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Analyses (Chapters Five to Nine), I have chosen a series of incidents, which I have
characterised as Sticky Moments, 2 on which to concentrate or focus my attention.
Within each of these Chapters, I focus at various points on different levels of
communication within the group. These range from the current or everyday level, down
through more primitive and less conscious levels of communication, to a primordial
level where individuality barely exists. In describing these levels of consciousness, I am
introducing Matte-Blanco’s (1975, 1988) notion of bi-logic, in particular as a way of
theorising surprising events in the group. I say more about this in Chapter Two Part
One, but this theorisation is also reflected in the next feature of the study that I want to
highlight.
My second feature is that of metonymy. Metonymy is a figure of speech in which one
term is replaced by another, when something is referred to by a word which describes a
quality or feature of that thing. Examples of metonymy include the use of ‘hand’ to refer
to a crew member at sea, or ‘The White House’ to refer to the Presidency of the United
States of America. Metonymy is like metaphor, in that, in both, one term is substituted
for another, and metaphor is also important in the field of the study. However,
metonymy is also unlike metaphor, in that in metaphor the substitution is based on
similarity, whereas in metonymy it is based on contiguity. The President does live in the
White House, and a crew member’s hand is joined to their body. An example of
metaphor is, (said, say, of a politician) ‘in supporting this legislation, he has shot
2 The notion of ‘Sticky Moments’ is discussed in Chapters Two Part Two and Three, as an aspect of both
the methodology and methods of group-analytic ethnography. It is taken from the title of a television
game show co-devised and hosted by the British comedian Julian Clary, and broadcast on UK Channel 4
between 1989 and 1990 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky_Moments_with_Julian_Clary). Clary’s
work was based on the art of double entendre, and hence made much use of phrases such as sticky
moments. Such a phrase was common in the discourse of characters in British inter-War adventure or
detective fiction, and used to signify moments of heightened arousal leading to perspiration. In Clary's
hands, a supposedly innocent description of experience and activity comes to stand for a sexual
experience. I chose the term as a short-hand device to indicate moments dense with layers of meaning,
which are I argue are particularly amenable to group-analytically oriented investigation.
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