Jeff Coulter argues that ethnomethodology can help us solve the macro-micro problem in sociology. How do the two relate to each other?
I don't know how ethnomethodology helps though. What is it about ethnomethodology that helps? I bet you Sacks is an ethnomethodologist. Harvey Sacks. Conversation analysis. Yep.
His argument is reminiscent of Latour insofar as the observability of the macro-social only obtains for a moment and then passes away. So it's not as though there's this thing called "society" that just exists, no. And it's not as though people stand in for or represent the macro-social as spokespeople, although I'm sure the logic of representation obtains in certain cases. He argues for the occasional relevance of the macro-social, which means that the macro-social entities show up only occasionally when they are relevant, and only for a second. I'm trying to think of an example. Like when I talked to that kid's parole officer and told him how much I appreciated him in class. According to Coulter, that was Inspire talking, no me.
In people like Chaput and Lundberg, you get that literal motif. Affect literally holds you in place or literally moves you to act. It's the same thing here. "When the telephone rings and the caller says, ‘This is Bay Bank. Are you interested in our new money market account?’, the person calling may be Jane Doe, but it is not Jane Doe calling. Although Jane Doe is clearly operating as its representative, it is Bay Bank calling."
"Under specific ranges of circumstances, when certain persons do and/or say specific sorts of things according to specific rules (rules constituting also under what identification auspices their conduct is to be construed—e.g., ‘Mayor,’ ‘President,’ ‘Pope,’ etc.), then these cases instantiate the conduct of macro phenomena. They bring these phenomena to life. They realize them, in occasioned ways, such that they (again, recurrently) enter into our lives as part of our structures of relevant orientation. Perhaps these are examples of the kind of roles that Weber would have assigned to his Träger in his comparative institutional analyses." Not really getting the "occasioned ways" bit. Maybe it has to do with place or kairos? "Consider the case of the ‘soldier’ who enters a store and becomes, for the purpose of a transaction, a ‘customer.’ Does this mean that he is no longer a ‘soldier’? Or consider the case of the ‘soldier’ who is off duty and is having a domestic quarrel about his family’s finances with his wife. Isn’t the ‘husband’ who is doing the quarreling also, and simultaneously, still a ‘soldier’ (i.e., an incumbent of a ‘macro-level’ category—the armed forces, the army, etc.)?" This is a rhetorical question, he's not arguing for the persistence of the category--I don't think. Don't forget about the "recurrently."
A lot of this chapter has to do with ordinary language philosophy. It has an analytic (in the technical sense) feel to it. "Consider the following as serious and literal locutions produced in social-communicative relations: ‘He sentenced him to ten years’ imprisonment,’ ‘She diagnosed lymphoma,’ ‘He arrested them for disturbing the peace,’ ‘She fired him on the spot.’ In these cases, one can discern the relevant membership categories which apply to the persons represented purely pronominally in the examples, namely, ‘judge,’ ‘physician,’ ‘cop,’ ‘employer,’ or their cognates, respectively. Contrast such cases to the following: ‘He committed suicide,’ ‘She interrupted them’ and ‘He complained about the heat.’ No specific identification categories can be inferred in these instances (the pronominal exhibition of gender aside). ‘Committing suicide,’ ‘interrupting’ and ‘complaining’ are categorically open activities."
(non)selfmembershipping was an interesting concept.
You really need to get a good def of praxiological.
Didn't know Weber was a methodological individualist. As I understand it, it means you don't study this thing called the army, you study this guy in an army uniform--something you can observe.
Same thing with symbolic interactionism. Study the social interaction, not the macro category. "only the micro level exists"
This is all reminiscent of that chapter in the CHAT book (Acting with Technology?) that talks about how in anthropology for a while they thought there were only particulars. Wait. Isn't that nominalism?
Important quote for his argument. "Ethnomethodology has often been located at the ‘micro’ end of the spectrum, but this characterization, as I shall argue at some length in this discussion, is misleading. Indeed, to the contrary, ethnomethodology’s abiding interest in revealing the logic of peoples’ practical conduct (including the logic of their everyday reasoning within and about their social environments) can be usefully elaborated so as to undermine the very initial generic dichotomy of ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ social phenomena here at issue."
"Almost all of the macro categories used by sociologists are ordinary-language concepts: such notions as ‘army,’ ‘bank,’ ‘state,’ ‘legal system,’ ‘class,’ ‘bureaucracy,’ etc., are not (or not in the first instance) technical concepts whose meanings intentionally depart from their vernacular usage"
Argument quote "The issue, as I will argue, is that the examination of members’ vernacular ways of conceptualizing ‘macro’-social phenomena will be instructive for us in dissolving ontological misconceptions often entertained by theorists (within both ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ sociology)."
"Because many of our macro-social concepts designate institutions which are linked to geographical/architectural structures (e.g., cities, banks, universities, hospitals, police departments, etc.), an ambiguity can readily arise concerning the ways in which such macro-social phenomena are actually observable in the world of everyday life. There is one sense, of course, in which one may ‘see’ a city (e.g., by flying over it), a college, a bank, or a hospital (by walking around or through its grounds and inspecting its building[s]) but, sociologically speaking, the social institutions of cities or colleges, companies, or consulates (etc.), are clearly not observable in this way. The tendency has been to envisage macro- social phenomena linked to identifiable material structures as ‘contained’ by or within such material structures. Once this move is made, however, puzzles arise. For example, in what sense is the ‘social institution’ itself visible within such material domains as geographical areas and/or architectural structures? What we locate there, after all, are people saying and doing a great variety of things, not all of which remotely instantiate ‘city-ness,’ ‘bank-ness,’ or ‘university-ness.’ It can readily appear as though the symbolic interactionists and methodological individualists are correct to propose that such social structures are abstractions from human interactions of specific sorts, and have no genuinely ‘independent existence’ as such." Kind of like Topsight though, the point of which is to make visible the social institution? Is the point to make visible the problem or the institution itself?
the ‘fallacy of large numbers’
"Collectivities have their life in through their praxiological instantiations, and especially through the occasions that make relevant the instantiating membership categories. Thus, it really isn’t ‘Jane Doe’ calling ‘Jeff Coulter’ when it is ‘Bay Bank’ calling me, just as it really isn’t ‘Karol Woytyla’ qua private citizen who instantiates Catholicism on those occasions when the enunciations are formally produced. Jane Doe, and Karol Woytyla, may say and do a host of things in their lives, but only on occasions bounded by specific sorts of rules do their saying/ doings make relevant those categories such as to instantiate the action of a collectivity. Armies can plan coups d’état, companies can fix prices, governments can declare wars, and so forth, only insofar as the practices and praxis-relevant identities of persons, sometimes few and occasionally many, are recognizably invocable." Rules. But it can't be a rule in the strict sense. It is probably rule in the metapragmatic sense, like how in the game of TEGWAR the rule ... Or maybe like how in school you're supposed to be active? like in that meme thing that you found? The rule in the game of ethics (just gaming) is to remake the situation. Like in the Oedipus example. Or in the Chris Basgier, amazon review example.
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~wamorris/theory.html
At the end of the "Second Day" Lyotard remarks that Oedipus Rex might be considered a comedy because Oedipus "does not know how to ruse as a narrator with the story of which he is the hero" (Just Gaming, 42). What is it "to ruse" in this way? Above all, it is "pagan", which in Lyotard's discursive politics means that "there is always the possibility of relating things differently" (Just Gaming, 41). For Oedipus, specifically Sophocles' version, Apollo's oracle narrates a story of which Oedipus is the hero, but in the discursive pragmatics of paganism such stories are not determinative. Apollo's oracle is essentially: "Be Oedipus," but Oedipus fails to "negotiate" (Just Gaming, 43) an identity that would reinterpret the oracle, that would (much in the style of Odysseus telling of his own adventures) recaste his "being-as-hero" of a story that he tells about himself. He fails to perform as a narrator who is not bound to reiterate just what he has been told. In the "pagan" schema, Apollo's oracle is subject to misprision, to a retelling that allows for, perhaps demands, revision. It is this revisionary agency that is characterized by Lyotard as rusing.
Oddly, what is at stake here is not a matter of genre distinctions so much as a failure of responsibility. The "flaw" in Oedipus is not tragic; it is ethical, and consequently political. Oedipus becomes "stuck to Apollo's text" (Just Gaming, 42) because he does not act according to his "obligation" to "relay" (Just Gaming, 35) not the exact contents of Apollo's narration but the very nature of obligation itself, the foundational ethics upon which community and political justice rest. He breaks the communaltradition. Oedipus is, therefore, a comic figure but in a postmodern sense. We must see him in the mode of Tom Stoppard's imported characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are "stuck to" Shakespeare's text, fated so that they are always already "dead." But Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot renegotiate their fateful interpellation into Shakespeare's play; the "terrorizing" (Just Gaming, 99) prescriptive of Hamlet unjustly prevents Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from rusing. Stoppard's parody is not genuinely "pagan". Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are caught up in Shakespeare's plot which follows the classical tragic paradigmto of returning order to the state. They are consumed by this plot/process that Stoppard exposes as a comedy of terror.
"Surely, it may be objected, macro-level phenomena ‘exist’ even when no single member is engaged in any kind of macro-instantiating conduct of the kind discussed here? Is this not merely an ‘immanentist’ argument?" Yea, nominalist probably.
capacity, power
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