PART 1. DOWNSTREAM FROM GOFFMAN: SOME RESEARCH TRENDS
Erving Goffman
pioneered numerous intellectual trends in the close analysis of everyday life.
Of course he didn't do it all by himself.
Intellectual life is prone to retrospective hero-worship; yet this can
be defended, practically speaking, as a convenient simplification whereby a
particular person becomes an emblem for a broad front of intellectual
advance. In talking about Goffman
and his following, we are talking about an extended family, and a somewhat
quarrelsome one at that. Goffman happens to be the most memorable
representative of this family; his work abounds in crisp formulations:
frontstage and backstage, facework, total institutions, interaction rituals,
frames, and more. I will sketch a select few of the downstream channels opened
up by Goffman's students and successors.
Micro and macro
The terms were
not used by Goffman and others of his generation. * But the theme was in the
air. Already in the 1950s, George Homans was declaring-- against Talcott
Parsons-- that society is no more than the actions of individual persons; ergo
sociology reduces to the explanations of behaviorist psychology. Herbert Blumer
was spearheading a militant version of symbolic interactionism: attacking statistics and "the variable"
because they do not actually do anything.
In class at Berkeley, he used to say things like: where is social class?
Where do you see it? In another part of the battlefield, Garfinkel developed his position (not
yet called ethnomethodology) in the 1950s, but he was a shadowy figure until
the mid-1960s, when he acquired creative followers such as Harvey Sacks,
Emmanuel Schegloff, David Sudnow and others. But they were at Berkeley, not
UCLA; Harold was notoriously difficult to work with, and the young radical
ethnomethodologists were Goffman's PhD students, even though Goffman was
teaching a different line.
*
At any rate, not until the last year of Goffman's life. I was among the first to use this
pair of terms (in the sociological sense) in a 1981 article in Amer. J. Sociol. "The
micro-foundations of macro-sociology." This has nothing to do with the
economists' sense; micro-economics studies the behavior of the firm in a
market; macro-economics studies the movement of entire economies over time.
From a sociological point of view, both of these are macro. As Greg Smith
pointed out (at the Cardiff University symposium, 2013) Goffman's comment in
his 1982 ASA presidential address was a rejection of my claim about the
micro-foundation of macro-sociology, published a year before. "...some...
argue reductively that all macrosociological features of society, along with
society itself, are an intermittently existing composite of what can be traced
back to the reality of encounters-- a question of aggregating and extrapolating
interactional effects. This position is sometimes reinforced by the argument
that whatever we do know about social structures can be traced back to highly
edited summaries of what was originally a stream of experience in social
situations.... I find these claims uncongenial." [Goffman, 1983. "The
Interaction Order." Amer. Sociol.
Rev. 48: 9]
The common
denominator of these figures is that all pointed to everyday life, where the
action is. Having said this does not settle what the research program would
be. Homans and his followers said
it's the actor's calculus of maximizing rewards over costs; at the time it was
called exchange theory, later renamed rational choice, after economists got on
board. Blumer's symbolic interactionism emphasized actors' definition of their
situation, stressing the possibility of reinterpreting the situation, and thus
giving volatility to social life. This line of analysis was brilliantly
developed by Norbert Wiley in his 1994 book, The Semiotic Self, with its empirical elaboration of the process of
internal dialogue (AKA verbal thinking) and internal rituals inside the
mind. Garfinkel's ethnomethodology
locates the key in commonsense everyday reasoning. The model is conservative in
just the opposite of the sense in which Blumer is radical; Garfinkel's famous
breaching experiments show that persons do not like to have their
taken-for-granted assumptions upset, and they try to restore order as quickly
as possible.
Garfinkel raised
a lot of hackles by declaring sociology does not exist, and should be replaced
by ethnomethodology. A more acceptable development came from Sacks and
Schegloff, who invented a new research method and field-- Conversation
Analysis-- using tape recorders to capture exactly what people say to each
other in real situations, getting at the local production of everything. And
since the data are recorded and minutely inspectable, this led to discoveries such
as the importance of rhythms in talk-- points not necessarily brought out by CA
theorists themselves, but by the broader movement of micro-sociologists-- which
show the micro-mechanisms by which solidarity is manifested, as well as
alienation and conflict. This is the pattern no gap, no overlap (originally
stated as a fundamental rule of conversation, by Sacks, Schegloff, and
Jefferson, 1974); and the ways this can be violated: no gap/no overlap
generates a strong rhythm which is the ultra-micro mechanism establishing
solidarity; long gaps evince alienation; persistent overlap is conflict.
In this array of
theoretical possibilities, Goffman took an ostensibly modest position. Society
exists and is primary, he said; I'm just studying the social in everyday life,
sideshow though it may be. What kind of intellectual impression management was
this? In one his few explicit references to his own intellectual ancestry, in
an early paper Goffman cited Durkheim on the point that society constructs the
individual self and makes it a sacred object; hence minor rituals like saying
hello, goodbye, handshakes and kisses, mirror the grand rituals of religion,
but in this case they give obeisance to the self. More precisely, they give
ritual respect to the other's self, in return for reciprocity in upholding
one's own. Moreover, these everyday rituals are obeisance to the collective
definition of the situation-- adding a touch of symbolic interaction, even
though Goffman was generally critical of that theory.
Although Goffman
said society is primary, he never studied it in the large. He shifted the
center of gravity to the situation itself; social life becomes a string of
situations. This is not an ontological claim: it is a research strategy. If you
want to understand mental illness, go into the schizophrenic ward and see how
people so labeled interact with each other and with their guards and medics. If
you want to see social class, go in and out the kitchen doors of a resort hotel
and see how the waiters put on a face for their upper-middle class clientele;
and then see how these proper Brits dress for dinner in their own private
backstage regions, putting on costume and manner to act out their frontstage
identities. Goffman had such a powerful influence because he led by dramatic
example; he provided both a research strategy and a theoretical mechanism for
what causes what and with what consequences.
What is the
value of reframing all this as micro and macro? In my 1981 article, I argued it is not a matter of what kind
of research people should do, or be prohibited from doing; if you want to study
revolutions à la Marx and Skocpol, or world-systems à la Wallerstein, go ahead
and do it; by their fruits you shall know them and if they come up with
something important let's learn it. By the same token, the followers of
Goffman, Garfinkel et al. were making discoveries and opening up frontiers.
Pragmatically it is pointless to demand that we should all do this instead of that. But many
sociologists at the time said exactly that, the positivist methodologists on
one side putting down researchers on everyday life as either unscientific or
trivial; and Garfinkel at the other extreme saying society is nothing but a
gloss on commonsense reasoning. Calling the choices of what to study
micro-and-macro was a way of saying that all sociologists occupy the same
empirical universe; some of us are looking at it up close, through
ever-more-sharply-focused micro-scopes; others were widening the vision, to
larger swaths of time and space.
Ontologically
micro and macro are not distinct realms. The macro can be zoomed in on
everywhere. A young ethnomethodologist at San Diego (Ken Jennings) once
convinced me of this by saying: since you want to do historical sociology, if
you could get in a time machine, exactly what would you want to see when you
got there? This made me realize not only that you always enter the macro at
some micro point; but that what macro-historical sociologists are doing is
grappling with a scale where stretching out beyond every micro situation are
other situations in the past and future; other situations spread out
horizontally, contemporaneously populated by other interactions, as far out to the
horizon as we have the methods to see. Macro is not different from micro, it is
just more micro-situations, viewed as they are clumped together in larger
slices of time, space, and number.
Pragmatically
there are always going to be different kinds of sociologists doing research at
different scale, not to mention anthropologists, linguists, historians etc. So
what is the point of saying that micro is the foundation of macro, while at the
same time saying let everyone approach the micro-macro continuum from their own
angle? I proposed a bet on
the micro-researchers: because macro-sociologists deal with things that they
refer to by nouns-- states, world-systems, societies, organizations, classes--
they can be led astray when they write as if these are entities that don't
depend on the people whose actions make them up. The more positivistic act as
if statistics are more real than the actions that they summarize. In this
respect, micro-sociologists have made a dent in how macro-sociology is now
perceived. There has been a shift from looking at societies as entities, to
viewing them as networks-- and networks of varied and changing shape and
extent, with ties of differing strengths.* It is not accidental that the era during which network
sociology has risen in importance has also been the era of militant
micro-sociology.
*
Two representative works are Michael Mann, The
Sources of Social Power, 1986-2013, demonstrating across world-history
there are no such things as unitary societies, especially as conventionally
glossed by the names of states or ethnicities, but a shifting and overlapping
mesh of networks of economic, political, military, and cultural exchange and
power; and John Levi Martin, Social
Structures, 2009, which derives social change as well as dead-ends from the
transformative possibilities of various kinds of networks. For a summary of the latter, see my June 2011 post, "Why Networks Change their Shape, or Not."
Macro-words such
as "the government of France," or "the Wall Street stock
exchange", may be convenient terms for referring to networks that tend to
hang together and reproduce themselves from year to year; but if macro is
really composed of the linkages of micro-situations in time and space, the
dynamics of macro should be found in the micro. And this means, when government
rise and fall, or markets go into booms and busts, we should zero in, get into
the streets and palaces of Paris on February 23rd 1848, or the streets of Cairo
on a sequence of notable days between 2011 and the present, and look for the
mechanisms by which micro processes drive macro events.
Sociology of emotions
This becomes
clearer with the theory of emotion work, developed by Arlie Hochschild, one of
Goffman's students at Berkeley in the mid-60s. Emotions are often performed
rather than simply experienced, Hochschild notes (The Managed Heart, 1983). There are professions whose chief skill
is putting on a particular emotional tone; she studied airline flight
attendants and bill-collectors; her students studied lawyers and strip-tease
dancers. If one wants to take on the core dynamics of macro political and
economic power, one could focus on those professional mood-spinners,
politicians and investment counselors. Hochschild's inspiration is Goffmanian;
people work on themselves to project emotions that fit the situation, or that
serve to control other people in a situation. In short, emotions are performed
on a frontstage, they are impression management, dramaturgy.
Hochschild has
been criticized for ignoring emotions which are spontaneous, but not so;
persons have to do emotion work precisely in situations where their spontaneous
emotions don't fit what is expected of them. There is an emotional backstage,
but here emotions are not just spontaneous, but scrutinized, strategized as to
how they can be transformed into frontstage emotions. Arlie has a wonderful
argument that, contrary to stereotype, men are more emotional then women. At least
in their relations towards each other, where men are more powerful, they can
express what they feel or at least what they lust, while women have more to
lose if they let their romantic emotions carry them away. Women do more emotion
work than men, precisely because they talk more about their emotions--
especially in backstage privacy with their girlfriends, trying to talk each
other into calculating which man is a good choice to let one's emotions roam
free with. Thus women are considered to be more emotional than men but this
really means women talk about emotions more, in backstage situations; men talk
less about their emotions, but simply act on them. The evidence is that men are
more likely than women to fall in love at first sight. The whole question of
who is more emotional is simplistic, unless one considers the front and
backstage dimensions of emotion work.
From Hochschild
and other contemporary researchers there developed the field of emotion
research-- Tom Scheff (another of
Goffman's former protégés), Theodore Kemper, Jonathan Turner, Jack Barbalet and
many others. What makes this more than just another subspecialty? It has a driving theoretical
significance because emotions are the glue of the social order, and the energy
of social change. Perhaps the social change aspect is more visible, with the
anger, enthusiasm, and exalted self-sacrifice found in political and religious
movements; but there are also the quiet emotions that sustain the social
structure when it does not change, i.e. when it repeats itself day after day
and year after year. Garfinkel and the ethnomethodologists had a blind spot for
emotions, but they are apparent in the breaching experiments: when commonsense
assumptions are breached, the reaction is bewilderment, shock, even outrage.
One can reformulate Garfinkel as holding that the merest glimmer of these
negative emotions-- these breaching emotions-- cause people to recoil and put
back normal social order as fast as they can. Tony Giddens picked this up and turned it into the
existentialist formulation, that ontological anxiety is what holds the social
order together. How far can we go with this? Recall, Garfinkel has a
conservative view of social institutions, where other micro-sociologists are
more inclined to a volatile view.
Garfinkel's world, in my summary exposition, rests on a crude
exaggeration, since people don't always succeed in putting social routine back
together; and "as fast as they can" refers to just the temporal
magnitude of the breaching experiments, more or less a few minutes or an hour
at most. A frontier area of research now is time-dynamics, how long emotional
sequences take, and what happens to the emotions after a few days, a few weeks,
a few months. The shifting moods in Tahrir Square over 30 months give some
indication of the kind of pattern we are trying to capture.
Here again a
path looks more promising that comes via Goffman (and behind him, from a
combination of Durkheim and Blumer)-- more promising in giving us the
mechanism, the switch that shifts social situations between reproduction and
change. This brings me to my third point, the micro-sociology of
stratification.
Interaction Rituals as the mechanism of
stratification
Let us go back
to 1967. Goffman had just
published his book Interaction Rituals,
composed of papers which he had published in the 1950s in relatively offbeat
places. Goffman was the subject of much discussion and gossip among Berkeley
graduate students; and not just for his quirky personality, such as why his
wife committed suicide by jumping off the San Rafael Bridge. Interaction rituals opened our eyes to
what we now could see all around us: everything that people were doing, minute
by minute, was not natural but socially constructed; it was all social rituals,
and they all operated (more or less unconsciously) to enact a certain kind of
social order. And that social order was power, it was class, it was
organization and authority. (This
was a few years before it occurred to us that it was also gender and sexuality.)
And we jumped to the conclusion-- not necessarily shared by Goffman himself--
that if social order was constructed it could also be de-constructed (not that we used that term), it could
be challenged, it could be torn down.
Whether something else would be put in its place was an open question,
since this was the age of the cultural revolution, AKA the psychedelic
revolution, and some in the counter-culture proclaimed that artificially
constructed social order would be blown open just by turning in on how it is
done, and dropping out from it. The utopian phase of this revelation was
relatively short-lived.
Goffman and
Garfinkel became intellectual heroes of a generation that had experience
challenging the taken-for-granted institutions of macro-power. Some of us had
taken part in campaigns against racial discrimination in the South, and in the
North as well, and had found that institutions of deference and demeanor that
supported white dominance could be broken. At Berkeley, and many other places,
students found that the traditional authority of university administration
could be successfully challenged, by collectively bringing the organization to
a halt. In the student movement of
the 1960s, sociologists were prominent-- not because they were the most
alienated, but because they had the intellectual tools to see what they were
facing. Herbert Blumer took no part in the university demonstrations, but in
his classes he would refer to students taking over the administration building
as an example of his point: an organization does not exist just because it is a
thing-like noun, but exists only to the extent that people act it out; when
they stop interpreting it as existing it stops existing. This is not idealist solipsism-- it's
all in your mind-- but rather it is situationally real or not depending on how
a group of persons act together to change a collective definition of a
situation.
In the event,
universities did pull themselves back together, although in ways that
incorporated some of the newer definitions of what they should be doing. My
purpose is not to trace the activist counter-culture politics of the 1960s and
its permutations in following decades; but to note that many then-young
sociologists saw Goffman and Garfinkel as having apocalyptic implications. Its
political fate is not the crucial point for this intellectual development; the
New Left did not win in the end; there were swings to the New Right, the
Neo-Liberalism of the 1990s, the revival of religious activism, and so on. The
fact that the counter-culture did not win in the long run is no disproof of
Blumer's radical symbolic interactionism; the social order of any given time is
the result of all the various groups of people who mobilize themselves to
define what social institutions are.
The student Left had no monopoly on mobilization; religious mobilization
shifted techniques for stirring up collective effervescence from Left to Right;
political movements were mobilized not just in the name of oppressed races,
ethnicities and sexual preferences but also in tax revolts by self-defined
economically oppressed middle-class; Western techniques of revolt spread to the
Soviet bloc and many other places, with results that may seem paradoxical in
macro perspective but which show the power of micro-techniques to transform
so-called big structures.
The story I am
telling is about Goffman's downstream; the main point is that Goffman's theory
of interaction rituals became radicalized, used in the service of stripping
existing practices of their legitimation. And then, when politics settled down
and it became apparent radical definitions were not going to go unchallenged by
opposing definitions, Goffman's micro-analysis came to be seen as a tool for
seeing how the dominant order makes itself dominant.
My take on it
was as follows. What makes classes strong or weak happens in micro-situations.
Some people get more out of their micro-interactions than others. Why? Goffman
had already given some clues: polite rituals like introducing oneself, leaving
calling cards, gentlemen taking off their hats to ladies, were means by which
stratified groups constitute themselves; persons who didn't carry out these
rituals properly were left outside their boundaries. Goffman's own examples
were historically rather backward-looking, and it seemed ironic that he was
taking them from old etiquette books at the time when a massive shift towards
informalization was going on-- at the time I used to think of it as the
"Goffmanian revolution". I attempted to generalize the model by
expanding on its Durkheimian basis, the theory of religious rituals which
constitute religious communities. I emphasized that rituals succeed or fail;
some gods are deserted because their worshipers no longer find their ritual
attractive, or because a rival ritual draws them away. The ingredients that go
into rituals must be seen as varying in strength: bodily assembly (i.e.
opportunities to mobilize as a group); techniques for generating a mutual focus
of attention, and for stirring up a shared emotion; when these ingredients are
favorable, they accelerate through mutual feedback, generating collective
effervescence, which seen through a micro-sociological lens, is visible in
rhythmic entrainment of people's bodies. Goffman helps us see that little
micro-rituals are going on all the time, varying in strength. Where these interaction rituals are
strong, they generate feelings of group membership-- in this case, membership
in a social class; feelings of moral solidarity-- the belief that their group
is right, what Weber would call legitimate, and should be defended against
rival ways of life. On the individual level, a successful interaction ritual
gives what I called, modifying Durkheim, emotional energy: feelings of
confidence, initiative, enthusiasm; conversely, failed rituals are emotionally
depressing.
All these are
elements in what makes some social classes dominate others. Dominant classes
are better at rituals, or monopolize the successful rituals; dominated classes
are weak in ritual resources, because they have no opportunity to assemble for
rituals of their own. This fitted well Goffman's analysis of the British resort
hotel (in The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life, 1959), where servants are underlings in higher class
rituals. But ritual resources can shift; sometimes subordinated groups get more
ingredients for themselves to mobilize; in the 50s and 60s there were vivid
examples before our eyes in the
black mobilization for civil rights, turning themselves into a committed,
energized, self-sacrificing group that gathered supporters by staging massive
public rituals which swung legitimation to themselves and away from the
segregationists.
One could go on
with a histoire raisonnée of dramatic social movements, analyzing their micro-techniques for
successful interaction rituals; as well as the decline of movements as they are
undercut by other ritual mobilizations
(e.g. the proliferation of gang rituals after the 1950s, which made
black people appear threatening, at just the time the civil rights movement was
making them respectable). To drop
to the level of spare analytical abstraction, let me list a number of ways in
which researchers in Goffman's wake have explained who situationally dominates
whom:
-- One version
is that higher classes are frontstage
personalities, while lower classes are backstage personalities. Higher classes appear in the center of
attention, on the stage of big organizations and networks, where they get to
formulate the topics and set the emotional tone. The lower classes are audiences for the higher. It does not
necessarily follow that lower classes are taken in by upper class rituals;
insofar as lower classes have enough privacy to gather on their own backstages,
they can carry out little interaction rituals among themselves, complaining and
satirizing their bosses. The result is a difference in class cultures: the
higher classes portray themselves in lofty ideals, the lower classes are
cynical.
-- Another
version is higher classes have more
refined manners, and spend more time policing their boundaries. They
generate refined rankings, some persons being judged more polite or
sophisticated than others; persons who might challenge class domination become
drawn into elite tournaments of micro-interactional skill. Goffman wrote
incisively about techniques like the aggressive use of face-work, coolly
insulting others in ways that those of lesser sophistication cannot respond to
except by losing emotional control and damning themselves by their own
outbursts. Such techniques, Jennifer Pierce (Gender
Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms, 1995) has shown, are part of the
interactional skill that make a successful courtroom lawyer.
--- A related
argument is in research by Lauren Rivera (Northwestern University) on how some
candidates become successfully chosen in job interviews for elite financial and
consulting firms; the key is not so much how the interviewer rates the
candidate's technical background or skills, but whether they have emotional
resonance. Manners, an easy flow
of topics to talk about, all serve as ingredients that make for successful
interaction rituals, which act as gatekeepers to the elite.
-- Another
argument is that the higher classes have
more emotional energy-- they have gone through a sequential chain of
interaction rituals where they have been successful; this gives them a store of
confidence and enthusiasm that enables them to dominate the next interactions
in the chain. Conversely, the lower
classes have less emotional energy; they are less confident of themselves,
take less initiative, are poorer at impressing others with their emotional
tone.
Successful
entrepreneurs and financial manipulators are not just cold calculators but
energy centers with investors chasing at their heels.
Careers of successful politicians, seen through
the microscope of interaction rituals, shows them developing the techniques
that make others into followers; but the trajectory of the chain can shift;
rising politicians can become overmatched, undergoing crises where they can no
longer control the emotional tone of situations, and lose their charisma.
(Instances to ponder include the rise and fall of Gorbachev, and the ongoing
vicissitudes of Obama.)
These mechanisms
of class domination are not mutually exclusive; together they may give an
overwhelming impression that class domination is impregnable. Nevertheless,
class orders do shift historically; individuals do move up and down in their
lifetime; and in the very short run of daily situations, interactional
dominance can fluctuate. I have referred to the latter as situational
stratification. Without trying to summarize all the ways micro-mechanisms can
change stratification, let me move to my fourth and last point, violent
conflict.
Violence and conflict as impression
management
Conflict is the
main way the caked-on sediment of custom is broken; not that the challengers always win, but
conflict is volatile, and can rearrange the resources that make stratification,
if it is renewed in the aftermath, different than it was before. I will
concentrate on violence, which is both the most extreme and perhaps the best
studied form of conflict. To say that violence hinges on impression management
is to say that the success or failure of violence is based on micro-mechanisms.
Elijah Anderson
in Code of the Street (1999) gives an
ethnography of the most violent zone of the inner-city black ghetto, in such cities
as Philadelphia and Chicago. His most striking argument is that most people are
faking it. The code of the street is a style of presenting oneself: tough,
threatening, quick to take offense. But Anderson shows, by years of careful
observation, that most people in the ghetto consider themselves to be
"decent"-- pursuing normal middle-class goals of a job, education,
family; but under conditions of the ghetto, where policing is non-existent or
distrusted, decent people-- this is a folk term in Philadelphia-- have to be ready to defend
themselves. "I can go for
street, too," they would say, referring to a different category of people
who are called "street"-- people who are committed to violence and
crime as a way of life. These are
two different styles of presenting oneself, and most people can code-switch.
The switch is micro and patently visible: a young man walking on an empty
street at the edge of the ghetto appears relaxed and happy, but at the sight of
another male drops into a hard demeanour, muscles tensed, shoulders swinging
and torso dancing with a nonverbal message emphasizing ownership of his
personal space.
This is situational impression management. Anderson developed
his analysis under the influence of Goffman, who was his colleague at University
of Pennsylvania. It is putting on a public face, don't mess with me. Anderson goes on to argue that
performing the street code is an attempt to avoid violence, and in two
different ways. One is to protect oneself from being a victim by looking tough. But this can backfire on occasion,
since two men (or two women) can become locked into a contest of escalating
face-work that leads to violence.*
Anderson gives a second technique: when both persons show that they know
the street code, they can establish membership, and both can pass through the
situation with honor without violence.
*
Shown also by research on homicides arising from escalated face contests. Luckenbill, David F. 1977. "Criminal
Homicide as a Situated Transaction." Social
Problems 25, pp. 176-186.
More detailed
field observations on this point are given by Joe Krupnick's research on the
streets of Chicago.** When gun-carrying gang members approach each other, their
concern is generally to avoid violence, since they are experienced enough to
know its cost. They use a micro-interactional technique when getting into
hailing distance-- brief visual recognition, no prolonged stares, studied
nonchalance, brief formulaic greeting, moving on past without looking back.
Failing to play this particular interaction ritual can result in getting rolled
on, with indignant charges-- "who he think he is, act like he rule the
street!" The proper
performance of interaction rituals is fateful in the most violent
neighbourhood. Similarly detailed
participant observation of Philadelphia street gangs has been done by Alice
Goffman, Erving's daughter, in a dissertation rich with all the ways that
performing the impression of violence is more important than the violence
itself.
Krupnick, Joe, and Chris Winship.
2013. "Keeping Up the Front: How Young Black Men Avoid Street
Violence in the Inner City." In Orlando Patterson (ed.) Bringing Culture Back In: New Approaches to
the Problems of Disadvantaged Black Youth.
In Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, I
argued that violence is difficult, not easy; the micro-details of a threatening
confrontation show that persons come up against a barrier of confrontational
tension and fear that makes them hesitant and incompetent even if they
consciously want to commit violence. This shared emotion will inhibit violence
from happening, unless one side or the other finds a way to get around the
emotional barrier. Violence is successfully carried out when one side
establishes emotional dominance over the other. And this is done chiefly by a
dramatic performance; emotional dominance precedes physical dominance. A
typical way to seek dominance is bluster: threatening, angry gestures, loud
voice, an attempt to dominate the communicative space. If the two sides are in
equilibrium, violence does not usually come off. The crucial technique of
violent persons, then, is violent impression-management: subtle micro-moves in
gesture and timing to get the other side into a passive, de-energized stance,
thereby allowing them to be subjected to violent force. Violence is a learned
skill, rather than merely a lack of self-control or an outburst of past
resentments; and what is learned is a specific way to manage the micro-cues of
self and other in violence-threatening situations.
Violence is an
area where we can palpably demonstrate that the micro makes a difference. This
is a counter to the position often taken in the micro-macro debate that micro
merely reflects macro-- that micro behavior just reproduces the macro
structure. Several versions of the
argument have been recently popular: the Bourdieu version is that habitus is
the individual's disposition to act in accordance with their sense of position
in the structural field. Another version is that people act out cultural
scripts, that they know what to do in any particular micro-situation because
they follow a cognitive script or schema. The trouble with both these types of
argument is that they are static; nothing ever changes because the same
habitus, the same script constantly operates; social structure simply
reproduces itself. Against this is the dynamism of symbolic interactionism,
bolstered by Goffman's tools for looking at the micro-details that determine
what happens in interactional situations. It is not a matter of looking inside
the individual for what habitus or script each happens to carry, but the
interaction between those individuals in the emotions and rhythms of the
situation itself. We see this most
clearly in the micro-contingencies that determine whether violence will break
out or not. And violence so often
is a cutting point, spreading through escalations and reactions, a micro-point
that gets dramatic attention and permeates the macro-space, sometimes setting
off major structural changes. At
such times, micro really does causally determine the form of the macro.
Goffman, by Goffman
In conclusion, a
few words about Goffman himself. I said at the outset that Goffman is an
emblem, a figurehead for the moving front of researchers who explored the
micro-sociology of everyday life. Can we turn a Goffman lens on Goffman
himself? I once asked him what he thought would be the micro-sociology of the
intellectual world, but he brushed it aside with a characteristically sarcastic
remark. Perhaps he did think about
it, in his own backstage. He did seem to operate with a strategy as if designed
to make himself the leader and emblem. He rarely cited any predecessors; he did
not put himself in the lineage of those who went before-- whereas we ourselves
rule out the possibility of claiming to be emblems, precisely because we talk
so much about our predecessors. Goffman occasionally criticized his rivals, but
only in dismissive footnotes: trashing Schutz and his followers (which is to
say Garfinkel's movement, which Goffman never mentions) in a few lines appended
to Frame Analysis; occasional lines
about taking the role of the other that only the cognoscenti would recognize as
a putdown of Blumer and Mead. Goffman never gave his rivals even the attention
that comes from direct attack.
Some prominent micro researchers have complained that Goffman never
cited them when it would have been appropriate, citing instead more obscure
sources. No other intellectual loomed up on Goffman's pages.
To be sure, he
himself did not loom up overtly; he affected a modest manner (in his writing,
that is-- his behavior in everyday life is legendary for his aggressive
face-work), but with an artfulness, indeed archness to his words. Goffman is
difficult to connect from book to book because he never used the same
terminology over again, nor explained how newer concepts might have improved
from the older ones-- how frontstages related to rituals and then to frames.
This may be part of the impression management that Goffman engaged in about his
own intellectual career. He was always reincarnating himself as an innovator,
covering his own tracks. As sociologists downstream from Goffman, we have
learned to see some of the tricks. He rested more on a larger movement than he
himself ever admitted. In that sense, he was an ordinary intellectual, closer
to ourselves. But as a personality-- his life was a masterpiece of singularity.
Then again--
can't we say the same about Harold Garfinkel?
PART 2. GARFINKEL: RIDING TWO WAVES OF INTELLECTUAL REALIGNMENT
Harold Garfinkel’s work
can be located in the two great waves of realignment that took place during the
20th century, the first in the 1920s and 30s, the second in the 1960s and 70s. Garfinkel,
I am going to argue, was one of a very few sociologists who centered oneself on
the realignment in philosophy in the 1920s-30s, when he was growing up. But his
reputation did not take off until the 1960s and 70s, when a school-- indeed a
cult-- formed of ethnomethodologists who made up the radical wing, in the
Anglophone world, of the second big realignment to hit the human sciences.
The First Realignment: From Neo-Kantians and Idealists to
Phenomenologists and Logical Positivists
Let us start with the
realignment that took place in philosophy when the dominant positions at the
turn of the 20th century gave way to a new set of oppositions in the 1920s and
30s. At the beginning of the century the major schools were the Neo-Kantians,
along with vitalists and evolutionists (the latter two sometimes combined, as
in Bergson). In the Anglophone world, the center of attention remained the
Idealists: the most famous
philosopher in Britain was F.H. Bradley—who performed a dialectical dissolution
of all concepts as incapable of grasping Absolute reality, with a capital A. Idealists
included Bertrand Russell’s teacher McTaggart, and Whitehead, who published an
Idealist system as late as the 1920s. In the US, Idealism as even more dominant,
and was part of the worldview of persons we otherwise think of as pragmatists:
William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, the early John Dewey, and George Herbert
Mead on down to his death in 1931. Earlier, the most famous Idealist was Josiah Royce, whose
name is on Royce Hall next door to the sociology building at UCLA. Idealism was partly a defense of religion
in rationalized form-- one reason
why Idealism was so important in the transition of American higher education from Bible
schools to research universities. Idealism was also a sophisticated
epistemology that holds that no one ever sees the so-called real world, but
only through the eyeglasses of one’s categories. The only sure reality is the
mind.
Neo-Kantianism dominated
on the European Continent, led by such figures as Dilthey, Windelband, and
Cassirer. Unlike the older Idealists, it was no longer concerned with defending
religion and no longer built metaphysical systems, and had made its peace with
natural science. Neo-Kantians took their topics from investigating the
constitutive logics of the various disciplines; Dilthey distinguished Geisteswissenschaft from Naturwissenschaft, each valid in their
own sphere, but using distinctive methods of hermeneutic interpretation or
seeking causality. In Windelband’s view, they wore different eyeglasses,
idiographic or nomothetic, seeing particulars or general laws. The newly organized social sciences
were especially good territory for Neo-Kantian meta-theorizing. Economics might
seem naturally to be in the Naturwissenschaft
camp, but in Germany, economics had been historical, not mathematical, and the
so-called Methodenstreit-- the battle
of methods that Max Weber took part in the early 1900s-- concerned what
approach should govern economists’ work. Weber’s ideal types were a Neo-Kantian
solution, designed to allow bifocal eyeglasses, so to speak. Psychology was a
favorite Neo-Kantian hunting ground; sociology and anthropology also became
targets. In the founding generation of sociologists, Weber, Simmel, and to a
degree Durkheim were all Neo-Kantians.
Vienna Circle
positivists of the following generation rejected the Neo-Kantian way of drawing
borders, and launched an imperialist campaign for unification of all the
sciences, including the social sciences. But for the moment we need to focus on
the earlier positivists, figures like Ernst Mach in the late 19th century. In
our own day, positivism has become a term of abuse, for number-crunchers,
dogmatic materialists and naive objectivists who regard natural science as the
only true reality. But positivism at the time of Mach meant almost the opposite.
Mach held that scientists do not observe reality, but only construct it out of
readings of laboratory instruments; hence the reality of science might as well
be abolished, replaced by instrument readings, which are always provisional.
Machian positivism was close to Neo-Kantianism, and a popular expression of the
position was published by Vaihinger in 1911 as The Philosophy of As-If.
The 1920s and 30s swept
away the dominance of the Neo-Kantians and their allies, and replaced them with
a new opposition: phenomenology, and the much more radical logical positivism
of the Vienna Circle. At first glance, phenomenologists like Husserl and
Scheler seem similar to Neo-Kantians: the same search for the conceptual
eye-glasses through which we see the world. One difference is that the
Neo-Kantians were much more concerned with academic disciplines, whereas the
phenomenologists shifted towards everyday life. Was phenomenology, then, the
stream of consciousness, just then in the early 1920s breaching the literary
world in the novels of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf? An
interesting question, which I will pass by, with the remark that only Proust
had much philosophical input, and that was from Bergson. Phenomenology seems
closer to psychology, and one might be tempted to link it with the Freudian
movement, or with the Gestalt psychology that was being developed in Germany in
the teens and twenties. But no, phenomenology was militantly
anti-psychological; psychology was merely the phenomenal level of experience,
governed by causal laws on the level of the natural sciences; phenomenology was
deeper-- in Husserl’s famous epochê,
bracketing the phenomenal contents of consciousness in order to seek the deep
structures, the forms in which consciousness necessarily presents itself.
The roots of phenomenology in the foundations of mathematics
The pathway into the
phenomenology movement was not from psychology, but from elsewhere: its
predecessors in the previous generation were in the foundational crisis in
mathematics. (There is an echo of this in Husserl’s 1936 title The
Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.) Issues
had arisen in late 19th century because the new highly abstract
mathematics had invented concepts with no counterpart in ordinary 3-dimensional
reality, concepts impossible to grasp intuitively: imaginary numbers,
non-Euclidean geometries and alternative algebras, higher orders of infinities
called transfinite numbers, etc. Some mathematicians declared these
monstrosities, products of illegitimate operations and lack of rigor; others
held that higher mathematicians had broken into a Platonic paradise where they
could create new objects at will. The dispute eventually would become organized,
around 1900, into the camps of formalists and intuitionists, each with a
program for how to logically carry through the foundations of all mathematics.
The most important moves were made around the 1880s and 90s by Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician who distinguished
between sense and reference in the manipulation of
symbols. In the verbal expression, “The morning star is the same as the evening
star,” this is a mere tautology because the two stars are both the planet
Venus; but the statement is not meaningless [Venus is Venus], because the two
star-names are being used differently in the syntax of the sentence. Frege was
concerned above all with mathematical symbolism, for instance the meaning of
the equals sign [=] at the center of a mathematical equation, or the plus sign
[+] used in addition, which is not simply the word “and” used in ordinary
language. The various mathematical symbols are not on the same level, but are
different kinds of operations, place-holders, and pointers. In short,
mathematics is a multi-level enterprise; things we had thought were clear, such
as numbers, have to be reanalyzed into a much more meticulous system of formal
logic.
Husserl was in the
network of Frege’s allies, and simultaneously connected with its most hostile
critics; he eventually left mathematics for philosophy and generated the phenomenological
program with an aim to provide secure foundations not only for mathematics and
science but for all knowledge. This proved to be an endlessly receding finish
line, as Husserl launched one program after another down to the 1930s; its
chief results, as far as we are concerned, were offshoots such as Schutz and
Heidegger. But for a moment, let us pursue Frege’s connections in a different
direction. In 1903, Bertrand Russell, who had been working on a program
deriving basic mathematics from a small number of concepts and axioms of
symbolic logic, began to correspond with Frege over a paradox in his attempt to
build a system of numbers out of the logic of sets. The conundrum is the set of
all sets that are not members of themselves; is it a member of itself? If yes,
no; if no, yes. The point is not trivial, on the turf of set theory, since this
was Frege’s way of defining zero and beginning the ordered number series which
is the basis of all mathematics. Frege threw up his hands, 20 years of work
down the drain! -- but Russell worked out a solution, in the spirit of Frege’s
distinctions between levels of operations, and what is allowable on each
level. Russell’s theory of types
led to further controversy; and at this point, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a young
German engineer who had interested himself in Frege’s work, arrived at
Cambridge and took up Russell’s problem. Published in 1921 as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
Wittgenstein’s argument hinges on the distinction between what is sayable and what is unsayable,
which we can see as a widening of the kind of distinction among incommensurable
operations such as Frege’s sense vs. reference, or later what linguistics would
call use vs. mention, and
echoed still later in ethnomethodology as resource vs. topic.
Within the realm of the
sayable, however, Wittgenstein’s approach is like that of the mathematical
formalists, building a system on a logically perfect language, starting with
simple elements (proper names with purely internal properties, logical atoms
unaffected by external connections), out of which all meaningful elementary
sentences can be constructed, and so on until giving complete knowledge of the
world. By the late 1920s, the Vienna Circle logical positivists were welcoming Wittgenstein’s methods as
a means of unifying all science on a secure basis. Not that the Vienna Circle’s
leaders were followers of Wittgenstein; Schlick, Neurath and others were
already well-launched, with their own networks coming from physicists like
Planck and Einstein, from leading mathematicians of both the formalist and
intutionist schools, from neo-Kantians like Dilthey, and late pupils of Frege
such as Carnap. I will skip over the internal struggles of the Vienna Circle,
including such explosive developments as Gödel’s undecidability proof and
Popper’s falsifiability criterion, and only note that the outcome of the Vienna
Circle for social science, above all in America, was a kind of militant
positivism that declares meaningless anything that cannot be put into the
strict methodology of empirical measurement, statistics, and derivation of
testable observation statements from covering laws. (Carnap, the most militantly
reductionist of the old-line logical positivists, become a professor at UCLA in
the 1954 [and died at Santa Monica in 1970]—apparently he and Harold had
nothing to do with each other.) The people who wrote sociology methods
textbooks around 1950, like Hempel, laid it down that what sociology needed to
become a true science was the guidance of Vienna Circle positivism.
Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language
This sounds like the
triumph of the Evil Empire. But I can only expound one side of things at a
time. The intellectual world operates by rivalries and conflicts; and I should
mention here the movement in England of ordinary language philosophy. By the
1930s G.E. Moore was reacting against the tendency of mathematically-inspired
philosophers to move further and further from the world of ordinary experience,
into a realm of abstract sets and meta-rules about what is permissible or
impermissible in operations upon them. Moore began to argue for simple
statements of ordinary language as incontestable truths (“Here is one hand, and
here is another...” 1939)-- and
therefore as a better standard of epistemology than convoluted systems of
logical axioms. Wittgenstein, distancing himself from his Vienna Circle
admirers, switched over to the anti-formalist side, repudiating much of what he
had written in the Tractatus-- but
retaining the key distinction of sayable
vs. unsayable. His own later comments describe mathematics as an
everyday practice that one can observe in detail, stressing that the key to all
the foundational disputes are to by found by this method (that we now would
call micro-observations of situated practices), rather than elaborating long
hierarchical derivations from concepts of sets. This emphasis on the ordinary
practice of language was made into an organized program by John Austin, whose
1956 book How to Do Things with Words, resonates with Frege’s use vs.
mention, now elaborated as speech acts and illocutionary forces. (And in fact
Austin had begun by publishing, in 1950, a translation of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic.)
Husserl's followers branch into everyday life
I need to fill in one
more pathway, and we will have arrived at Garfinkel. This is the pathway of
Husserl’s followers. I will single out two: Alfred Schutz and Martin Heidegger.
Schutz set out to examine Max Weber’s notions of verstehen, and the ideal types of rational and non-rational action
that Weber proposed as tools for the analyzing the social bases of modern
capitalism. But Weber had operated as a typical Neo-Kantian, more or less
inventing these ideal types out of his own head; whereas Schutz applied the
more rigorous phenomenology of Husserl. The result was Schutz’s 1932 book, The Phenomenology of the Social World,
which attempts to lay out some basic rules of the everyday construction of
reality, such as the reciprocity of perspectives. Garfinkel
encountered Schutz teaching at the New School for Social Research
around 1950.
Heidegger was a pupil of
Hussserl who had been given the task of making a phenomenological analysis of
the experience of time. His Sein und Zeit,
in 1927, is the first famous statement of what became existentialism. What is
striking about Heidegger is the religious dimension, perhaps not surprising for
a former Catholic seminary student, but one who had thrown off religion. In
effect, Heidegger propounds a theology for atheists, where God is dead and
there is no afterlife and no transcendence of the world. Nevertheless, the
human individual is Dasein, being-there, thrown into the world at a
particular time and place, with no fundamental reason for the arbitrariness of
why we are here; more broadly, in the background, no reason why anything should
exist at all rather than nothing. This is like the sheer arbitrariness of why
God created the world in the first place, a question that is no more answerable
if one translates it into the naturalistic language of the Big Bang or some
other scientific cosmology. Dasein is
being-towards-death, the conscious being that projects itself towards the
future but knows it is going to die. Hence the underlying motive, or at least
deepest human experience, is existential angst. Heidegger resonates with the most sophisticated positions of
philosophical rivals: with the paradoxes plaguing the foundations of
mathematical logic, with Gödel’s soon-to-be-discovered incompleteness theorem;
with Wittgenstein’s unsayability and the inability of language to encompass
practice. Heidegger well dramatizes the philosophical realignment: a long way
from the comfortable world of the Neo-Kantians, as well as making the strongest
possible opponent to the science-is-all viewpoint of the Vienna Circle
positivists. Above all, Heidegger’s existential phenomenology holds that
meaningfulness does not exist in any objective sense; it has to be created and
posited, at every step of the way. He doesn’t say, created collectively, as an
interactional accomplishment; Heidegger was not yet a sociologist. But the step
was there to be taken.
Garfinkel as existentialist micro-sociological researcher
Garfinkel, in my view,
is largely a combination of Schutz and existential phenomenology. Of course
there are other strands: Garfinkel at Harvard was impressed with his teacher
Talcott Parsons’ argument [in The
Structure of Social Action, 1937] that the basic problem of sociology is
how is society possible in the first place, given the Hobbesian problem of
order, and Durkheim’s argument that society is held together not by conscious,
rational contracts but by pre-contractual solidarity. But what is this tacit
level and how does it operate? Garfinkel set out to discover this by
phenomenological methods, just as Schutz had done for Weber’s categories of
action. Moreover, by the 1950s, Garfinkel was operating in a milieu in which
studies of everyday life were growing, with or without philosophical impetus:
in France, Henri Lefebvre, a Marxist philosopher who published in 1947 a Critique of Everyday Life; Fernand
Braudel and the Annales School grounding history in the details
of ordinary activities and things; Jean-Paul Sartre, doing phenomenology of
everyday life with the eye of a naturalistic novelist; in America, Goffman’s
early ethnographies, and those of Howie Becker and other symbolic
interactionists; George Homans and others abjuring grand abstractions in favor
of studying behavior in small groups. Some of this incipient micro-sociology
was done in the laboratory, but so were a number of Garfinkel’s breaching
experiments, under grants from the US Air Force office of research. One might
say Garfinkel exploded the American research establishment from within,
breaching the walls of the laboratory and making the entire world of everyday
life a laboratory for experiment on the order-making and meaning-constructing
methods of folk actors.
I was struck, visiting
Harold’s home library in the 1980s, by how few sociology books he kept there--
mainly a few of Durkheim, but shelves full of the philosophy and literature of
phenomenology and existentialism. Here I want to suggest how much Garfinkel
resonated with Heidegger, even translating existentialist concepts into findings
of ethnomethodology. All action is situational, arbitrarily thrown into a
context. The human reality constructor projects towards the future, assuming
that ambiguities will eventually be resolved in retrospect. But ambiguity lurks
everywhere, as key aspects of communicative action, with others and with
oneself, are indexical, not capable of translation into an objective system of
references; Dasein is by definition
indexical, inhabiting the thus-ness
of the world in those exemplary indexicals, here
and now. But actors avoid questioning
what they tacitly feel, hiding from the unsayable. Human practical actors
assume meaning, take it for granted, and interpret even the most contrived or
accidental events as if they had meaning.
In Heidegger’s terms,
persons strongly prefer to inhabit the world of the inauthentic, what Sartre
called ‘bad faith’; the primary ethnomethods are all about keeping up
comfortable appearances, a gloss of normalcy. Why? Breaches are highly
uncomfortable; we rush to restore order, especially cognitive order, first by
socially acceptable accounts, and if these fail, by labeling, exclusion, and
attack. The most striking detail for me, reading Harold’s breaching
experiments, is the reaction of the victims of the breach: bewilderment, shock,
outrage. And not just because of momentary embarrassment, but because the
arbitrary foundations of the social construction of reality have been
temporarily revealed. What breaching reveals is Heidegger’s world of Dasein, thrown-ness,
Being-towards-death, existential anxiety. Ethnomethods for finding and
restoring order look like a way of pasting over Heidegger’s world lurking just
below the surface.
If you want more
evidence for the crucial important of Heidegger in opening the way for
Garfinkel, bear in mind that Heidegger overturned the primacy given to mind by
both Idealists and phenomenologists. Existential phenomenology is embodied,
inhabiting the material world in the sense of the here-and-now Umwelt; this means physicality not as a
theory or philosophy about matter—which Neo-Kantians could easily dissect as a
dogmatically asserted Ding-an-sich—but
as the primary existential experience of Dasein.
This conception is central in Garfinkel’s repeated admonitions on how to do
ethnomethodology, always focusing on “incarnate, embodied” activity—not the
primacy of mind (the mistake of superficial critics who called ethnomethodology
mere subjectivity) but the mind/body doing something practical in the lived
bodily world. And “incarnate” also has a religious resonance, since Jesus is
incarnated, not transcendental; and mystics—especially in many lines of
Zen—emphasize that Enlightenment is not elsewhere but in grasping the here and
now as such.
I am aware that my
existentialist reading of Garfinkel is not the only one. There is also a
Wittgensteinian reading, rather more optimistic in tone, which marvels at the
ongoing creativity of human actors in creating order out of situations, again
and again, “for another first time.” Here, the tacit, unsayable processes are all
to the good. This has been ably
argued by John Heritage, and may be more characteristic of the Conversation
Analysis branch. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think an existentialist theme
is more central to Harold himself, in his own intellectual biography, in the
distinctive emotional quality of his work. This aspect of his personality
struck those who encountered him personally, and made up an important part of
his charisma.
The second realignment: from existentialism to language-centered
structuralism and deconstruction
I am near the end of my
account, and so far have arrived only at the doorstep of the second “great
turn” in the human sciences, that of the 1960s and 70s. Harold, born
in 1917, and spending a number of years in World War Two, is an intellectual
product of the post-war years, beginning graduate work at Harvard in 1946. The early 60s found him still crying in
the wilderness. What made
Garfinkel famous was not merely the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology in 1967, and the emergence of a network of former students
with a program of ethnomethodological research, but another great realignment
in the larger intellectual world.
The shift of the 1960s
and 70s is still too close to us for unpolemical analysis. It has no generally
agreed-upon name. Most famously, it was the rise of the counter-culture,
attacking the academic and every other Establishment, throwing off traditional
manners, politics, and the hegemony of science. It was a time of political
radicalism, spearheaded this time by student movements rather than workers or
peasants. But although radicalism penetrated the intellectual world in a
revival of Marxism and in other politically engagé stances, these had little
direct influence on ethnomethodology, with its resolutely high-intellectual
outlook. A major component of the reception of ethnomethodology comes from
winds blowing from a very different direction. Above all was the rise of
linguistics, as a formal discipline, harking back to earlier mathematical formalisms.
In America, the
new-found prestige of linguistics centered on the program of Chomsky [1955 Univ.
of Pennsylvania PhD; 1957 Syntactic Structures]. This had started by the late 1950s (and got its first fame in polemical
opposition to the behaviorist-reductionism program of B.F. Skinner), but the
Chomskyian movement became a beacon for other disciplines only in the 60s and
70s. Anthropological linguists, of course, had long been cataloguing languages,
but the field was dispersed and lacked widespread interest, until the
Chomskyian program of generative grammar, proposing to unify all language
studies around layers of deep structures and transformative rules. This
resonated with the burgeoning of cognitive psychology and the incipient field
of cognitive science fed by the computer revolution, and gave new prestige to
anthropologists who took a linguistic-theory approach to their materials.
In Europe, above all in
France, American developments were paralleled by movements that even more
strongly gave the linguistic model a kind of hegemony over the human sciences.
Structuralist linguistics had existed since the 1910s in Saussure’s work,
although not recognized as widely important for another half-century. In 1949,
Lévi-Strauss produced The Elementary Structures
of Kinship, a formalist comparison of kinship structures as systems of
rules that might be combined in various ways and result in distinctive
sequences; an appendix by the mathematician André Weil tied this to
mathematical theory of groups. In the 50s and 60s, Lévi-Strauss rose to fame as
figurehead of a structuralist program; his method was to compare tribal myths
for their underlying combinations, oppositions and sequences of formal
elements, thereby proclaiming a universal code of the human mind.
The structuralist
movement was widened by the influx of Russian Formalism into France in the
1950s. The origins of the Russian Formalists goes back to the early 1900s,
among literary critics and folklorists; their accomplishments included Vladimir
Propp showing the basic elements from which folk tales are produced, and Viktor
Shklovsky’s analysis of literary texts as a combination of devices that migrate
from one text to another. One result was to radically downplay the author: if
Cervantes had not lived, nevertheless Don Quixote would have been written. This
alliance of literary theorists and folklorists combined into a distinctive
school of linguistics, migrated to Prague with Roman Jakobson, and eventually
to Paris. By the 1960s, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes and others were using
Formalist methods to decode texts of all kinds, focusing on the textuality of
the entire world, and declaring the death of the author, now seen as mere
conduit for a stream of intertextual rearrangements.
On the whole, the
structuralists were rivals of the existentialists, attacking their subjectivism
and focus upon the individual consciousness. But a tie-in with phenomenology
was made by Derrida, whose earliest book, Edmund
Husserl’s Origins of Geometry, in 1962, brought textually oriented
structuralism into connection with the deep roots of the early 20th century
intellectual transformation, the mathematical foundations crisis and the
grappling between formalist and intuitionist programs. Derrida thus became the
philosophical heavyweight of the late structuralist, or deconstructionist
movement. Derrida’s own texts are
famously multi-leveled and self-ironicizing, but one could also say this is in
keeping with the whole tendency of philosophy from Frege to Wittgenstein:
having emphasized what is unsayable, then going on if not to say it, at least
finding devices for talking around it.
The anti-positivist wars in America and the fame of
ethnomethodology
Back in the USA,
Garfinkel’s ship was finally floating on the crest of a flood tide. A more adequate metaphor might be, a
multiplicity of raging rivers overflowing their banks: The relatively quiet stream from
Husserl to Schutz, and the more dramatic one from Heidegger and the
existentialists; the purely academic growth of Chomskyian linguistics, and the
growing community of anthropologists and cognitive scientists who became the
best audience for ethnomethodologically-inspired work in conversation analysis.
Then also the raging flood of the academic political revolts, and the anti-establishment
psychedelic revolution, with its slogans “It’s all in your mind” and “Blow
their minds.” Back inside the serious work of scholarship, came a growing
academic stream of micro-sociologists and ethnographers of daily life-- it is
not coincidental that the first round of young ethnomethodological stars--
Sacks, Schegloff, Sudnow-- were Goffman’s protégés at Berkeley. (According to
Manny Schegloff, they were all brought there by Philip Selznick to staff his
new Institute for Law and Society, but quickly rebelled.) And finally, by the 1970s, all this was enveloped in the
European tide, the prestige of structuralist/deconstructionist literary theory,
although in America largely
confined to departments of literature and anthropology, and the institutionalized
insurgencies of feminist theory and ethnic studies.
I have tried to contain
this whirlwind tour of the 20th century in two metaphorical bags, a sequence of
two big realignments in philosophy and the human sciences. It would be
misleading to think of this as a shift from one gestalt to another, a simple
Kuhnian paradigm revolution. One way this is inadequate is that there is never
a single dominant Zeitgeist or “turn”, but always rival positions;
and each of these big camps is always a mixture and jockeying among various
campaigns. The first big realignment, in the 1920s and 30s, replaced
Neo-Kantians with the opposition between phenomenologists and logical
positivists, plus an ordinary language movement revolting against both.
Garfinkel combined much of the impetus in phenomenology, coming from the
foundational crisis in mathematics and therefore in theory of symbolism and
symbol-use, with an increasing micro-focus of research on the details of
everyday life. The second big realignment, the 1960s and 70s, was in some
respects an advance by a later generation of phenomenologists, with further
support from literary formalists and code-seeking structuralists, in a fairly
successful attack on the logical positivists. But of course other versions of
positivism survive and prosper, in the worlds of statistics, biology, economics
and rational choice, und so weiter.
A turn or realignment is not the end of history.
All the other movements of the huge contemporary intellectual world do not go
away; they are there is the absences I have not mentioned, in psychology and
political science, in all the branches of sociology that go their own way, not
very surprisingly, and maintain their own research programs. My title turns out
to be merely rhetorical, if it is taken to imply one big triumphal turn in the
later 20th century. But even with
all the caveats, it has been a big movement, a major part of the action.
Unpacking Garfinkel’s trajectory and influences connects him to much of the
most serious and profound intellectual life of the 20th century. Unlike so many
others this side the Atlantic, Garfinkel was not merely transplanting
Francophone influences. He got there first, in his own way. And he launched a
research program, one that announced most dramatically the presence of militant
micro-sociology under sail.
Downstream from Garfinkel and Goffman, we
are beginning to appreciate the channels they ripped open, and the flood-plains
on which we float today, towards the always approachable but never-attained sea.
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Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy
Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs
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For sources on movements of 20th century
philosophy see: Randall Collins.
1998. The Sociology of
Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Harvard University Press.
To witness the continuing insights of
ethnomethodological research: Kenneth Liberman, 2013. More Studies in Ethnomethodology. SUNY Press.
