Sacks, silence, and self-(de)selection

This chapter offers a discussion of Sacks’s penetrating and influential investigations of silences in conversation and builds on those insights for an analysis of self-deselection—or methods whereby participants recognizably pass up the chance to self-select. It traces Sacks’s early interest in absences as a phenomenon for systematic analysis and shows how his investigations of silence in conversation produced some of CA’s foundational and enduring discoveries. A close reading of his observations about silence, particularly those related to the turn-taking organization, reveals a form of silence that has largely been overlooked and under-analyzed: the conversational lapse. Lapses are silences that emerge when all participants forgo the option to speak, which results in rounds of possible self-selection. I suggest that several forms of conduct are analyzably oriented to the practical issues that such lapses can present. In particular, I show three methods for self-deselection—displays of availability, sequence recompletion, and disengagement—and argue that they target a problem in turn allocation in lapses.