Robert Goldman, HEGEMONY AND MANAGED CRITIQUE IN PRIME-TIME TELEVISION: A Critical Reading of "Mork and Mindy". Reprinted from Theory & Society, 11 (May 1982): pp.363-388. Part 3.

Interpretive sociologists contend that, at the practical level of daily life, reality is constructed out of a shared intersubjective world. The everyday world and the provinces of meaning contained therein are emergent, processual, made by the people who inhabit it. It is also received by them. Thus interpretative sociologists have inquired into how people are able to generate shared meanings. But these questions of communication are obscured by the tacit processes and structures of shared communication. Mork, as a lay interpretative sociologist, clarifies for us what we routinely take for granted. Mork lays bare the "tacit, taken-for-granted characteristics of phonology and syntax as normative rules" that are "designed to force everyday behavior into normal forms that permit the assumption that relatively unambiguous decisions are being made."¹⁸ Mork's steady violations and misapplications of these normative rules (with the justification that he is an outsider) give prominence to these very rules. Moreover, Mork's actions, comments, and gestures fill in for the viewer the tacit signifiers and coding forms that guide day-to-day interaction. These normally unspoken signifiers and codes encompass the rules, information, assumptions, and procedures that Alfred Schutz termed "stock knowledge at hand". But the actions of Mork, the stranger, disclose the taken-for-granted character of stock knowledge. In making these underlying forms of information the object of conscious reflection, a series of questions emerge: Why rules? Why these rules and not others? Where do these assumptions and procedures come from? Are they negotiated or imposed?

I would playfully suggest the coinage of a new mass culture verb "to Mork". "To Mork" would refer to a reflexivity of analysis of meaning-producing activity in daily life, and conversely to the rescue of the sedimented abbreviations of meaning through which interaction "normally" operates. Providing viewers with a vocabulary of reflexiveness, "Morking" has the potential for revealing both the vitality and the reification of speech communities. Reflexivity refers to the capacity for asking metaquestions self-referentially, thus making thematic the role of human agency in constituting a given order of social relations. Instances of reflexivity, in this broad sense, are found in several episodes that raise the issue of metacommunication. In the opening episode, the second person Mork meets on Earth is a ten-year-old Black male. An ensuing scene reveals that Mork assumes this youth to be a typical native language speaker because he generalizes from the earlier conversation linguistic usage and meaning. But Mork's use of the Black street vernacular in non-appropriate contexts belies this assumption. In a later episode, a Russian immigrant assumes Mork to be a prototypical speaker (because they introduce themselves to one another as "aliens"). Again the audience is compelled to analyze meaning-producing acts of a stereotypical Russian learning our language and conventions as mediated through the categories of an Orkan.

But the most frequent instances of reflexivity occur when Mork verbally articulates background understandings generally unspoken) that accompany nonverbal forms of communication. Listening to someone explain a personal problem, Mork responds "Choke. Gasp. Look of sincere empathy." In another episode, Mork enters a room in which a number of people are reacting to the sudden death of a disliked acquaintance. Unaware of the death, Mork reels off a series of jokes about the solemnity, each joke contradicting established rules or conventions for dealing with those touched by a death. But when someone finally communicates to him the "facts" of the death, he immediately affects a change of facial expression to sorrow and dismay, while simultaneously making the sincere utterance "Oh! Embarrassment. Genuine look of grief." This speech act in conjunction with the facial gestures draws the audience's attention to what Mead calls the conversation of gestures. Mork verbally performs the Meadian conversation of gestures. The reflexiveness consists of making explicit the motivation of signaling: verbally describing the doing of facework. The practice of verbally describing the motives working in interaction processes is, however, a severe violation of notions of sincerity of performance in our society. Facework is a form of interaction based on the manipulation of appearances. It is a pervasive form of interaction in advanced industrial societies where the impersonality of the market and relations of exchange and instrumental rationality are genetic factors in the elaboration of facework codes. These codes demand the appearance of sincerity of performance or they collapse.

These violations of signaling and coding procedures,¹⁹ as well as making explicit ordinarily tacit features of the structure of daily life, are important factors in accounting for the popularity of the show. The actions of Mork reveal a spontaneous and playful attitude that is ordinarily suppressed and deemed inappropriate during typical interaction processes. This playful quality derives from the rapid stepping in and out of roles along with the juxtaposing of normative rules. For many adults this is a childlike quality that has long since been expunged from their interaction, where the "performance principle" so dominates that they are not readily allowed to contradict the sincerity of performance or the sincerity of appearance. Mork does aloud what many of us do in silent conversation with ourselves, but cannot openly express for fear of stigmatizing repercussions. Thus the reflexive linguistic description of a gesture is rarely tolerated because it threatens to expose the hegemony of institutionalized meanings and the hegemony of normal forms (that block the explosive potential of spontaneity and playfulness).²⁰ Part of the humor in the series is based on the incapacity of the non-native speaker (Mork) to retrieve information contained in indexical expressions.

The significance of descriptive vocabularies as indexical expressions lies in their providing. . . 'instruction' for recovering or retrieving the 'full' relevance of an utterance; suggesting what anyone must presume or 'fill in' in order to capture the fidelity of a truncated or indexical expression whose sense requires a specification of common assumptions about context (the time or occasion of the expression, who the speaker was, where the utterance was made, and the like).²¹

The meaning of a speech act is dependent on the context in which it is uttered. But these contextual constraints create difficulties for non-native speakers because they do not know "what everyone knows". Thus Mork consistently (insistently) confuses meanings that are context-specific and embedded in various social conventions. When a waitress asks, "What would you like?" Mork's response is "world peace, an end to poverty, and a date with Annette Funicello." In another episode, Mork gives away a new coat to a wino, as he confuses the commercialized morality of television game shows with the rules governing daily interaction.

Mindy: Mork, you shouldn't give away your belongings like that.

Mork: Monty Hall does. I saw him give a thousand dollars to two sweaty avocados.

Mindy: That's a game show.

Mindy continues to counsel Mork that he must learn to refuse requests. The doorbell rings and Mork opens the door to find a Girl Scout selling cookies. He emphatically screams "No!" and slams the door. Mindy, visibly appalled, adds the injunction that it is not proper to slam doors in little girls' faces. This is an exaggerated elaboration of the requirement that contextual features be identified so that general social rules and norms may be applied to particular events. Likewise, another episode concerns the practice of sincerity and its inverse, dishonesty. The theme of the show is that contextual variations produce specifiable modifications of rules concerning honesty; that the ability to negotiate these modifications in a socially competent manner requires competency in the use of "descriptive vocabularies". The point is that rules cannot be spelled out; they are not mechanical in a rule-governed sense, but contextual. The inability to read background contexts and the subsequent juxtaposing of multiple meanings of a single term account for a large portion of the jokes on the show. And the capacity of the audience to laugh at any given indexical confusion is based in turn on their ability to "fill in" or expand utterances and then note the discrepancies created by Mork. Waiting on Mindy so that he can take a phone message, Mork comments that "it's so hard to get good Caucasian help ." The audience laughs. But why is this funny? It is a reversal of the anticipated upper middle class assertion that "it's so hard to get good help" in which it is implied that "help" designates minorities. This reversal reveals the usual superordinate/subordinate relations of races in this country. Without drawing on the tacit knowledge of the usual relations of domination by class and race, the reference to Caucasian help would not elicit laughter.

Cicourel's position is that the ability to expand utterances is more or less identical with the "developmental acquisition of social structure." The principle of indexicality not only suggests that we mean more than is said, but also that the ability to decipher these tacit signs and to fill in meanings rests on a series of shared but unstated coding rules. Because he does not share our principles of a generative grammar, Mork's use of interpretative procedures is consistently problematic. The generative principle permits the native speaker-hearer to produce arbitrary surface signs for communication that are understood on the basis of a deep grammatical structure. Mork simply does not know the transformational rules that bridge surface usage of signs and deep grammar. For example, when Mindy directs him to "Answer the phone," Mork responds, "OK, rringghh." As a stranger, Mork seeks to impose a rigorous, formal logical set of categories over linguistic usage and cultural logic. Put another way, he seeks a stable set of transituational rules and operational meanings as a means of guiding interpretation. Formal reconstruction of the phrase "answer the phone" produces a perfectly reasonable response from Mork, which is yet absurd to the native viewer who is able to expand the meaning of the phrase. Many jokes are thus based on the contrast between Mork's assumption of transituational or transcontextual rules of meaning and the native speaker's dictionary of interpretative procedures. The contrast produces an understanding of the "unevenness" (the contextual and negotiated quality of transformational rules) of our interpretative procedures, and hence generates reflexivity in the form of laughter. Whereas this discussion focuses on the inability or refusal to perform interpretative competencies, another dimension of the show's humor relies on the premise of a lack of cultural information on the part of the stranger. This is most evident in the continual misinterpretation of idiomatic expressions. For instance, Mork translates "give the bride a shower" into "jump into the shower with the bride and hose her down." In the following sequence a similar misinterpretation is made, but with the addition of a clarification statement demonstrating the expansion of meaning.

Mork: What I'd really like to know is more about weddings. Could you help me?

Cora: Shoot.

Mork: You don't need to swear. Maybe I'll ask somebody else if you're really bummed out.

Cora: No, no, I mean, what would you like to know? (my emphases)

 In another episode Mork formally addresses the issue of multiple meanings of words and their idiomatic usage in his monologue that concludes the show. He observes that the word "run" may be used as "rivers running," "people run down," "men can run stores," and "the female of the species can get a run in her stocking." This example addresses both the situationally bound features of meaning and the cultural content of idiomatic usage. Note the contextual and cultural content of sexual politics that "runs" through the usages. In learning the usage of the word "run" children also acquire the understanding that men are active providers (businessmen) and that women are passive preeners (functionally narcissistic). Besides the technique of juxtaposing a formal system of cultural logic against a socially negotiated cultural logic, taken-for-granted norms and values are challenged via the premise that Mork comes from another planetary system. This permits the writers to create alternative cultural configurations for comparison with American cultural formations. Hence Mork 'treats cowardice as a virtue, violence as humiliation and disgrace, and work as a novel concept (i.e., is work a necessary activity in post-scarcity society).

Mork's behavior also provides a catalogue of violations of normative rules constraining behavior in daily life. After being told that trust is highly valued in our society, Mork is also informed that he is not supposed to trust strangers. Yet he seeks to practice trust uniformly across all interactional settings, regardless of circumstances. This produces a vivid exemplar of the internal contradiction between the middle class ideology of liberalism and the notion of exclusionary material interests generated by the practice of competitive individualism. Or, told that he needs to make more friends, Mork inquires of a random nonacquaintance, "Will you be my friend for life?" Disregard of a convention concerning interaction with strangers reveals the distancing and privatized individuation characteristic of "bourgeois civility". Viewed in the light of Elias' thesis that the substance of modern civilization has been the "distancing" and control of "affect relations," Mork's behavior in general constitutes a challenge to "affect control."²² Mork violates prescriptions concerning the abridgment of personal space (e.g., "I took a bath. Did you?") and disregards social definitions concerning physical distancing between persons. Likewise Mork's inability to suppress or inhibit affect gives rise to acts such as the public exposition of internal personality conflicts or the inability to defer gratification in the presence of others. Indeed, in an elegant restaurant Mork finds himself unable to resist his desire for the lobster that has been served at the next table to a sedate, well-dressed couple. Mork walks over to the table, addresses the man as "bourgeois pig" and appropriates the lobster.

A homology exists between the rules and conventions that guide social interaction and the exercise of hegemony at the macrosocietal level. It is through the daily, material performances of rules and practices that a hegemonic form is "constitutive and constituting." In an episode satirizing the authoritarianism of pop self-help gurus, Mork stands to address the leader (Ellsworth). He begins by making a point of order, or rather a "Point of Ellsworth-order." His correlation of the concept of "point of order" with the name of the authority produces a statement about the structure of power and its replication in forms of social etiquette and procedural rules of order. So clearly is this exposure a challenge to the taken-for-granted relation between systems of deference and the power to define the moral order that Ellsworth immediately replies "You're out of order, pal!" (i.e., that was a violation of the procedural qua moral order of the group). Still, ethnomethodological critique as performed by Mork is not identical with ideological critique. The reflexive unmasking of conventions does not, in and of itself, culminate in a counterhegemonic critique. Whereas M & M sets up potentially emancipatory moments via Mork's method of ethno-anarchism, those moments are most typically encapsulated within the form of the show, such that the critiques of conventions are inconsistently translated into critiques of social formations and ideologies.