THE MANAGEMENT OF TEMPORALITY. Ethnomethodology as Historical Reconstruction of Practical Action

THE MANAGEMENT OF TEMPORALITY: Ethnomethodology as Historical

Reconstruction of Practical Action

Kyung-Man Kim Sogang University

There has been a cleavage within the sociological community regarding the question of reflexivity. While some see ethnomethodology as inevitably adopting a constructivist point of view and argue that it can in no way avoid the problem of referential reflexivity, others cherish Harold Garfinkel’s teaching that ethnomethodology should not be engaged in an ironic mode of theorizing and argue that the problem of referential reflexivity is totally misconceived. In this article, after showing why the advocates of referential reflexivity fail to indicate the nature of constructive work involved in the ethnomethodological studies of practical action, I will analyze some of the ethnomethodological studies of scientific practice conducted by the antireflexivists and demonstrate that, despite their arguments to the contrary, the antireflexivists are engaged in an ample dose of constructive work to render a sequence of experimental action intelligible. More specifically, I will argue that antireflexive ethnomethodologists’ alleged recovery of the temporally situated logic of the members involves the narrative logic of history.

Ever since Harold Garfinkel hit the responsive chord of the Anglo-American sociological community by publishing his provocative Studies in Ethnomethodology (1 967), ethnomethodology has spawned a wide variety of theoretical debates among social theorists and philosophers (Coleman 1968; Coser 1975; Gellner 1975; Giddens 1976, 1977; Wilson and Zimmerman 1979-1980; Habermas 1984; Maynard and Clayman 1991; Hilbert 1992). In what has been called the ethnomethodological respecification (Garfinkel 199 l) , ethnomethodology is heralded to be on a different “track” from conventional sociology. In contrast to the conventional social theory in which the aim of a theory is conceived to accurately represent the objective social reality, Garfinkel and his associates (Button 1991) disavow such an aim and respecify sociology as an intellectual endeavor to delineate in descriptive detail how the intersubjective world of actors is reflexively maintained and made visible in temporally extended social actions. It is thus well known that their work has been concerned with the study of “endogenous” organization of social action in which theoretical categories invented by the theorists have no role to play.

It is however less well known that there is a cleavage within the sociological commu-

Direct all correspondence lo Kyung-Man Kim, Department of Sociology, Sogang University, I Sinsu-dong, Mapo-Ku, Seoul, Korea.

The Sociological Quarterly, Volume 40, Number 3, pages 505-523. Copyright 0 1999 by The Midwest Sociological Society. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720. ISSN: 0038-0253

506 THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY Vol. 40/No. 3/1999

nity regarding the question of reflexivity. While some see ethnomethodology as inevitably adopting a constructivist point of view and therefore argue that it can in no way avoid the problem of referential or radical reflexivity, others cherish Garfinkel’s teaching that ethnomethodology should not be engaged in an ironic mode of theorizing and argue that the problem of referential reflexivity is totally misconceived. The first group (Woolgar 1988; Ashmore 1989; Pollner 199 1; Cicourel 1993) argues that ethnomethodology’s central finding that all meanings are the product of members’ construction must be reflexively applied to the ethnomethodological analysis of practical logic itself. In arguing so, these sociologists explicitly draw our attention to the close connection existing between their approach and a cluster of theoretical positions that have been variously designated as decon- structionism, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. What these scholars share as their common denominator is the rejection of the traditional view in which language is conceived to “represent” the pre-existent reality. Instead, they deny to language any degree of competent reference to a nonlinguistic world and stress the fictitious and constructive character of historical and social scientific discourse (Foucault 1972; Brown 1977; White 1978; Barthes 1981, 1984; Woolgar 1981, 1983; Rorty 1989; Lemert 1992; Seidman 1992). Reflexively applying their findings to their own discourse on social sciences, these two groups of scholars push their critique of traditional social theories to its limit where even their own critique loses its epistemological validity.

In contrast to the first group, the second group (Sharrock and Button 1991; Bogen 1993; Lynch 1993, 1996; Watson 1994) argues that ethnomethodology has never been interested in “debunking” or “going beyond” the world of ordinary actors. Rather it aims to retrieve and hence exhibit the “performative requirements” of situated knowledge by analyzing the interaction of people in concrete social settings. These authors also argue that since exhibiting the performative requirements by no means implies going outside the concrete situations of practice and formulating some principles, “their” ethnomethodological investigation has nothing whatsoever to do with constructing a theory. In their view, the first group’s urge to reject upon the epistemological status of the ethnomethodology and the ethnomethodologists themselves results from its acceptance of the classic Cartesian dualism between sign and referent, theory and practice, and/or theorists and laymen. For these ethnomethodologists, playing with the problem of radical reflexivity only leads to a futile metaphysics and eventually ends up with a pessimistic tu quoque argument that invalidates every assertion regarding truth. One writer’s remark in this connection is symp- tomatic of this position: “Thus the reflexive adequacy of practices in the human sciences would . . . have to be sought within their respective situations of inquiry” (Lynch 1988, p. 92) and not outside the practice under investigation. This denial of outside is closely connected to Garfinkel’s teaching that ethnomethodological investigation should not be conducted with an ironic intention.

But such a tension between the reflexivists and the antireflexivists has been rarely discussed, and the advocates of the radical reflexivity such as Steve Woolgar, Melvin Pollner, and others allude to its connection with the postmodern social theory without confronting head-on the objections raised by the antireflexive ethnomethodologists to such an allusion. In the first part of this article, by juxtaposing and contrasting these two groups’ radically different attitudes toward the problem of radical reflexivity, I will show that, while the advocates of radical reflexivity are right when they argue that ethnomethodological work itself should be subject to the radically reflexive analysis, they nevertheless fail to indicate precisely what kind of constructive work is involved in the ethnomethodological studies of

The Management of Temporality 507

practical action. In the second part, by analyzing some of the ethnomethodological studies of scientific practice conducted by the antireflexivists, I will demonstrate that, despite their arguments to the contrary, the antireflexivists are engaged in an ample dose of constructive work to render a sequence of experimental actions intelligible. Preoccupied with the recovery of the “performative requirements” for being a competent member, these antiskeptics do not realize that their alleged “recovery” of the temporally situated logic of the members indeed retrieves more than what they claim to have recovered. This is because of the fact that their allegedly descriptive account of the members’ practical logic involves a narrative logic of history and as such involves a hermeneutic reconstruction of the practical logic of the members.

ETHNOMETHODOLOCICAL RESPECIFICATION

Launched initially as a critique of the Parsonian theory of social action (Thomason 1982; Heritage I984), ethnomethodology has now settled down as one of the established theoretical doctrines in sociology (Boden 1990; Pollner 1991). Unlike many traditional social science explanations in which a social actor is portrayed as a “judgmental” (Garfinkel 1967) or an “interest” dope (Woolgar 1981), that is, actors reconstructed in the theoretical domain are regarded as “puppets” manipulated by the theoretical categories invented by the theorists, ethnomethodology as conceived by Garfinkel and his followers rejects all such imposition of theoretical concepts “from without.” Instead, they urge us to focus on the manner in which members of society assess the rationality of their own activities and make their actions “accountable,” or, to use Garfinkel’s own words, “reportable,” “tell-a- story-aboutable,” “analyzable,” and so on.’ Thus, ethnomethodology

refuses serious considerations to the prevailing proposal that . . . rational properties of practical activities . . . be assessed, recognized, categorized, described by using a rule or a standard obtained outside actual settings within which such properties are recognized, used, produced, and talked about by settings’ members. (Garfinkel 1967, p. 33)

In a recent publication, Garfinkel (1991, p. 16) reemphasizes this stance by calling it ethnomethodological “respecification” and argues that the locally and endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable phenomena of social order reported by the ethnomethodological studies “cannot be recovered with a priori representational methods.” Garfinkel also argues that ethnomethodology as such is set against the traditional social theory “as an incommensurable” research program (p. 17).

In such an ethnomethodological respecification of practical actions, people’s understanding of themselves and others supposedly depends on the “implicit” and “taken-for- granted” but largely “unarticulated’ (hence unstated) set of background assumptions. In our everyday interaction with people, for example, we understand each other on the basis of, to use Alfred Schutz’s (1967) term, a stock of knowledge that in itself cannot be fully articulated and hence cannot be explicitly formulated in general terms. The stock of knowledge, consisting of the sedimentation of the various elements of past experiences, enables the social actors to communicate and make sense of each other’s actions and utterances. The application of such a stock of knowledge in a wide variety of interactional settings, though, cannot be formulated in advance. Rather, such a set of taken-for-granted assumptions is continually interpreted by the social actors to make sense of what is actu-


ally happening in concrete situations. Taking seriously Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dictum that “a rule does not contain its own applications”, ethnomethodology attempts to delineate the process of how actors “manage” the indeterminacy and contingencies necessitated by the applications of such implicit rules to a wide variety of concrete interactional settings. And, in this sense, social organization of action is conceived as an “ongoing accomplishment” of social actors.

Central to such an ethnomethodological respecification are two closely related notions; the “indexicality” of the meaning of utterances and actions and what Pollner ( 1 991) calls “endogenous” reflexivity. Indexicality refers to the fact that the meaning of a specific utterance or action cannot be determined simply by referring to the fixed rules of interpretation, but by referring to the local-social contexts in which those actions and utterances are embedded. Since the practical actions and skills displayed by the actors in concrete interactional settings are beyond explicit formulation, the study policy of ethnomethodology recommends to attend to how the “seen but unnoticed” features of the social settings operate as the backdrop against which “an inner temporal course of interpretive work” is accomplished by the members of a society to figure out the unfolding situations.

Such a “circular” or “self-organizing’’ character of practical action is in turn captured by the notion of endogenous reflexivity that refers to the “embodied” and “incarnate” character of social action and is well exemplified in Garfinkel’s classic work on the competent reading of the fragmentary case notes in a psychiatric clinic. Garfinkel (1967) dem- onstrated that the assignment of patients into different categories could be accomplished only by “reading into the notes” what they knew about the social setting, that is, the clinic routine. For ethnomethodologists, therefore, social structure is not “out there,” waiting to be deployed by sociologists to causally explain certain cluster of actions and utterances, but is “in here”, in the sense that actions and utterances are interpreted with recourse to the shared knowledge of the social setting; conversely, individual actions and utterances in turn reinforce the sense of the social setting. Hence the “inseparability” of the setting and meaning.2

One of the several intellectual sources that influenced Garfinkel’s conception of ethnomethodology was what Karl Mannheim (1952) dubbed the “documentary method of interpretation”. Faced with the problem of understanding the global outlook or “weltanschauung” of an epoch, Mannheim devised the notion of the documentary method of interpretation, which is essentially the same as what has been variously called the “hermeneutic circle” or “spiral”. According to Mannheim (1952, p. 74), understanding in the cultural sciences pro- ceeds in the following way:

We understand the whole from the part, and the part from the whole. We derive the “spirit” of the epoch from its individual documentary manifestations-and we interpret the individual documentary manifestations on the basis of what we know about the spirit of the epoch. All of which goes to substantiate . . . that in the cultural sciences the part and the whole are given simultaneously. (emphasis added)

What is important here is Mannheim’s emphasis on the “holistic” and “circular” nature of theoretical understanding in the human sciences. As Mannheim remarks (1952, p. 71), if one “eliminate[s] the dimension of documentary meaning,” every event “loses its specific morphological character” and becomes a chaotic jumble devoid of meaning.3


The ethnomethodological respecification as discussed above nicely captures this “mutually elaborative” process in which fact and meaning are endogenously produced through the interaction between the social setting (pattern) and individual actions (instances). Garfinkel takes objects-words, utterances, events, and so on-as the surface “documents” of an underlying reality and attempts to show how, despite many irresolvable epistemological problems, members can actually forge a connection between such surface documents and the reality that is presumed to lie behind those surface documents. Forging a connection between the surface documents and the underlying reality however does not mean that by doing so one can establish a “causal link” between the two, since, as Mann- heim took pains to show, the parts and the whole are not given sequentially but always simultaneously4 According to the ethnomethodologists, we are caught here in a circle in which actions and utterances on the one hand and the setting/social structure in which they are embedded on the other are inextricably related.

Pollner (1991) calls this “circularity” involved in the sustenance of a local orderliness “endogenous reflexivity.” What Garfinkel frequently denotes as the reflexive accountabil- ity of social action also refers to such a circularity in which “what members do in, to, and about social reality constitutes social reality” (Pollner 1991, p. 372). On this construal, the traditional analytic or constructive sociology that allegedly argues for the possibility of escaping from such a reflexive circle is doomed to failure:

Insofar as the subject matter of sociology is “social action”, then one cannot assemble a collection of observable occurrences without already having introduced a substantial amount of generality, without already having subsumed the instances under general pattern. . . . Social actions are irreducibly events-in-a-social-order and they cannot therefore be adequately identified independently of the social order in which they are embedded. Neither . . . can the social order which is the site of those actions itself be identified independently of them. The particulars (the actions) and the pattern (the social setting/social structure) are inextricably connected, are mutually elaborative. (Sharrock and Button 1991, p. 158) (emphasis original)

E T H N O M E T H O D O L O G Y AS REFLEXIVE CRITIQUE O F L A N G U A G E

Garfinkel’s criticism of the so-called “constructive” sociological analysis is in fact based on the recognition that the documentary method of interpretation used by the lay members applies equally to the professional sociologists’ fact production. In contrast to the professional sociologists’ characterization of their procedures of fact production “as processes of ‘seeing through’ appearances to an underlying reality” and hence as “grasping the invari- ant,” Garfinkel (1967, p. 96) argues, “many of the features” of the lay members’ documentary work “are recognizable in the work of professional sociological fact production.” But while Garfinkel castigates conventional sociologists for not recognizing the circularity in their fact production process, curiously enough, he seems to be less interested in turning the same criticism back on ethnomethodology itself. Anthony Giddens (1977, p. 177) thus argues, “The reflexivity of the ethnomethodological observer, on the other hand, is rarely mentioned at all. This in some part serves to conceal the unresolved character of the two strains in Garfinkel’s writing . . . a recognition of the hermeneutic circle on the one hand, and a tendency towards naturalism on the other.”

Giddens’ critical remark is actually shared with some of the established ethnomethod-

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ologists, such as Pollner and Aaron Cicourel, who argue that the settlement of ethnomethodology in the suburbs of sociological theory gradually deprived it of the critical spirit that initially informed its practitioners.5 Radical reflexivity, in contrast to endogenous reflexivity, refers to the researchers’ reflection on their own linguistic practice that presumably captures what we have referred to as the “endogenous” way of constructing reality or, more laconically, members’ methods of constructing reality. In this sense, radical reflexivity is closely related to the problem of representation. If we grant that, following Garfinkel, all activities are “accomplishments” based on the documentary method, then ethnomethodologists’ representation of members’ practice itself is not an exception and should be subject to the same treatment. After all, various notions, such as “accounting procedure,” “reflexivity,” “indexicality,” and so on, employed in ethnomethodological descriptions of practical activities are not in fact available as members’ vocabularies but only as theoretical vocabularies used by ethnomethodologists. For neither members nor analysts find the indexical character of meaning and the necessity of interpretation problematic (i.e., making them researchable topics) until they are “tutored to see meaning as an achievement” (Pollner 1991, p. 375). In other words, no matter how they try, ethnomethodologists cannot produce a description of practical activities purged of theoretical interpretation. On this construal, ethnomethodologists’ professional activities must be considered as constructions that in themselves do not faithfully reproduce the members’ social world. Pollner ( 1 991, p. 372) thus argues that:

Not only arc members deemed to be involved in endogenous constitution of accountable settings, but so are analysts. Thus, ethnomethodology is referentially reflexive to the extent it appreciates its own analyses as constitutive and endogenous accomplishments.

While Pollner complains that most ethnomethodological studies recoil from the question of radical reflexivity, in the flourishing field of the sociology of scientific knowledge, radical reflexivity has been one of the most hotly debated issues (Woolgar 1982; Latour and Woolgar 1986; Ashmore 1989; Pinch 1993). Sociologists of scientific knowledge had been especially keen on the problem of radical reflexivity primarily because that problem was the first obstacle to be overcome in their fight with the traditional philosophers of science.6 It is well known that many philosophers including sociologists (e.g., Bottomore 1956) advance the following classical argument against the relativism implied by the sociology of knowledge: if all knowledge is socially constructed, how can a sociologist of knowledge argue that his own claim is an exception? Such a tu quoque argument has been used by philosophers (Laudan 1982) as the standing refutation of various kinds of relativism.

Steve Woolgar has been in the forefront of those sociologists of scientific knowledge who take radical reflexivity seriously. Woolgar argues that the social constructivists’ use of irony as an instrument to subvert the positivists’ view of science creates a dilemma that they themselves cannot resolve. For in ironicizing the positivist account of science and thereby attempting to put a “better” (i.e., social constructivist) account in place of the original one, social constructivists cannot help but commit themselves to what has been known as the “self-excepting fallacy”: that while the original account can be ironicized, that is, can be shown to be constructed and hence arbitrary, their alternative account must be exempted from such an ironic treatment. Therefore, to be consistent, constructivists must give up the claim that their own alternative account rather than the original one is closer to and hence reflects more accurately the underlying reality (Woolgar 1981; Lemert 1992).

The Management of Temporality 51 1

For example, when Donald MacKenzie (1 978) explained the Karl Pearson-George Yule controversy regarding the measures of statistical association between two nominal vari- ables in terms of their starkly different social interests, Woolgar argued that the social interests invoked by MacKenzie were themselves “constructed” by MacKenzie. Using Garfinkel’s documentary method of interpretation, Woolgar criticized MacKenzie for fail- ing to recognize the “constructive” and hence “circular” relationship between the thing to be explained (actions of Pearson and Yule) and the thing that does the explaining (interests). Accordingly, Woolgar argued that, in MacKenzie’s interest explanation, the explanandum and the explanans are in no way separable from one another. Rather, Wool- gar (1981, p.382) notes, “The sense and character of appearance [in the present case, scientists’ action] is modified as its ‘relationship’ with the underlying pattern [social interests of the actor] is constructed.”

This means that the character of explanandum itself is dependent upon the various ways in which the analyst “constructs” the explanans. This can be shown, according to Woolgar, by tracing out how MacKenzie constructs his explanation of the controversy in terms of the social interests of the two protagonists. Woolgar argued that MacKenzie first inferred the underlying interests of Yule and Pearson from the published works of the latter and then made their statistical publications speak to the existence of these interests. And, by doing so, he presented the arguments found in their published works “not as mere arguments but arguments-made-for-a-purpose’’ (Woolgar 198 1, p. 384). This then made the arguments and the purpose (interests) appear as two analytically distinct entities. Finally, such a splitting of interests from the arguments enabled MacKenzie to causally explain the actions (that is, arguments) of Pearson and Yule. At this point, the inversion of the previous relation between arguments and interests takes place. Far from being regarded as actively “constructed” from the arguments, the constructed objects (that is, interests) begin to be treated as independently existing entities that are causally responsible for a wide range of arguments of the two protagonists.

To support this view, Woolgar argued that Pearson’s behavior can be made equally intelligible by invoking a variety of alternative factors other than his cognitive and social interests. For example, Woolgar cited Pearson’s desire to be “bloody-minded’’ as an equally plausible explanation of Pearson’s criticism of Yule. In short, being undetermined by the actions of scientists, a host of different factors other than “interests” can do the explanatory job with equal plausibility. This shows that MacKenzie organized his sociological discourse, to use Roland Bathes’s (1981) term, around the lexicon of social interest. Such social interests, Woolgar argued, turn out to be nothing but a linguistic construct available only in MacKenzie’s figurative mode of discourse. Woolgar (1982, p. 489) thus argued that his own ethnographic description of the laboratory practice is merely one of many alternative verbal descriptions of laboratory practice:

We . . . tried to make the reader aware of his own involvement in the text by drawing attention to the $fictional character of the text’s production. And we explicitly denied any claim to epistemological privilege vis-i-vis the scientific practice we described.

Hence, a reflexive sociologist of knowledge is not interested in offering a better or truer account of the essence of science by ironicizing the existing accounts. Rather, clearly aware of the possibility of the indefinitely numerous ways of representing what actually goes on in science, a reflexive sociologist aims to touch more profound questions by mak-


ing our own taken-for-granted reasoning process itself problematic: how we adduce and select evidence, make interpretations, decide relevance, attribute motives, and so on. In short, a reflexive sociologist attempts to delineate the process behind the various linguistic representations of scientific practice. At this point, he also shows the “rhetorical self- consciousness” about the very language he uses to describe a given set of sociological data. The following argument of Woolgar (1986, p. 312) gives us a way into the postmodern emphasis on the primacy of language and its relation to ethnomethodology:

This [poststructuralist] view of discourse is consistent with the position of the idealist wing of ethnomethodology that there is no reality independent of the words (texts, signs, documents, and so on) used to apprehend it. In other words, reality is constituted in and through discourse.

But since Woolgar did not deconstruct ethnomethodological work per se, but the “traditional” sociological explanation, Woolgar could not convince the “hard-headed’ ethnomethodologists who emphatically denied that they were engaged in constructing a causal theory like MacKenzie’s. Accordingly, Woolgar fails to specify exactly what kind of constructive work is involved in the ethnomethodological studies of practical activities.

On the other hand, while Pollner focuses on some of the ethnomethodological studies produced by the antireflexivists, such as Garfinkel and Lynch, and points out that these ethnomethodologists themselves are engaged in constructing the world of actors through some kind of theoretical activity, he nevertheless fails to show what such a constructive work would look like. For example, Pollner (1991, p. 373) criticizes Garfinkel and his associates’ ethnomethodological study of the discovery of pulsar as “driven toward increasingly more detailed, veridical, or vivid representation” of the essential quiddity of scientific work, and as a consequence, in such studies “the endogenously reflexive aspects of the work through which these practices are analytically formed and formulated is left out.” But he never spells out what he means by “endogenously reflexive aspects” of the ethnomethodologists’ work. While the term certainly refers to the fact that ethnomethodologists are involved in a certain kind of theoretical activity, we are never told what such a theory is like or how it is used by the ethnomethodologists to formulate the practices. Does this simply mean that ethnomethodologists selectively use their data or that they use “theoretical vocabularies”? Or both? After all, Pollner’s argument that ethnomethodologists themselves are constructing the social reality of actors remains patently ambiguous. As I will discuss in the next section, such a failure to specify the nature of constructive work that is supposed to be involved in the ethnomethodological studies of practical activities provokes a group of antireflexivists who emphatically deny that they are engaged in constructing a theory about the world of actors.

ANTISKEPTICS’ REJECTION O F RADICAL REFLEXIVITY

In his recent book (1993) and an unpublished paper (1996), Michael Lynch argues that the advocation of radical reflexivity by some ethnomethodologists is due to their complete misunderstanding of what he calls an “authentic ethnomethodology” as opposed to a proto- ethnomethodology. Lynch is not alone in rejecting radical reflexivity as a pseudoproblem.7 What is at stake here is to determine whether ethnomethodology actually constructs a theory. For the tu quoque argument (and the associated notion of radical reflexivity) has force


if and only if ethnomethodologists construct a certain kind of theory, formula, or principles and then use them to cover all contingent and locally produced meanings of utterances and actions.

But do ethnomethodologists formulate such principles? If so, in what sense of theory is ethnomethodology a theory of anything? In order to see more clearly what is at stake here, let me briefly consider Garfinkel’s (1967) famous meaning4aboration experiment. One of Garfinkel’s early experiments was devised to show how language, action, and meaning are inextricably related to one another in such a way that it no longer makes sense to argue for a correspondence theory of truth. Garfinkel’s aim was to argue for the impossibility of separating talk and the “talk-about-ables”, or to put it differently, the sign and its referent. To argue this point, Garfinkel asked students to report ordinary conversation between the two parties. In this experiment, what was “actually said” was written down on the left- hand side of a sheet and what the students thought the parties were talking about was written down on the right-hand side. In carrying out this job, students naturally feel that their task consists of repairing the “sketchiness” of what was said by elaborating or filling out its content. Having observed that students soon reached a point where more filling out did not contribute to the clarification of what was said, and also having met a resistance on the part of the students that such an effort is after all a vacuous exercise to explicate “what everybody knows,” Garfinkel recommends them to read the right-hand column not as a “corresponding contents of the left,” an elaboration of what was actually said, but as an “instruction” as to how to use what was actually said as a “method for seeing” what the conversationalists said. In doing so, Garfinkel (1967, p. 30) was actually asking students to “formulate the method that the parties had used in speaking as rules of procedures to follow in order to say what the parties said, rules that would withstand every exigency of situation, imagination, and development.” As it turns out, students increasingly found this task more difficult and soon reached a point beyond which they could do no more.

From this exercise, Garfinkel notices two things. First, the infinite regress or endless process of “repairing indexicality” involved in filling out the sketchiness of content of the conversation by no means indicates that the conversationalists, being increasingly skeptical about the rational grounds of their conversation, cannot accomplish the conversation! Actually the experiment was conducted to show that the contrary was the case and to indicate the absurdity of the skepticist interpretation of social action. Second, we cannot “extract” from the analysis of conversation any formulae or theoretical generalization under which all details, contingencies, and concreteness of the situation can be subsumed without residue. Indeed, from this meaning-elaboration exercise, Garfinkel did not con- clude that people can never understand each other.

But the skeptics might still ask the following questions: If the above interpretation is correct, what is it that stops such an infinite regress? Can we explain how such an infinite regress comes to an end without formulating a rule that is external to the local setting in which interaction occurs? Garfinkel’s meaning-elaboration exercise resonates with Witt- genstein’s notion of following a rule and hence is closely related to the notorious debates between the two opposing interpretations of Wittgenstein’s notion of “following a rule.” While skeptics argue that there must be some social mechanism designed to stop such an infinite regress or irreparable indexicality (Woolgar 1982, 1988; Bloor 1992), antiskeptics (Winch 1958; Bogen 1993; Lynch 1993; Taylor 1993) argue that such an “external solution” to the problem of following a rule results from the skeptics’ hopeless confusion of Wittgenstein’s notion of following a rule. Skeptics regard both actors and their analysts as


involved in a constant struggle to repair indexicality with a certain kind of representational device (or a general theory) and call this problem the “methodological horror” (Woolgar 1983). Thus, as we have seen above, by investigating the representational practice of scientists and sociologists, Woolgar and other advocates of radical reflexivity attempt to show how various groups of people including sociologists “manage” the methodological horror.

The antiskeptics, however, argue that the methodological horror is a horror only for those who attempt to substitute a formula or representation for indexical expressions, but not for those who don’t attempt to separate language from practice. For example, any attempt to explain scientists’ behavior in terms of interest of whatever stripe is an attempt to substitute “interest”, that is, a universal-linguistic formula for the practice of scientists, and as a consequence cannot avoid the tu quoque charge that interest “theory” itself is constructed and as such has no validity in itself. Now the antiskeptics ask, why should we try to “reduce a mountain with buckets” (Garfinkel 1967, p. 26) and opt for such a pessimistic and unproductive solution as radical reflexivity for the problem of indexicality (and methodological horror)? Why not go directly into the everyday details of social interaction and delineate the temporal development of social action in which people make each other understandable? Ethnomethodologists who reject radical reflexivity as a problem argue that we must concern ourselves not with finding a remedy for the irreparable indexicality but with retrieving the detailed performative requirements of situated knowledge. Accord- ing to the antiskeptics, Garfinkel’s meaning-elaboration exercise brought home an important argument against the skepticist interpretation of Wittgenstein’s notion of following a rule. For the experiment shows that, even without formulating and hencc introducing an external social mechanism that is supposed to stop the infinite regress, people can success- fully carry out their everyday interactions. The “self-organizing” properties of social action indeed obviate the introduction of social mechanism from without. Thus, according to these antiskeptics or “internalists,” all those advocates of radical reflexivity succumb to the still lingering residue of Cartesian dualism in which the distinction between the sign and its referents or theory and practice is still “in play” (Lynch 1996).

THE MANAGEMENT OF TEMPORALITY: ETHNOMETHODOLOGY AS HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF PRACTICAL ACTION

The antiskeptics are right when they argue that members are not always skeptical of what they are doing and do not always raise serious doubts about the assumptions on which their behavior and conversation rest. It is therefore absurd to assume, as the skeptics do, that every time members act and speak they have to decide which action to take and which words to say in order to solve the problem of indexicality (or the lacuna between the sign and its referent). Similarly, since the antireflexivists do not attempt to substitute a formula for indexical expressions, the problem of radical reflexivity simply does not exist for them, Lynch thus argues that radical reflexivity is a problem only for those protoethnomethodol- ogists who still keep intact an analytic attitude that presumes the radical distance from everyday linguistic resources.

What then does it mean to use “everyday linguistic resources” to recover the intelligibility of social action? Lynch relies on Wittgenstein to answer this question and argues that, rather than distancing himself from those concepts used in the fields of action described, an ethnomethodologist should deploy those concepts in order to make language use perspicuous. Lynch (1993, p. 182) further argues that these concepts are “not the con-


ceptual property of an academic discipline but part of a common human legacy.” Such an answer in turn begs a host of other questions. First, does the use of familiar everyday linguistic resources, such as giving orders, asking questions, and giving instructions, guaran- tee the recovery of the practical logic of members? If so, what is the epistemological status of the various concepts used in the ethnomethodological descriptions, namely, indexicality, reflexivity, incarnate actions, and so on? Aren’t these concepts distinct from those that Lynch calls “natural linguistic resources”? Second, what does the recovery precisely mean? Does it mean the return to the practical logic of the members under study? If so, how could they be sure if such a return is successful? Is there any independent way to check whether such a return to the “perspective of the members” is a genuine one? Or is it more honest to admit that, as a group of scholars, ethnomethodologists themselves develop an endogenous reflexivity regarding the assessment of “their” own intellectual activities? That is, to use Garfinkel’s words, whether their works are “adequate-for-the- task-at-hand” or “reasonable for all practical purposes”?

The existence of an endogenous reflexivity (of ethnomethodologists) is amply demon- strated by the enormous difficulty experienced by the sociologists who try to come to terms with the ethnomethodologists’ particular way of “seeing” the social worlds of various groups of actors. It is also true that they consciously developed such a perspective in opposition to other scholars working within different intellectual traditions. Ethnomethod- ology is indeed a hybrid discipline in which various intellectual traditions such as phenomenology, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and neo-Kantianism are amalgamated. Thus ethnomethodology can be located in the evolving networks of various intellectual lineages that were developed in opposition to one another (see, for example, Collins 1998). Which means that ethnomethodology, in contrast to what it professes, is inevitably “tradition- bound’ and therefore has to remain “detached’ from the urgency of everyday life. In that sense, it maintains what Pierre Bourdieu (1990) calls a “scholastic point of view”, an intellectual stance peculiar to the world of intellectuals as opposed to that of ordinary people.

Ethnomethodologists do not merely topicalize several paradoxical epistemological problems; they also become a group of researchers, studying everyday interaction and situated cognition; and it is because of what they can display through their research that they can influence many sociologists and other scholars. The point of all this is that ethnomethodologists, however hard they try to guard against the insidious influence of the scholastic view, end up having a-to use Hans Georg Gadamer’s (1975) phrase-particular intellectual “horizon”. As I will show below, ethnomethodologists’ description of the production of social order is the product of the fusion of their particular horizon with that of the members under study. This leads us to the problem of hermeneutic understanding. In what follows, I will argue that ethnomethodological study of scientific practice produces an understanding of science that is much more than the mere exhibition of the performative requirements of the situated production of knowledge. It is, more than anything else, a “productive” rather than “reproductive” understanding of human practice.

To substantiate my argument, let me introduce a fictional eyewitness whom Arthur Danto (1964) calls an “ideal chronicler.” Suppose that an ideal chronicler can record all events at each moment and can store and retrieve them. Thus, the ideal chronicler can write down in an observation language everything that happens and how it happens. How- ever, even such a fabulous eyewitness is worthless, for the perfect eyewitness reports are “meaningless” unless they are related to other later events. For example, the sentence “A boy was born at Woolethorpe on Christmas day in 1642” is meaningless unless the predi-


cate with which an event is narratively presented is related to the later event, that is, Isaac Newton’s publication of the Principia Mathernatica in 1687. Thus a typical narrative sentence is in the form: “The author of the Principia was born in 1642.” In this narrative sentence, two time-separated events are related by referring to the earlier event. But the ideal chronicler cannot write such a narrative sentence in 1642. He is not in a position to judge whether a certain event is meaningful at the time of its happening, for such a judg- ment would presuppose anticipating events beyond the time of observation. Indeed, while he is empowered to record everything he observes, he cannot distinguish significant from insignificant events. For him, every event is equally significant or equally insignificant. The ideal chronicler is not able to weave even a single story because he lacks a point of view for interpreting relations between events with different time indices. He therefore cannot see the beginning, the crisis, and the end of an action complex or story.

Let’s see if this argument applies equally well to the retrieval of the requirements of competently doing a chemical experiment described by ethnomethodologists (Lynch, Liv- ingston, and Garfinkel 1983). Of course, the time scale here is much smaller than in history. But, as I will argue below, the same logic applies to the ethnomethodologist’s allegedly interpretation-free description of the practical logic in the laboratory. Let’s first assume, following ethnomethodologists, that the analyst (i.e., ethnomethodologist) does not bring any kind of interpretation into his description of how things are managed in a chemical experiment. Being preoccupied with demonstrating the rationality of “singular” occasions of conduct (Lynch 1993, p. 285), ethnomethodologists attempt to record every performative requirement of doing a chemical experiment “one at a time.” In this sense, an ethnomethodologist can be said to be performing the role of an ideal chronicler whose sole aim is to record and delineate everything that happens and how it happens.

Let me briefly explicate what the rationality of singular occasions of conduct means, since it is central to the ethnomethodologists’ rejection of any “will” to interpretation (Lynch 1992). When ethnomethodologists argue that they are concerned with demonstrating the rationality of singular occasions of conduct (or indexical expressions), they oppose the prevalent idea in social sciences that singular occasions of conduct are trivial, chaotic, and messy and that only repeatable and generalizable patterns or structures are important.8 The rationality of such singular occasions of conduct is exemplified by pointing out the fact that members do not have to resort to the reconstruction of what they have been doing to understand each other. As we have seen, this is the point of Garfinkel’s meaning-elaboration experiment. For ethnomethodologists, it suffices to show how the “thises” and “that’s” used by the members in their situated discourse can produce mutually coordinated and sensible activities. The term “haecceity” (or “just thisness”) is invented for demonstrating such rational properties of indexical expressions.

But unlike the members who can immediately see what the thises and thats specifically mean in singular occasions of conduct, an ethnomethodologist cannot immediately cap- ture the members’ horizon of meaning and what thises and thats mean in a singular occa- sion of conduct. For instance, an ethnomethodologist cannot understand what thises and thats mean in scientists’ discourse about certain discovery without introducing a horizon as to what the discovery is about, what the outcome of the discovery turns out to be, and above all, how to put together such a series of singular occasions of conduct into a meaningful whole. Without an interpretive horizon, he does not know how to establish the meaning or significance of a singular action and, like an ideal chronicler, produces only a heap of meaningless discursive collage.


Let’s now examine more closely how ethnomethodologists establish the meaning of a chemist’s action by retrospectively connecting the two time-separated actions and hence by specifying the relation between them. For example, it was reported that “a manipulation of a bunsen burner” gave rise to an unexpected contingency that had to be repaired immediately (Lynch et al. 1983). Does such a singular act of manipulating a bunsen burner have a definite meaning for the ethnomethodologist? Here the manipulation of bunsen burner in a specific way does not in itself have any meaning or significance unless it is related to the later events to which such a manipulation gives rise. Similarly, in their study of the embodied production of the independent Galiean pulsar, Garfinkel and his associates (1981) trace the process of “attaching pulsar to nature” by analyzing the temporal sequence of astronomers’ spontaneous remarks. But in such a study of the genealogy of cultural objects, any singular occasions of conduct or indexical expression of the astronomers could not have meaning for the ethnomethodologists unless they have a certain prior notion (or horizon) of what the discovery is about and what the outcome of the discovery eventually turned out to be. It is only when the result of the search (i.e., discovery or non- discovery) is taken into account that the ethnomethodologists can confer definite meanings onto each of the successive singular events and discourse of the astronomers.

Now the question becomes: how do ethnomethodologists fill in the interpretive void that exists between a series of events? The only option open to them is to go back in time and “retroactively re-align’’ (Danto 1964) the past sequences of experimental trials, adjust- ments, and so on, so that such a realignment can show how contingencies are eventually managed by the “embodied” or “incarnate” practice of the chemist. In their discussion of the temporal order in laboratory practice, Michael Lynch, Eric Livingston, and Harold Garfinkel (1983, p. 220) recognize that their description of the laboratory practice is in fact nothing more than a local “history” of the laboratory:

The “what was seen” at any given point in an experiment is an historicized construct based upon “what it turned out to be” in the end. Even more fundamentally, the very “seeing” of anything at all, whether it is later treated as fact or artifact, “noise” or nothing worth bothering about, is itself embedded in a local history of technical activities.

However, curiously enough, these ethnomethodologists deny that their writing of local history, like those of other historians, involves elements of interpretation-to say nothing of construction. As ethnomethodologists, Lynch and his colleagues used such terms as “contingencies”, “indexicality”, “incarnate or embodied character” of experimental action, “reflexivity”, and so on to connect-ol; more accurately, to render the sequence of experimental actions intelligible-the otherwise meaningless sequence of experimental practice. Would the chemist agree with using such concepts that are alien to him to describe his experimental practice? He may or may not. However, it is clear that such concepts as the incarnate or embodied character of laboratory practice, reflexivity, and indexicality which have been used by ethnomethodologists to connect certain actions with different time indices, and hence to establish their meaning, are not used by the members to depict their own practice. In short, as I argued above, while these concepts are clearly distinct from those Lynch calls natural linguistic resources, he fails to specify the difference between the two and, as a result, fails to make clear the effects such a concept laden inquiry brings about.9

In conclusion, let me explain in more detail where such a concept laden inquiry ulti- mately leads us. If, as the antireflexivists argue, their use of a particular set of concepts-


reflexivity, indexicality, embodied action, and so on-is not for theoretical construction, what then are these concepts for? As I have argued above, these concepts are used to render a sequence of experimental actions understandable in a novel and productive way and as such they conjure up a particular image of scientific practice. Such an image is indeed radically opposed to the traditional rationalistic understanding of scientific practice in which what is not under intellectual command (contingencies, accidents, and indexical expressions) is all relegated to the “marginal” and “negligible” status, and only those elements that constitute the timeless theoretical system (reasons, evidence, deduction, and so on) are regarded as intellectually acceptable. In contrast to the traditional picture of scientific practice in which the sequence of singular occasions of conduct of scientists are retroactively realigned by using such terms as reason, rationality, evidence, data, and so on, ethnomethodologists seize upon the contingencies endemic to scientific practice and retroactively realign a sequence of singular occasions of conduct by stressing the reflexive and embodied nature of scientific practice.

It is by using such an interpretive horizon that ethnomethodologists can sequentially or temporally connect the otherwise meaningless series of singular experimental conducts and thus make the experimental practice-to use W. B. Gallie’s (1964) term-a “follow- able” story in which the contingencies associated with the manipulation of the inscription devices successively give rise to an another set of situations that, for its management and repair, in turn requires the reflexive and embodied technique of the experimenter. Such a story is indeed a teleological one in which the readers are “pulled forward”, as it were, by the temporal unfolding of contingent events that finally leads to the conclusion of the story.

The phenomenology of following a story, Gallie argues, is quite different from following an argument. In contrast to the conclusion of an argument that can be deduced or predicted, the conclusion of a story is “not something that can be deduced or predicted, nor even something that can be seen at a later stage to have been theoretically or ideally pre- dictable on the basis of what had been revealed at some earlier stage” (Gallie 1964, p. 23). In looking back from the end of the story, the reader eventually accepts that, despite many contingencies, coincidences, and surprises, the end does follow from the narrated events that have led to it. In such a story, in contrast to the traditional image of scientific practice in which contingencies are condemned as anathema, following the temporal development of the contingencies somehow succeeds in rendering these contingencies not only acceptable but also necessary for the conclusion of the story. Essential to such an understanding is the continuity or the followability that is displayed by the contingencies built into the narrative tissue. Such contingencies and the ways in which they are managed by the reflexive and embodied practitioners, while at no point can be anticipated, nonetheless enable the reader to follow the story to its conclusion without an interpretive failure.

In providing us with such a “proxy-experience’’ (Louch I969), ethnomethodologists cannot be said to observe from the horizon of the scientists but describe events and actions out of their own interpretive horizon that goes beyond the scientists’ horizon of expecta- tions. For the meaning that retrospectively accrues to the series of singular events in this way emerges only in their interpretive horizon. Consequently, the ethnomethodological description of the experimental practice becomes in the course of time much richer than the empirical observation at the moment of its happening allows. Thus, what is recovered is not the intelligibility of scientific practice per se, but a creative and productive understanding of the social world of scientists under investigation. While there is a sense in


which ethnomethodological understanding of scientific practice is better than those “mechanistic” versions of scientific rationality, it never exhausts our understanding of scientific practice,’O because the otherness of “an-other” culture (in this case, science) that has been overcome and made part of new us reappears continually and demands another kind of understanding.

AC KN OW LE DCME NTS

This article was presented at a seminar organized by Randall Collins at the University of California, Riverside, winter quarter, 1997. I am grateful to Randall Collins, Anthony Gid- dens, Mike Lynch, Dick Pels, and Jonathan Turner for their valuable comments on earlier versions. I am also much indebted to the four anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticism for the improvement of this article. Finally, I should like to express my gratitude to Norman Denzin for his generous encouragement.

NOTES

1. In this sense, ethnomethodology is concerned with exploring what Barnes calls “natural rationality’’ as opposed to “normative rationality.” The study of “quiddity” or “whatness” of social organization of action stresses that analysts must refrain from making judgments as to the rationality, irrationality, falsity, or validity of the beliefs held by the members of social organization under study. Rather than impose a normative criteria of rationality from without as is usually done by philosophers and by the Parsonian functional analysts, the study of natural rationality is concerned with providing a descriptive analysis of how the members construct a set of criteria that they use to assess the rationality of “their” own actions and judgments. For a detailed discussion of the concept of natural rationality, see Barnes (1976). The debates between philosophers and the relativist sociologists of knowledge concerning the concept of natural rationality are discussed in Kim (1994). For a critique of Parsonian functional theory from the ethnomethodological perspective, see Heritage (1984). The conceptual affinity of natural rationality with Garfinkel and Sack’s (1970) notion of “ethnomethodological indifference” is evident here. The concept of ethnomethodological indifference was first introduced in Garfinkel and Sacks (1970).

2. Thus Sharrock and Button (1991, p. 141) argue that the ethnomethodological respecification consists in treating “the solution to the problem of social order as completely internal to those sites. It conceives social settings as self-organizing and for just that reason has no further need for the received concepts of ‘social actor’ and ‘social structure’ .”

3. Compare Garfinkel’s (1967, p. 22) remark that any attempt to get out of such a documentary process or hermeneutic circle is “very much like complaining that if the walls of a building were only gotten out of the way one could see better what was keeping the roof up.”

4. As Garfinkel (1967, p. 78) writes, the documentary method “consists of treating an actual appearance as ‘the document’ of, as ‘pointing to,’ as ‘standing on behalf of’ a presupposed underlying pattern.” Once the individual evidences are interpreted as pointing to the underlying pattern, Garfinkel argues, these two elaborate each other. In Heritage’s (1984, p. 147) words, the “description evokes a context to be searched and, in turn, the results of this search elaborate the specific sense of the description.”

5. An ethnomethodologist might argue that Pollner, Cicourel, and other social constructionists are not genuine ethnomethodologists since these sociologists regard actors as grappling with the problem of indexicality. If there is an unambiguous distinction between ethnomethodologists and the social constructionists, such a criticism might be justified. But as I shall demonstrate below, there is an ambiguity as to who must be counted as conducting genuine ethnomethodological research. The


problem is that there are many sociologists who think that they have been engaged in ethnomethodological research but nevertheless think that people are grappling with the problem of indexicality. For example, even Cicourel, who has been unambiguously identified as one of the first generation of ethnomethodologists, argues that ethnomethodology has been concerned with the “situated nature of the way in which ordinary activities are constructed in locally negotiated settings.” He further argues that the ethnomethodological inquiry into social practices “is itself to be viewed as an ‘achieved’, or ‘constructed’, accomplishment.” (1 993, p. 97). Consider also Barnes’s (1981, p. 482) statement: “all studies of agents’ methods of accounting of the ways in which they make things visible as this or that, I shall call ethnomethodology.” If we accept this definition of ethnomethodology, then Pollner, Woolgar, and other sociologists of knowledge such as Barnes and Bloor who view actors as engaged in the “politics” of constructing reality should be counted as genuine ethnomethodologists. Therefore, there is a genuine rift between the radically reflexive and antireflexive ethnomethodologists. These sociologists embrace Wittgenstein’s so-called finitism, which refers to the fact that the concept application--or practical reasoning-in both science and ordinary life is not fully determined by its previous application but depends upon the “local, social context” in which the concept is applied. On this view, the meaning of a term or concept would not be fixed until the actors solved the problem of indexicality, that is, until they reached an agreement as to how it should be used through their negotiation in a local, in-situ interactional setting. This resonates with Garfinkel’s teaching that ethnomethodology is concerned with showing how actors make sense of each other in a temporally extended social interaction. Woolgar (1990) thus argues that his work on the reflexive sociology of science owes much to Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology. Perhaps the meaning of the term ethnomethodology itself must be negotiated.

6. See, for example, the debate between Laudan (1981) and Bloor (1981). 7. For similar arguments, see Sharrock and Button (1991) and Bogen (1993). Indeed, the rift

between the radical reflexivists (or social constructionists) and the antireflexivists is much more serious and explicit than has usually been assumed. For instance, in a recent article, Watson (1994) con- trasted the radical reflexivists’ (in his words, social constructionists) approach to what he thinks is the truly ethnomethodological (that is, antireflexive) inquiry and argued that, in contrast to popular misunderstanding, the type of inquiry in which both Pollner and Woolgar have been engaged is not ethnomethodological in the genuine sense of the word. This is because they see actors as grappling with the problem of indexicality and thus ironicizing the actors’ world. Here are excerpts from Wat- son’s (1994) article that indicates the gulf existing between the radical reflexivists and the antireflexivists: “While the social constructionists set out to describe and analyze the mundane means whereby the ‘troubles’ of indexicality and reflexivity are ‘managed’ ” and therefore “obliter- ates their informants’ own sense-making processes” (p. 42 I ) , ethnomethodologists (i.e., antireflexivists) “describe how informants go about constituting their world as recognizable state affairs for them” (p. 407). This is certainly a laudable proposal but, as I hope to demonstrate below, description of the ways in which informants constitute their world from their own perspective will eventually turn out to be unfeasible.

8. Garfinkel (1991, p. 14) calls such seemingly chaotic, messy, and trivial concreteness of the singular occasions of conduct Parsons’ “plenum” and argues that, in The Structure of Social Action, Parsons treated plenum as having “no orderliness.”

9. According to Lynch, I define theory in such an extremely “undifferentiated” way that I fail to distinguish between concept-laden and theory-laden inquiry. Lynch thus argues that “descriptions which are concept laden” (Le., his ethnomethodology) do not warrant my claim that they are “theory laden” (personal communication). However, those concepts used by ethnomethodologists are not “isolated” from one another but are related to each other in such a way that they confer a “theoretical coherence” on the ethnomethodologists’ description of the temporal sequence of situated actions.

10. Gubrium and Holstein’s (1997) recent introduction of the idea of “analytic bracketing” pro- vides another approach to the problem of understanding social practice. They suggest that interpretive practice involves two “inseparable” elements: one element refers to the process in which the


actors construct reality through their interaction in concrete social settings, and the other refers to the “substantive resources” or “realities” that actors deploy in such a process of reality construction. According to Gubrium and Holstein, while ethnomethodology brackets the substantive realities in order to focus on constitutive activity, analytic bracketing has an advantage of moving back and forth between the two elements specified above. Since the process of constituting reality, and the objects and events produced through such a process are mutually constitutive, we cannot privilege one element over the other. They thus suggest that we should “alternately bracket” the “whats” (the substantive reality upon which actors rely) and “hows” (the construction process itself) in order to come up with a more intelligible picture of social practice (1997, p. 119). Especially when the analyst brackets the hows and focus on the whats (and the whys), he brings into his analysis a certain kind of interpretation that in turn is subject to the reflexive analysis (1997, p. 120). For more details of their arguments, see Gubrium and Holstein (1997), especially pp. 97-122.

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