Alec McHoul

In August 1999, Jacques Derrida gave a number of lectures and seminars in Melbourne and Sydney. The seminar of 13 August, held at Sydney's Seymour Centre Theatre, was open to the public. It consisted of a question-and-answer session with Genevieve Lloyd, David Wills, Paul Patton and Penelope Deutscher. Its title, 'Themes from Recent Work', reflected interests in the work from Specters of Marx (1994) onwards which some, including Paul Patton, have referred to as deconstruction in its affirmative phase. What follows is a by-no-means verbatim record of the event. Rather it is but one member of the audience's account of what transpired in the seminar – an account which is therefore necessarily selective and pressed through the grid of my own quasi-philosophical interests. Following this account of the seminar, I offer some marginal notes on the open discussion following the seminar, then, finally, some reflections on a particular matter discussed at the dinner which followed that – madness.

Here I offer a reminder of some of the phenomenological and ethnomethodological roots of conversation analysis (CA) in the form of a set of 'field propositions'. Over the years, CA has certainly 'branched out' from those roots. However, I believe a reminder is timely if we are to prevent a drift towards a rather mechanistic approach to the study of everyday cultural objects such as conversations and their ilk.

This work begins with the general question of whether it is possible to think of the idea of culture beyond the confines of representationalism, and discusses Heidegger’s ‘matter’ of Ereignis as the ‘mis-appropriability’ of cultures and cultural objects. In the second section, it moves on to the question of the ontological difference and its significance for a non-representationalist version of culture as ‘poiesis’. This leads to a radical notion of (transcendental) empiricity beyond the ordinary sense of ‘the empirical’ and, in light of this, a questioning of cultural relativism and the invisibility of the ontological difference to the cultural sciences. The third section of the paper briefly addresses the ethics of cultural research and the possible deconceptualisation of (the idea) culture. The final section summarises the paper by offering a (counter) definition of culture as such.

To deal with some current debates about the analytic validity of 'contextual' details in the analysis of talk-in-interaction, we (Alec McHoul and Mark Rapley) work through two cases. The first is hypothetical and derives from the current literature in speech-act-theory-inspired pragmatics (Capone, 2005). The second is actual and arises from our initial disagreement with an earlier publication by one of our colleagues (Antaki, 1998). What we hope to show is that the idea of context is, itself, something of a moveable feast; that it can have multiple formations ranging from the broadly political to the almost-but-not-quite effect of surface texts and their sequential implications. In this respect, we hope to ease tensions between otherwise cognate approaches to the analysis of talk-in-interaction. Our argument is that, if context is hearable in the talk as such, then it can't be ignored by analysts. In section 3 of the paper (and precisely so as not to make this a 'contestation'), Charles responds in his own terms and to see what kind of mutual footing there may (or may not) be for all involved in the analysis of talk vis-à-vis questions of context. If there is an upshot of the paper as a whole it is that further work on the 'context question' in studies of talk-in-interaction could well entail a return to (and perhaps a respecification of) the foundational ethnomethodological question of the status of 'members' knowledge'.

I have no doubt whatsoever that this book will become and remain the definitive work on the analysis of sequencing in conversation and that the projected series of volumes on conversation analysis (CA) as a whole will become and remain the definitive work on CA. It is through, comprehensive, rigorous and accessible to beginners and seasoned practitioners alike. And this is no more or less than we should expect from one of the founders of CA itself with a remarkable publication record in the field spanning some 40 years.

The questions dealt with in this special issue of Journal of Pragmatics are doubly vexed. The first matter at issue is that the papers I have solicited take on some aspects of the debate within, and between, ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) – and, by extension, wider approaches to discourse analysis and perhaps even pragmatics as a whole – as to whether and, if so to what extent, contextual particulars are relevant to the analyst’s task in hand; therefore specifying, to some degree, what that task actually is.