6 - Agreeing and disagreeing: maintaining sociable argument

Summary

In a Monty Python sketch a man knocks on a door and says ‘I came here for an argument.’ A man sitting at a desk in the room says ‘No you didn't.’ ‘Yes I did.’ And they are off on an argument about what constitutes an argument. Disagreement is essential to a pub conversation about football teams, talk over coffee after a movie, or speculation about an election. Some institutional interactions are built around disagreements: not only Prime Minister's Question Time and courtroom litigation, but also television talk shows (Tolson 2001), radio phone-ins (see Chapter 9), vox pop interviews (see Chapter 10), academic seminars, and children's games (Goodwin 1990). In all these settings, even in the Monty Python sketch, there are conventions governing how and when one can disagree, and the forms used for disagreement.

Disagreement has a bad name: heated or unresolvable arguments are often seen as a kind of failure of the friends, host, diplomat, counsellor, or family. But Deborah Schiffrin pointed out in a classic paper (‘Jewish argument as sociability’, 1984), arguments among friends can be a form of sociability, not the breakdown of civility. The term ‘sociable’ as used here goes back to an essay (first published in 1910) by Georg Simmel, who argued that a theory of society needed to consider the centrality of a ‘play form of association’, a ‘social game’, apart from economic and political interests (Simmel 1949).