Understanding mediated appearances and their proliferation: The case of the phone rings and the ‘crisis of the summons’

Understanding appearances as performative occurrences

The appearance of a distant other – whether they ring at the door, call by phone, send a letter or message, or appear through a comment on the website of a social network – constitutes a micro-event that is conventionally recognizable as a certain kind of social action, with immediate effects and more long-term consequences. It immediately produces an ‘initiator/enunciator’ and an ‘addressee’, who are mutually obliged to each other. The appearance of the other instantly triggers a particular moral and pragmatic charge which may become especially visible when certain elements of context make it unbearable for addressees and prompt them to take specific measures to protect themselves.

The particular story of one of our interviewees provides a striking illustration of the pragmatics of ‘mediated appearances’ (in his case, the appearance of a letter in his mailbox). He told us that he often let his mail pile up in his mailbox for weeks or even months. He preferred feeling the dull but haunting guilt of not checking his mailbox at all to taking out his mail and letting it pile up on the table without dealing with it. The difference is incomprehensible in a rational theory of action, for in both cases there is unanswered mail that piles up. Things become clearer, however, when considered from a performative point of view. In the latter case he would have been able to hold the letters in his hand and to speculate what they may contain, before leaving them to pile up again. The appearance of the other (through the mere manual and visual grasp of the letter) would have been ‘recognized’, which immediately would have put the addressee under an ‘obligation’. His guilt in this case would stem from the fact of not having answered particular people and not having honoured specific expectations. For an individual who is admittedly slightly depressed, this proves to be less bearable than ignorance and the real but diffuse guilt felt because he has not opened his postbox.

Whether the appearance of the other relies on old or new media, whether it takes the form of someone calling in the street, of a phone call, an instant message or a post on Facebook, it establishes a sequential order. Such an event projects expectations: that it will be understood and noticed, that it will elicit a kind of response, etc., and it immediately constitutes a system of preferences for possible answers. Hence the actual response, should it be given, or else the lack thereof, will be intelligible and justifiable in relation to this normative order. The production of responses that are not preferred will usually be marked and their provision will trigger forms of justification or excuses.

By considering mediated appearances in this way, we are very close to linguistic theories of performativity. John Austin proposes that we treat concrete statements as speech acts that may succeed or fail (Austin, 1970). They are conventionally and immediately recognizable, in the framework of a ‘total situation’, as a certain kind of social act (illocutionary effect), and a relevant and appropriate response is therefore expected (‘securing an uptake’). They also project expectations concerning subsequent consequences and their accomplishment (perlocutionary effects). The performative linguistic action is not a given, already present in the statement itself, as in taxonomic approaches (Searle, 1970). Its accomplishment appears as a joint construction, negotiated in the framework of a situated interaction in which it immediately modifies the relationship of interlocution between the agents, along with their duties and mutual obligations, with a force likely to be modulated (Sbisa, 2001). These different properties also apply to mediated appearances, which explains why they are so often described as speech acts.

Judith Butler stresses the capacity of language in its performative dimension to constitute subjects, identities and social categories (such as gender), during ‘social performances’ where they are constantly put to the test (Butler, 1997). In its illocutionary dimension, performative action is credited with the ontological, if not ‘magical’, power to produce realities, to configure postures and relations through its accomplishment, whereas perlocutionary effects depend on characteristics of the situation to succeed. Judith Butler argues that performative force cannot be understood in the framework of a single isolated speech event. The apparently ‘obvious’ and natural character of gendered categories or the force of insults feed on the history of all the previous social performances in which they have been brought into play. The performative force of linguistic actions increases in the repetition of successful trials; but the success of the performative is never guaranteed. Each new utterance event may be an opportunity for the production of new and unexpected responses, and for the emergence of new subjects. The risk of failure is a structural property of illocution, and this constituent vulnerability is the other side of the performative power of language to produce reality and ontologies (Butler, 2010).

Both Austin’s and Butler’s theories of performativity emphasize the fact that performativity is a property of language, whereas mediated appearances can take other forms that are not strictly linguistic (e.g. a telephone ring). This is not too much of a problem with Butler’s theory of performativity, because her discursive conception of language can, it seems, be extended fairly easily to non-verbal symbolic occurrences. Her paradigmatic example is, moreover, a situation that she finds in Althusser, and that can take on a non-verbal form: that of a passer-by in the street, waved at by a police officer, or called with a ‘Hey!’ As soon as the passer-by turns around he or she is simultaneously constituted as the recipient and as a potential accused, to the point of experiencing a fleeting feeling of guilt even if he or she is perfectly innocent (Althusser, 1970; Butler, 1997). Nothing precludes the ontological power of the linguistic statement from being extended to occurrences such as a knock at the door or a telephone ring.

Certain aspects of Austin’s theory are less applicable to technology-mediated appearances of the other, because of the angle of his analysis. Austin specifically seeks to elaborate an analytical philosophy of language that is distinctly different from the evaluation of propositions in terms of truth or error. But the latter categorization does not generally apply to the occurrences that we are considering here, and there is little meaning in the idea of a telephone ring being true or false. Saying that it can succeed or fail is more straightforward and has fewer philosophical implications than saying the same thing about a descriptive proposition. This is also because, with Austin, an essential property of linguistic performativity stems from its reflexive nature, shown by explicit performatives that ‘say’ what they do – something that three knocks at the door or a phone ring do not do.

My definition of performativity is therefore broader than Austin’s. Appearances of the other constitute performative events, in so far as they can be recognized as social actions of a certain kind, which do several things:

Beyond language: collective arrangements and socio-technical networks

In many cases mediated appearances cannot be imputed to the sole agency of a definite human subject (‘she-who-appears’), such as the speaker of an opening utterance in conversational settings: a complex socio-material chain of agency has to be taken into account. Take the example of dating websites, which strategically use the appearance of others and their performative effects to facilitate meetings. They multiply micro-events in which the action of another user is signalled by means of a pop-up on one’s own computer screen. In my video recording of a navigation session on such a site, a user suddenly sees on her computer screen: ‘“Secretum is currently visiting your profile.” Close / See his profile / Chat with him’ (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Window that appears on the screen of users of dating sites to indicate that another member is ‘visiting’ their profile.

This window presents essentially as an announcement that ‘X is visiting your profile’, triggered by the actions of X which the user cannot see. The window appears in the middle of the screen, so that it covers what she was busy doing. This appearance of X is thus specifically configured to be noticed and dealt with. The design of the window conspicuously proposes a set of three relevant responses: three buttons corresponding to different actions and incorporating a system of preferences. Preferred responses are those that project future interactional moves (‘Chat with him’) or preserve such a possibility (‘See his profile’), and this is marked by larger yellow buttons. The action that seems to exclude any follow-up (‘Close’) is marked as being not preferred by being assigned a smaller white button to click on. This is a particular form of appearance, mediated by digital devices, and whose design is visibly oriented towards specific performative effects.

But ‘who’ is at the origin of this micro-event? Can one really even identify the main site of its production or enunciation? It is not X himself, since the appearance of this notification of his ‘visit’ is a consequence of his actions, which is done automatically without his intervention and of which he is not necessarily aware, especially if he is a novice. Nor is it imputable only to a computer system, since the message sent is an ‘automatic’ consequence of X’s action, and its format was designed by the team of the website, while the possibility of X appearing also depends on the parameters set by the potential addressee, who can block them. Moreover, several ‘voices’ seem to ‘talk’ in this message, in addition to the ‘author’ of the main announcement. There is the voice at the top of the window, which reflexively places the event in the category ‘a member is visiting your profile’, from a necessarily overarching or totalizing perspective. And there is the little voice just below that, which authorizes the user to block these ‘alerts’ and which is legally connoted. Note that the term ‘alert’ rather than ‘announcement’ seems to lessen the human agency in favour of technical mediation. It is thus with a plurality of voices, themselves heterogeneous, that the addressee is confronted. Gradually, the source of this announcement, intended to facilitate the electronic meeting of two users, turns out to be a socio-technical network, an assemblage of a number of human and non-human actors, some of them quite remote from the situation itself.

How can this plurality be integrated into the analysis of mediated appearances and their performative effects? Deleuze and Guattari propose an original theory of performativity (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980), which opens an interesting avenue. Between the statement and the action that it accomplishes, they see a space in which multiple voices can intervene. Understanding performativity then implies the need to account for a kind of ‘heteroglossia’ which constitutes any enunciation. All these voices that ‘talk’ through the speaker compose a collective arrangement (‘agencement collectif’), i.e. a heterogeneous assemblage of elements which conspire and function together (Deleuze and Parnet, 1999: 65). This accounts for the particular relationship between what is said and what is done, in a way that is neither completely within the order of language, as in Butler’s own treatment of performativity, nor completely outside it, as Bourdieu would have it (Bourdieu, 1982). Such heterogeneous assemblages play a constituent role in what the statement they contribute to producing actually does. It is even possible to go a step further than these authors and to see the connection with the ‘actor network theory’ (Callon, 1991; Latour, 1992). There is indeed no reason why this collective arrangement should not incorporate artefacts. As the example of the pop-up ‘X is visiting your profile’ shows, a socio-technical network is simultaneously at the origin of the announcement and of its performative effects.

This additional step does not only explain the performative dimension that is partially implicit in the actor network theory – and which Michel Callon recently exploited in studying the ontological effects of scientific enunciation, in his work on the ‘performation’ of economic sociology (Callon, 2007: 320), to show how the socio-technical network produces a world in which the scientific and technical propositions describing it are relevant. In the general theory of technical mediation that the sociology of innovation proposes, the actor network and the ceaseless work of translation and ‘blackboxing’ through which it is constituted and maintained are used to account for: (a) the possibility of a material object being present or appearing in the situation (e.g. a ‘sleeping policeman’ or speed bump on the road, placed there by civil engineers in Bruno Latour’s famous example (Latour, 1993); and (b) a reconfiguration of possible responses and their relation to rules when the artefact suddenly becomes relevant (e.g. when a driver speeds towards the speed bump on the road). In Latour’s work the injunction or ‘action programme’ incorporated in the artefact condenses this performative dimension. The appearance (for basically that is also what this is about) of the artefact is equivalent to an enunciation of the action programme that it incorporates. Like any enunciation, this injunction can succeed or fail (depending on whether the driver slows down or not). The artefact, or rather its sudden relevance with regard to the activity underway, constitutes an occurrence that will have performative effects. The actor network articulates the way in which people and things can appear, and the performative effects of these appearances. This articulation can moreover become visible and empirically observable when the actors have to justify or apologize for what they have done.

We now have tools for understanding the forms that the appearance of distant others can have, and their performative effects. But how can we account for the historical and cultural variations in the way of apprehending and treating mediated appearances? How can a history and anthropology of social accessibility be made possible?

What mediated appearances do: the anthropological perspective

The detour via anthropology is useful for two reasons. The first is that for a long time anthropologists have been confronted with the question of understanding what other cultures consider is accomplished in social rituals, and the type of effect that subjects associate with the various ways in which various kinds of entities may appear or be invoked in given situations. This is, for example, particularly visible and explicit in some of the work that has been done on ‘magic’, in which appearances in the form of apparitions and evocations are highly consequential: the performative production of a relationship of interlocution between the ‘witch’ and the bewitched, in the mode of a public, ritualized announcement (Evans-Pritchard, 1976: 40), the ‘power’ of the witch’s gaze (Favret-Saada, 1977) or the effects of putting into play an effigy resembling a subject (which constitutes an ‘icon’ in action) in ‘volt’ witchcraft (Gell, 1998).

The second reason concerns the way in which, over the past 30 years, linguistic anthropology – adopting Malinowski’s argument that ‘the main function of language is not to express thought, nor to duplicate mental processes, but rather to play an active pragmatic role in human behaviour’ (Malinowski, 1935: 7) – has made linguistic pragmatism an object of study and a point of entry into the analysis of societies (Duranti, 1997a). The idea has been to study the way in which the members of given societies accomplish various types of linguistic action and ‘elementary’ interactional sequences, such as deixis and reference to people and things (Hanks, 1990) or greetings (Duranti, 1997b).

In this framework, Michèle Rosaldo outlined what the ethnographic approach could gain from an entrance via performativity: the ‘force’ of speech acts depends on what the participants expect and on their socio-cultural ways of behaving (Rosaldo, 1982). She showed how acts of language were distributed and accomplished by the Ilongots in the Philippines. Struck by the fact that they produced many directives, more than her Western culture has accustomed her to, Rosaldo explained that the Ilongots’ acts of language were distributed around two main classes: directive and declarative. She studied the composition of certain directives frequently used in the family environment, and showed how they both reflected and produced a social order and a division of work characteristic of Ilongot society.

I would like to adapt these concerns to my purpose, which is to grasp, from an anthropological point of view, what I call ‘the performative texture’ of ordinary accessibility (in the sense of extended performativity defined in the preceding section). My aim is thus to understand what mediated appearances do when they involve a remote participant. The project then revolves around five questions, directly transposed from the linguistic anthropology programme:

This way of posing the problem enables us to move towards an empirically grounded anthropology of sociability. The prevailing values and norms in different groups or societies, and the accepted ways of engaging in various forms of interaction with known or unknown others are revealed in the finer details of the organization of interactional sequences initiated by mediated appearances.

Data collection methods

I will use different data sources as material to discuss the phone ring example and will frame it with respect to the argument of the paper. Regarding the post-WWII period, I worked on two types of primary sources: short recorded sequences featuring telephone conversations in French TV fiction series from the early 1950s to the 1970s gathered at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) archives in Paris, and existing online archives of American telecommunication ads from the 1930s to the 1970s (see for instance http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/communications-ads). For the current mobile phone period, I relied on some of the main results of a qualitative interview-based study of the uses of musical mobile ringtones of about 25 French users, which was reported elsewhere more extensively (Licoppe, 2011). The point was to use such material as well as secondary sources to show how a phone ring is constituted as a different case of mediated appearance in both periods with different pragmatic consequences in each case, and thus to provide evidence of a more general trend regarding the evolution of mediated appearances.

Telephone rings and their uses after World War II

From the 1930s, the take-up of the telephone was widespread in industrialized societies. After initially promoting it as a tool intended for utilitarian purposes, telecommunications firms became aware of the importance of personal conversation in the use of the telephone, and of its commercial potential (Fischer, 1992). The next step was therefore to ensure that the device was present in domestic contexts and that calls were readily accepted. Advertisements from that time show the telephone as a medium for trivial and frequent conversations. It was, moreover, endowed with a positive value, in so far as it was a means for strengthening personal relationships, and the welcome herald of these conversations was the telephone ring (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

An advertisement of the Bell Corporation characteristic of the 1940s and 1950s, which overtly tries to shape the meaning of the phone ring’s experience while promoting personal and informal conversation with family and friends, which had formerly been criticized as a futile waste of time.

Whereas it was initially a potentially intrusive tool that people acquired for a specific purpose, in the post-WWII years the telephone was promoted as a necessity in every household, and its use was extended to communication with family and friends. One bought a telephone once, so that it would ring throughout the year and help to maintain bonds with faraway loved ones (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

‘Here’s a gift that rings the bell the whole year through’.

Along with the telephone terminal, the ring became a regular feature of everyday life. As switchboards and their operators disappeared in the post-WWII decades, it became easier to forget the socio-technical infrastructure on which the ring was based. In fact, the ring ‘punctualized’ a more complex actor network (Callon, 1991). It became an occasional occurrence that directly signalled a caller’s intention to make contact, and was designed to produce repetitive and relatively disturbing sound events, until the correspondent answered. This design incorporated a strong normative expectation that the correspondent would answer if he or she was there, without having information (at that time) on who was calling and thus ‘appearing’. In his highly detailed analysis of the way in which rings were treated, Emmanuel Schegloff showed how people oriented towards more or less acceptable intervals before answering, and how the design of the ring gave it the character of a ‘summons’ (Schegloff, 1972): it demanded a reply by repeatedly ringing until one was obtained. The arrival of the telephone in people’s homes also posed the problem of the members’ ability to recognize a telephone ring for what it was (that is, its illocutionary force) – a necessary condition for it to be dealt with appropriately. Another question that the take-up of the telephone in middle- and working-class homes raised was how to regulate the answering of calls. Who should answer, given that all members of the household co-present could hear the ring? These practical problems were evident in France in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a time when the government authorities had set the goal of putting a landline phone in every French home – a public policy that amounted to politically legitimizing the vulnerability of domestic situations to telephone ‘appearances’. TV series of that period reflect the relevance of such a new form of vulnerability for middle- and working-class homes, by illustrating two interactional problems related to the telephone, as well as their relevance in the media sphere of the time: (a) learning to distinguish the telephone ring from other sound devices mediating the appearance of an ‘other’, such as the doorbell; and (b) negotiating who was to answer, since it was a number and a phone associated with a place and a family unit that was ringing.

To sum up, the media archives of the time show the efforts of firms and public policy to format domestic situations as normally vulnerable to telephone calls (which was absolutely not the case at that time for numerous institutional events and interactions in public). Commercial promotion sought to make telephones that rang throughout the year acceptable, and to enhance their social value as they allowed for chatting with family and friends (whereas this type of conversation had previously been scorned and criticized). This implied the need to facilitate the acquisition of competences to recognize the phone ring sound event as an injunction to answer, and to regulate who answered. The ring itself was designed and treated as a summons through its repetitive sound organization, which shows the strength of normative expectations that were constituted at the time around the action of answering a ringing telephone in one’s home.

Mobile musical ringtones and their ambiguous performative effects

With the spread of the mobile phone, the end of the twentieth century witnessed a radical transformation of the performative texture of telephone accessibility. Any type of situation, be it private, professional or institutional, became potentially vulnerable to telephone appearances. The interactional problems that this ‘omni-relevance’ of calls and thus of telephone rings raised are evidenced in the design and use of the rings themselves, and characterized by a new degree of subtlety. Whereas before, phone rings were simply imposed by the phone manufacturers, they may now be chosen by the user from a very wide range of sound excerpts. To understand the performative effects of contemporary ringtones, I will refer to some of the main relevant results taken from a previous qualitative study of the choice and uses of musical ringtones (Licoppe, 2011). This research revealed contrasting logics of choices and uses, with two significant types of orientations regarding the performative effects of mobile rings, their personalization and their ‘musicalization’, which I will review and put into perspective.