The interpersonal metafunction is concerned with enactment.
Through language, people establish social relations, negotiate positions, adopt roles, create expectations, and orient themselves toward one another in systematic ways. The interpersonal metafunction is therefore not primarily concerned with experience, but with the social relations enacted through meaning.
Yet one of the most familiar descriptions of this process is framed through a different metaphor.
The clause is understood as exchange.
Information may be given or demanded.
Goods-&-services may be given or demanded.
Questions demand information.
Statements give information.
Commands demand goods-&-services.
Offers give goods-&-services.
The formulation is elegant, influential, and deeply intuitive.
But what exactly is being exchanged?
This question becomes increasingly difficult once meaning is understood relationally rather than as a transferable object.
If meaning is not a thing, then what could it mean to exchange it?
The self-evidence of exchange
The metaphor of exchange feels natural because everyday discourse frequently appears to exhibit exchange-like patterns.
One person asks a question.
Another provides an answer.
One person makes an offer.
Another accepts or rejects it.
One person issues a command.
Another complies or refuses.
The resulting interaction often appears to involve the movement of something between participants.
Indeed, ordinary ways of talking about communication reinforce this impression.
We speak of:
- conveying meaning,
- transmitting information,
- getting ideas across,
- receiving messages.
Such expressions encourage us to imagine meanings as entities that can be moved from one person to another.
The metaphor is so familiar that it often passes unnoticed.
Yet familiarity is not explanation.
The appearance of exchange does not necessarily establish exchange as the underlying process.
What exchange requires
The concept of exchange carries significant ontological commitments.
For something to be exchanged, it must first exist as an identifiable entity.
It must be capable of being possessed by one participant and subsequently possessed by another.
It must retain sufficient identity throughout the process for us to recognise it as the same thing before and after the exchange.
These assumptions are relatively unproblematic when discussing physical objects.
A book may be exchanged because it persists as the same object throughout the transaction.
Money may be exchanged because it remains identifiable despite changing possession.
Meaning presents a different case.
When a question is answered, what exactly moves?
What is the entity that leaves one participant and arrives in another?
What remains identical throughout the process?
The metaphor suddenly becomes much less straightforward.
The problem of semantic objects
Exchange presupposes objecthood.
Something must exist as a thing before it can be exchanged.
This requirement often remains hidden within common ways of talking about communication.
Information is treated as though it were a substance.
Meaning is treated as though it were a possession.
Ideas are treated as though they were packages awaiting delivery.
The language is familiar enough that its assumptions often go unnoticed.
Yet the assumptions remain assumptions.
The notion of exchange quietly depends upon meanings being the kinds of things that can be transferred.
Once this assumption is questioned, the explanatory power of the exchange metaphor begins to weaken.
A simple example
Consider the following interaction:
What time does the meeting begin?
Nine o'clock.
At first glance, this appears to be a straightforward exchange.
One participant lacked information.
Another participant supplied it.
The informational deficit was resolved.
But notice how much of this account depends upon the language of possession and transfer.
What exactly was possessed?
What exactly was supplied?
What exactly moved?
The interaction is real.
The answer is real.
The coherence of the sequence is real.
Yet none of these observations requires the existence of an information-object moving between participants.
The appearance of exchange may therefore be concealing a different process.
Description and ontology
At this point it is important to distinguish between description and ontology.
As a description of recurrent interactional patterns, exchange is extraordinarily useful.
Questions frequently lead to answers.
Statements frequently invite agreement or disagreement.
Commands frequently invite compliance or resistance.
The exchange metaphor captures these regularities elegantly.
The issue is not whether the description works.
The issue is what the description commits us to ontologically.
A map may accurately describe a river without claiming that the river literally consists of lines.
Similarly, discourse may be describable as exchange without exchange constituting the fundamental process through which interpersonal meaning operates.
Description and ontology are not the same thing.
The interpersonal problem
The challenge, then, is not merely to criticise the metaphor of exchange.
The challenge is to understand why it appears so compelling.
If meanings are not transferable objects, why do interactions so often appear exchange-like?
Why do questions seem to obtain answers?
Why do statements seem to provide information?
Why do commands seem to impose obligations?
The persistence of these patterns suggests that something important is being captured by the metaphor.
The question is whether exchange is the process itself or the visible consequence of something deeper.
Looking ahead
The purpose of this series is not to deny the reality of the interactional patterns traditionally described as exchange.
Those patterns are real.
Questions are followed by answers.
Statements are followed by agreement or disagreement.
Commands are followed by compliance or refusal.
The issue is not whether these patterns exist.
The issue is how they arise.
The interpersonal metafunction is traditionally understood as the domain of enactment.
Through discourse, participants continually establish, negotiate, and transform social relations.
Perhaps the appearance of exchange is not the foundation of this process, but one of its consequences.
The posts that follow explore that possibility.
If interpersonal meaning is fundamentally a matter of enactment, then the question is no longer what meanings are exchanged.
The question becomes:
What exactly is being enacted when people speak to one another?
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