Cooren, François. Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism. 2010. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 206 pp. ISBN 978-90-272-1023-4.
Reviewed by Patrick McLane, Department of Sociology, University of Alberta (CA)
François Cooren’s masterfully synthetic Action and Agency in Dialogue brings Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory together with Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction to generate a unique perspective on discourse analysis. From Derrida (1988) Cooren takes the ideas that figures of speech cannot be isolated from their literal meanings and that action cannot be reduced to actors’ intentions. From Latour (2005) he gets the notion that humans are not the only actors.
[Image credit: Patrick McLane]
This combination leads Cooren to focus on how nonhumans (institutions, texts, principles, objects, etc.) are active in dialogue. He argues that when people say ‘the memo dictates’ or ‘the lights alerted the burglar’ researchers should not supplant the memo with its author or disregard the lights in looking for the person who turned them on. The way action is attributed makes a difference with regards to findings of responsibility and opportunities for intervention. For example, to say ‘the hot coffee burned Denis’ invites inquiry into the temperature of the beverage and the way it was served (as in the notorious case of Liebeck v. McDonald’s). To say ‘Denis burned himself with his coffee’ still reports that Denis was burned and that a cup of coffee was involved but invites evaluations of Denis’ wakefulness and competence (162-163).
Likewise, saying ‘the jealous wife killed him’ is not the same as saying ‘jealousy struck again.’ As such Cooren writes that we should attend to how things like jealousy, scalding coffee and other people become present and active in our conversations (61, 76). How does jealousy take credit for something like a murder, lifting the burden off psychosis, culture and perhaps even the murderous lover? How is poor Denis made a klutz who needs his coffee served cold?
Action and Agency in Dialogue speaks to the importance of space and culture in understanding attributions of responsibility by prompting us to consider how material objects, virtual actors and human agents support, excuse and implicate one another. The book would be an excellent text for an advanced qualitative methods course. Students will be encouraged to think critically about what it means to act and how agency is distributed while being introduced to major thinkers ranging from John L. Austin through Harold Garfinkel and Michel Foucault. It is also a must read for those of us who think Latour and Derrida should be put to work together.
The book’s only fault is in its choice of examples. Cooren relies on fragments of talk recorded during ethnographic research with Medecins sans Frontiers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These call for more comprehensive analysis than is accorded to them as illustrations of the book’s theoretical points. For instance, commentary on the role of racial or colonialist prejudice in conversations between MSF administrators and African hospital staff is absent. Cooren explains that his three days in the field did not allow him to grasp subtle forms of discrimination (120) and he compensates for this with a useful discussion of the ways other authors have studied ethnocentrism through conversation analysis (113-121). However, it seems to me that by applying his novel ideas on action and agency to issues like prejudice Cooren would better show their applicability to everyday talk and utility for sociological research.
References
Derrida, J. (1988). Limited Inc. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stella Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, P.T.S., Inc. and McDonald’s International, Inc. 1995 WL 360309 (D.N.M. 1994).