Reexamining Literary Theories and Practices || The Social beyond Words: The Case of Harold Garfinkel

The Social beyond Words: The Case of Harold GarfinkelAuthor(s): Bryan GreenSource: New Literary History, Vol. 39, No. 4, Reexamining Literary Theories and Practices(Autumn, 2008), pp. 957-969Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20533124 .

Accessed: 10/05/2014 14:46

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNew Literary History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 151.226.121.118 on Sat, 10 May 2014 14:46:36 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20533124?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


The Social Beyond Words: The Case of Harold Garfinkel

Bryan Green

No one who thinks about education for long can

remain ignorant of the intimate and ambiguous relation between religious passions and the im

pulse to theorize.

?Kenneth Minogue1

Once literary criticism was set free to travel roads other than

canonical literature, it was always likely to reach unexpected

places. One of these, the subject of this paper, is sociological

theory, a genre sometimes satirized for its turgid prose and ponderous

neologisms even within sociology itself. The aim, however, is not to find

fault but to appraise generic pressures in "writing the social" and to

examine literary responses to them. In particular, the paper examines

the writing style of Harold Garfinkel, notorious in the discipline for its

oddness and difficulty.2 My interest, however, is not in the difficulty of

the writing but in those features that give it a sometimes religious, sac

ramental, even rapturous tone?a tone conspicuously alien to normative

social science. There is, for example, in the following passage, something like a consecration of the humdrum. Garfinkel is comparing the rational

orderliness of written instructions (in this case, how to assemble a chair

from boxed parts) with the in vivo work of turning a projected pattern into an actual thing recognizable as the pattern. He stresses the ineffably

strange properties of any such process (which would include making

socially real things from laws, rules, plans, or any other representations of actions) : "Wheresoever you are engaged in vivo in finding and follow

ing instructions, THAT is where those properties will be given ... So

we'll say: In the first place, they occur massively. Massively is too weak.

We need something in the order of the heavens' multitude, and then

beyond numerosity ... I mean to be talking about something awesome

and beautiful, which is what I take it that Merleau-Ponty spoke of as the

familiar miracle of ordinary society" (EP 206).

Elsewhere, Garfinkel reinforces this sense of reverence in the presence of the social by placing "the congregationally witnessable coherence of

New Literary History, 2009, 39: 957-969



958 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

the most ordinary things in the world" (EP 139) beyond the reach of even the most refined methods and formal concepts of social thought,

speaking of God to make the point:

Consider that immortal ordinary society evidently, just in any actual case, is

easily done and easily recognized with uniquely adequate competence, vulgar

competence, by one and all. Yet, for all that, by one and all it is intractably hard

to describe procedurally. Procedurally described just in any actual case it is elu

sive. Further, it is only discoverable. It is not imaginable. It cannot be imagined but is only actually found out, and just in any actual case. Absent that and God

knows how it is put together. More to the point of strange: in God's silence,

formal analysts, by exercising the privileges of the transcendental analyst and

the universal observer, do not know, yet still somehow they know they need not

hesitate to say. (EP96)

The language is almost biblical and sacerdotal, capable of creating a

reading spell. But what is it doing in a programmatic declaration of so

ciology? Is it only a momentary taking leave of scientific sense? A mere

idiosyncrasy? A curious textual folly? Or is there a deeper interpretation to be found, one rooted in the sociological enterprise itself? It is the latter I want to argue. In particular, that sociology's founding object of knowl

edge, the social, is resistant to representation in ways that have something in common with objects of religious, mystical, and some kinds of poetic

discourse. Something sufficiently similar to push deep reflection on the social as such into literary touch with those regions of language, even

against rational intention and discipline norms. To pursue this claim, I will focus on a literary strategy that links these regions together: the

strategy of saying by unsaying, technically called apophasis.

I. Apophasis and Unsayable Things

Some things are so overflowingly significant they defy words to express them. At least this is the ontological way of stating the point. Stated rhe

torically, one way for a writer to create reading effects of overflowingly transcendent significance is to signal the inadequacy of mere human

language to describe it. Among the effects created are those of awe and reverence. When a text leads words to the very edge of an object or

event, then declares it impossible to go further, there is an implication that it would be improper, perhaps transgressive, to try. The referent is left defined by an act of verbal abdication, of looking away, leaving a

penumbra of reverential (sometimes rapturous, sometimes horrified) distance, all these being connotations of the sacred. It is tempting to say that in such cases, the language creature falls silent, but this cannot be



THE SOCIAL BEYOND WORDS 959

so where writing is concerned. Rather, as Michael Sells argues, unsaying has to be said, apophasis has to be interwoven with its nominal opposite,

kataphasis, producing a special kind of discourse, where "a rigorous ad

herence to the initial logical impasse of ineffability exerts a force that

transforms normal logical and semantic structures."3

Examples abound in theological writings. Kenneth Burke, to take one

instance, draws attention to the rhetorical role of multiple oxymorons in the Confessions of Saint Augustine, for whom God is "changeless, ever

changing; never new, never old . . .

always acting, always quiet."4 These

oxymorons correspond to what Sells calls apophatic paradoxes in mysti cal discourse and are, he observes, especially intense when "language encounters the notion of the unlimited" (ML 212). That notion is logi

cally contrary to the delimiting function of naming and of "kataphatic" definition. The name "God" carries within it the apophatic paradox referred to by Sells, as, perhaps, does "the social."

To move from theological to sociological discourse, it helps to be

reminded that apophasis has a history in Western culture and that it

has by no means been confined to religious and mystical language use.

Showing the broad interpretive range of the device, William Franke

speaks of "apophatic poetics."5 His target texts are two sets of poems: one by Edmond Jab?s on words being irremediably lost in the chasm

between human language (all our conceivable books) and the Language of absolute being (the Sacred Book onto whose silence our books open); the second set, by Paul Celan, circles around the incapacity of words

to grasp singular events and concrete things. Both sets resonate with

Jewish sensibility in the context of an event that has become a modern

symbol of inexpressibility, the Holocaust. Celan is thematically closer to

Garfinkel in that he evokes the sheer exteriority of existence to words: an ancient tradition of discourse traced by Franke from Philo Judaeus to

Ludwig Wittgenstein as an "apophaticism of existence" (635). In contrast, the tradition underlying Jab?s's invocation of an absolute inner limit to

language, developed especially in the Kabbalah, is termed an "apophati cism of the divine Name" (635).

Although these concerns are far removed from those of sociology, a

possible link is provided by Franke's optimism that his inquiry "can pro vide a viable approach to the problem of relation to the other and the

singular" (624). This problem has, in fact, been a recurrent methodologi cal issue in sociology, especially at its border crossings with ethnography, social anthropology, and history. As an example, American sociology after

World War I was torn by a struggle for dominance between advocates of

quantitative methodology oriented to precise measurement, and quali tative methods based on ethnographic closeness to singular others and

their circumstances.




Charles Cooley, a founder of the American Sociological Association

and its president in 1918, insisted that valid knowledge of the social

could only come through empathy and mutual contact, gained in field

work and transmitted in appropriately styled text-work. This method

gained supremacy, mainly through "the Chicago School," until the

1930s, when it lost ground to the quantitative approach, centered at

Columbia.6 Although the conflict is usually portrayed as epistemological, I would claim that it was also literary, since ways of writing the social are

constrained to fit the way the aim of social inquiry is conceived. Com

parably, German social science (though along boundaries with history and cultural studies rather than ethnography) was beset from its outset

by a struggle between the nomothetic ideal of covering-law explanation and idiographic intent to understand the singular properties of unique socio-cultural-historical formations. The tension is nicely captured in Max

Weber's aim to "seek knowledge of an historical phenomenon, meaning

by historical: significant in its individuality (Eigenart),"1 but to do so by

constructing "ideal types."8 While Garfinkel's sociology is not concerned with ethnographic

closeness to others, it is most certainly concerned with singularity: the on-the-spot creation of singular social things, time after time. Eth

nomethodology's abiding task is 'just in every and actual case asking for

each thing, what makes it accountably just what that social fact is" (EP 251). The question

cannot be answered by classifying the actual thing or by any other act of conceptual modeling or imagination, but, as cited

previously, "is only actually found out." This leaves suspended, however, the problem of representing actually found singular field properties for

someone who was not there. Ethnomethodology cannot do without rep

resentational language because its existence depends on being attached, even if parasitically, to a literature. Consequently, it becomes liable to

the inner limits of language thatjab?s's poetry strains to express; in par ticular the bias of language, especially strong in fields of study, to absorb

singularity into typicality, reducing the significance of the singular to that

of the repeatable and refindable, the instance and example. Apophatic discourse is extraordinary in textual practice precisely because it resists

the generalizing flow of language as such.

Our question can now be given a more precise wording: if apophasis is a feature of Garfinkel's writing style, what is it doing there, and with

what possible value for studying the social? The conditional phrasing forces attention to a factual claim that needs to be substantiated in order

to properly consider the question of value.




II. Apophatic Features of Garfinkel's Text-Work

The first feature to stand out has to do with Garfinkel's method of

inquiry rather than details of his style, but it sets an apophatic frame for

the latter. An inquiry must begin, he insists, with an accepted description of a social phenomenon; accepted, that is, from vernacular description or from any of the specialized writings (social science publications, in

stitutional reports, policy studies) that Garfinkel collectively calls formal

analysis (FA). It will be a cogent description, self-evidently reasonable and

readily open to instances of more of the same. The description is then

to be reread as consisting of instructions for finding and recognizing such an object (a service line, traffic wave, suicide, or whatever), leaving

open the question of what the embodied enactment of the instructions

might be in the singular circumstances of any actual case.

In short, an ethnomethodological inquiry (EM) begins by unsaying a

description: "I want to say that a description can be misread ... I mean

read alternately so that... the readings

are incommensurable. They don't

translate point for point. But, instead they go together. If you can find one you can always find the other. I'm calling the second reading an

instruction, or an instructed action" (JEP112 n. 36). Lexical translation

being blocked, the meaning of the second reading can only be redeemed

by going forward into a scene of action concretely exhibiting what the

description can only name. Linguistic imagining and redescription are

left behind. An EM "misreading" is an opening to finding a merely named phenomenon, not an invitation to exegesis. Its practical purpose is to expel the social inquirer from the Eden of linguistic sufficiency,

where words are the reality of things, into extratextual places where we "become strange again with the ways of practical action as worldly stuff (EP210), implementing Garfinkel's dictum that "generic things cannot be lexical" (EP 140). The dictum itself is apophatic in that its

assertion of lexical insufficiency has to be said, but it only reflects an

entirely apophatic procedure that begins with unsaying straightforward

(kataphatic) description of what something is, but then, if it is to make

us (readers) "strange again with the ways of practical action," must do

so in writing. The ineffable must, somehow, be expressed. Garfinkel's

syntax and vocabulary strain toward the social beyond words because, in his vision, there is a prior orderliness in the practical making of social

things which makes orderly accounts of them possible. These accounts

(descriptions, narratives, explanations, analyses, and the like) only achieve

"in texts, not elsewhere, the observability and practical objectivity of

their phenomena."9

In contemplating a realm of things, the social, which constitutively transcends language, Garfinkel reaches the "logical impasse of ineffabil




ity" that Sells takes to underlie apophatic discourse in mystical writing and other literatures. More importantly, his writing rigorously adheres

to the impasse. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to analyze in detail the linguistic abnormalities of Garfinkel's style, the samples

already given show that abnormalities are indeed present, and further

illustration is in the concluding section. To confirm, however, that the

impasse operating in Garfinkel's work stems from the intractability of

a particular referent, the social, it is worth commenting briefly on his

treatment of a basic sociological topic, the problem of social order. No

matter what denotations or connotations "the problem of social order"

evokes (political, legal, cultural, moral, Hobbesian, and whatever one's

literary resources allow for), they will not easily withstand the surge of

"prepositional phrasings" used by Garfinkel to convey EM's alternate

interest,10 which is: "order in, about, as, inside with, as of, and within

ordinary society" (EP 65). As if concerned that even this lexical flood might be reduced to orderly

summary (as happens in textbook accounts of what ethnomethodology is really all about), Garfinkel has taken the extraverbal step of spelling "order" (and its semantic concomitants) with an asterisk. Asterisked spell

ing not only interrupts reading and slows down conventional response, it directs thought toward things yet to be revealed, beyond familiar words,

perhaps beyond words at all?that is, to ineffable things: "Sometimes

familiar words for phenomena are used, names found in common vernac

ular or technical terminologies ... familiar names are used tendentiously

. . . with a deliberately corrective, but concealed tendency. In speaking

tendentiously, a term is written with its asterisked spelling, for example, detail* ...

by detail* is meant something other and different than the

reader would explain or can

explain with any of detail's many vernacular

straightforward meanings" (EP99 n. 15, original emphases). For a reader committed to the rational order of familiar names, the

unsaying effect of asterisked spelling might smack of mystical conceal

ment and a demand for faith in ultimate revelation. Indeed, the same

footnote goes on to say that "explanation is being delayed deliber

ately . . .

knowing that an explanation will be forthcoming at an appro

priate place," yet that place is specified to be a place of worldly inquiry, not private, subjective, out of body, or out of this world experience. Garfinkel's "corrective" is to received lexicons of order* (which includes

all terms and topics to do with reason, logic, and objective knowledge where social things are concerned). His apophasis of the social is not a

plunge into textual traditions of mysticism but a push into the orderly fullness of social things in practical action. Its point is to free social in

quiry from lexical servitude so as to fasten attention to the phenomenal

properties of singular social things in the course of being made. This




cannot be done simply by throwing aside words, but only by strenuously

unsaying them in particular cases as openings to inquiry, an operation

depending on the particular kind of literary device corresponding to

the practice of apophasis. Garfinkel's students (and other readers) may be forgiven if they some

times suspect they are victims of an anarchical prankster. Indeed, he al most seems to admit as much sometimes, as in saying jocularly of bemused

responses to one of his estranging tutorial exercises: 'Who ever heard

people talk in that crazy way? And why would you need to talk like that?"

(EP 278). The need, I am arguing, arises from the collision of language,

normally serving to delimit things, with something (the social) whose

defining property is to be illimitable. The logical impasse yields, among other effects, "crazy talk." Sells includes among the generic features of

apophasis an anarchic element, and usefully compares it with violations

of normative language that detonate laughter in jokes (ML 210).11 Gar

finkel is no joker, but there is something impish in his emptying out of

the authority of formal social science into the fullness of practical action,

denying the methodologically conferred power of the transcendental

analyst to pronounce on the rational orderliness of "immortal ordinary

society." Sometimes his perception of the extraordinary in the ordinary results in a peculiar bathos, as in the following comment on the mundane

wonder of a crowd of students forming themselves into witnessable lines

when school buses in front of a local library opened their doors: "The

properties that I described before?phenomenal field properties, tran

scendentality, immortality?become naturally accountable, unavoidable,

unavoidably intelligible, without remedy, without alternatives, witnessably there. Above all, they can be photographed" (EP 255). The throwaway line at the end challenges the authority of words to express the truth of social things, as does EM inquiry in general.

In summary, the apophatic pressures in Garfinkel's program are as

follows: (1) the social can only be approached for inquiry through words;

yet (2), the social is ineffably more than words can possibly say; there

fore (3), the social can only be apprehended in unsaying words, more

exactly words with the vernacular and/or technical authority to stand

in its place. The question now is whether these pressures are evident in

others for whom the social is a rigorous object of reflection.

III. Why Speak Like That?

The approach I have taken looks for an answer to Garfinkel's strange

style in the peculiarities of the social as an object of discourse, arguing that it is inherently conducive to apophasis. If this were true, however,




one would expect comparable strains of unsaying to be common in

sociological writing, instead of a striking rarity. The line of argument could be reprieved by claiming that sociologists do not, for the most

part, reflect on the social as such but on m?tonymie and metaphorical substitutes more easily kept in conceptual and empirical bounds: social

system, social structure, social role, social network, social exchange, and

so on.12 The ice here is decidedly thin, however, and, more importantly, risks hypostatization by attributing discursive causal power to a mere term, "the social." To spring that trap, it is necessary to attribute apophatic

pressure not to "the social," but to a particular way of beholding it. For

Garfinkel, the social is an unimaginably extensive flow of things being created in living practice: a sui generis universe of things, an ineluctable

presence. It can now be proposed that anyone imagining the social in

a comparable way will display apophatic distortion of normal language in trying to represent it. I will follow this lead a little further because it

broadens the frame within which to read Garfinkel and, at least, shows

that the stresses and strains in his writing are not just his own.

A trail of textual evidence is suggested by the subtitle of the program statement I have been using: Working Out Durkhdm's Aphorism. At first

glance, Durkheim seems an unlikely candidate for apophatic discourse,

though all the more telling for being so. He was the most whole-heartedly dedicated sociologist of the canonical three founders of the discipline and made it his lifework to establish sociology as a respectable science.13

To this end, he developed rules of method for students of the social,

stipulating as the most basic rule "to consider social facts as

things."14

Though addressed to French scholars, the rule seems almost English in its no-nonsense, straightforward direction. In

attempting to correct

misreadings of the rule, however, Durkheim muddied the waters: "we

do not say that social facts are material things, but that they are things

just as are material things, although in a different way."15 At this point there are signs of a paradox, expressible as a child's riddle: Q. When is a thing not a thing? A. When it is a social thing. The paradox deepens

when Durkheim sp?cifies the something more of a social fact to consist

of ways of thinking and acting that are "in some sense psychical," since

they are inside individual consciousnesses, yet are really outside them,

forming a "collective consciousness" whose properties are so different that

they can only be known sociologically, from without, not from within.16

By now, we have a contortion so extreme as to suggest a

sociological

aporia: society exists through individuals but is a reality external to them?

inside and outside, within and above, at the same time. Small wonder

that Everett Wilson, a translator of Durkheim's lectures on moral educa

tion, felt it prudent to issue a prefatory warning to readers: "Durkheim's

conception of society involves him in the use of terms that have mystical, even

supernatural, connotations for English and American readers."17




In Durkheim's final book, The Elementary Forms oj Religious Lije (1912), there is convincing textual evidence of being drawn into apophatic

expression, even

against his scientific intent. Here, earthly societies are

envisioned as the sources of everything we call reason, moral feeling,

divinity, sacredness, and ideals of perfection. The immensity of the social

is palpable, so much so as to be incommensurable with actual society "as

it exists and functions before our eyes ... a mediocre, sometimes even

base reality,"18 the society available for scientific study. Beyond profane

society is sacred society, the collective consciousness, which "sees from

above, it sees far ahead; at every moment, it embraces all known reality" and is the matrix of "a creative power that no observable being can match"

(445, 447). Faced with the logical impasse of finding words to grasp

something that "embraces all known reality," including words, Durkheim

can only resort to apophasis. The society of perfect ideals, sacred society, "is not outside the real one but is part of it." Here Durkheim initiates

an unsaying of the real society "before our eyes," which is continued by the scientifically startling assertion (especially for the reader remember

ing his first rule of method) that "a society is not constituted simply by the mass of individuals who comprise it, the ground they occupy, the

things they use, or the movements they make, but above all by the idea

it has of itself '

(425). Consequently, when Durkheim comes to define

"the vocation of sociology" as finding out whether "that which is in the

individual but surpasses him may not come from that supraindividual,

yet concretely experienced, reality that is society" (448), we are forced

to interpret that "reality" by what it is not (perfect society) and what it

transcends ("real society" before our eyes), that is, become engaged in

apophatic paradox. Textually immersed in these paradoxes, we cannot

help but be bemused by Durkheim's belated kataphatic assertion that

"society is by no means the illogical or alogical inconsistent... being that

people too often like to imagine" (445). A logical paradox is, however,

precisely what his entranced vision of the social demands if it is to gain written expression. The same is true, so I would argue, of Garfinkel, even though his vision, developed in a different cultural, disciplinary, and practical context, is also different in linguistic ways.19

The concept of apophasis, like any good interpretive reading tool,

provides unexpected linkages between texts that show them in a new

light. This has been shown by reading Garfinkel's program in the light of Durkheim's writing on the social provenance of all things religious and supernatural, rather than just the methodological text to which

Garfinkel points. Provided that due caution is exercised about the scope of apophatic expression in sociology, we can accept William Sewell's

judgment, derived from a comparative history of the social sciences, that

"'Society' and 'the social' came to signify the complex and ultimately unknowable reality of human existence, a reality previously represented




by such religious concepts as Divine Will or Providence. 'The social' in

herited the mysterious ontological referent of the divine ... the concept of 'the social' is vague and mysterious because it still carries a whiff of

the divine."20

IV. A Poetics of the Social

A separate way of approaching a "why" question is in terms of value to an enterprise?here, studying the social. Attention is now shifted from

the object of discourse to text-reader contact, where language acts and

responses are central. Here it is not so much a matter of knowing the

social as voicing it in a certain attitude with a distinctive tone and affect.

Something of this has been conveyed in recalling the mystical, religious

provenance of apophatic style, but attention is also due to its poetic prov enance, especially in giving sublimity to life's small details and fleeting

moments. When Shelley uses apophasis to depict a skylark?"Bird thou never wert. . . What thou art we know not. . .

thy music doth surpass . . .

I know not how thy joy we ever should come near"21?he is not register

ing attributes of an object but textually creating a sublime aura around a mundane thing. Comparably, Garfinkel does not simply observe social

things but transforms them. Here, he marvels at the mundane work of

freeway drivers doing traffic together: "For the cohort of drivers there,

just this gang of them, driving, making traffic together, are somehow,

smoothly and unremarkably, concerting the driving to be at the lived

production of the flow's just thisness: familiar, ordinary, uninterestingly,

observably-in-and-as-of observances, doable and done again, and always,

only, entirely in detail for everything that detail could be" (EP 92 n. 1,

original emphases).

Writing devices other than apophasis are at work here (preposition

strings, comma splices, living suffixes), but they are complementary to it

in at least two ways. First, the liquification of nouns, by resisting capture in familiar and/or analytic names, leaves reading suspended in a flow

of lexical action, reaction, and interaction that mimics an elusive refer

ent, a "thisness" just beyond words and overflowing them. One effect, as

in Shelley's apophatic poem, is rapturous contemplation of something marvelous. Using Sells's formulation of apophasis, Garfinkel enacts a

"dis-ontological discursive effort to avoid reifying the transcendent as

an 'entity'" (ML 6). A mundane referent, driving, is infused with the

significance of transcendent-yet-immanent sublimity, time-bound yet im

mortal. Second, the strain placed on conventional syntax, by representing

something just more than words can grasp, prevents the reader from

treating the writing as declarative prose and forces resort to a different




interpretive frame, one that is nearer poetic evocation than prosaic

description?a poetics of the social with an apophatic cast.

In conclusion, it must be asked what possible value such a poetics

might have for the normatively sober work of social science. One answer

emerging from this reading of Garfinkel concerns relationship to the

subject matter, the social, and the kind of affect invested in it, not just as researcher but as author. It is a textual mark of all great scholarship and science that writers exhibit something of a love affair with their

subject matter. There is an ardent relation to the subject that is contrary to routinized treatment, familiar seeing, and normalized cognition. Gar

finkel's poetics enacts such a relation, not through sentimental gesture, but through intense consistency of style, come what may. There is no

courting of plaudits but devotion to a vision of the wonderful achieve

ments that are ordinary, trivial society.

Just as great art restructures the senses and refreshes perception,

so

great theorizing restructures cognition and invests familiar things with

strange significance. There are few things more familiar to us, or more

tiresome, than a service line, but Garkinkel's poetics transforms it into

something remarkable: "Its morality recapitulates the property mentioned

previously of indefinitely deep availability to inexhaustible investigation once the analyst catches on to just this collaboratively exhibited existence

of an order of service. The analyst who catches on therewith receives a

gift of inquiries" (EP256). The value of Garfinkel's gift to sociology shines all the brighter in the

context of pressures for social inquiry to be instrumentally useful. Such

pressures were present in the history of the discipline and are institu

tionally strong today.22 They have been variously displayed?in social

planning, social reform, social revolution, and social engineering?but

have in common an attitude toward the social as something to be used

for moral, ideological, humanitarian, administrative, or other goals.

The means-ends attitude is incompatible in textual practice with sheer

wondering contemplation. Whereas instrumental discourse aims for

"the governance, guidance, control, or execution of human activities,"23

contemplative reflection, whether in theoretic or poetic form, is riveted

to the marvel of the way things are, entranced by just what they are:

"just-thisness; just here, just now, with just what is at hand, with just who

is here" (EP 99 n. 16). A poetics of the social, while unable to sustain sociological discourse

from its own resources, is in a vital and revitalizing tension with instru

mental discourse imperatives of the discipline, everything Garfinkel calls

formal analysis (FA). An instrumental aim, of necessity, takes away from

social things their mystery, the "ineluctable presence?the thingness of a

thing?that we can never

grasp."24 Conceptual conquest of a subject




matter comes at a price, part of which is loss of wonderment. D. H. Law

rence attributed his "undimmed wonder" of hymns to their being beyond rational appraisal, adding that wonder is "the religious element in all

life,"25 including, we must suppose, the life of intellect and mind.

We can now appreciate the full apophatic paradox of Durkheim's

seemingly instrumental rule of method, to consider social facts as things. To implement the rule in terms of formal concepts and methods is to

sacrifice what they are as things and the wonderment that attends them.

Durkheim's sense of wonder was restimulated in reading ethnographic accounts of religious practices in preliterate societies.26 It was transmitted

to readers like Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the College de Sociolo

gie, inspiring their aim of a sacred sociology, and reappears, undimmed, in Garfinkel's poetics of the social. Through his apophatic vocabulary of

immeasurable, immortal, inexhaustible, ineffable social things, couched

in a strangely counter-nominal syntax, Garfinkel manages to be "poetic" and "religious" without being a poet or a theologian, while still staying in readable touch with sociology.

York University

NOTES

1 Kenneth Minogue, The Concept of a University (Los Angeles and Berkeley: Univ. of

California Press, 1973), 7.

2 See, for example, John Rex, Sociology and the D?mystification of the Modern World (London:

Roudedge, 1974); Ann Rawls, "Editor's Introduction," in Ethnomethodology's Program: Working OutDurkheim's Aphorism, ed. Harold Garfinkel (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Lit?efield, 2002): 1-64. (References to Ethnomethodology's Program hereafter cited in text as EP). Although

Garfinkel is best known for Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,

1967), the later book is stylistically more challenging and is my target text.

3 Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying ( Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 3 (hereafter cited in text as ML). 4 Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1961), 52.

5 William Franke, 'The Singular and the Other at the Limits of Language in the Apo

phatic Poetics of Edmond Jab?s and Paul Celan," New Literary History 36, no. 4 (2005): 621-38 (hereafter cited in text). 6 See George Steinmetz, "American Sociology Before and After World War II: The

(Temporary) Setting of a Disciplinary Field," in Sodology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007), 314-66.

7 Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. Edward Shils and Henry Finch

(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949), 78.

8 See Susan Hekman, Weber, the Ideal Type, and Contemporary Sodal Theory (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1983). Also, see Weber's strenuous engagement in the

methodenstreit which beset German social science in Weber, Rosher and Knies: The Logical Problems of Historical Economics, trans. Guy Oakes (New York: Free Press, 1975) and Critique

of Stammler, trans. Guy Oakes (New York: Free Press, 1977). 9 Garfinkel, Michael Lynch, and Eric Livingston, "The Work of a Discovering Science

Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar," Philosophy of the Sodal




Sciences 11, no. 2 (1981): 139. Here the actual work of discovery was caught through a

tape being accidentally left running, recording the talk between two astronomers out of

which the discovery of a pulsar was made sufficiently sure to bear the weight of ajournai announcement and a formal analysis. It is normal to exclude the actual work of science

from scientific texts as being both unavailable and insignificant. 10 Rawls, "Editor's Introduction," to Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology's Program. 11 To this one might add Mikhail Bakhtin's observations on "carnivalized writing," par

ticularly the collapsing of hierarchical authority achieved in conflating elevated with vulgar and mundane signifiers. M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his Work (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1968).

12 See, for example, Ken Morrison, "The Disavowal of the Social in the American Recep tion of Durkheim,"/owrnaZ of Classical Sodology 1, no. 1 (May 2001): 95-125.

13 Weber was a trained historian, legal expert, and political economist who thought of

sociology as an ancillary discipline; Karl Marx was a critical political economist and never

mentions sociology. 14 Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method, ed. Steven Lukes (New York: Free

Press, 1982), 60.

15 Durkheim, "Preface to the Second Edition," in Rules of Sodological Method, 35.

16 Durkheim, "Preface to the Second Edition," 40.

17 Everett Wilson, "Preface" to Durkheim, Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and Ap

plication of the Sodology of Education (New York: Free Press, 1961). 18 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free

Press, 1995), 422 (hereafter cited in text).

19 The apophatic trail left by Durkheim could be followed further; for example, the

attempted founding of a "sacred sociology" by a group of erstwhile surrealists (Georges

Bataille, Michel Leiris, and Roger Caillois) in 1937, inspired by Durkheim's concept of the

creative power of "collective effervescence" to unmake and remake society. The story of

the Coll?ge de Sodologie is told by Mich?le H. Richmond, Sacred Revolutions: Durkhdm and the

Coll?ge de Sodologie (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2002). The relative closeness of

the social, at least in certain images of it, to religious regions of language is readily certi

fied by imaging reactions to a proposed "sacred economics," "sacred political science," or

other human science. It could only be received as a satire or joke, whereas the Collegians could at least cite the chief founder of the discipline of sociology to make legal tender of

their ideas.

20 William H. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Sodal Transformation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005), 325-26.

21 "To a Skylark," in Shelley's Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism, ed. Donald Rei

man and Neil Fraistat, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2002), 304-7.

22 See, for example, Calhoun, ed., Sociology in America; and, for western Europe, Wolf

Lepenies, Between Sdence and Literature: The Rise of Sodology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press, 1988).

23 Walter Beale, A Pragmatic Theory of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press,

1987), 94.

24 Peter Schwenger, "Words and the Murder of the Thing," Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1

(2001): 102. 25 D. H. Lawrence, "Hymns in a Man's Life," in Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and

Other Prose Works, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (New York: Viking, 1968),

598-99.

26 Durkheim describes a "revelation" he experienced in 1895, requiring him to take up "afresh" all his previous researches into the social. See Steven Lukes, Emile Durkhdm, His

Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), 237.



Date post:	25-Dec-2016
Category:	Documents
Upload:	bryan-green
View:	214 times
Download:	1 times

Reexamining Literary Theories and Practices || The Social beyond Words: The Case of Harold Garfinkel

Documents