ch 9, ethnomethodology and the logic of practice
In this chapter, ML reviews? ethnomethodology in order to address the "vexed problem of the practical objectivity and practical observability of practical actions and practical reasoning", which is a phrase that gets repeated like five times in this.
These thoughts are going to be a little fragmented, but here we go. The whole Boltanski connection is interesting. First of all, ML says this,
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18 This is an allusion to Wittgenstein’s (1953) suggestion that his investigations therapeutically renounce the ‘craving for generality’ that pervaded scientistic philosophy. Ethnomethodology is empirical, but it does not (or, rather, in my view it should not) entertain the logical-empiricist dream of a special form of investigation that uncovers realities that are unknown to (or misrecognized by)
‘common sense.’
And just before I forget, it is interesting that ML quotes a scene from a trial, given that B & T are all about the trial as a controlling metaphor.
But the " renounce the ‘craving for generality’ that pervaded scientistic philosophy" is odd. Isn't Boltanski after generality in a way? or not after per se, but ... Well, let's see. Maybe it's the kind of generality, because good generality, if we can call it that, is generality produced in situ, whereas bad generality is the generality produce exogenously.
Like for example, in ML, there's the example of interruptions in male and female interchanges.
In conversation analysis, a common way to gloss the difficult task of forging a link between professional and members’ analyses is to speak of ‘participants’ orientations.’ Whenever a conversation analysis study employs vernacular categories for persons and actions, the requirement is to demonstrate analytically that those categories are relevantly part of the ‘analysis’ performed by the participants on the scene. Failures to meet this requirement can be instructive. For example, Schegloff (1987) criticizes a well-known study by Zimmerman and West (1975) about conversations between women and men.
Z & W studied male and female conversations and as a result determined that ... well, I'll just quote it:
Zimmerman and West employ a mixture of procedures from conversation analysis and experimental social psychology in order to examine male and female speakers’ uses of, and responses to, interruptions in conversation. The study’s findings confirm what many of their readers may suspect on experiential grounds, that men dominate conversations with women and tend not to listen to what they have to say.
ML continutes :
Without suggesting that this general proposition is false, Schegloff argues that Zimmerman and West’s empirical analysis is irrelevant to the proposition’s truth or falsity. He reviews Zimmerman and West’s transcribed interchanges between pairs of male and female university students, and criticizes the authors’ analytic procedures for identifying ‘interruptions’ and assigning each interruption to the ‘male’ or ‘female’ participant. The vernacular concept of ‘interruption’ implies that one person speaks before the other has finished and that the cut-off was not warranted. Schegloff argues, on the basis of his own re- analysis of Zimmerman and West’s transcripts, that the ‘interruptions’ they identified in many cases can be characterized more appropriately as locally warranted moves, and he also questions the relevance of the category pair ‘male/ female’ for setting up the accountability of the (alleged) interruptions.
The latter part, the yellow bit, confirms what is becoming a theme in this volume, that exogenous (and therefore overly theoretical) explanations of practice can be reexplained endogenously.
This move is like the materialist/not materialism argument; that is, say, Latour is actually more of a materialist than these other people since the people who take matter seriously in this other way are harboring these theoretical assumptions. Or to put it in a way that ML does in the ch,
I do not have space to go into the details of Schegloff’s argument, but an
appreciation of the issues can be gained by reference to the same lecture by
Sacks that I have been discussing. Sacks introduces the notion of a ‘priority
item’ to describe one way in which a cut-off of an ongoing action can be locally
warranted. A ‘priority item’ is an action that exhibits ‘superseding relevance...
rights and obligations to be done, perhaps without regard to what it is that has
been taking place, under some proper conditions occurring’ (Sacks 1992: 296).
He adds that one of the features of priority items is that ‘when they are properly
invoked they are not interrupting what goes on, and what goes on ought to
cease’ (Sacks 1992:296, emphasis added). One systematic way to claim priority
for such an item is to produce it as a ‘repair’ of a potential mistake or possible
misunderstanding in the ongoing activity. The contingent relevance and priority
of such an item turns upon ‘a systematic categorization of the various personnel
present, of locating among them “the one who ought to do the priority item’”
6
(Sacks 1992:297). The categorization is produced locally by the parties to the scene, and it is intertwined with the recognizable (or in some cases claimable) identity of the priority item as a locally warranted action. An unwarranted ‘interruption’ is therefore a residual category, in the sense that it cuts off an ongoing utterance without displaying that it is a type of action that should have priority at that moment and/or that the ‘interruptor’ is locally entitled to perform the action. Almost anyone is eligible to perform some kinds of priority items— for example, stopping someone in order to warn them about an immediate hazard —whereas other actions—for example, stopping a speaker in order to correct their grammar or pronunciation—can be done by persons in restricted social categories (parents, teachers, etc.). Persons who cannot claim the appropriate relational rights are vulnerable to the objection, ‘Who are you to do that?’ One can get a rough appreciation of this issue by imagining an encounter in which
146 MICHAEL LYNCH
one speaker (an adult male teacher) begins speaking before the other (a female child in the teacher’s classroom) has finished. A number of alternative characterizations can be made of this moment of interaction: the male interrupts the female; the teacher corrects the student’s recitation; the adult dominates the child; the expert identifies the novice’s mistake. It might seem reasonable to suppose that each of these descriptions is just as correct as any of the others, and that theoretical assumptions (or ideological presuppositions) will govern any particular attribution the analyst makes. If, as is often argued, there is no avoiding the theory-ladenness of observation, it follows that a responsible analyst should be explicit about her theoretical assumptions in order not to present ideological attributions under the guise of unequivocal characterizations of ‘objective’ states of affairs. But if, as conversation analysts insist, the intelligibility of the actions in question rests in the first instance on the evident way in which those actions are ‘oriented to’ in a local pragmatic context,7 then some theoretical (and operational) criteria can be irrelevant (and even incorrect) for categorizing particular actions and their doers. Although categorizing a pair of interlocutors as ‘male’ and ‘female’ may be relevant under some circumstances, and while it might be true that a pupil may not have finished what she was saying before a teacher ‘interrupted’ her, the demonstrable pairing of personal categories (‘male/female’) and action (‘interruption’) can be difficult to support in the face of the locally relevant alternatives: ‘teacher/pupil’ and ‘correction.’ Consequently, in order to control such ascriptions, conversation analysts argue that it is necessary to demonstrate that the analyst’s characterizations are contingently relevant to the production of the actions under analysis. In particular cases, such demonstrations can themselves be doubtful and disputable, but the point of the policy is to restrain an all-too-familiar interpretative tendency to stipulate identities and actions from a privileged vantage point.
Metanoia. Can't believe I thought of this or remembered this, but it's the opposite of kairos. "When Kairos, the god of opportunity, passes by, Metanoia is left in his wake. At first glance, Metanoia is the embodiment of regret, a sorrowful woman cowering under the weight of remorse. However, there is more to the concept of metanoia than feelings of regret. " (Kelly A. Myers)
Latour def seems less special after reading this, esp since we're talking about things like endogenously produced, locally produced, self-organizing and transient practices that are intersubjectively accountable. Assemblage too.
Ethnomethodology is the study of practical action and practical reasoning.
Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) studies of jurors, coroners, and social science
researchers set the agenda by describing the accomplishment of relevant tasks in
specific situations. In addition to presenting empirical research on situated
practices, Garfinkel’s writings develop a praxiological orientation to the classic
1
language, knowledge, trust, reasoning, meaning, normative order, rationality,
method, etc. (and ‘etc.’ itself is a name Garfinkel gives to an ad hoc practice).
Simply put, this praxiological orientation is a matter of treating these topics not
as ontological entities, foundational processes, parts of society, social structures,
cultural systems, behavioral mechanisms, or cognitive faculties, but as situated
accomplishments by the parties whose local practices ‘assemble’ the recurrent
scenes of action that make up a stable society. So, for example, when described
ethnomethodologically, discourse becomes a practically organized phenomenon:
a coordinated assembly of what is said, and by whom, in particular
circumstances. When treated in this way, social order becomes an array of
practical, self-organizing and selfinvestigating phenomena. What is at stake is not
the theoretical problem of order, but the substantive production of order on
singular occasions. As Garfinkel (1991:11) puts it in characteristic fashion,
‘sociology’s fundamental phenomenon’ of the ‘objective reality of social facts’
is ‘every society’s locally, endogenously produced, naturally organised,
reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere,
always, only, exactly and entirely, members’ work, with no time out, and with no
possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postponement, or buy-outs.’ This
‘stunning vision of society as a practical achievement’ is not original to
ethnomethodology. It is central to the entire tradition of social theory from
2
objectivity and practical observability of practical actions and practical reasoning,’
which provides a constant and unfinished task for social theory; a problem that
problemsandtopicsinphilosophyandthehumansciences. Thesetopicsinclude
Hobbes to Parsons. No less central is ‘the vexed problem of the practical
‘because it was vexed, serve[d] as the standing source and grounds for the 3
adequacy of theorising’s claims’ (Garfinkel 1991:11).
Sense a genre from the inside, devitt, weber, woodcutting, mind, quoting lyotard, resemblance,
In this example, Sacks offers an analytic notion (the ‘round’ as a contingently produced assemblage of performances by the parties in the scene) which establishes the background condition for a notable absence (the nonoffer of candy to Roger). There is a superficial resemblance between this conception of analysis and the more familiar conception of understanding the subjective meaning of action in interpretative anthropology and sociology, but there is also a crucial difference. Consider Weber’s classic example of the woodcutter. Weber uses the example to distinguish between two ways of understanding actions. When we see ‘the action of woodcutter or of somebody who reaches for the knob to shut a door or who aims a gun at an animal’ these are instances of ‘rational observational understanding of actions’ (Weber 1978:8). Weber distinguishes this ‘direct’ mode of understanding from the ‘explanatory understanding... consists in placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of
ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND THE LOGIC OF PRACTICE 143
meaning’ (Weber 1978:8). So, in the case of the woodcutter, one kind of
explanation would place the immediate behavior in one or another motivational [think CHAT again, MIND, motives and the inside of action are all over this collection]
context: working for a wage, supplying a store of firewood, getting some
exercise, or working off a fit of rage. If one were to apply Weber’s distinction to
Sacks’s example, it might be said that Sacks, as an over-hearer of the
conversation, ‘directly observed’ that Jim failed to perform a relevant action.
(We shall ignore for the moment that there can be a significant difference
between ‘directly observing’ something and ‘directly observing that’ something
(has not) occurred.) If Sacks had drawn inferences about why Jim did not offer
the candy to Roger—saying it was done as a joke or a snub—this would be an
example of ‘explanatory understanding.’ It should be clear, however, that Sacks
is not primarily addressed to a matter of ‘direct’ or ‘explanatory’ understanding.
Although Sacks’s own understanding, and the understandings of Jim, Al, Ken,
and Roger, are implicated in the description of the ‘something that didn’t
happen,’ according to his analysis the relevant understandings are grounded in
the embodied and concerted production of a recognizable round of offers.
Considered as an interpretative matter, noticing ‘something that didn’t happen’ in
a round of offers is not essentially different from noticing that a number is
5
missingintheseries1,2,3,5,6,7. InthecaseofJim’snon-offertoRoger,itis possible to formulate an abstract rule that would account for the (non)event as a transgression (one might even find such a rule in an etiquette manual), but one of the points Sacks makes is that this transgression was made contingently relevant by the production of a round [I wonder if this is a Lacan/Jackobson thing, but for sure a sociology of action thing]. Both the observability of the (nonoccurring) action and the orderly ground against which it becomes noticeable are produced in and through the practices of composing the round. The rationality in question is not strictly a matter of recognizing what we see when we observe the action from a detached vantage point; instead, it is a matter of what we do (or, in this case, what Jim, Al, Ken, and Roger evidently do) [Levinas, seeing things askew, you can't look the other in the eye] when engaged in the embodied, here- and-now, production of a scene. The shift in analytic focus is from an observer’s interpretation of a scene to a concerted production of the scenic features. By analogy, a ‘direct observational understanding’ of what is missing in a number series presupposes a conventional use of a rule for counting. If we imagine an unconventional way to continue the series (for example: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11), the number 4 no longer counts as ‘absent’; or, rather, its absence is accountable not as a mistake or anomaly, but as a constitutive property of the series [here is where we think of the Devitt for sure i.e., the accountants]. The conventional mode of counting does not originate in an eternal, Platonic realm, but is established through a whole array of daily activities in which we normally and routinely count like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.... We rely upon the numbers we use, the things we count, and the persons who do the counting to ‘behave’ in stable and reliable ways. Similarly, the fact that we ‘count on’ Jim to complete his round of invitations and notice when he fails to do so, is grounded in a practice, in this case not of counting with numbers but of performing a sequence of offers that counts in Al and Ken and counts out Roger. For Sacks, the lesson is not that the ordering principle in question originates in a practice,
144 MICHAEL LYNCH
but that the practice is instantiated in situ, in a developing production that contingently establishes the recognizability of an incomplete instance of its performance.
The round. Priority item? Yes. Priority item and round.
Omg, did you get to the whole Giltrow and Paré thing? You recuperated that from your comps. In Giltrow, you see experts who are novices, and in Paré, you see novices who are experts, which confounds the whole a novice acquires what the expert is laying down thing.
You were also thinking of Burke and the psychology of form at one point.
You were def right on with the inside/outside thing.
Also keep in mind the Bourdieu/Schryer inside/outside method thing.
Verstehen. You didn't catch that though.
Orientation.
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7 The ‘orientations’ in question do not necessarily refer to intentions or psychological states within the individual agents. A more appropriate sense of
ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND THE LOGIC OF PRACTICE 157
‘orientation’ has to do with the evident relations between expressions and actions in pubic situations. It is possible to describe the complex ways in which an answer is ‘oriented to’ a question, without assigning analytic priority to whatever may be going on ‘in the head’ of the answer.
§
OK, good thing you went back, because you caught something big. You noticed three things though. Four actually:
1. The objectivity thing. You put this before, but you wanted to say something about THE problem around which the chapter is centered. THE problem, again, is the "vexed problem of the practical objectivity and practical observability of practical actions and practical reasoning" So what is practical objectivity? Practical objectivity is, well, situational objectivity. I think this is partly the reason why it was so difficult to nab Fung for being bad at his job or something? The lawyer and the jury weren't in situ, so they couldn't DIRECTLY observe it? Does this just boil down to "you had to be there"? Well, maybe not, but that's the next point.
2. Generalizability. I didn't catch how ethnomethodology could solve problem that were around prior to ethnomethodology. So the problem of noticing something that didn't happen in a relevant and admissible way is solved? by ethnomethodology because you learn from folks in conversation...that is, you listen in. on conversations as a kind of therapy and then generalize what you learn to other situations. So there's a good generalization and a bad one. The bad one is like what happens in the male/female interruption research; you take concepts (interruption) and dyads (male/female) and impose them on a situation, thus taking away or not being sensitive to the singular assemblage that might arise. The good one is where you learn by listening and describing the self-investigating and metapragmatic situations that do arise and then use those "analyses" as a basis for (ground of?) generalizations. You can generalize because the participants themselves generalized? maybe?
In social and cultural theory, there are a number of familiar examples of ‘something that didn’t happen’—a nonoccurrence of a workers’ revolution, a nonexercise of latent powers, a failure to return a gift in the culturally prescribed fashion, or a failure to choose the most efficient of the available means to a given end—and there are also a number of familiar (and ‘vexed’) theoretical solutions to the problem of identifying ‘something that didn’t happen,’ but Sacks opts for a characteristic ethnomethodological solution:
142 MICHAEL LYNCH
What we can perhaps do is see whether there are some methodical ways that persons arrive at such noticings [of ‘something that didn’t happen’]... There are some occasions under which absences are noticed. If we can characterize the bases for them, we can come up with a usable notion of ‘absence.’ And such a notion could perhaps be generalized beyond the specific occasion that we happened to construct it in relation to (Sacks 1992:294).
In this instance, Sacks suggests that the notion of a ‘round’ in conversation might account for the notable absence of an offer to Roger.
3. Most important point. You didn't catch that ML was "on" the other side of the Weber example, so to speak. let's recap:
In this example, Sacks offers an analytic notion (the ‘round’ as a contingently produced assemblage of performances by the parties in the scene) which establishes the background condition for a notable absence (the nonoffer of candy to Roger). There is a superficial resemblance between this conception of analysis and the more familiar conception of understanding the subjective meaning of action in interpretative anthropology and sociology [oh, and you didn't catch the object/subject split here too], but there is also a crucial difference. Consider Weber’s classic example of the woodcutter. Weber uses the example to distinguish between two ways of understanding actions. When we see ‘the action of woodcutter or of somebody who reaches for the knob to shut a door or who aims a gun at an animal’ these are instances of ‘rational observational understanding of actions’ (Weber 1978:8). Weber distinguishes this ‘direct’ mode of understanding from the ‘explanatory understanding... consists in placing the act in an intelligible and more inclusive context of
ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AND THE LOGIC OF PRACTICE 143
meaning’ (Weber 1978:8). So, in the case of the woodcutter, one kind of
explanation would place the immediate behavior in one or another motivational
context: working for a wage, supplying a store of firewood, getting some
exercise, or working off a fit of rage. If one were to apply Weber’s distinction to
Sacks’s example, it might be said that Sacks, as an over-hearer of the
conversation, ‘directly observed’ that Jim failed to perform a relevant action.
(We shall ignore for the moment that there can be a significant difference
between ‘directly observing’ something and ‘directly observing that’ something
(has not) occurred.) If Sacks had drawn inferences about why Jim did not offer
the candy to Roger—saying it was done as a joke or a snub—this would be an
example of ‘explanatory understanding.’ It should be clear, however, that Sacks
is not primarily addressed to a matter of ‘direct’ or ‘explanatory’ understanding.
Although Sacks’s own understanding, and the understandings of Jim, Al, Ken,
and Roger, are implicated in the description of the ‘something that didn’t
happen,’ according to his analysis the relevant understandings are grounded in
the embodied and concerted production of a recognizable round of offers.
Considered as an interpretative matter, noticing ‘something that didn’t happen’ in
a round of offers is not essentially different from noticing that a number is
5
missingintheseries1,2,3,5,6,7. InthecaseofJim’snon-offertoRoger,itis possible to formulate an abstract rule that would account for the (non)event as a transgression (one might even find such a rule in an etiquette manual), but one of the points Sacks makes is that this transgression was made contingently relevant by the production of a round. Both the observability of the (nonoccurring) action and the orderly ground against which it becomes noticeable are produced in and through the practices of composing the round. The rationality in question is not strictly a matter of recognizing what we see when we observe the action from a detached vantage point; instead, it is a matter of what we do (or, in this case, what Jim, Al, Ken, and Roger evidently do) when engaged in the embodied, here- and-now, production of a scene. The shift in analytic focus is from an observer’s interpretation of a scene to a concerted production of the scenic features. By analogy, a ‘direct observational understanding’ of what is missing in a number series presupposes a conventional use of a rule for counting. If we imagine an unconventional way to continue the series (for example: 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11), the number 4 no longer counts as ‘absent’; or, rather, its absence is accountable not as a mistake or anomaly, but as a constitutive property of the series. The conventional mode of counting does not originate in an eternal, Platonic realm, but is established through a whole array of daily activities in which we normally and routinely count like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.... We rely upon the numbers we use, the things we count, and the persons who do the counting to ‘behave’ in stable and reliable ways. Similarly, the fact that we ‘count on’ Jim to complete his round of invitations and notice when he fails to do so, is grounded in a practice, in this case not of counting with numbers but of performing a sequence of offers that counts in Al and Ken and counts out Roger. For Sacks, the lesson is not that the ordering principle in question originates in a practice,
144 MICHAEL LYNCH
but that the practice is instantiated in situ, in a developing production that contingently establishes the recognizability of an incomplete instance of its performance.
But I guess this is confusing because, if ML's argument hinges on a direct understanding, then how do you square that with the theory-laden-ness of observation? just by being honest and reflexive about your assumptions?
I bet this had to do with common sense.
More importantly, though, the ‘direct observational understanding’ is opposed to CHAT. There was even the whole chapter in the context and consciousness book...no...the acting with technology book about how CHAT qualifies ethnomethodology and picks up where it leaves off. It's just interesting because when Weber is talking about the "more inclusive context of meaning’ (Weber 1978:8).", where one "draw[s] inferences about why Jim did not offer the candy to Roger—saying it was done as a joke or a snub" which is "an
example of ‘explanatory understanding.’ ", that sounds like the motive in CHAT. I bet you this distinction could give me a foothold in the OOW versus CHAT conversation.
4. And last, I was just thinking about the meta-pragmatic. When folks self-investigate (hey, why didn't you give X any candy?), or when analysis is relevant, or when methods in situ are called into question, that must be the meta-pragmatic.
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