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Lecture

1
Doing 'being ordinary'
Usually I start the course by doing what I do in the course, without any
programmatic statements, without any indication of why it should be of any
interest to anybody. But - and this may be unfair - the course will tum out
to be much more severely technical than most people could possibly be
interested in, and some good percentage will drop out, and usually that has
the consequence that they get nothing out of the class if they last one time. So
I decided to spend the first time telling people something that I take it could
hardly not be of interest to them. Then, when they drop out, they'd at least
have gotten what I figure would be worth the price of the course. And I guess
I should say if this isn't absorbing, you could hardly imagine how unabsorb
ing the rest will be.
Now, this is in many ways nothing like the way I'll proceed throughout the
rest of the course. In the course I will be taking stories offered in conversation
and subjecting them to a type of analysis which is concerned roughly to see
whether it's possible to subject the details of actual events to formal
investigation, informatively. The loosest message is that the world you live in
is much more finely organized than you'd imagine. As well as that loose
message, there are some really specific things about how stories work and why
they work the way they do. I'll do that from next time on. But in this lecture
I won't be studying the organization of telling stories in conversation, and I
won't be attempting to prove anything. I'll be saying some things about why
the study of storytelling should be of interest to anybody. But people don't
have to stay around after that to have caught that message, and to have been
armed with some materials that would permit them to wander around
noticing things that they might not have noticed, and find them ghastly.
I've been studying the organization of stories, how they work, for some
time. And one sort of issue is, what do people make stories out of? In
particular, given what they might make stories out of, what do they make
stories out of? It wasn't of particular interest to me why anybody else should
be interested in such an issue, but the question arose and now will constitute
the business of this lecture: What sort of large-scale interest does what people
make stories of or what they don't make stories of, have? A good deal of what
I'll say has its obscure intellectual source (I say 'obscure' because if anyone
were to read the book it's not likely that they'd find that it says what I say,
but with some consideration they might see how it is that I owe what I'm
saying to this source) in a novel called Between Life and Death by a French
novelist, Nathalie Sarraute. The book is absolutely not assigned; I'm just
citing a debt.
Lectures on Conversation, Volume I, II Harvey Sacks
1995 The Estate of Harvey Sacks. ISBN: 978-1-557-86705-6

215

2 16

Part IV

A kind of remarkable thing is how, in ordinary conversation, in reporting

some event, people report what we might see to be not what happened, but
the ordinariness of what happened. For whole ranges of things that you
might figure to be kind of exciting, something like this will be offered (the
following sorts of things are not made up but are actual) : Somebody
talking about a man they met the night before might say "He's very nice.
He's very very nice. " Or if they saw a movie they might say "It was really
good . " If they went away for a weekend, they say something like "We
went to Palm Springs. Bud played golf with the guys and I sat around the
pool with the girls. ' ' The reports do not so much give attributes of the
scene, activity, participants but announce the event's ordinariness, its
usualness. We might figure that lots of these things could be stories, but
they're not made into stories. And if you think of literature or poetry you
can perfectly well know that out of any such event as is passed off as "It was
a nice evening. We sat around and talked, " really elaborated characterizations
are often presented. So I've been wondering about the non-production of
stories.
Now I come to the central sorts of assertions I want to make. Whatever we
may think about what it is to be an ordinary person in the world, an initial
shift is not to think of an 'ordinary person' as some person, but as somebody
having as their job, as their constant preoccupation, doing 'being ordinary. '
It's not that somebody is ordinary, it's perhaps that that's what their business
is. And it takes work, as any other business does. And if you just extend the
analogy of what you obviously think of as work - as whatever it is that takes
analytic, intellectual, emotional energy - then you can come to see that all
sorts of nominalized things - personal characteristics and the like - are jobs
which are done, which took some kind of effort, training, etc. So I'm not
going to be talking about an 'ordinary person' as this or that person, or as
some average, i.e. , a non-exceptional person on some statistical basis, but as
something that is the way somebody constitutes themselves, and, in effect, a
job that they do on themselves. They and the people around them may be
coordinatively engaged in assuring that each of them are ordinary persons,
and that can then be a job that they undertake together, to achieve that each
of them, together, are ordinary persons.
The core question is, how do people go about doing 'being an ordinary
person'? In the first instance there's an easy answer: Among the ways you go
about doing 'being an ordinary person' is spending your time in usual ways,
having usual thoughts, having usual interests, etc.; so that all you have to do,
to be 'an ordinary person' in the evening, is turn on the TV set. It's not that
it happens that you're doing what lots of ordinary people are doing, but that
you know that the way to do 'having a usual evening' is to do that. It's not
just that you're selecting, "Gee I'll watch TV tonight, " but you're making a
job of, and finding an answer to, how to do 'being ordinary tonight. ' Some
people, as a matter of kicks, could say "Let's do being ordinary tonight. We'll
go watch TV, eat popcorn, ' ' etc. - something they know is being done at the
same time by millions of others around.

Lecture 1

217

We can see, then, that it's a job. You have to know what anybody/
everybody is doing; doing ordinarily. And you have to have that available to
do. There are people who don't have that available to do, and who specifically
can't be ordinary. If, for example, you're in prison, in a room with no facilities
at all - say, it has a bench and a hole in the floor and a spigot - then you find
yourself doing things like systematically exploring the cracks in the wall from
floor to ceiling over the years, and you come to have information about the
wall in that room which ordinary people don't have about their bedroom
wall. It's not a usual thing to do, to say "Well this evening I'm going to
examine that corner of the ceiling. " Of course it may be that prison walls are
more interesting than other walls, since among the other things prisoners are
occupied with is leaving information on the wall that they've been there, so
there's things to read on the walls. But it's perfectly available to anybody to
spend an afternoon looking at a wall. You could choose to do that. If you take
drugs you're permitted to do that. But unless you take drugs you would not
find yourself allowed to do it, though nobody's around. That is to say, in
being an 'ordinary person, ' that's not a thing you could allow yourself to
spend the day doing. And there is an infinite collection of possibilities, of
things that you couldn't bring yourself to do; not out of boredom, though
that's one way you could formulate it, but in the midst of the most utterly
boring afternoon you nonetheless would rather live through the boredom in
the usual way - whatever that way is - than see whether it would be less or
more boring to examine the wall or to look in some detail at the tree outside
the window.
There's a place in Freud where he says, "with regard to matters of
chemistry or physics or things like that, laymen would not venture an opinion.
With regard to psychology it's quite different; anybody feels free to make
psychological remarks. ' ' And part of the business he thought he was engaged
in was changing that around, i.e. , to both develop psychology and educate
laymen, co-jointly. So that the laymen would know that they don't know
anything about it and that there are people who do, so that they would
eventually stop making psychological remarks as they stopped making
chemical and physical remarks.
I raise this because while we all can see that that's quite so, there's a related
and in a way much more interesting thing that I doubt we've noticed. If one
were to pick up the notebooks of writers, poets, novelists, you're likely to find
elaborated studies of small real objects. Like in the notebooks of the poet
Gerard Manley Hopkins there are extended naturalistic observations of a very
detailed sort, of, e.g . , cloud formations or what a leaf looks like, looking up
at it under varying types of light. And for some novelists what you have is
extended character observations. Now, my notion is that as it is for chemistry
and physics, so it is for making distinctive observations about the world and
its persons. That is to say, that's the job of novelists and poets and not an
ordinary person. It's just a thing that, in being ordinary, you don't do. For
example, considering the situation of the Palm Springs weekend described as
"I sat around the pool with the girls, " you don't get, from somebody doing

2 18

Part IV

'being ordinary, ' a report of what the wind did to the water in the pool, or
some character observations other than "She was nice, " "She was not so
nice, " "She's getting older, ' ' of the people with whom the afternoon was
spent.
And I think it's not only that one doesn't make the story but does perhaps
make the observations, it's that the cast of mind of doing 'being ordinary' is
essentially this: Your business in life is only to see and report the usual aspects
of any possibly usual scene. That is to say, what you look for is to see how any
scene you're in can be made an ordinary scene, a usual scene, and that's what
it is.
Now plainly that could be a job; it could be work. The scene doesn't in the
first instance simply present itself, define itself, as insufferably usual, nothing
to be said about it; it's a matter of how you're going to attack it, what you
are going to see in it, what you are going to see in it that you can say about
it. Plainly, people are monitoring scenes for this storyable possibility. I'll give
a gruesome instance of it, from a book called An Ordinary Camp by Micheline
Maurel. She reports the first day in a concentration camp. The first hours are
terribly horrifying, and then there's a lapse.
Little by little conversation sprang up from bunk to bunk. The rumors
were already beginning to circulate. Luckily the news is good. We'll be
home soon. We'll have an unusual experience to talk about.
A way in which this event was dealt with while it was taking place - and
which, for an experience which might leave one utterly without hope, we can
see as wonderfully relevant for being able to survive it - was that in the end
it will tum out to have been a good story. And we've all experienced being
in scenes the virtue of which was that as we were in them we could see what
it was we could later tell people had transpired. And there are presumably lots
of things which, at least at some points in people's lives, are done just for that,
i.e. , it seems fair to suppose that there's a time when kids do 'kissing and
telling, ' that they're doing the kissing in order to have something to tell, and
not that they happen to do kissing and happen to do telling, or that they want
to do kissing and happen to do telling, etc., but that a way to get them to like
the kissing is via the fact that they like the telling.
It seems plain enough that people monitor the scenes they're in for their
storyable characteristics. And yet the awesome, overwhelming fact is that they
come away with no storyable characteristics, where presumably any of us with
any wit could make of this half hour, or of the next, a rather large array of
things to say. But that would take a kind of effort that could make one feel
awfully uncomfortable.
So, there's a business of being an 'ordinary person, ' and that business
includes attending the world, yourself, others, objects, so as to see how it is
that it's a usual scene. And when offering what transpired, you present it in
its usual 'nothing much' fashion, with whatever variants of banal character
izations you might happen to use, i.e. , there's no particular difference between

Lecture 1

2 19

saying "It was nothing much" and "It was outta sight. " That is to say, we've
all heard the usual characterizations of 'our Protestant society' or 'our Puritan
background, ' which involve that ordinary people/ Americans/Europeans are
built in such a way that they are constrained from doing lots of experiences
that they might do, were they not repressed. And we think of the kinds of
repressions that people have that are sociologically based, i.e. , the Puritan
ethic involves spending most of your time working, holding off pleasure, etc. ,
which we think of as definitively what it means to be a usual person in
Western civilization. Though that's manifestly important, it misses an
essential part of the thing, which is: Were you to have illegitimate experiences,
the characteristic of being an 'ordinary person' is that, having the illegitimate
experiences that you shouldn't have, they come off in just the usual way that
they come off for anybody doing such an illegitimate experience. When you
have an affair, take drugs, commit a crime, etc. , you find that it's been the
usual experience that others who've done it have had. Reports of the most
seemingly outrageous experiences, for which you'd figure you'd be at a loss
for words, or would have available extraordinary details of what happened,
turn out to present them in a fashion that has them come off as utterly
unexceptional. So we could perfectly well remove the Puritan constraints - as
people report they're being removed - and our utter usualness, the ordinary
cast of mind, would nonetheless be there to preserve the way we go about
doing 'being ordinary. '
My guess is that we could now take that point with us, and, watching
ourselves live in the world - or watching somebody else if that's more pleasant
- we could see them working at finding how to make things ordinary. And
presumably it would be from such a sort of perceived awareness of, e.g. , the
ease with which - after practice - you see only the most usual characteristics
of the people passing (that's a married couple and that's a black guy and
that's an old lady) or what a sunset looks like or what an afternoon with your
girlfriend or boyfriend consists of, that you can begin to appreciate that there's
some immensely powerful kind of mechanism operating in handling your
perceptions and thoughts, other than the known and immensely powerful
things like the chemistry of vision, etc. Those sorts of thing would not explain
how it is that, e.g. , you can come home day after day and, asked what
happened, report without concealing, that nothing happened. And were you
concealing something, if it were reported it would turn out to be nothing
much. And, as it happens with you, so it happens with those you know. And
further, that ventures outside of being ordinary have unknown virtues and
unknown costs, i.e. , if you come home and report what the grass looked like
along the freeway, that there were four noticeable shades of green some of
which just appeared yesterday because of the rain, then there may well be
some tightening up on the part of your recipient. And if you were to do it
routinely, then people might figure that there's something odd about you;
that you're pretentious. You might find them jealous of you; you might lose
friends. That is to say, you want to ask what are the costs, and if people have
checked out the costs of venturing even slightly into making their life an epic.

220

Part IV

Now it's also the case that there are people who are entitled to have their
lives be an epic. We have assigned a series of storyable people, places, and
objects, and they stand as something different from us. It may be that in
pretty much every circle there's a somebody who's the source andj or the
subject of all neat observations, as there are for the society in general a
collection of people about whom detailed reports are made; reports that
would never, not merely be ventured about others, they'd never be thought of
about others. The way in which Elizabeth Taylor turned around is something
noticeable, reportable. The way in which your mother turned around is
something unseeable, much less nonreportable.
The question is, why in the world should it be that it's almost everybody's
business to be occupationally ordinary? Why do they take on the job - it's not
that others do it for them - of keeping everything utterly mundane? I'm not
going to answer that question, but I guess it has some diagnostic interest, i.e. ,
there are presumably a really large collection of what seem to be serious
changes in the world - changes in governments, economies, religions - that
would not change the business of being ordinary. Across such changes it is
enforced on pretty much everybody that they stay, finding only how it is that
what's going on is usual, with all their effort possible.
And it's really remarkable to see people's efforts to achieve the 'nothing
happened' sense of really catastrophic events. I've been collecting fragments
out of newspapers, about hijackings and what the airplane passengers think
when a hijacking takes place. The latest one I happened to find goes
something like this: "I was walking up towards the front of the airplane and
by the cabin I saw the stewardess standing, facing the cabin, and a fellow
standing with a gun in her back. And my first thought was he's showing her
the gun, and then I realized that couldn't be, and then it turned out he was
hijacking the plane . " And another; a Polish plane is in the midst of being
hijacked, and the guy reports, "I thought to myself we just had a Polish
hijacking a month ago and they're already making a movie of it. " And a
classically dramatic instance is that almost universally the initial report of the
Kennedy assassination (the first one), was of firecrackers.
Just imagine rewriting the Old Testament in its monumental events, with
ordinary people having gone through it. What would they have heard and
seen, e.g. , when voices called out to them, when it started to rain, etc. There's
at least one place in the Old Testament where that happens. Lot was warned
of the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah, and given permission to bring his
daughters and sons-in-law out. ' 'And Lot went out, and spake unto his sons
in law, which married his daughters, and said, Up, get you out of this place;
for the Lord will destroy this city. But he seemed as one that mocked unto his
sons in law . " And they stayed behind.
Here I'm only giving specifically dramatic sorts of things, as compared to
seeing the interesting possibilities in an event that can also be seen to be
ordinary - which is really a much more fundamental kind of thing. And when
we start considering stories, at least one tack we can take is to treat the
overwhelming banality of the stories we encounter - in my data, in our own

Lecture 1

22 1

experiences - as not so much something that, e.g. , allows for statistical

analysis of variation, or that makes them therefore uninteresting to study, but
as a specific feature which turns on a kind of attitude; say, an attitude of
working at being usual, which is perhaps central to the way our world is
organized.
Now there are enormous virtues to seeing the usual in a scene. It perrnits
all kinds of routine ways of dealing with it. Also, if you're dealing with an
utter stranger, e.g. , somebody in an approaching car when you're about to
cross a street, it seems to be awfully useful to know that what he sees, looking
at you, is the usual thing anyone would see, with its usual relevancies, and not
God only knows what. You do not, then, have to make an each-and-every
time decision whether or not you'll be allowed the right of way. So, then, I'm
not saying let's do away with the ways in which we go about being ordinary.
Rather, if being ordinary is the sort of thing I'm suggesting it is, then we want
to know what importances it has.