LAUSR

This paper describes a phenomenon in everyday interpersonal interaction in which one participant displays an awareness of another’s subjectivity via unusual turn design: a word selection error or a phrase that is conspicuously ill-fitted to the interactional moment for which it was produced. This phenomenon, called poetic confluence, has enigmatic properties, in that these oddities seem to exhibit one person’s apparent awareness of a co-participant’s interior subjectivity. The phenomenon is traced historically, via work in psychoanalysis and studies of conversational interaction. Three examples from the author’s corpus of instances are examined to identify the transactional dynamics that may be mediated in poetic confluence. The paper concludes by arguing that studies of the relationship between subjectivity and social action may be usefully informed by observations from research on everyday social interaction.