Abstract
The recently published Harold Garfinkel: Studies of Work in the Sciences invites readers to “take the leap” (p. 132) with Garfinkel and his collaborators in approaching the work of the sciences as a matter of practical action. The collection offers a range of materials that, as a whole, provide a sense of how doing so is more than a straightforwardly empirical matter, and can straightforwardly not be a matter of theorization. The leap involves asking: “What kind of science is theoretical physics, if with respect to its every possible technical matter that it could be concerned with, with respect to the full array of technical order topics, it is done as practical action?”
In this sense, the collection is concerned with the ways in which access might be gained to the lived detail of the practical action involved in achieving the observation of a pulsar, achieved not only as the demonstrable work of science in a general sense, but also as the work is organized, understood, and experienced as the work of science, of physics, as that lab’s work, as just that practice, which is the haecceity of disciplinary, and irrevocably situated, efforts at scientific discovery (of a pulsar, in this instance). As Garfinkel describes it, they are after “access to the just-what, just-this; not the ‘somehow’ of that night’s work, but the just-what-how of that night’s work, insofar as the work itself is not different than the lived orderliness of theoretical physicists’ own topic of order, now available as practical achievements” (p. 144).
Readers will likely be familiar with the “pulsar paper” (Garfinkel, Lynch, and Livingston 1981) and, of course, Michael Lynch’s own descriptions of scientific work. The collection works as a companion of sorts to those, and here we are presented with a previously unpublished “companion” manuscript (referred to as the “Respecifying paper”), its appendixes, and a series of five transcribed seminars-cum-lectures. Together, the materials that make up this new collection provide additional insights into the development of ethnomethodology after Studies (Garfinkel 1967), as well as some neat ways of describing ethnomethodology itself issued from the horse’s mouth, as it were, to knowledgeable others. As readers, we get a chance to “peer through the keyhole” as the difficulties of recovering the detail of the scene come into view.
In providing this access, the editor of the collection, Lynch, is to be thanked for the evident care with which the materials are curated; a care that resists the temptation to “interpret” or “translate” Garfinkel’s words. Explaining what Garfinkel might really mean is left to Garfinkel himself. Such explanations are occasioned and furnished, locally, in the course of the writing-and-its-reading and discussions-as-available-on-the-page in the seminars. I am, of course, all too aware that writing a review might find me straying toward translation. For that, I can only apologize and point to the practical circumstances in which I write this piece, and recommend that anyone interested go to the book itself. I do not, here, need to add to the words already expended discussing Garfinkel’s “difficult” writing style. Suffice to say that there is good evidence in the seminar discussions that Garfinkel is not being obscure or obtuse or awkward. He does, however, regularly move the ground, intentionally resisting any sign of the (re-)production or application of doxa, or of things settling down into formulations that miss that sought detail of practical action and the natural theoretic account of the scientists involved in its production. They are hunting the animal, in just the way that the scientists hunted and observed the animal of the pulsar against a foliage of their own achievement.
In my reading at least, the collection offers a significant glimpse of the shifting lay of the land between the two “versions” (we might already be in trouble here) of ethnomethodology found in Studies and Ethnomethodology’s Program (Garfinkel 1967, 2002). The Respecifying paper is marked in part by a series of dissatisfactions and critiques of “ethnomethodology thus far” and an ambivalent treatment of efforts in “analytic ethnography” (see also Rawls and Lynch 2022). In the seminars, we find discussions that incrementally explicate haecceity, embodiment, specificity, the significance of the unique adequacy requirement of methods, and remarks on contingency, objects, and, intriguingly, what Garfinkel glosses as “demonic order.” Perhaps most significant is the emergent emphasis on setting and the contingencies that membership practices must provide for or include (p. 135) over “membership” as some property of individual action. Membership is not necessarily “dumbed down” (as suggested by Pollner 2011) but, I would suggest, better “put in its place.”
The pulsar scientists, Cocke and Disney, are working within an unfolding, contingent scene that is bigger than themselves: “Now now. Now now” (p. 113). This is part of the leap or gestalt switch that Garfinkel is leading us to, recognizing that the scene, scientific practice, the gestalt switch achieved by the scientists are endogenous practical achievements through and through. It might, as Pollner suggested, be seen as a fomenting a move away from the description of practices found in Studies. The “leap,” however, can also be read as a fuller effort by Garfinkel to put practical action and thisness-as-it-happens “in our hands” (besides, Garfinkel reminds us that achievements are somebody’s achievements). For the practices of the “two bozos” at the monitor this means including, producing, and providing for a range of contingencies in play when (potentially) observing that pulsar for the first time. The account of the discovery finds Cocke and Disney not so much “applying” the scientific method as producing and exhibiting it, moment by moment. There is, significantly, an orientation built into their practice to the lab, to the “community,” and, importantly, to the observation of the pulsar as a “local, historicized project” (p. 187, see also p. 177) and a reminder to not see this as answerable by appeals to “common culture” (“the cheapest of cheap shots” [p. 179]).
Far from the scene’s order being understood as “stable,” we are instead shown the scene as capricious. The working of the monitor itself, the availability of the trace, the cold temperature of the lab, the temporal ordering of the setting, that and just how the talk was chained to the screen, and so on makes for a “wildness” (p. 134). And these are practical achievements too. Indeed, in Macbeth’s well-known “basketball paper” we are shown how the very possibility of an errant pass is built in to the practical accomplishment of a scene in which a “good pass” can be made. If Cocke and Disney were to be sure to have their hands on the animal they and others had been hunting, then their practices must provide for that wildness, a wildness not “of the world but of his embodied practices in that place that make up handling machinery, picking it up, turning it around, not looking where he should be looking, tripping over . . . et cetera, et cetera” (p. 134, emphasis added).
In other words, the seminars develop a sense in which the animal might be found-in-place, in the detail of the gestalt, figure-ground, character of the observation, the scene and all its contingencies, and in the practices through which those contingencies were to be managed if the scene was to be accomplished as a scene in which a scientific discovery had legitimately occurred. Part of what is in play at the scene rather than in the description thereof is what Garfinkel begins talking about as the “cunning of objects.” We get to this intriguing juncture right at the point where Garfinkel and Co. have had enough. There is a long pause and Garfinkel asks (for another first time) for coffee. We are left to muse for ourselves how the notion of “demonic order” might help us draw out the animal.
The publication of this collection is well timed indeed. There has been a recent surge of treatments of Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology relating to its “method.” The materials gathered here remind us of Garfinkel’s warnings of hunting the animal in any formalized way. There are warnings against various notions of ethnographic observation and representation (“just so stories”), of interviewing without adequately knowing the field being discussed, of treating the transcript as “evidence” of anything at all, of imagining that “bugging the scene” will bring one closer to detail. Instead, we are led to the “leap” by a whole array of angles that relate to practical action and, notably, of gestalt contexture and figure-ground relations as accomplishments thereof (did you know, the famous duck-rabbit illustration switch lags when one has imbibed alcohol?). As Garfinkel remarks, responding to a question from a present student, “we’re reading Escher to find what the features are of Cocke and Disney’s work.” Getting close to the detail of events is not so easy (see Sormani 2022), and particularly so if one takes seriously the leap in meaning that it is the embodied, practical action that achieves the scene and the presence at that monitor, on that night, that really matters for the doing of astro-physics in and as the natural theoretic work of or for its practitioners. And in that sense, the devil really is in the detail*.