Becoming‐other‐wise: Conversational performance and the politics of experience

This theoretical discussion about conversation, performance and cultural politics makes eight moves. First, conversation is theorized as the micropractical flows and microphysical traces of the means of production and reproduction of dominant ideas, prevailing beliefs, and articulated subjectivities. Second, rules, rituals and performances of everyday life are theorized as both art and practice. Third, practicality, temporality and spatiality are then reformulated as common senses and conventional wisdoms. Fourth, conversational turn‐taking formats are theorized in terms of the political‐economics of turn‐taking. Fifth, human bodies are theorized as the material in and through which memory and practical consciousness are inscribed as both context and artifact. Sixth, conversing selves are conceptualized as unfinished, open ideas with multiple voices that express the truths of tactical and strategic experience. Seventh, conversation is theorized as the micropractical production and reproduction of the ideology of everyday life, as the methods of formatting consciousness, structuring feelings, and expressing experience in ways that allow meaning and signification to reproduce themselves indefinitely. Finally, conversation is theorized in terms of autoethnography, as the writing practices of self‐implication and self‐reflexivity.