Abstract
This paper is an essay about Harold Garfinkel’s heritage. It outlines a response to Eric Livingston’s proposal to say goodbye to ethnomethodology as pertaining to the sociological tradition; and it rejects part of Melvin Pollner’s diagnosis about the changes occurred in ethnomethodological working. If it agrees with Pollner about the idea that something of the initial ethnomethodology’s program has been left aside after the “work studies” turn, it asserts that such a turn has nonetheless made possible authentic discoveries. So the paper speaks for a better integration of the two versions of ethnomethodology separated by Pollner.
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Notes
Garfinkel’s “rendering theorem” explains why the lived work and the “witnessable order of the lived-society” (Livingston) can’t be rendered by collections of signs: their details and their “Gestalt contextures” (Gurwitsch) are left out, and can’t be recovered from renderings using signs. That is why classical sociology misses the work of the ordinary society, and it can’t repair this failing by improving its practices and technologies of renderings (see Garfinkel and Wieder 1992).
“My purpose, by deliberately misreading Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty, is to appropriate to the interests of EM investigations and its policies and methods, the topics and themes of Gestalt phenomena that Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty describe as the achievements of their investigations. I give them the EM name: ‘a figuration of details’” (Garfinkel 2002: 177).
Such a substituting for representation by acting and showing isn’t peculiar to Garfinkel; for example, it was a Jamesian leitmotiv. In A Pluralistic Universe, James wrote: “I am tiring myself and you, I know, by vainly seeking to describe by concepts and words what I say at the same time exceeds either conceptualization or verbalization. As long as one continues talking, intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field. The return to life can't come about by talking. It is an act; to make you return to life, I must set an example for your imitation, I must deafen you to talk, or to the importance of talk, by showing you, as Bergson does, that the concepts we talk with are made for purposes of practice and not for purposes of insight. Or I must point, point to the mere that of life, and you by inner sympathy must fill out the what for yourselves. The minds of some of you, I know, will absolutely refuse to do so, refuse to think in non-conceptualized terms. I myself absolutely refused to do so for years together, even after I knew that the denial of manyness-in-oneness by intellectualism must be false, for the same reality does perform the most various functions at once. But I hoped ever for a revised intellectualist way round the difficulty, and it was only after reading Bergson that I saw that to continue using the intellectualist method was itself the fault. (…) When conceptualism summons life to justify itself in conceptual terms, it is like a challenge addressed in a foreign language to someone who is absorbed in his own business; it is irrelevant to him altogether—he may let it lie unnoticed” (James 1909: lecture 7).
“If it’s not in the look of things, then where in the world do you think you’re going to find [the factual adequacy of what you are doing]? And if it’s going to be in the looks of things, then you’re going to have to get very respectful of what this preoccupation with the appearances of things is all about” (Garfinkel 2002: 180f.).
In the 16 and 17th centuries, a “cabinet of curiosities” is a room where were showed collections of rare and strange objects, produced by men or belonging to the animal, plant and mineral kingdoms.
I repeat here part of the arguments stated in a previous paper with Cédric Terzi (Quéré and Terzi 2011).
From that angle, Livingston rediscovers part of the importance Dewey gave, in the conduct of inquiry, to practical factors and practical operations (“an activity of doing and making”) and to the transformation of the materials: “Contrary to current doctrine, the position here taken is that inquiry effects existential transformation and reconstruction of the material with which it deals (…). Traditional theory holds that such modifications as may occur in even the best controlled inquiry are confined to states and processes of the knower—the one conducting the inquiry. They may, therefore, properly be called “subjective,” mental or psychological, or by some similar name. They are without objective standing, and hence lack logical force and meaning. The position that is here taken is to the contrary effect: namely, that beliefs and mental states of the inquirer cannot be legitimately changed except as existential operations, rooted ultimately in organic activities, modify and requalify objective matter. Otherwise, "mental" changes are not only merely mental (as the traditional theory holds) but are arbitrary and on the road to fantasy and delusion” (Dewey 1938: 159f.).
Interpretation is more a constituent of our accounting practices. However, where a dynamical organization takes place, as in the perception of Gestalt phenomena, or in the prospective-retrospective dynamics of physiognomical perception, something similar to the “documentary method of interpretation” occurs, without giving rise to an operation of interpretation.
I thank Michel Barthélémy, Ivan Leudar, and Rod Watson for their assistance with this paper.
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Quéré, L. Is There Any Good Reason to Say Goodbye to “Ethnomethodology”?. Hum Stud 35, 305–325 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9234-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9234-0