Harold Garfinkel |
Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism |
| Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2002. |
[p. 92]
Immortal, ordinary society,(1) the fundamental empirical phenomena of social order that Durkheim was talking about, is made accountable as the professional achievement of the worldwide social science movement with its technology of formal analysis. Thus FA technology exercises universal jurisdiction in targeting phenomena for analysis. Phenomena of order are made instructably observable in formal analytic details of concertedly recurrent achievements of practical action. These range from the conduct of war to the transient pause of hesitation before an invitation is refused. Phenomena made instructably observable in formal analytic details of concerted recurrencies of practical actions are so provided for by FA that a phenomenon, whatever the phenomenon, and whatever its scale, is made instructably observable as the work of a population that staffs its production.
Populations are usually treated as straightforward counts of bodies. This population is exhibited by FA in surveyable particulars of body counts and dimensionalized demographics. These are elucidated with variable analysis, quantified arguments, and causal structures. Such analytic descriptions are available in all administered societies contemporary and historical.
By contrast, it is the programmatic task of Ethnomethodological studies to specify the naturally accountable work(2) of making and describing the social facts of immortal, ordinary society. These are the things of social order—the phenomena [p.93] of ordinary society that Durkheim was talking about. Whereas FA studies foci on surveyable populations, in Ethnomethodology the proposal is instead that it Abe workings of the phenomenon that exhibits among its other details the popuh Lion that staffs it.' EM investigations have their origins, aims, directions, policie methods, the corpus status of its results, its clients, and its consequences, in world and real work of making things that Durkheim was talking about discoverabl and making their discovery accountably evident, as things of immortal, ordinal society.
Working out Durkheim's aphorism Ethnomethodologically is concerned wit this work, how it is done, by whom, its various bibliographies, its argued diversit its center, its consequences, what's in it for Departmentally based sociology, in more consequentially, what's in it for the endless analytic disciplines and science of practical action and practical reason. In its central tasks Ethnomethodology directed to the reform of technical reason,4 and doing so with the premier aim of specifying the work of the social sciences and the natural sciences as natural) accountable sciences of practical action and practical reason.
Contrary to the commonly accepted interpretations of Durkheim's work, from beginning of his writings the objective reality of social facts was Durkheim's provisio for sociology's distinctive and unique subject matter.' Ethnomethodology took up the neglected initiative. According to Ethnomethodology's programmatic understanc ing, the objective reality of social facts was Durkheim's descriptive proxy for ever . topic of logic, meaning, reason, rational action, method, truth, and order in inte lectual history, specified in any actual case as a congregationally produced an naturally accountable, endogenous order production populational cohort's cor certedly witnessable and recognized, intelligible empirical phenomenon of immortal, ordinary society. Therein the phenomena of order consist of lived, immediate, unmediated congregational practices of production, display, witness, recognition, intelligibility, and accountability of immortal ordinary society's ordinary phenom ena of order, its ordinary things, the most ordinary things in the word.
1. Immortal is borrowed from Durkheim as a metaphor for any witnessable local setting whose parties are doing some human job that, can range in scale from a hallway greeting to a freeway traffic jam where there is this to emphasize about them: Their production is staffed by parties to a standing crap game. Of course the jobs are not games, let alone a crap game. Think of freeway traffic flow in Los Angeles. For the cohort of drivers there, just this gang of them, driving, making traffic together, are somehow, smoothly and unremarkably, concerting the driving to be at the lived production of the flow's just thisness: familiar, ordinary, uninterestingly, observably-in-and-as-of-observances, doable and done again, and always, only, entirely in detail for everything that detail could be. In and as of the just thisness (the haecceities) of driving's details, just this staff are doing again just what in concert with vulgar competence they can do, for each another next first time; and it is this of what they are doing, that makes up the details of just that traffic flow: That although it is of their doing, and as of the flow they are "witness-ably oriented by" and "seeably directed to the production of it," they treat the organizational thing as of their doing, as of their own doing, but not of their very own, singular, distinctive authorship. And further, for just this cohort, it will be that after they exit the freeway others ome after them to do again the same familiar things that they—just they—just these of us as drivings doings are in concert doing.
Immortal is used to speak of human jobs as of which local members, being in the midst of organizational things, know, of just these organizational things they are in the midst of, that it preceded them and will be there after they leave it. Immortal is a metaphor for the great recurrencies of ordinary society, staffed, provided for, produced, observed, and observable, locally and naturally accountable in and as of an "assemblage of haecceities." EM places heavy emphasis on "immortal." It is a recurrent theme in the catalog of EM investigations and a source of its topics.
2. Harold Garfinkel, Michael Lynch, Eric Livingston, "The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar," Philosophy of the Social Sciences, June 11, 1981, 131-58; Eric Livingston, Making Sense of Ethnomethodology (London: Roudedge & Kegan Paul, 1987); David Weinstein, unfinished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California vine, 1972.
3. It is the workings of the traffic that make its, staff available as "typical" drivers, ac drivers, "close in" drivers, and anything else that demographers need to have in order to administer a causal account of the driving. Endogenous populations are a subject of recurring &ha methodological interest. In order to specify an endogenous population you start with concern things--traffic flow—not bodies. For Conversation Analysis conversation's myriad things, massively present, on every hand, exhibits its speakers as typical, recurring, doing it again in the same way, staff.
4. Cf. Phil E. Agre, "Accountable Artifacts: Ethnomethodology and the Reconstruction Computing" (article presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association San Francisco, August 23, 1998).
5. See Anne Warfield Rawls, "Durkheim's Epistemology: The Neglected Argument," American Journal of Sociology (September 1996): 430-82; Rawls, "Durkheim's Epistemology: The Initial Critique: 1915 to 1924," Sociological Quarterly 38, no. I (Fall 1996): 111-45; Raw "Durkheim and Pragmatism: An Old Twist on a Contemporary Debate," Sociological Theory 15, no. 1 (March 1997): 5-29.