This section expands the previous ones by looking at the writers’ anticipation of others’ interpretants of the signs they have animated. The patterns of evaluative stancetaking in this section orient to possible but non-desired or non-ideal interpretations. They reflect the writers’ commitment to particular interpretants and their wish to reject other interpretants, which they are nevertheless able to anticipate based on, for instance, an understanding of
others’ partly differing ontologies, epistemic formations, or denotational stereotypes. This section, then, focuses on the writers’ attempts to control sign-interpretant relations, or the consequences of their signs. (A particular focus will be placed on representational interpretants; chapter 6 will take notice of affective and energetic ones.) In a sense, the cases dealt with in this section are at the heart of selfhood, as they make visible the reflexive processes of caring about and committing to others’ interpretants of one’s signs.95 In many cases, others’ interpretants figure as internalized, i.e., as belonging to the self and having been taken into account in one’s behavior (see the discussion of Me-self in 2.3.1). In some cases, however, non-ideal interpretants are explicitly dialogized and othered as belonging to a type of addressee, not the self. (See Kockelman 2010: 128; Wilce 2009a: 59.)
The writer in such cases is primarily taking a negative stance towards others’ acts of interpreting him or her with a particular representational interpretant, not necessarily the content of the interpretant as such. For instance, in the following example, the writer rejects an interpretation that could be made on the basis of what was said earlier about her hobbies. The negation and the contrastive structures clearly dissociate the unwanted description (“a bundle of energy brimming with endless drive and dashing forward all the time”) from the writer, and contrast it with the ensuing hedonistic imagery that she does commit to:
(5.20) Harrastukseni ovat urheilullisia, mutta kropan kurittamisen ohella myös pääkopan sivistäminen on minulle tärkeää. En kuitenkaan ole koko ajan eteenpäin säntäävä, loputonta energiaa pursuava tehopakkaus, vaan sohvalla makoilu ja hyvän ruoan ja juoman nauttiminen ovat myös arjen kohokohtia.
(5.20) My hobbies are athletic, but in addition to tormenting my body I also find it important to educate myself. I am not, however, a bundle of energy brimming with endless drive and dashing forward all the time, but lying on the sofa and enjoying good food and drink are also highlights of my everyday life.
The formulation of the rejected social type itself, however, might also be understood as relatively positive (“a bundle of energy brimming with endless drive…”). The connotation of sännätä (“to dash”), implying a sort of rash and irrational movement, is the only clear sour tone.96 Writers may perfectly well
95 In another (pragmatist) terminology, we are dealing in this section with discursive manifestations of what Charles H. Cooley (1956 [1902]: 184) named the “looking-glass self,” a self-conception consisting of three elements: (1) the imagination of our appearance to others, (2) the imagination of their judgment of that appearance, and (3) a self-feeling (such as pride or shame) resulting from that imagination.
96 And, in fact, the scope of the negation and the position of the adverb koko ajan (“all the time”) in the clause structure could be construed in two different ways. In one construal, the writer merely temporally restricts the appropriateness of the description: “However, I am not all the time a bundle of energy… [but I am sometimes].” This would also change the construal of the additive relation
wish to reject such interpretations that either they or others do consider positive on the level of desires or ideals – but that the writers are either not willing or not able to pull off. They are, then, problematic only as interpretants of the self in the context of a particular social relation. One may, for instance, reject an anticipated interpretation, if one considers it “too good” from the standpoint of oneself or “too demanding” from the standpoint of others (e.g., “I don’t mean that you should be a runner-up of some beauty pageant, quite the contrary,” En kuitenkaan tarkoita, että sinun olisi oltava joku missikisojen perintöprinsessakaan, päinvastoin). Usually, however, it is quite clearly a negative stance towards some social type that leads to the rejection of an anticipated interpretation (e.g., “If the first things that came to your mind are trendy clothes, a convertible, and a high education then please move on to the next advertisement,” Jos mieleesi tuli ensimmäiseksi trendikkäät ryysyt,avoauto ja korkea koulutus niin ole hyvä ja hiihdä seuraavaan ilmoon). In short, the particular reasons for and the complex metastance relations behind the negative stances taken towards representational interpretants vary in the following examples – and are sometimes more, sometimes less recoverable empirically from the data available.
Another specification is in order as well. The cases in this section deal with non-desired interpretations of one’s own signs. A closely related set of cases in which the writers orient to types of non-desired interpreters, i.e., types of persons whom the writer wishes to exclude from the group of respondents altogether, will be examined in chapter 6. It is in such cases, when the writers explicitly address and reject non-desired alters, that the self-other disjuncture receives its fullest extent. The examples examined in this section deal with stereotypic, inferable, or otherwise anticipatable links between positive and negative characteristics. The general pattern is as follows: some characteristic (C1) described by the writer (e.g., a role name, an attribute, or a behavior) is explicitly or implicitly dissociated from one or more other characteristics (C’1...C’n) that are somehow incompatible with the writer’s ideals. There is, then, some presupposed general cultural or experiential link between the ideal interpretations and the rejected ones, but in the case of the particular figures at play (the writer, ideal readers) that link is severed. This section, therefore, also relates to the concerns of the previous chapter, since the cases examined make explicit the writers’
understandings of alternative inferences and alternative theoretical representations of the same processes. That is, they make visible the writers’
own orientations and attitudes towards social and linguistic realities as well as the writers’ understandings of others’ corresponding orientations and attitudes.
expressed by myös (“also”), i.e., whether the state of affairs that “lying on the sofa…” is paralleled with is “[being] a bundle of energy…” or “tormenting my body” and “educat[ing] myself.”
The rejection of non-desired interpretations is a pervasive phenomenon in the data. Table 8 illustrates some of the simplest kinds of cases. Most of the examples are textual patterns in which the writers either describe the attributes or habits of themselves or others (adjectives, VPs) or identify themselves or others with a role name (NPs). These different kinds of typifications are closely related via cultural knowledge and stereotypes. One enables inferences about the other: role names allow inferences about the typical attributes and behaviors of that type of person and, vice versa, descriptions of attributes or behaviors point to a set of appropriate noun phrases that could be used to designate that type of person. In the examples below, the writers explicitly reject negative role names, attributes, or habits suggested by the descriptions they formulate. They may also specify the proper degree of some characteristic by renouncing descriptions of excessive or insufficient degrees of the characteristic. These patterns, then, point to the kinds of diacritics that separate ideal and non-ideal personae from one another.
Textual pattern Presented information
and allowed inferences Examples of rejected inferences (5.21a)
My favorite character in Winnie the Pooh is Eeyore, but I am still
I’m no sports enthusiast, but I try to keep fit.
En ole mikään himosporttailija, mutta yritän pitää kuitenkin kuntoa yllä.
(5.21c)
I am quite the romantic but still a reasonable, down-to-earth
Textual pattern Presented information and allowed inferences
Examples of rejected inferences (5.21d)
Because of my sports hobbies, I stay fit, both mentally and physically. – – As for my looks, I could say that I look quite nice. I have even been complimented as being handsome, and not just by my girlfriends and my mom. Still, I am not the Mister Finland type.
Liikuntaharrastusteni takia olen hyvässä kunnossa, sekä henkisesti että fyysisesti. – – Ulkonäöstäni voisin sanoa olevani ihan kivannäköinen. On minua joskus komeaksikin kehuttu, muutkin kuin tyttöystävät ja äiti. En kuitenkaan ole mikään Mister Finland -tyyppi.
(5.21e)
I hunger for romance and like to be petted and pampered. Even so, I am not a princess who cries about a pea under the mattress.
I want a man who is satisfied with what he sees in the mirror but without being too vain.
Haluan miehen joka tyytyväinen siihen mitä näkee peilistä olematta kuitenkaan liian itserakas (5.21g)
I hope you are fairly uninhibited but not ‘pervy’, whatever that
Some of the examples in the table explicitly coordinate two or more ideal characteristics and merely imply that their co-occurrence is somehow unexpected. In such cases the rejected inference (C’1) remains relatively implicit. Example (5.21c), for instance, claims that the writer is a “romantic”
(C1) and implies (“but still”) that the characteristic does not stereotypically
combine with attributes such as “reasonable” (C2) or “down-to-earth” (C3).
The implicitly rejected characteristic (C’1), then, is some stereotypic characteristic of “romantics” that somehow contradicts the kind of practical reasonability described by C2 and C3 (such as “daydreamer” like qualities).
The decribed characteristics (C2, C3) serve directly as proof against the implicit rejected characteristic (C’1). The rejected characteristic is merely implicitly projected both by stereotypes of personhood (i.e., knowledge about what “romantics” can or cannot be like) and the (antonymous) sense-relations of C2 and C3 (e.g., C’1 ≠ “down-to-earth”; C’1 ≠ “reasonable”). With a pattern like this, the writer does identify with the stereotype of “romantics”
but only in a modified form (i.e., building a new emergent configuration of diacritics).
Other examples formulate the rejected characteristic more explicitly.
Example (5.21d), for instance, first describes characteristics such as
“physically fit” (C1) and “handsome” (C2). After that, the writer dissociates himself from what he calls the “Mister Finland type” (C’1), an interpretation activated by C1 and C2. The use of the role name presumes that the social type is to some degree recognizable for the addressee and locatable on a map of the social world. Both in example (5.21d) and the following example (5.21e), the rejected role names (“the Mister Finland type”; “a princess that cries about a pea under the mattress”) point to either completely fictive realms or such social realms that are somewhat remote from the everyday life of an average person. That is, they would probably be interpreted relatively metaphorically (cf. sections 4.4.3 and 4.4.4) and might be given adequate paraphrases with more everyday designations (e.g. “macho” or “exceptionally fit and good-looking”; “spoiled,” “cry-baby,” etc.). In fact, once again the stereotypic connotations of the symbolic designations (“the Mister Finland type”; “a princess that cries about a pea under the mattress”) are not highly negative in any unanimous sense. Rather, it is the negation and distancing from the self that imply an evaluative stance. However, the rejection of “the Mister Finland type” as an interpretant of the self might as easily be motivated by a negative stance towards that social type (e.g., not liking “the Mister Finland type”) as by a fear of promising too much in a positive sense (e.g., not claiming to be that fit or good-looking). One might argue that, from the standpoint of the respondent, the interpretation of the text requires some inference about the writer’s stance towards the social type as such to properly motivate the rejection of it as an interpretant of the self. As will be seen later, in many cases the formulation of the rejected representational interpretant is much more revealing of the writer’s stance.
The last example (5.21g) in Table 8 is particularly interesting, since the rejected designation (“‘pervy’”, ‘pervo’) is explicitly singled out with quotes to draw attention to it as a word (see also section 4.4.5). In addition, the writer explicitly notes that the meaning of the word is somewhat unclear or disputable (“whatever that means...”). The example makes visible the distinction between ‘uninhibited’ behaviors as such and the symbols that
denote such forms of “unhibitedness.” The designation for the excessive degree (“‘pervy’”) is animated by the writer with a certain insecurity and distanced from the self as the word of others and as pointing to others’
behaviors. That is, the writer orients to two kinds of diacritics: embodied social behaviors and discursive practices. The line between the acceptable and the excessive is drawn both at the level of behavior (not behaving in too
‘uninhibited’ ways) and discourse (not behaving in ways that are talked about as “perviness”). The example makes explicit a more general concern, the calibration of symbols to actual embodied behaviors (see also sections 5.2.1 and 7.2). It is probably safe to say that in most cases the writers are controlling representational interpretants precisely in order to control consequences at the level of actual embodied behaviors. That is, they are ultimately not interested in representations or words per se but in how others actually look or behave or what others expect them to actually look or behave like. Many of the cases in this section simultaneously deal with both levels: (1) how the same linguistic signs can be differently interpreted and (2) how the objects made knowable by the interpretation of linguistic signs can be further interpreted as signs of personhood.
Let us now take a look at two more complex cases. The first might be regarded as relatively more “dialogized” and the latter as relatively more
“internalized.” In example (5.22), the writer first approaches a description of his persona by positing it in a middle ground between negative extremes (C’1
and C’2). After that he presents a general ideological formulation (C1) that applies to all individuals and crystallizes his ideal of personhood (“one must have self-esteem and honesty”). It is inferable that C’1 and C’2 are particular examples of cases that fall outside the ideal. Furthermore, it is strongly implied that the writer himself does, in fact, fulfill or instantiate the ideal and that ideal respondents should too:
(5.22) En ole avaruuteen kurkottaja (C’1) mutten myöskään pidä siitä että ”tässä maan matosena kuljen” (C’2) itsetuntoa ja rehellisyyttä pitää olla (C1).
(5.22) I am not one who reaches for space but I don’t like it either that “here I walk as a worm of the earth” one must have self-esteem and honesty.
With the initial negation the writer dissociates himself from the kind of persona designated by the NP avaruuteen kurkottaja (“one who reaches for space”). The attributes and habits associated with this role name are left for the respondents to infer based on general cultural knowledge, and might be, for instance, along the line of “excessive ambitiousness” or even “arrogance.”
Secondly, within the same sentence the writer dissociates himself from another kind of social persona by denoting a negative stance towards a quoted segment of their speech (“here I walk as a worm of the earth,” “tässä maan matosena kuljen”). The represented speech can be interpreted as the
kind of thing the non-ideal type of other would say or think.97 That is, the indexical origo of the 1SG and spatiotemporal deictics (“here,” tässä) in the quote is an imagined typical event in the life of the non-ideal type. The reported speech itself interdiscursively sources from Biblical discourse an idiomatic expression of humility and insignificance (“a worm of the earth,”
maan matonen), which is projected as a self-initiated designation (i.e., as if the quoted person himself had used that designation about himself). These elements suggest an exaggerated or ironic voicing. That is, there is a superimposition of the writer’s voice and the figure’s voice so that the signs are at least partly composed by the writer to serve his interests. In other words, the persona of the other is inhabited not to represent it realistically (i.e., as they would actually speak) but to caricature aspects of it so that their speech would maximally correspond with and justify the writer’s negative interpretation of them (see also section 7.1.2). In a sense, then, the writer is speaking his own mind with another person’s mouth, or invading the persona of an other to make a point about himself. For instance, a particular kind of (“Biblical”) humility is caricatured, dissociated from characteristics such as
“self-esteem,” excluded from ideal types of personhood, and described as the object of negative affect. Moreover, the writer’s stance is naturalized by grounding it in the others’ own purported speech behaviors.
The text carves out a model of ideal personhood in the social space by delineating the ideal from the excessive and the insufficient. All this happens within a single orthographic unit (which is unorthodox from the standpoint of official norms of writing but makes sense functionally). The text starts by setting points of reference in the non-ideal extremes and by distancing the self from non-ideal others (“one who reaches for space” <> “a worm of the earth”). What lies between in the middle ground is represented as the domain of “self-esteem” and “honesty” in which the self resides and others should as well. Even such a short segment of text diagrams a relatively complex set of social relations. There is a core set of diacritics that the writer uses to evaluate persons. They might be described as, say, a balance between assertion of oneself and accountability to oneself. These diacritics are then layered with more specific emblematic values and justified ideologically (e.g., described symbolically as “self-esteem” and “honesty” that one “must have”
in order to avoid the excesses of individual hubris or Biblical humility).
Similar patterns are common in the data (see also example 5.23). It is also noteworthy that, in this case, the diacritics are relevant for the ongoing interactional event as well. That is, the described ideals of personhood also implicitly regiment the ongoing evaluative self-presentation as one kind of practice in which the general characteristics of “self-esteem” and “honesty”
97 Strictly speaking, there is nothing in the example that forces one to attribute the voice to another person. It might also be understood as a voicing of another, non-ideal or imagined, persona of the writer himself. Nevertheless, it is not the actual persona currently inhabited by the writer and, therefore, an other.
should be manifested. (For the more general relationship between description and performance, see sections 4.1 and 4.2.)
The writers can also undertake the task of deconstructing or modifying the stereotypes they orient to. That is, while they presume and reparticularize such stereotypes in their text, they simultaneously attempt to change or reorganize them. Instead of merely rejecting potentially negative interpretations, they can use them as building blocks and useful contrasts for new, emergent figures. Such textual patterns then function as metasemiotic constructs that re-regroup the diacritics associated with a stereotype and give them new emblematic values. In example (5.23), the writer orients to the disclosure of his profession as an act with potentially negative consequences because of the interpretations he assumes others might make. At least in light of his performance, the writer has thoroughly internalized others’
interpretants of his profession. It is considered a stigmatizing part of the self that the writer has to somehow explain and deal with:
(5.23) ¶Oman ammatin myöntäminen pelottaa aina, mutta tulisi sekin kai jossain vaiheessa ilmi. Olen insinööri-ihmisiä [be:IND.PRS.1SG engineer_person:PL.PTV]
ja ihan vakituisissa oman alan töissä. En todellakaan ole mikään elämäntapainsinööri, enkä tuo töitä kotiin, vaan jätän ne toimistolle. Työt töinä ja oma elämä omana elämänä. Tiedän, kuinka paljon insinöörejä karsastetaan, ja ihan aiheesta. Ei meikäläistäkään kiinnosta kun esimerkiksi työpaikan
ja ihan vakituisissa oman alan töissä. En todellakaan ole mikään elämäntapainsinööri, enkä tuo töitä kotiin, vaan jätän ne toimistolle. Työt töinä ja oma elämä omana elämänä. Tiedän, kuinka paljon insinöörejä karsastetaan, ja ihan aiheesta. Ei meikäläistäkään kiinnosta kun esimerkiksi työpaikan