Picking Over Garfinkel’s Corpse (Part 2 of 2)
Posted by jalfro on 2025-03-06
A review of Livingston, E. (2024) ‘Ethnomethodology’s Broken Promise,’ Human Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-024-09770-1
Livingston illustrates what he proposes to be the failure of Garfinkel’s studies primarily with reference to two chapters of Ethnomethodology’s Program, and the paper more recently edited by Lynch (Garfinkel 2022). An interesting feature of all these studies is that they were published long after the fieldwork had been completed. Livingston goes to some trouble to document this, stating for example that the ‘Galileo’ study was conducted “[s]ometime during the mid-1980s” (2024:12). This historical work does little to further Livingston’s argument, but it does highlight a possible further piece of progressive myth making: in her note to the ‘Galileo’ paper, Rawls suggests that: “Much later studies were done by Lynch and Livingston and others, and the emphasis on unique adequacy in science and other professions was carried through.” (2022:267:n6) It is not said what these later studies were, Lynch and Livingston’s fieldwork reports being published at around the same time.
Livingston doesn’t appear to understand the purpose of the ‘Galileo’ study. Garfinkel is not interested in the law of falling bodies (which was, after all, discovered a long time ago) but in the question of ‘the disappearing phenomenon’. It is precisely the reproduction of Galileo’s results (and not his scientific findings) which interests him. It is difficult to know what to make of Livingston’s further suggestion that “Galileo does not demonstrate a law of the “Real Motion of Free Falling Bodies,” (13). What then was the purpose of his experiment, if indeed that is what it was?
Nevertheless, all three papers amply demonstrate Livingston’s complaint: the lack of detailed uniquely adequate description. But is this a ‘broken promise’, or something of a more serious methodological nature? Livingston’s critique rests heavily on Garfinkel’s conception of rendering theorems. The idea is that [the uniquely adequate understanding of the phenomenon] is rendered as {a theoretical description of that phenomenon in which its constituent detail is lost}. This may seem to some to be an inadequate characterisation of the concept, but that’s merely part of the problem. The question is: in what sense is Livingston’s ‘[waiting for the lecture to begin]’, preferable to Garfinkel’s ‘the lecture hasn’t begun’? (9) Of course it isn’t. Livingston himself would not claim that it is. ‘[Waiting for the lecture to being]’ is merely a proxy for Garfinkel’s actual lived experience of waiting for the lecture to begin. But how should that be represented? And does it make any difference?
Livingston was lucky. His discovery, which excited Garfinkel, was that in mathematics, the putative mathematical description (the maths on the page) is a direct analogue to the performance of mathematics as a practical action: if you can read the mathematics on the page, you are performing the mathematical operations – a lebenswelt pair! For Garfinkel, the next task was to produce such a pair from a study of science. Such a description was, as far as I know, never achieved.
This is where the breach occurs. While Livingston continued to follow Garfinkel’s advice to produce careful detailed* descriptions, Garfinkel himself, discovering that such descriptions were never adequate, were always the product of a rendering theorem, or something akin to one (a descriptive technique), looked for another way of approaching the problem. This was clearly an embarrassment; Garfinkel’s ambivalence towards his studies, on the one hand delighted by his findings, while on the other reluctant to publish, may well have been motivated by his feeling that these findings were only ever provisional, there was always a deeper level to be achieved. Furthermore, the findings became increasingly context dependent and ephemeral.
The inadequacy of description, any and all description, presents a more serious difficulty. If descriptive techniques are merely distorting rendering theorems, then where else is there to go? The answer seems to have been that the best way to specify an ‘instructed action’ is through instruction. Garfinkel’s later works (and perhaps even the Studies papers) are best read as instructions as to how to find a phenomenon, rather than attempts to describe one. Ultimately, only by following these instructions and experiencing the phenomenon for oneself can one truly and fully understand it.
Livingston’s careful descriptions are not to be sneered at, but neither are Garfinkel’s attempts to research more recalcitrant topics. Rather than picking over Garfinkel’s corpse, we should be taking forward the many insights he gave us, extending the reach of the analytic techniques he developed, and eventually adding to them.
Filed under Ethnomethodology