The Cappuccino Community : cafés and civic life in the contemporary city.

ESRC Project July 2002- June 2005

Reference Number:  R000239797

Principal Investigator - Eric Laurier

Co-researcher – Chris Philo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                      The End of the Occasion 

a paper given at the International Institute for Ethnomethodology & Conversation Analysis Conference, Bentley College, Boston 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eric Laurier,

Institute of Geography,

University of Edinburgh

Edinburgh G8 9XP

 

 

 

August 2005.

 

 



 

If, whenever housewives (sic.) were let into a room, each one, on her own, went to some spot and started to clean it, one might conclude that the spot surely needed cleaning. On the other hand, one might conclude that there is something about the spot and about the housewives that makes the encounter of one by the other an occasion for cleaning, in which case the fact of the cleaning, instead of being evidence of dirt, would itself be a phenomenon. P168 (H. Garfinkel, & Sacks, H., 1986)

 

While trying to put this paper together I realised that dealing with the beginnings and endings of the occasion in the same paper was a little over-ambitious. Given that my hope was to touch on the differences between the accomplishments of beginning and ending phonecalls and beginnings and endings that involved arriving in and leaving cafes, a quick comparison seemed possible. I wanted to use the comparison with the phone call firstly because recordings of phone conversations have provided such central resources for CA and secondly because beginnings and endings would have to be locally accomplished with a different reservoir of resources stored in the café.

 

It is no accident that the phonecall has been one of CA’s central phenomena since the phone call is one of “Sack’s glosses”, like his traffic police study, given that the phonecall is a perspicuous setting that ‘the analyst looks to find, as of the haecceities of some local gang’s work affairs the organizational thing that they are up against and that they can be brought to teach the analyst what he needs to learn and to know from them …’ (H. Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992) p186. The organizational thing that can be offered back to the local gang in quite unexpectedly detailed descriptions of numerous local accomplishments. The organizational thing that Sacks was pursuing was, of course, turn-taking as one of the machineries for organising conversation. In terms of being an occasion the phone call has those exceptional qualities of talk constituting its openings and talk constituting its closings.

 

Leaving the café requires the production cohort (the customers & staff) to achieve the ending as an appropriate accountable part of the occasion that it is (none of the methods being a reliable ejector seat). The peculiar ethno twist, for me as an erstwhile geographer, is that I do not want to treat the café as the location for activities of meetings, be they convivial, business, familial or, as often, admixtures. In visiting a café for refreshments, customers will be occasioning these various activities using, whilst also realising, the café’s spatio-temporal features as a resource for doing those activities [1] . What I am curious about in the café, then, is the local occasioning of the occasion. There are some of the most sharply described order accounts from CA that we can imagine ever being produced by the social sciences of occasioning. One of the best of these is Doug Maynard’s(Maynard, 2003) superb examination of the news delivery sequence: Bad News, Good News. In his book he details the preannouncements/blocks or go-aheads, the itemized news inquiry or topic initial elicitors (‘how are you’) which, very briefly, lead into : (1) announcement. (2) response, (3) elaboration and (4) assessment).

 

The classic which ushered in these studies is Schegloff & Sacks’ paper from 1973 ‘Opening up closings’ and it’s one that I’m certainly not the first to revisit. What I want to recall from their paper is that having closely described the technical aspects of producing closings in telephone conversations, they return, in capital letters, to what kind of other less technical thing is being ended:

 

 ‘the possible need for preparing them, has to do with the OCCASION’S ending, and it is a part of conversation that the occasion may be ended. It is by way of the use of the closing the conversation for ending the occasion that the use of a section to end the conversation may be appreciated, in a way similar to our appreciation of the use of a snack to end an evening or get-together. Schegloff & Sacks 1973 (Harvey Sacks & Schegloff, 1973)

 

Before leaping straight into examples of ending café going as an occasion I’d like to back-up a little to think about the other related work that my material on customers exiting cafés touches on. That is, to draw on the corpus of studies on how talk organizes and is organized by locomotion of speakers through, by, away from and toward architectural features. This avenue builds on Christian Heath and Dirk vom Lehn’s (Heath & vom Lehn, 2004) museum studies wherein they have looked at movement around the museum and its exhibits. Secondly Lorenza Mondada (Mondada, forthcoming) and her colleagues (Balthasar & Mondada, 2005) have also been doing some lovely studies of speakers:

a) as guides and tourists involved in walks in the city

b)  as flatmates moving in and out of the kitchen, dining room and halls in a domestic space.

And thirdly the studies of Crabtree (Crabtree, 2000) and Carlin (Carlin, 2003) of navigation through libraries’ heavily textually textured architectures as part and parcel of searching for books. These studies bear some resemblances to our café study [2] in that there are all manner of intriguing ways that talk’s work attends to, utilizes, arranges and transforms the trajectories and orientations of bodies of mundane architectural practices. What is pertinent to ending the occasion is that entire conversations or merely topics can be brought to a close by persons using their arriving at or leaving of a particular room, exhibit, desk or area of shelfed books. Our interest, like theirs being in how such closings or transitions are done and what we might learn about being in the café as an occasion rather than a location.

 

Now let’s look at some actual instances. Really rather quickly, and in reverse – we will start off with a customer heading towards the door and work backwards to customers preparing to exit the place.

 

click to play (requires quicktime)

 

Staff: Bye

Customer: Bye

 

In a simple sense the locomotion of a customer toward the café exit, where the locomotion is seen in its details as [exiting the café], is responded to with the first pair part “bye” from the barista. There’s no preceding conversation between the barista tidying up the cake cabinet and raincoat wearing exit-er. The “bye” is not doing the closing of a conversation, it is marking her departure from this place. One interesting thing it does is change her exit from unmarked to marked and gives her the sense that she, even if only as a customer, is worth saying goodbye to. Where, for any café, if it’s a place that customers’ attendance is cared for at all, then some member of staff of that place should say goodbye. Given that the café does not impose staff-customer conversation because doing so would ruin one of its valuable aspects – that one can be alone there and be left alone with one’s business – then if one is a customer there then one is expectedly cared for in this and potentially other un-imposing ways.

 

 

         Table: Have a good one.

         Exiter: You too. Enjoy your time

         Table: Yup

         Exiter: See ya

         Table: Bye

 

What we have here are some of the interesting complexities of leaving where several goodbyes may have to be done. It begins with “see you” to the staff and then follows with well-wishing to the table and its return. The locomotion of the departing customer arranges things nicely since the table is placed as second in the sequence in relation to walking toward the exit (and was greeted first on arriving). Moreover it involves customer-to-customer closings, where those customers are not at the same table, nor involved in the conversation directly preceding the closing. However the interest is in who a customer might be obliged to say goodbye to. These café goers have obligations to one another as acquainted regulars – this  category being of great import in the inhabitation of the café. As such well-wishing, greeting or snubbing other regulars is one of the things regulars can insert into the recognizable and projectable courses of arriving and leaving cafés. Regulars affirm (or may deny) their ongoing memorability to one another in doing so without having to build their relationships up into friendships.

 

 

What we have in this clip are, as we travel further backwards into the pre-endings are firstly ‘togethers’ of a different intensity (family) and secondly, some of the body movements that go into ending their café occasion. Notionally ending the occasion does not end their being together since they will go on to shop together and return home together and as a ‘together.’  Their body movements in ending their time on the terrace are of utter familiarity to us from all manner of occasions that involve drinking or eating together at a table be it as families, colleagues or friends, the particularity of being in public spaces is leaving the table together. The son in the middle leans back in his chair, his lean-back bearing a resemblance to the use of a [pause] in phone conversations by the phone-called that prefigure closing sequences (H. Sacks, 1992). In this case I think it’s related to his observed, and activity-generated, status as the last-person-left-drinking. When the last-person-left-drinking leans back from his or her cup then coffee drinking is observably finished and something can be done with that. In this case, the other son soon leans in and claps his hand on to his thighs. His gesture which he pairs with the drinking being over, is displaying for all concerned that it is time to get up and leave. Now what we would expect and what is nice is that both turn their attention to mum who assents and a conjoint gradual rising up from the table begins. And we see something of the consequentiality of leaving the café in that while the mum blithely takes the lead, to begin their next shopping task, the sons escape. One son initially follows her but the other sees the opportunity to split by walking off in the opposite direction. The consequentiality on their ending their sitting together in this café is that their togetherness can be sundered.

 

 


 

In that clip the two women have been sitting for about ten minutes when the ending of the coffee break begins.




The woman with her back to us (B) lifts her cup and then adds that extra tilt which while mechanically necessary also makes it visibly the last sip (just as it would be for a glass of beer etc.). So here is one of the criteria in place for a possible completion of the coffee break BUT and one big BUT here is that F is not even half way through her coke.




 

 The other ‘BUT’ is in the talk between B & F (see transcript). It is the ‘but’ that happens at the same time the coffee cup starts on its rise towards B’s mouth. It is the ‘but’ that F [looks away] on before returning to [look toward] B. The [look away] preceding the [look toward] nicely accentuates the ‘you’ of ‘you’re right’. The look also monitors the rise, sup and drink of the coffee cup and thereby allows the supping’s ordinary course to guide the production of the turn. This is sort of speculative, but if we look at a transcript the cup rises with one possible turn unit and falls on F’s next turn. And F nicely extends her ‘too’ as a possible turn completion which B takes up just as her cup touches back down on to its saucer. The organization of the drinking in other words supplies organizational resources to the talk.

 



The last sip nevertheless brings in the relevance of finishing the coffee break and B looks toward her wrist and this time we see a second pair-part gesture produced by F in response when she brings her wristwatch into play, twisting it around and looking at it. Of course B & F are not bringing their wristwatches into consideration (‘mine’s a Rolex’), they are topicalising the time where for the two of them on a coffee break, the break has clock-marked features. It could be that on checking their watches they discover that they are late and leap up immediately. What in fact happens is that F immediately takes a visibly quick drink from her glass. By drinking as the immediately succeeding action F orients to a speeding up of their drinking. In other words to make it to the end of their drinking in time for the end of their marked time. The pace of their refreshment has been increased.

 

There is a charming and classic gesture of having finished with her drink when she puts it back on the table. After F has placed the glass down on the coffee table, she pushes it away from her. The glass ending up slightly beyond the can of coke, a visible adjustment to the previous repeated return of the glass to the table by her pushing it away, she is establishing it, at this point in the unfolding action, as potentially the last sip from the glass. This is something that does have to be established since unlike B her glass still has more to drink in it. In the greater round of their preparing to leave we can appreciate what F displays in this gesture, that she has noticed that B has finished her coffee and is now making available to B that they are potentially both finished with their drinks.

 

What B and F put in place is a possible ending, yet much like the closing sequences of phonecalls, the closing sequence can be abandoned and further talk can ensue. Which it does. The conversation about colleagues and work is too good and it picks up again. While it seemed like it was all over for the drinks, B has a reserve glass of water that she can now pick up. Given that it is another unfinished drink, it then projects forward another stretch of time that it will take to finish it. We might think of this as a reversal of the Arabian Nights phenomenon where in the original the endless supply of stories prevented the death of the heroine, here so long as there are drinks to be drunk then the stories can continue to be told.

 



B takes another three slugs from her glass of water and we find the closing sequence repeated again when B visibly finishes the glass of water. F uses three runs to build up the expectation of her closing evaluation of their troubles talk at the café ‘it’s terrible’, ‘it’s dreadful’. She further orchestrates her evaluation with the rising glass which once lifted, then hovers, waiting for her to take that last anticipated sip. B’s attention is doubley secured. On the way toward banging the glass down on the table, she actually slaps her thigh, and while she still has the gestural turn (as it were) she takes a hold of her handbag while saying ‘we’d better get back’. And at this point they get up in almost perfect synchrony and leave the café. F handles the local history of their leaving in the thigh-slapping glass banging of what is on this attempt: a second run. Having abandoned their first possible leaving the second one has to replay it. The problem is not so much how to accomplish a restart as how to achieve a refinish in practically accountable ways.

 

 

Closing Remarks

 

As CA studies have shown closing can be accomplished in various ways through talk: for instance the use of “we-ell” & “okay” or a return to the topic which the conversation began or the circumstances at its outset “I’ll let you get back to your cooking” and here we have seen some of the further ways in which the occasion can be ended. Each of the clips have shown aspects of closing that will be unsurprising to those familiar with Heath & vom Lehn’s work, with Mondada’s studies and of course Goodwin’s work on gesture. Closing is accomplished in the manipulation of the crockery and the furniture in cafés, in the visibility of last sips, in the trajectory of customers towards the exit and sequences of posture and more.

 

The further question remains as to what it is about the café occasion that makes it particularly that setting without my wanting to posit that it is based on the “bedrock” of turn-taking organization (Hester & Francis, 2001)? Schegloff and Sacks’ original article on opening up closings did indeed disattend deliberately to the occasion by concentrating on phone calls. It was only toward the end that parenthetical remarks were addressed to what particular occasions might be.

 

What I find myself reflecting on is the variability of the occasions we find occasioned in the café and wondering what qualities they nevertheless share.  Despite Starbucks’ promises that the café is a third place between home and work in which we could hang around forever in comfy armchairs, we do have to leave [3] . In its typical form the coffee break lingers somewhere between a quarter of an hour and half an hour.  There might, then, be something essential about that brevity – knowing the ending comes quickly? There is the way that an occasion makes room in the day and literally makes a room that is the dwelt in architecture of this day. It makes room in the café whether that be to shift it from empty to occupied or full to accommodate just one more? And in otherwise empty days on holiday, in retirement or in a foreign city a visit to the café puts an occasion in the day, or obversely, in otherwise full days the café puts a break in the day.

 

Is it that occasions can be ended in certain ways that maintain their value as the routine? It’s not been so much occasioning the occasion as putting something at the end of the occasion that allows and often promises that there will be another? Or rather putting something in that can either open up the next thing we will do – the café visit is not the main occasion … or if the café visit is the main occasion then putting something in place that we can meet again? The occasion must be both finished and yet opened out: this is the routine mundane problem that people face in doing regularity and thereby having that particular form of recognisability that is the regular.






Bibliography

 

Allegra-Strategies. (2004). Project Café 5. London: Commercial Research Report, available from Allegra Strategies.

Balthasar, L., & Mondada, L. (2005). Multiscope video and the continuous access to relevant details. paper given at Interacting Bodies, Lyons 2005., copies available from the authors.

Carlin, A. P. (2003). Aspects of Spatial Arrangement in Libraries. In T. Lask (Ed.), Constructions sociales de l'espace, Les territoires de l'anthropolgie de la communication (pp. 87-99). Liège: Les Éditions de l'Université de Liège.

Crabtree, A. (2000). Remarks on the social organisation of space and place. Journal of Mundane Behaviour, 1(1), http://www.mundanebehaviour.org/issues/v1n1/crabtree.html.

Garfinkel, H., & Sacks, H. (1986). On Formal Structures of Practical Actions. In H. Garfinkel (Ed.), Ethnomethodological Studies of Work (pp. 160-193). London: Routledge and Keegan Paul.

Garfinkel, H., & Wieder, D. L. (1992). Two Incommensurable, Asymmetrically Alternate Technologies of Social Analysis. In G. Watson & R. M. Seiler (Eds.), Text in Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology (pp. 175-206). London: Sage.

Heath, C., & vom Lehn, D. (2004). Configuring reception: looking at exhibits in museums and galleries. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(6), 45-63.

Hester, S., & Francis, D. (2001). Is institutional talk a phenomenon? Reflections on ethnomethodology and applied conversation analysis. In A. McHoul & m. Rapley (Eds.), How to analyse talk in institutional settings, a case book of methods (pp. 206-218). London: continuum.

Maynard, D. W. (2003). Bad News, Good News. Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings. Chicago: University of Chiacago Press.

Mondada, L. (forthcoming). Deixis spatiale, gestes de pointage et formes de coordination de l'action. In J.-M. Barberis & M. C. Manes-Gallo (Eds.), Verbalisation de l'espace et cognition situee: la description d'itineraires pietons. Paris: Editions CNRS.

Sacks, H. (1992). Lectures on conversation, Vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell.

Sacks, H., & Schegloff, E. A. (1973). Opening up closings*. Semiotica, 8(4), 289-327.

 


[1] Cafés’ accommodation of all sorts of meetings and their occasioning of routine-ness, or everydayness, is at the heart of their worth in any society. At a simple level, when two colleagues are having a conversation, during the organizational thing that is their fifteen minute coffee break, their shared orientation to what can be done in a coffee break is of use in organising just what can be spoken about in that time. At the same time their speaking makes the fifteen minutes into a conversation rather than sitting watching each second tick by. In other words the colleagues will make the time of the conversation while the clock marks the time of the conversation.

[2] For more detail see the project website: http://web.ges.gla.ac.uk/~elaurier/cafesite/

[3] Though in the UK and the USA we really do spend more time than ever now doing what we do in cafés (Allegra-Strategies, 2004).