A - Garfinkel, Harold Ethnomethodology's program: Working out Durkheim's aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. 2002 (Chapters 6, and then 1, and then 4)

 

1. In deeds (that are also words and conversations)
   1. "Working out Durkheim's aphorism"

      What indeed is a thing? The thing stands in opposition to the idea, just as what is known from the outside stands in opposition to what is known from the inside. A thing is any object of knowledge which is not naturally penetrable by the understanding. It is all that which we cannot conceptualise adequately as an idea by the simple process of intellectual analysis. It is all that which the mind cannot understand without going outside itself, proceeding progressively by way of observation and experimentation from those features which are the most external and the most immediately accessible to those which 'are the least visible and the most profound. To treat facts of a certain order as things is therefore not to place them in this or that category of reality; it is to observe towards them a certain attitude of mind. It is to embark upon the study of them by adopting the principle that one is entirely ignorant of what they are, that their characteristic properties, like the unknown causes upon which they depend, cannot be discovered by even the most careful form of introspection. (Durkheim [1895] 1982: 35-6)

      Recasting the classical issues through a re-interpretation of Durkheim (among others) though a shift in the emphases to be placed on this or that passage from the Rules.

   2. A direct challenge to the first interpretation of Durkheim by Parsons and other sociologists of the mid 20th century.
      1. Garfinkel was student of Talcott Parsons who argued systematically against Parsons and who, as a student proposed a new type of experimental work designed to to "examining the meanings and efforts that make up the grounds and tactics that B employs in meeting [a] treatment of A." ([1948] 2006: 206-207)
         1. a form of experimental sociology to allow the sociologist to, precisely, see a social fact as a "thing" rather than a formal representation of a thing
            1. for example, a "traffic wave" (pp. 162-65) is a formal representation that can be modeled and manipulated but it is not the thing that arises. How the thing arises is the "preposterous problem" that Durkheim posed, though he did not solve it.

               on driving down a modern highway

   3. A call for "radical ethnography" that can be related to the movement of Boas, his students and other anthropologists, away from their armchairs.
   4. some fundamental "findings" about what is inevitably an aspect of social action:
      1. the participants are in the same relationship to each other as social scientists are in relation to whomever they observe: they have methods to discover what is happening that is affecting them: thus "ethno-methodology" (a left over from a moment in time that also produced "ethno" -musicology, -science, -etc)
      2. the participants tell each other what they are to each other (and thus an observer "only" has to listen)
      3. the participants instruct each other about who they are and what the other is to do
      4. but instructions that can deal with every contingency are impossible thus they must be grounded in the here and now of the interaction as discovered through whatever ethno-methods
      5. in any event instructions only have to be "good enough" to get something approaching the goal (the "etc." principle)
      6. indexicality
      7. passing
   5. but why "immortality" for things that arise and disappear?
      1. a double perspective:
         1. from the participant entering something made in the past (merging into a cohort of cars on a superhighway, approaching a service line, entering a classroom, starting graduate school...)
         2. to the observer following the construction, de-construction and re-construction of this something (studies of traffic flows and their mathematics, history of western schooling, etc.)
         3. even as he is caught within the immortal moment of his own research (planning, conducting, reporting, etc. within a congregation of researchers, academics, journalists)
            1. thus the paradoxes of the sociologies of science (from Thomas Kuhn to Latour).
            2. or the paradox of the dance:

               This is an orchestration for an event. For a dance in fact. The participants will be apprised of their roles at the proper time. For now it is enough that they have arrived. As the dance is the thing with which we are concerned and contains complete within itself its own arrangement and history and finale there is no necessity that the dancers contain these things within themselves as well. In any event the history of all is not the history of each nor indeed the sum of those histories and none here can finally comprehend the reason for his presence for he has no way of knowing even in what the event consists. In fact, were he to know he might well absent himself and you can see that that cannot be any part of the plan if plan there be.
               (Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian 1985)

               Labour is blossoming or dancing where
               The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
               Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
               Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
               O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
               Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
               O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
               How can we know the dancer from the dance?
               (Yeats "Among School Children" 1933)

      2. leading to questions about the temporality of an interaction
2. in words and conversations (that are also deeds)
   1. inter-action, in real time, always involve language
   2. Searle on language that acts
      1. "with this ring I thee wed"
      2. "We are now planning to continue to teach virtually through the rest of the Spring 2020 term"
   3. language that is "in use" (beyond Saussure and a massive recasting of his passing comments about "contract among speakers")
   4. Jakobson on all that is involved as we start speaking (total social fact)
   5. the beginning of a new field in linguistic, sociology, anthropology, and particularly anthropology of education (from McDermott to Limerick)