Abstract
From the outset, Melvin Pollner tried to come to grips with ethnomethodology, especially Harold Garfinkel’s contributions. In recent years he was especially concerned with where ethnomethodology had gone and where it was headed. In Garfinkel’s recent book, Ethnomethodology’s Program (2002), and other writings, Pollner saw a distinctly different version of ethnomethodology in contrast with Garfinkel’s (and others’) earlier work. “The End(s) of Ethnomethodology” represents Pollner’s most polished, if still incomplete, reflection upon the state of ethnomethodology in the early 21st century. This article is published posthumously. Robert M. Emerson and James A Holstein assembled and edited the final text.
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Notes
There is disagreement. Anne Rawls (2002) in particular seems to suggests a continuous and unified position (not only internally but continuous with Durkheim).
Sharrock (2004) identifies several factors that contributed to this uncertainty: “…there was some disappointment that the recent book contained a very long editorial introduction and only a relatively small proportion of Garfinkel’s own writings. Add to this the fact the since the earliest period of his work Garfinkel has preferred to set out his ideas through extensive empirical examples, accompanied only by terse theoretical statements.”
Thus, it is probably a mistake to view these positions as evolving a strict chronological order. Garfinkel provides a plethora of “proto-initiatives,” drawn from a variety of sources, the early mentions of which can be found side by side in early works—perhaps in the earliest published work. The appearance of Ethnomethodology’s Program consolidates the developing change and provides a significantly different picture of what ethnomethodology could be about, Rawls introduction notwithstanding.
To be sure, Ethnomethodology’s Program does review and consider “practices” and there are references to production and work in the accomplishment of a setting—but they receive less attention than the “coherence” of the “phenomenal field” and the “haecceity” (Garfinkel and Wieder 1992) of embodied action.
Garfinkel’s work can be seen as a series of increasingly refined negations: of Parsons, of sociology, of formal analysis, and ultimately of ethnomethodology itself (as yet another instance of exogenous description). The negations are substantive and methodological. In substantive terms, Parsons and mainstream sociology missed central phenomena, most notably the processes through which the fabric of social life is created, experienced and sustained by participants. In methodological terms, any form of representation or analysis came to be seen as hopelessly unable to recover the phenomenon of lived presence. Representation itself is increasingly seen as problematic. Initially, the problematic is that representation is a phenomenon (descriptions are integral features of the settings they describe): no description is complete, save for practical purposes and requires an "etc. provision." Sacks paper on sociological description intimates that sociological description is a constituent feature of the society. Relatedly, there are early intimations of avoiding description by, e.g., becoming the phenomenon or providing instructions to reproduce the phenomenon. Later: sociological description is hopelessly inadequate because it is done under the auspices of alien concerns—or because it is "representation."
This quotation, with the exception of the materials in brackets, appears on pg. 72 of Ethnomethodology’s Program, ending with a footnote referencing “Heath and Winter on “amusia.’” We were unable to locate the source of the full quotation. RME/JAH
To some extent this status was always insecure. Recognizing the primacy of practice and activity (Peyrot 1982), the very notion of “member” or “person” could be transformed into a practice.
In the asterisk, Garfinkel suggests that every setting is a unique form of life. In Wittgenstein’s terms, “Slab” might be a sentence, a request, a description—a who knows what? To understand (if “understanding” is what the enterprise is about), the ethnomethodologist must become an adept practitioner. Hybridity compliments the asterisk in that having severed its ties to sociology (via the asterisk), ethnomethodology affiliates with and merges into the particular domain or endeavor it analyzes. In so doing, however, the ethnomethodologist may become a Wittgensteinian Lion who is no longer intelligible to us, and/or be forced to distort the form of life in order to make it intelligible.
Although Garfinkel abjures radical reflexivity, the movement toward relinquishing ethnomethodology (hybriding, etc.) is a testament to just that reflexivity: an awareness that ethnomethodology itself has become a form of practice which transforms, etc. the phenomenon. Thus, ethnomethodology is advised to vaporize, erase, despise, eliminate, bracket itself. Ethnomethodology is through and through reflexive in the sense of a reflexive appreciation of how it creates/discovers its phenomena—“ethnomethods.”
In his original text, Pollner used the term “deflexivity” in the subheading leading to this section and in a table summarizing this section (see Table 1). He did not, however, return to the term to explain its meaning or use. There are no other mentions of the term in Pollner’s notes. It is likely that the term was coined to capture EM 2.0’s fading interest in radical referential reflexivity. Michael Lynch, who engaged Pollner in extensive discussion of reflexivity, both in print and in conversation, suggests something to this effect. In personal communication with the editors, Lynch speculates that the version of reflexivity that Pollner found in early ethnomethodology, and developed in his own work, was an unsparing examination of how sociological analysis constitutes its phenomena. According to Lynch, Pollner argued that ethnomethodology (EM 2.0) and conversation analysis opted for a more mundane conception of reflexivity as a property of constitutive practices of social interaction, which deflected attention away from the reflexive relations between the ethnomethodologist’s practices and the phenomena studied. “Deflexivity,” Lynch conjectures, may have been a critical reference to that flattening or objectification of reflexivity, turning reflexivity into a property of actions-in-context, while deflecting attention away from the observer/analyst’s own conceptions and production of [actions-in-context]. RME/JAH
But perhaps this is the anticipatory anxiety about which Garfinkel spoke—and which keeps us contained. If so, radicalism is ironically contained by practical sociological reasoning.
An interesting sidelight to this “blackholing” is how ethnomethodology sustains itself as a recognizably distinct enterprise by evading/avoiding/deferring ethnomethodological dictates. The challenges to analytic nerve here are not merely intellectual but practical: Lynch (1993:152) lays out some of the professional cul de sacs awaiting those who might seek to pursue what he refers to as post-analytic ethnomethodology.
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This article is published posthumously. It has been edited by Robert M. Emerson and James A. Holstein. Please address correspondence to R.M. Emerson, Sociology Department, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1551, USA. e-mail: remerson@soc.ucla.edu.
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Pollner, M. The End(s) of Ethnomethodology. Am Soc 43, 7–20 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-011-9144-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-011-9144-z