody who understands the point of the game

Ludwig would make the moves leading to this situation. (Fogelin 2003: 45-46)

Agents playing Ludwig act according to two kinds of constraints:

(1) the constraints of the game (and of its rules);

(2) the constraints that they impose on the space of their moves in order to

try to win.

The point Fogelin (and, according to him, Wittgenstein too) is trying to make is that, in

order to avoid the paradoxes that rules in (1) may bring into life, one must look at

constraints in (2); (2) could be seen as a regulative rule and as something that has to do

with the aesthetics of the game, with what makes a game a good game or a beautiful

game.11 One who plays chess badly may execute moves correctly but in such a way as

to lose very quickly with a fairly experienced player. He/she is not pursuing his/her own

goals at best.

According to Fogelin, even in institutional activities, a way to prevent paradoxes

is by following this strategy and trying to play well. But sometimes this is not possible,

for instance when players are too inexperienced or when participants to an institution

are confused by its rules; sometimes players/participants on purpose force the

interaction towards the impossible situation, when they believe they can gain power

from the breakdown of the game/institution (take for instance a lawyer who knows the

law very well and leverages on its inconsistencies to prevent his/her client from being

declared guilty in a trial).

Another very interesting aspect is the effect of rule-entanglement on the past.

Fogelin notices that the fact that two novice players have been stuck in a contradiction

of the game does not endanger the correctness of the game as it has been played by

smarter players in the past: the effects of this contradiction don’t affect the past. But

there are also more difficult cases, in which it is not immediately decidable whether

there would be a backward effect and in case which kind of effect. Take for instance a

diploma which is conferred by an institution which is not entitled to do it. Maybe this

happened because the requisites for being an entitled institution are contained in civil

laws that have been promulgated at different times and that contradict one another. As

11 In Garfinkel’s terms, they belong to the larger set of rules of preferred play (cf. Garfinkel 1963: 192).

15

long as the bug in the system is not discovered, every former student can go on

pretending (or being convinced) to hold a diploma. Again, all information relative to

diplomas can enter the REF of a lot of interactions and everybody can superficially

agree on such information. But what happens when this is discovered? Suppose that the

diploma has been given to thousands of people over the years and that some of them got

a job thanks to that diploma. Which are the backward effects? How can the bug be

fixed? Do we consider all the issued diplomas null? Do we relax the requisites so that

all can be considered valid? Do we make an ad hoc adjustment for the past and

promulgate new, coherent laws for the future?

All these are interesting open problems, yet the main point we want to make is

that rule entanglement is another phenomenon that can threaten interactions, but agents,

once they discover it, can decide whether to acknowledge it or not, and the choice may

depend by the power they can acquire either by making it public or keeping it hidden.

If we take constitutive rule breaking, in most cases, except those in which

cheating is involved, it is very rare not to detect the impasse, since usually this results

from a behaviour which is overtly against the spirit of the game or the institution. If the

violation has been caused by ignorance of the agent, other participants to the activity, or

an authority, like for example a referee, can notify (declare) the violation to the agent

and wait for him/her to recognize it and, in case, make amendments. If, on the contrary,

the agent willingly committed the violation (possibly to protest against a law he/she

deems unjust), then it is the agent him/herself who declares the violation and wait for

the other participants to the institution to recognize it and accept it as violation. In this

case the impasse can be solved either by classifying as “invalid” the action taken by the

agent, and keeping the game as it is, trying to restore the initial situation by some

actions aimed at nullifying the effects of the violation action; or the community

understands, through the violation, that the rule was unfair or disadvantageous for the

system itself and will try to change the system of rules rather than condemning the agent

for his/her violation. This latter case is particularly interesting, as an agent who was

beforehand not particularly powerful, can increase his/her power just by making an

overt violation accompanied by an act of declaration.

For cheating, we can distinguish two cases: covert and overt. For the former,

much more common, we can say that at start the cheater is the only one aware of the

16

surface impasse and pretends the game is correct. The cheater contributes to create a

false REF and tries to take advantage from it. The cheating in many cases prevents the

other agents from understanding the real situation and from acting in a more effective

way. The cheater acquires power as he/she steals it from the other interactants. The case

of overt cheating, instead (like when someone pass by a group of people who are

queuing) most of the times is a sort of display of an already acquired power.

3. Impossible situations, power relationships and power-oriented interactional

work

What is then common to overt and covert meaning-breaking? It is placing someone into

an impossible situation, by leveraging on the attraction of interaction via a contradictory

or misleading REF. The strategy of those who gain power over the other interactant/s is

to put in the REF —to make the other/s accept— RPs that are contradictory or

misleading (by themselves, by their intertwining, or by their link with the shared

phenomenal world), so that the one who is subjected to power falls into an impossible

situation. Not knowing what to do next could open up the possibility of devolving

power to someone who proposes – often implicitly, by presenting it as the only option –

a “solution” for repairing or recovering from the impasse. Therefore, from an

interactionist point of view, a possible way to frame impasses is by considering them as

situations in which the following dilemma is at stake: to sustain the interaction itself or

to save one’s face, the rules of the “game” or the institution, etc.? This is particularly

clear when considering asymmetrical interaction (emperor-subject/s, manager-worker/s,

etc.).

In fact, agents start an interaction with power relationships already holding.

Notwithstanding the fact that, even in apparently symmetric situations, there could be

specific ambits in which the balance of the relation is lost, many times the REF of an

interaction already contains the presence of an asymmetric power relation between

interactants. We can have, therefore, various cases of meaning-breaking depending on

the a/symmetry of the relationships.

Let’s start by considering the case of an asymmetrical relationship holding

among the participants since before the interaction, whether they did or did not know

each other before that specific interaction. The relationship, in the latter case, has a

17

conditional ontological status – yet it immediately slides towards an actual, alive,

enacted one if and when the condition of a situated interaction (i.e., a SOI via at least

one IU) is satisfied. In the presence of power asymmetry, the meaning-breaker can be

the one who occupies the inferior position or, instead, the one who is higher in one or

more social hierarchies (professional, occupational, gendered, etc.). They both may act

overtly or covertly. We then have four cases.

(1) The one who breaks some meaning, rule or agreement is superior to the

other participant/s, and s/he acts overtly. It is pure exercise of power, the breaker acts as

s/he does just because s/he thinks to be entitled to do so. It is often associated with

violence, since the breaker believes to be entitled to the latter as well. Think, for

instance, to the “because yes!”, or “it’s so because it’s so”, or “it’s like that since I say

so” with which are often addressed children12, strangers (cf. Schütz 1944), deviants and,

more generally, non-competent members of any social community.

(2) The one who breaks some meaning, rule or agreement is superior to the

other participant/s, and s/he acts covertly. This is typical of the paternalistic attitude,

where the superior declares to act for the sake and wellbeing of the other/s, or to have

just the intention to make a compliment (surface level: my actions are well-meant),

while s/he is gaining control, thus maintaining or increasing his/her power, over the

other/s, sometimes to the point of making her/him doing what s/he wants (deep level: do

what I say and acquiesce to what I do). It is rarely associated with open, physical

violence, but it can anyway harm the interest of the other/s. Consider, as an example,

the case of the US President Nixon and the female journalist that Goffman (1981)

analyses in the opening of his work on “footing”.

(3) The one who breaks some meaning, rule or agreement is inferior to the

other participant/s, and s/he acts overtly. It could be the reaction – and sometimes a

violent one – to the power of the other interactant/s, like the case of the Italian Prime

Minister (at the time) Silvio Berlusconi hit by a tripod in Rome by a tourist13. It could

also be a display of protest and resistance to a power, institution, rule, value, etc. that

12 “Mum, you’ve said we would have stop for an ice-cream! We’re passing by the shop! Why aren’t you stopping?!!” – “Because yes!”. This is a conversation the woman would never have with an adult “normal” member of society. 13 See: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04E6DC1539F932A35752C0A9639C8B63

18

the breaker regards as illegitimate. Political movements’ operations mostly fall under

this case.

(4) The one who breaks some meaning, rule or agreement is inferior to the

other participant/s, and s/he acts covertly. It is the act a la Robin Hood, a form of

resistance to power enacted by stealing power from the other/s yet only at the deep level

and not at the surface one (Robin does not want the title of King John, he simply wants

his money and, especially, people to know that he is fooling the King).

When power relations are symmetrical, and the interaction is among peers, we

have two other possible cases.

(5) The one who breaks some meaning, rule or agreement acts overtly towards

his/her peer/s. It is, in most of cases, the display of an assumption of power that co-

occurs the actual seizure of such a power14. Think, for instance, to someone who uses

the emergency route when everybody else is stuck in the highway, or someone who

skips the line at the mall or the club’s bar. Breaching experiments too fall under this

category in the most of cases.

(6) The one who breaks some meaning, rule or agreement acts covertly towards

his/her peer/s. It is the most common case of cheating. Examples are innumerable when

it comes to games. However, there are also more complex cases, as the following

example illustrates.

Indeed, we want now to introduce and analyse in detail an empirical case. It is the

transcription of a phone call to an Italian medical emergency dispatch centre

(emergency number 118).15 In this case, the asymmetrical relationship – which is able to

“activate” some constitutive rules of the interaction and to enter its REF– is not real, at

the deep level; yet it is projected onto the interaction and sustained all along its duration

by both participants. It shapes the conversation, and eventually brings it to a particular

impossible situation, where the impossible is made explicit (and soon after the

interaction reaches an end). Such an illusionary relationship is that between a (female)

nurse operator and a (male) physician; whereas the former is, so to speak, a real

character, the latter is a particular sort of faked one, created by an act of covert cheating

14 Similarly to what happens in the Garfinkelian (1967) “passing”. 15 Data gathering took place within the research project “Traffic control as work”, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research (MIUR 2001). National Coordinator: Prof. Cristina Zucchermaglio, University of Roma La Sapienza; Bologna Unit Supervisors: Prof. Giolo Fele and Prof. Pier Paolo Giglioli, University of Bologna.

19

that the other interactant sustains without even being fully aware of (until she finds

herself explicitly doing so and the “impossibility” of the situation comes in plain sight).

030906162852ch50 16

00 O: Onehundredeighteen

01 C: E:: goodevening. [Family name] of [village A]

02 O: Ye:s

03 C: I would need an ambulance for the following reason (.) there is an elder subject (.)

04 he is one hundred and two years old, he has fallen on the ground and needs surgical sutures (.)

05 then he is in oxygen-therapy and we can not transfer him

06 O: Are you physician, I’m sorry?

07 C: No, no I am not a physician=

08 O: =Ah=

09 C: =I am a pharmacist. //I’ve seen the case: //therefore I’m calling the onehundredeighteen=

10 O: //Yes //yes =yes=

11 C: =Then there is the need for an intervention of an ambulance since the people who have:- say,

12 The people which he is at are not in the condition of being able to give him the oxi:gen from

13 [village A] up to [village B].

14 O: >Sure. Therefore oxygen-therapy. Did he had a traumatic cranial injury for the fall?<

15 C: Say, yes, he had a traumatic cranial injury, I:- he has been provisionally medicated

16 //but he needs surgical sutu:res=

17 O: //I see =Okey. Would you give me the address?

[… series of question-answer turns concerning the address and the caller’s contacts]

37 O: Can he be seated or the gurney is needed?

38 C: Yes yes no no (.) now he’s seated, he thre:w up too

39 O: Ah he thre-=

40 C: =Perhaps as an effect of the trauma, yes. We have waited a li:ttle so tha-=

41 O: =Is a concussion the trauma or not?

42 C: I beg you pardon? No no no, fortunately not, otherwise I would have alrea- called immediately

43 O: Okey, all right doct- //°doctor°

44 C: //My gratitude uh

16 For notation signs cf. Jefferson (1974).

20

Let’s see what happens step by step. Immediately after the opening, once the call-

taker has given him the turn (line 02), the caller opens the institutional conversation as a

competent member of the epistemic community of medical science/practice17 (lines 03-

05). In particular, he does so by providing the call-taker with all the information

concerning the fact necessary for the latter to take action, by providing them in the

correct sequence (cf. Bassetti 2004), and by using, in so doing, precise technical

language – in sum, by providing a competent account. This creates the operator’s illusio

about the caller being a member of the healthcare community and one occupying a

dominant (Bourdieu 1979), hegemonic (Gramsci 1977) position in such field, a position

which is hierarchically higher than the operator’s one, and this triggers her explicit

question at line 06.

Note, moreover, that such a question is a confirmational one: she does not ask

“Which is your role/occupation?”, rather she attributes to the caller a specific

institutional role on the basis of the previous piece of interaction, and explicitly asks for

confirmation. Indeed, any role other than that of a member of the healthcare community

would be irrelevant to the operator’s task; it is instead such a role that would be relevant

to the following interaction and thus to the task, and this in two respects: in case the role

attribution would be confirmed, the operator could modify accordingly (i) the way she

collects information and the nature of such information (with particular regard to the

patient’s conditions), as well as (ii) the way she addresses the caller. The knowledge of

such relevance, furthermore, is precisely the caller’s motif to cheat, in order to obtain

what he wants through the call and to obtain it as quickly as possible.

The caller replies to the question by declaring the formal truth: he is not a

physician (line 07), “just” a pharmacist with direct knowledge of the events, who is

doing what he knows one should do when one finds him/herself in such circumstances

(line 09). At the surface level – that is, overtly – he does not lie. However, at the deep

level, he keeps on cheating by the above-mentioned display of knowledge and know- 17 A peculiar kind of emergency call has been found to be triggered when the caller belongs to the healthcare community and, on way or the other, display that (Bassetti 2004). Such a display, usually, accelerates the process of determination of the fact and the place, for various, interconnected reasons. First, it favors the call-taker’s understanding and offers, from the point of view of the latter, more precise information. In so doing, moreover, it reduces the amount of necessary questions. Second, it makes the call-taker regard the caller as a member of his/her own community, and the degree of trust is higher than usual. Trust, furthermore, is associated with different degrees of solidarity and deference depending on the power relationship holding among participants: when the call-taker attributes to the caller a specific institutional role, higher than her/his own, deference tends to prevail on solidarity (Bassetti 2004: 77).

21

how. Self-presentation (Goffman 1959, 1961) and, more generally, representation play

a key role here: how the issue at stake (in our case, a role and the consequent power

relations with other roles) is presented and represented to the other participants is

meaningful, and this means that it can be also used to destroy the meaning of the action

at stake (in the case at hand, declaration at line 07).

In what follows, the caller keeps on cheating by the use of technical language and

other various strategies. In so doing, he sustains and nourishes the illusio, so that the

operator, caught by the attraction of a specific, asymmetric interaction, keeps on

addressing the caller and carrying out her work tasks as if being a physician. In other

words, they collaboratively create and sustain a fictional asymmetrical relationship: one

that holds its position in the REF and, therefore, shapes the interaction as if it was valid

at the deep level too.

Besides technical terms and the like, the caller’s strategies for covertly performing

the fictional role and thus gaining the actual power connected to such a role, are diverse.

On the one hand, he answers medical questions, especially those concerning the

patient’s conditions, with clarity and providing information in a specific way. On the

one hand, this has to do with some linguistic and rhetorical features of talk, like the

impersonal, whose relevance clearly appears from the caller’s re-start at line 15 (“I:- he

has been medicated”). On the other hand, he adds pieces of additional information.

More specifically, he adds information able to convey his (ac)knowledge(ment) of the

implicatures and taken-for-granted hidden in the operator’s question. Implicatures that

only a competent member of the healthcare community could detect. A clear example of

this strategy is at line 38: “he thre:w up too”. The operator’s following turn consists of

an acknowledgement of the reception of the information and the fact that she did not

possess such information before (“Ah”) – that is, it is additional (line 39).

This allows the caller, in his next turn, to adopt another strategy: he performs – in

an en passant fashion – an initial diagnosis, searching for a medical explanation of the

reported fact, and he somehow provides medically-grounded explanations of the way he

has dealt with the issue at stake before calling the dispatch centre (line 40). Note also

that, from the point of view of the asymmetry of the fictional role relationship, the caller

keeps on cheating by producing this turn in minimal yet present overlap with the

operator’s previous turn. The overlap is not enough to make the caller rude (it is not an

22

interruption) – something which would have undermined the covert enactment of his

pretended role – but is enough to display that, if he had wanted to interrupt the other

interactant, he would have had the power to do so.

A third strategy is that deployed at line 42. After the operator – probably in the

attempt to display a similar knowledge and thus her competence in front of a superior –

asks a further, quite specific, question (line 41), the caller, by recognizing once again a

possible implicature of the call-taker’s question (even if – or rather precisely because –

such implicature was not in her intention, i.e., the content of the implicature was not

intended by the operator as being in the REF), replies with a composite turn. (1) In the

first instance, he enacts a non-reception in order to reply to the supposed implicature,

which, in his view, would be an implicit accusation. He does so with a polite but

determined “I beg your pardon?”. Clearly, he does not deem the accusation as really in

place, and indeed he does not wait for the operator’s reply or repetition of her turn;

however, he is interested in implicitly state that such an accusation would be

inappropriate if it had been actually ascribed to him (and by a mere nurse operator!). (2)

In the second instance, the caller replies to the question he has actually well received,

and restates twice the answer (“No, no, no”). In doing so, he (i) provides the operator

with further medical information, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, (ii) displays

once again his competence by being able to answer and by being convinced of such an

answer (fact manifest in the reiteration). His move consists of a statement like the

following: I am capable to answer a specific medical question because I am capable to

evaluate medical conditions once “I have seen the case”. (3) In the third instance, he

adds an evaluation of the situation to the answer he has just presented as such

(“fortunately not”). By that “fortunately”, he conveys a whole set of knowledge, and

displays his competence once again. (4) Finally, he reinforces such a display – and thus

makes it more explicit, (re-)marks it in the REF – by providing an account, in negative

form, of what he would have done if, unfortunately, that had instead been the case

(“otherwise I would have alrea- called immediately”). The statement he makes – in line

with the supposed accusation implicature, in a way – is twofold. On the one hand, as

mentioned, (i) he displays further competence: not only I knew what to do in the actual,

“fortunate” case, but I would have also known what to do in the possible opposite case.

23

On the other hand, (ii) he conveys the idea of an offended Self18: how can you even

think it could have been the case, given the way I acted and since you know I am a

competent member of (y)our community?

The operator, on her part, is cooperative with respect to the caller’s strategies.

Despite his initial negation of being a physician, she carries on the subsequent

conversational sequences as if he had been one. This is because of the force of attraction

of the interaction, and the structure of interaction (to have a FOI, a SOI is necessary via

at least one IU). Given that, at the deep level, the caller behaves like a physician in

terms of both competence and role enactment in front of someone who occupies an

inferior role position, and this is the only IU he offers, so to speak, then the operator has

no way to keep interacting other than accepting such IU, with all the constitutive rules

that it covertly entails. This is the hard core of the caller’s cheating: he puts in the REF

an entire set of constitutive rules, but he does so covertly; actually, he explicitly

declares and formally acknowledges that they are playing a different game – yet he puts

in the REF the rules of the former. It is the meaning of such superficial declaration,

indeed, the one the caller breaks.

The operator gets lost in the illusionary projection of a fictional asymmetrical

relationship, and, on such a basis, she contributes to put in place a covert REF, which is

illusionary as well. However, given the properties of supposed sharedness and

objectivity of the REF, it perfectly works in the interaction as if it was ontologically,

rather than interactionally “valid”. The operator repeatedly exploits one way or the other

such a REF, for instance by asking specific questions that require medical knowledge,

thus implicitly attributing the latter to the other interactant; in doing so, she also uses

technical language.

Collaboration in the construction of the illusio by the operator is also detectable

from various conversational features. Minimal and cooperative overlaps19, for instance,

are frequent (e.g. lines 10, 17). The amount of affirmative locutions and expressions of

agreement is significant as well: “Sure.” (line 14), “okey” (line 17), “I see (0.3) Okey,

all right doct-”20 (line 43). In this turn, which initiates the closing sequence and is both

paradoxical and (therefore) fundamental, the operator uses a vocative that assigns to the

18 A threatened face in Goffmanian (1956) terms. 19 Cf. e.g. Johanson (1997). 20 The term “doctor” (dottore), in the Italian commonsense language usage, is the same as “physician”.

24

caller an institutional role he has declared not to hold. She does so while being caught in

the attraction of interaction, and given his cheating strategies. At some point she realizes

her “error”, and interrupts the uttering of the vocative. However, she has few choices

apart from starting again to utter the word, even if in a lower voice, and complete her

turn. This second, complete utterance of the role-word is in overlap with the closing

turn of the caller. The latter, besides closing the call, achieves two results. On the one

hand, given its placement in the conversation, it spares the operator from using in plain

silence, so to speak, a role label that – as it has been put in the surface REF – is

incorrect. The operator’s wish for more rumour (like we wish darkness when we do not

want to be seen, at least not too clearly), in order for her “error” to be less clearly

perceivable, was evident to the caller thanks to her lowering the voice. In doing her such

a favour, on the other hand, the caller scores his final cheating point, by closing the

conversation in a manner which sustains the illusio as it is typically used among

members, even if strangers to each other, of one or the other epistemic community

(healthcare sector employees vs. the rest of national citizens, Italians and Italian

migrants vs. citizens of the “host country”, etc.).

The above presented empirical case is not completely different from Andersen’s

tale. Whether in co-presence or at the phone, within an asymmetrical or supposed-as-

such yet symmetrical relationship, in a group or dyadic situation, because one possesses

the power or wants to acquire it, the point is to make the other/s tacitly accept and put in

the REF a false, contradictory or misleading “truth” (or constitutive order of events),

and to do so in such a way that the other cannot protest against what is agreed, i.e., s/he

cannot change nor even explicitly discuss the REF. The point, in other words, is to put

someone in a situation in which for him/her is impossible to act, or to act differently

than the other wishes and works for.

4. Attraction of interaction, violence and power

This, moreover, is among the reasons why “victims” tend to collaborate with their

exploiters: either they do not act, or they cooperate with the meaning-breaking

perpetrator/s, since there is only one IU at disposal to inter/act. Given the attraction of

interaction, most of times the victim inter/acts, and s/he does so in the way the other

wants – s/he thus gives over her/his power. This is especially true when covert strategies

25

are in place, since the victim, unsure on what is happening (of what event/sequence are

they in), usually prefers “to wait for clarification” (Garfinkel 1967), and tries to act

smoothly – to follow the trend, so to speak – as long as s/he is waiting for additional

information. Furthermore, by being in the very same interactional unit, and

continuously achieving the latter by interacting together, participants may experience a

sort of illusio, that make them – or at least one of them – think that what is going on and

what will happen in the immediate future is somehow projectable.

On the part of the meaning-breaker, both covert and overt meaning-breaking

strategies entail “resisting” the attraction of interaction and, like in Collins’ (2007)

analysis of the enactment of violence, to adopt peculiar interactional moves. Collins’

account of interpersonal violence, moreover, resonates with the results of Garfinkel’s

breaching experiments: “[t]he incongruity generated by these interventions produced

[…] also considerable social distress and anxiety in the perpetrator” (Garfinkel 1963:

189, emphasis added). That is the effect, on social beings, of resisting intersubjective

entrainment, mutual coordination and the fundamental attraction of interpersonal

interaction.

There are differences, however, between overt meaning-breaking strategies and

covert ones. They all ask for resistance and, in a manner of speaking, management of

the interaction’s force of attraction, but at different degrees. The experiments designed

by Garfinkel (1963, 1967) constitute overt incongruity-producing strategies, and were

considerably stressful for the conductors. We can perhaps attribute a lower level of

stress to the Tijo of the Pennac’s novel quoted in Section I, who was not only among

peers, but also engaged in covert meaning-breaking21.

The same applies to the caller of the empirical case presented in the previous

section, who enacts interactional work oriented towards gaining power by being

regarded as a superior (deep level), while explicitly, however, he tells the truth (surface

level), and this also means that he cannot be deemed responsible or sanctioned for

having been lying on his occupation and profession – which he did not. In a way, the 21 Tijo’s experimental cheating relies on the different degrees of explicit accountability (Garfinkel 1967) of different systems of signs (Goodwin 2000), or different means of communication and expression (Goffman 1961), in terms of both actual possibility (having the means to provide a propositional account of a particular sequence of actions) and social legitimacy, or normalcy (being socially legitimated to take the time to provide such an account). It is easier, in ordinary life, to accuse someone by saying “But you have said X (when instead the truth is Y)” than, for instance, “But you gestured like X (yet your gaze and bodily posture were like Y)”.

26

caller cheats precisely in making the operator enact, via presenting it as the only

possible option, the other half of the interactional work necessary to put into existence

an asymmetrical relationship, or at least its effects. And this to the point that, in the end,

the operator, by using the role label in the conversation’s closing, is the only one who

lies, in a manner of speaking. This is not completely different than the case of Stalin's

“purges” (1936-37), where the victims were required to be cooperative, to cheat in order

to accuse themselves.

A second difference between overt and covert mechanisms, we believe, is that

the former asks more easily for violence, and/or asks for more power in the first place,

as in the case of asymmetrical power relationships. Overt meaning-breaking strategies

mainly consist in power (ab)uses, often associated with violence. Now, the necessity to

resist the attractive force of interaction is higher when one intends to exercise violence;

to overtly break some meaning, rule or agreement; or a combination of the two: e.g.,

one intends to use violence in order to being able to overtly violate a rule – whether the

final purpose is to change the rule, like in political protests’ case, or to take some

personal advantage as a consequence of the violation without being sanctioned for that,

like in the case of rape.

Violence and overtness, therefore, ask for more work to resist the force of

attraction of interaction, and this is especially true in absence of a perpetrator’s

“original” higher power (the Emperor has less to take into consideration than the

ordinary rapist, and he is somehow more used than the latter to interact without

coordinating and mutually attuning “too much” with others22). When the two are

simultaneously present, that is, when we are in front of a displayed and violent

meaning-breaking, such as at war, lapidating, public executions, etc. (cf. Collins 2007),

the forms of management and control of ordinary interpersonal entrainment become

exponentially necessary and complex.

Indeed, the differences we have highlighted between overt and covert meaning-

breaking, with particular respect to the force of attraction of interaction and the moves

one should or should not enact, would need to be considered together with and, so to

speak, to be mapped onto the matrix of possible power relations among participants. We

22 Think also, for instance, to the ritual complex ways Chinese Emperors were (not) allowed to interact with their subjects.

27

have tried to show why so, yet a more detailed and precise analysis is necessary, and we

deem that as a fruitful avenue for future research.

Consider, as a further corroboration, the case of rule entanglement. As we have

mentioned (Section 2), (a) it can foster overt change and innovation, or (b) it can be

ignored for the sake of the interaction per se, or, finally, (c) it can be covertly exploited

by someone who knows about the contradiction, better controls his/her drive to interact,

and cheats in order to put the other/s into an impossible situation and take advantage

from that. Overt change of rules, especially in institutionalized contexts, is generally

reserved to whom is higher in social position and power; when that is not the case,

violence is more often at stake (like in political revolutions). As for the case sub (b), is

the one endowed with more power that, usually, is in the position to overtly ignore

rules’ reciprocal contradiction; those who are subject to such power more easily try to

pretend nothing is happening, nothing is wrong, and hope the other does not realize that

there is a contradiction (and his/her interlocutor knew about that). Similarly, the

exploitation of rule entanglement is easier for the one who occupies the higher position

(a position closer, in social hierarchies, to that of rules themselves), and, otherwise, is

almost always enacted through covert strategies.

Conclusions

A we have tried to show, power both allows and is somehow reinforced by meaning-

breaking. This both means that (a) power equals —so to speak— the possibility to break

shared meaning without apparently doing so and/or being sanctioned, and that, at the

same time, (b) the lack of (public) recognition of meanings having been broken by

someone – a cheater – enhances and increases her/his power. Finally, (c) there are –

rarer – cases in which someone’s power increases after s/he declares s/he violated a rule

in order to show its absurdity or the like (think to revolutionary leaders such as Fidel

Castro). Therefore, actual meaning-breaking is an exercise, and thus (re-)affirmation, of

power.

Furthermore, even in overt cases, such as those entailing paternalistic ways of

suggesting/controlling, the considered modality of power exercise includes also

avoiding to have it explicit in the REF that the impossibility has been strategically put

in place. This, in a way, makes both overt and covert strategies ways of cheating.

28

The reason why we deem relevant such topics and embarked in the present

research endeavour is twofold.

(1) On the one hand, as we mentioned, meaning-breaking – especially when

considered as a form of cheating and an exercise of power, rather than, for instance, as a

form of resistance to mainstream culture – constitutes a sort of ethnographic blind spot.

This is so not only (a) in terms of explicit topic of research and the possible refinement

of our conception of social interaction and order* that can result from such a research,

but also (b) in terms of actual research practice: that is, fieldworking. From this point of

view, we are convinced that a better knowledge of overt and covert mechanisms of

meaning-breaking in interaction can be helpful in at least two respects: (b.i) first, in

orienting our way of seeing sociologically23 towards specific aspects of social

interaction (this has especially to do, one could say, with participant observation);

second, and possibly, (b.ii) in suggesting further interactional “tricks” for the

ethnographer to reach and make emerge particular features of the field and of the

interaction among its inhabitants (this has to do, more particularly, with observing

participation24).

(2) On the other hand, we think that situated meaning-breaking hides forms of

exercise of power, or, more generally, power-oriented work (power maintenance,

acquisition, legitimization, deprivation, etc.). We regard the analysis of the considered

aspects of social interaction as particularly relevant in at least two respects. First, (a) it

can reveal implicit, underground, hidden mechanisms of power-oriented interactional

work25, and tell us something about the interconnections among control, power and the

exercise of violence in institutional as well as ordinary life. Second, and finally, (b) it

can enhance our understanding, as we have tried to show, of victims’ collaborative and

cooperative behaviour – a phenomenon observed in diverse contexts, variously tackled

by psychology, but yet to be accounted for and explained in sociological terms, and

especially from within an interactionist perspective.

23 Cf. Garfinkel (2006). 24 Cf. Wacquant (2000). 25 Similarly as happened with Goffman’s (1981) notion of “footing”, or Foucault’s (1975) analysis of the embodied dimension of disciplining.

29

As a concluding remark, allow us to summarise our aim and auspice as follows:

that an ethnographer, whenever confronted with a situation like those described in this

paper, recognizes it as such and grasps its hidden power-oriented interactional work.

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Acknowledgments

C. Bassetti and R. Ferrario are supported by the VisCoSo project grant, financed by the Autonomous Province of Trento through the “Team 2011” funding programme. E. Bottazzi is supported by the STACCO project grant, financed by the Autonomous Province of Trento through the “Post-doc 2011” funding programme.