Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation)—Project-ID 262513311—SFB 1187, Collaborative Research Centre: “Media of Cooperation”. The authors thank XanEdu Publishing, Fulfillment Partner of Duquesne University Press, for permission to reproduce images from Gurwitsch [1964] in Figures 1–5 of this article.
- 1 Gurwitsch, who was born in 1901 in Vilna, Lithuania, spent much of his early life moving throughou (...)
- 2 The letter is available in the Garfinkel archive in Newburyport, MA.
1It is well known that Harold Garfinkel relied heavily on Alfred Schütz’s sociological treatment of transcendental phenomenology when he began to develop ethnomethodology. Talcott Parsons was his PhD supervisor at Harvard University in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and by his own admission Garfinkel continued into the early 1960s to be what he called Parsons’ “local agent”. However, Garfinkel never fully adhered to Parsonian structural-functionalist theory [cf. Garfinkel 2019], as the perspective he developed on social action and social structure relied heavily on phenomenology, a philosophical orientation that would seem deeply at odds with Parsons’ neo-Kantian approach. Even before working with Parsons, Garfinkel already had taken an interest in phenomenology, and while pursuing his PhD at Harvard he met frequently with Aron Gurwitsch.1 During those meetings, they discussed a manuscript that Gurwitsch initially started to draft in the 1930s, which later was published as Théorie du champ de la conscience [1957] and Field of Consciousness [Gurwitsch 1964, 2010]. The manuscript was based on Gurwitsch’s studies of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. Garfinkel had not yet met Schütz, and in a letter of December 5th 1949,2 in which he introduced himself to Schütz, he mentioned his relationship with Gurwitsch.
I have been fortunate in having as a friend and extracurricular teacher, Dr. Aron Gurwitsch, with whom I have had many conversations about the particular problems involved in an effort of this sort, as well as the problems of general methodological and theoretical significance that result when one addresses a phenomenological critique to such pressing analytical problems in current sociology as the theory of meaning, the theory of objects, the method of verstehen, the role of motivation theories in accounting for change, the logical character of the subjective categories, and so on. I have felt for a long while the need to talk with you, and I have been encouraged by Dr. Gurwitsch to ask for a meeting.
2Garfinkel met with Schütz after sending the letter, and they had further meetings and correspondence. Although he relied heavily on Schütz’s writings through the 1950s, Garfinkel remained interested in Gurwitsch’s work after completing his PhD in 1952 and moving to Los Angeles, where he remained for the rest of his life while working in the sociology department at UCLA. In 1957, Garfinkel and Aaron Cicourel hired a graduate student, Arturo Biblarz, to translate Gurwitsch’s manuscript, which had not yet been published in English, and in lectures and seminars Garfinkel frequently elaborated upon Gurwitsch’s treatment of Gestalt theory.
- 3 Although Schütz is prominently featured in Studies in Ethnomethodology, according to Garfinkel [20 (...)
3Although Garfinkel met repeatedly with Gurwitsch before his first meeting with Schütz and had more personal affinity with Gurwitsch, readers of Garfinkel’s published work through the 1960s could easily conclude that Schütz was the main source of his understanding of phenomenology and a major influence on the development of ethnomethodology. In Studies in Ethnomethodology [1967], Garfinkel only briefly mentioned Gurwitsch while extensively relying on Schütz, especially in chapter 8.3 However, in the decades following the publication of Studies, he continued to turn to phenomenology, but less to Schütz than to Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Heidegger [Garfinkel 2002, 2022], [Garfinkel & Liberman 2007]. He also assigned selections from Gurwitsch’s writings to students and extensively discussed themes from The Field of Consciousness in his graduate seminars at UCLA [see, for example, Garfinkel 2021].
4Garfinkel is best known for having founded a line of research called ethnomethodology, the study of constitutive practical actions in ordinary and specialized settings. Conversation analysis (CA) developed out of ethnomethodology (EM), and the acronym EMCA is often used in reference to the conjunction of the two fields. Although some current ethnomethodologists have retained Garfinkel’s continuing interest in phenomenology, others—particularly in conversation analysis—pay little heed to it. In this article, we argue that, while Garfinkel is explicit in his “misreading” of Gurwitsch and other phenomenologists, that misreading can be used to understand the way language-use is analyzed in CA—particularly in the early work by the founder of that field, Harvey Sacks.
5Despite his long-term interest in the writings of key phenomenologists, in lectures he delivered in the decades following the publication of Studies, Garfinkel frequently advised his students to misread Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Heidegger [Eisenmann & Lynch 2021]. What exactly he meant by such “misreading” is potentially confusing. We agree with Meyer [2022] when he says that, far from misreading Gurwitsch’s writings, Garfinkel read them “in a profound and detailed fashion, producing in his lectures exegeses that are well-founded and philosophically advanced” [2022, 139]. The same could be said about his “misreadings” of other phenomenologists. Clearly, he was not advising his students to misunderstand their writings, nor was he granting them license to settle for casual or simplified versions of the phenomenologists’ writings. Instead, his advice was to make of the phenomenologists’ writings something completely different from what the original authors could possibly have hoped or imagined readers would take from their texts.
6Garfinkel’s proposal might be dismissed as a defensive maneuver, aiming to preempt accusations that he was expositing a misleading, or even perverse, version of the key texts, or was attempting to exaggerate the novelty of his version of phenomenology. Hammersley [2019], for example, suggests that Garfinkel’s ideas were anticipated by those of Schütz and other phenomenologists, and that talk of “misreading” obscures this lack of originality. In our view, however, Garfinkel was offering his students and readers an alternative to an interpretation of textual meaning. Instead of an interpretation, he proposed a respecification [Garfinkel 1991] of familiar topics in philosophy and social theory. Although Garfinkel did assign and discuss selections of readings in his seminars, he put more emphasis on exercises for students to perform. The exercises were designed to be more than illustrations of abstract principles and conceptual themes, as they were designed to exhibit material phenomena and to cultivate understandings of those phenomena through worldly practical engagements.
7Garfinkel introduced such exercises—which he also called “tutorial problems” and “perspicuous settings”—as “propaedeutic cases” [Garfinkel 2002, 149]: cases that provide preliminary instruction and understanding of the production of actions that constitute recognizable social objects and occasions. The problem is that embodied phenomenal details and properties involved in achieving coherence and cohesion in everyday tasks and activities are very easily missed—i.e., deemed unworthy of thematic investigation. They are, as Garfinkel argues, ordinarily uninteresting (seen-but-unnoticed), taken for granted and seemingly unproblematic. Therefore, he utilizes breaching exercises and other estrangement devices to create “trouble”; various ways of making phenomena and their settings available (“perspicuous”) for detailed observation and further investigation. Such “tutorials” raise awareness of evidently trivial, familiar, embodied social skills as highly coordinated work. However, Garfinkel’s tutorials also exhibit how formal analytic identification of elements used in the service of generic representations of social practices contribute to “losing” such phenomena by rendering them into what he called “signed objects”.
- 4 The quote is a paraphrase from the English translation of Phenomenology of Perception in the chapt (...)
8In light of these exercises, Garfinkel’s “misreading” of phenomenology can be seen as a two-sided endeavor. On the one side, he highlights particular remarks and central themes from the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Gurwitsch, and others, and praises them for their insight and profundity. On the other side, he offers an explication that differs from an interpretation of meaning and theoretical significance. For example, in a 1992 seminar, Garfinkel [In press] proposes that his students should try to “explicate a famous remark that Merleau-Ponty once made”. The remark (or “slogan”) is, “Existence is the process whereby the hitherto meaningless becomes meaningful”.4 Garfinkel then asks, “What the hell did he mean? That is to say, not what could you interpret that to consist of, but where in the world could you go to find of that remark that it was speaking of the thing you found in the world? A thing you found as a worldly matter”. He then suggests a “work setting” where one could go to find out what “that slogan is about [...] where explicating it means providing for the hitherto meaningless becoming meaningful in existence’s own glossed detail [...]”. The specific setting he suggests is Rancho Los Amigos, a rehabilitation center in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The informants who would give “instructions for reading Merleau-Ponty” were patients at the facility who would tell of the unforeseen circumstances that led to their catastrophic injuries from, for example, a motorcycle accident that occurred on a route that the rider had taken many times without trouble, and would have been no trouble again “but for” some gravel that happened to have been spilled on the road shortly before he rounded the corner and spun out of control on the loose gravel. This tragic “but for” narrative provides an “explication, that is the setting, as of which, in and as of which, the slogan is provided [...] not only sense, it is provided the phenomena that open up the hitherto meaningless that becomes meaningful. And the existence then is again provided in great specificity” [Garfinkel In press, 7–8, draft copy, emphasis in original].
9Another example is a well-known phenomenological theme—Heidegger’s [1962] example of the broken hammer, which for the frustrated user makes evident the tool’s taken for granted transparency as a “ready-to-hand” extension of embodied action, distinct from a “present-at-hand” thing in an “external world” [cf. Garfinkel 2002, 211]. Garfinkel credits Heidegger with an “incredible neat metaphor”, but then advises students to “ditch the metaphor, as soon as you possibly can. You can’t do it any old way, and you surely can’t do it by thinking your way free. That is to say, if you’re going to be doing it ethnomethodologically, then you’re going to have to go to the setting, and there find that, I call it a perspicuous setting” [Garfinkel 1992a]. Garfinkel devised exercises that disrupt fluent embodied action with inverting lenses and other devices in order to bring under examination the readiness of the hand to move chess pieces as a mundane part of the game or to move a piece of chalk in order to write something on a blackboard and to find an orientation for doing so. Heidegger’s theme becomes evident and examinable, not as a general ontological distinction, but as an occasioned requirement of practical action evident through its breach.
10In the sections that follow, we discuss some of Garfinkel’s misreadings of Gurwitsch’s phenomenological account of Gestalt principles of perception that respecify those principles as organized practical achievements in material fields of social action. Perhaps his exercises could be said to be deflationary in the way they open to investigation philosophical themes that are usually abstracted from daily life; themes to be investigated on the ground of what Garfinkel called “naturally organized ordinary activities”. We begin with a brief summary of some of the themes in Gurwitsch’s [1964] The Field of Consciousness that Garfinkel respecified as practical achievements.
11In Field of Consciousness Gurwitsch asks how it is possible that we perceive an ordered world, and how this organization of perception is achieved. Gurwitsch elaborates how the previous philosophies of perception start from disconnected sense data, elements that need to be grouped together, or, alternately, as with William James, identified with “the continuity and streamlike nature of experience” [1964, 16]. The question then arises of how persons discriminate and decompose distinct perceptions from such a totality of experience—a preoccupation of the Gestalt theory of perception elucidated through the distinction between figure and ground.
12Gurwitsch proposed a radically different approach: instead of starting with unordered sense data, or the unorganized stuff of experience, which then would require either external or internal (learned or unconscious) processes for Gestalts to become organized in perception, Gurwitsch began with experience as already (more or less) organized as an autochthonous achievement. As Gurwitsch stated:
Organization is inherent and immanent in immediate experience, and not brought about by any special organizing principle, agency or activity. [Gurwitsch 1964, 8]
13Gurwitsch then extends this foundational critique to almost “all” theories of perception, arguing that they implicitly retain adherence to what he calls the “constancy hypothesis”. Although more can be said about the relation of sense data and perceiving the world, for Gurwitsch the problem these approaches take up originates in a dualistic conception that “appears in the very distinction between ‘sensation’ and ‘perception’ ” [1964, 88]. Such a dualism, Gurwitsch argues, implies that sense-data are modified by some kind of extraneous non-sensual process, whereas in his view the organizing is an immanent property of experience (in Merleau-Ponty’s [1962] terms, a “phenomenal field property”).
14Gurwitsch’s critique of this dualism resonates with Garfinkel’s take on the problem of social order, as well as with his critique of constructive and formal analysis. In a manner analogous to the way Wittgenstein locates the problem of how words have meaning as a preoccupation that sets philosophy off on a wrong track, Gurwitsch treats the theoretical problem of how perception arises out of sense data as an initial confusion regarding the organization of perception. This also parallels the way that Garfinkel & Sacks [1970] address the phenomenon of indexicality, which philosophers, logicians and social theorists encounter as a problem. Gurwitsch dissolves the problem with his notion of “functional significance”, which does not presuppose that data are separate from experience, and therefore does not treat indexicality as a problem to be overcome.
15Garfinkel elaborates on the meaning of “functional significance” (which Garfinkel formulates as “functional signification”) by starting with a simple demonstration that [1964, 106 ff.] produces with the example of points—of what Garfinkel calls “dots”—inscribed on a page or blackboard (see Fig. 1). He starts by inscribing one dot, and then inscribes another next to it, where the relation of next to and affiliated details, such as left-hand member, right-hand member, the gap between them, and the possibility of inscribing a line through them, arise simultaneously with the inscription of the second dot. Garfinkel calls the contexture of details “phenomenal field properties” arising from a relationship that is observable and demonstrable in and as a Gestalt contexture of the pair of dots, and not an additive feature of the second dot combined with the first one. The phenomenal field properties are endogenously produced as properties, in, as, and of, the developing details of the display, in the “relationship of contexture”: that is to say, the contexture consists of the two dots in relation to the space between and around them.
Figure 1: Redrawn from [Gurwitsch 1964, 106]. Used with Permission from XanEdu Publishing, Fulfillment Partner of Duquesne University Press.
16With the addition of further dots aligned with the first two, more elaborate contextural possibilities become evident. Figures 2 and 3 elaborate the initial pair of dots from Figure 1. Pairs of twos emerge in Figure 2, and those pairings are further modulated and regrouped with variations in spacing exhibited in the four lines in Figure 3.
Figure 2: Redrawn from [Gurwitsch 1964, 108]. Used with Permission from XanEdu Publishing, Fulfillment Partner of Duquesne University Press.
17The essential point for Gurwitsch is that the pairs emerge from the field as pairs, a quality that is not added to perception but is part of it. The autochthonous achievement is evident on the surface of the display and does not require introspective reflection or neurological examination. There is, as Garfinkel [2021] points out in a 1993 lecture on Gurwitsch, no need for abstraction, a theory of signs or language, a concept of pairs, a Euclidian room, or a Gestalt, etc.:
We would find it here in and as the worked over revealed details of the display. So, I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble, let’s say, to say, “see how my brain is working despite the fact that I’m on the verge of a headache”. It has nothing to do with that, and nothing to do with a theory of signs. I didn’t advise you that these are the first terms, for example, having a sense with which then they refer to the senses used and stand in correspondence to an object that these are its corresponding features of. No, we didn’t go to that. What we did instead was to go to the display. [Garfinkel 2021, 26]
18To understand what Garfinkel is saying, it is necessary to pay close attention to how perception is organized in relation to what is made available in the contexture of the display (theme/thematic field and margin). That does not rule out the possibility that we sometimes do learn to see certain figures or schemata in a particular way—but this possibility does not explain the immediate achievement of perception that Gurwitsch is demonstrating.
Figure 3: Redrawn from [Gurwitsch 1964, 110]. Used with Permission from XanEdu Publishing, Fulfillment Partner of Duquesne University Press.
19In contrast to theories that account for the learning of schemata, Gurwitsch emphasizes the importance of how a phenomenal field and its contexture of details is organized and perceived in the first place. He illustrates this with a comparison of two figures in which a letter or numeral is embedded in a more complex figure. In Figure 4, the letter “E” on the right side is superimposed with the lines that make up the geometrical figure on the left side. Although the “E” can be discerned, it is as though “hidden in the foliage” of the larger figure.
20In Figure 5, the number “4” (shown in isolation on the right side) is easier to recognize than the “E’ in Figure 4, when embedded in an array of lines in the left side of the figure. Although the lines that make up the “4” in the center of the figure are crossed by several lines, they are not superimposed by lines that do not “belong” to the number.
Figure 4: Redrawn from [Gurwitsch 1964, 134]. Used with Permission from XanEdu Publishing, Fulfillment Partner of Duquesne University Press.
Figure 5: Redrawn from [Gurwitsch 1964, 134]. Used with Permission from XanEdu Publishing, Fulfillment Partner of Duquesne University Press.
21The fact that we are familiar with the letter E and the number 4 does not explain how we extract the letter and number from the “foliage” in the above figures. These examples make observable Gurwitsch’s argument that recognition depends not only on prior familiarity with concepts or categories of an object (in this case, numbers and letters), but also on the contexture of details making up the field in which it is placed.
22Garfinkel wrote a lengthy footnote in an unpublished piece [in an undated note from the mid-1960s] which also partly appeared in a talk he gave at ASA meetings titled “Sign functions” [Garfinkel 1965]. The following excerpt from this footnote furnishes a useful summary of how he was building upon Gurwitsch:
Because of certain compatibilities with Gurwitsch’s “functional signification”, I called them at the time the title was submitted to the [American Sociological Association] section chairman “sign-functions”. That I no longer use this term in no way changes the debt that these arguments owe to the startling, brilliant, and immensely consequential demonstration that Gurwitsch makes in his book, Field of Consciousness, of the use of the constancy hypothesis in theories of form, including those of every version of Gestalt-psychology, and including Husserl’s theory of the ideality of signs and meanings. Gurwitsch’s studies made it possible to see the prevailing use of theories of form as organizations of elements and their use as Ideals. His own account of an “ensemble of functional significations” is a startling suggestion, which motivates the developments in my studies of indexical particulars as organizationally situated, particular appearances-of-an-organization-of-activities; i.e., the phenomena centering on the organizationally situated events-in-an-order. I am indebted to his work [...] as a method for making “structures” available to rigorous descriptive study that recovers them with full and essential particulars. [Garfinkel, “Notes on Indexicality”, undated, 1963-1967]
23In the next paragraph of his note, Garfinkel addresses the most significant difference involved in moving from a phenomenology of perception to a praxeological phenomenology; that is, moving from perceptual relations explicated from a viewer’s or hearer’s vantage point to the local (temporally and spatially situated) production of actions that are interactionally accountable. Even when Garfinkel uses Gurwitsch’s example of the two points, he turns it into an interactional performance:
The decision to locate actions, talk and accounts in the objects they are recognized features of; the decision to do so as a practice of descriptive sociological theorizing; [...] the decision to use the essential reflexivity of indexical particulars to state the “problem of social order and its solutions”; together with the abandonment of “rationality-by-rule” for the tasks of accomplishing the tasks of sociological inquiry, discourse, reportage,—i.e., for the tasks of accomplishing sociological theorizing—these decisions are mine. I have taken inspiration from Gurwitsch’s writings, but I have no assurance that he would agree with me. In no case therefore are his magnificent writings to be held responsible. [Garfinkel, “Notes on Indexicality”, undated, 1963-1967]
24As noted earlier, Garfinkel proposed what he called a “misreading” of Gurwitsch to effectuate a transition from the perception of a given figure against a background, or of hearing an unfolding melody, to the embodied production of action and interaction. In the case of a melody, he proposes, not to talk about a melody as listened to, or heard, as others play it, but instead he proposes the term “sounded doings”: “We’re talking about playing the melody” [Garfinkel 2022, 142].
25Regarding the phenomenal field properties that arise in the midst of the production of ordinary activities, Garfinkel later exhibited those properties in a seminar with a demonstration in which he enacted the shift from the prevailing focus on individual perception to his distinctive emphasis on embodied production and social interaction. He enacted a sequential and temporal organization by standing at a blackboard, addressing the audience, and then inscribing the first dot. He then paused, while making an argument, before inscribing the second dot, pointing to the blackboard, and then waiting for a response from the audience. With this deliberative enactment, Garfinkel not only referred to, or represented, a phenomenal field; he also inscribed and enacted a field of social practices and praxeological descriptions [Eisenmann & Lynch 2021]. Garfinkel thereby embodied his “misreading” and “re-specification” of Gurwitsch’s demonstration. As Garfinkel put it: “Take Gurwitsch’s findings and then administer them, meaning, they’re the first segment of an instructed action, then go follow them.” That is, “Use those details that [Gurwitsch] offers, and go searching to find the cases he’s talking about” [Garfinkel 1992b, 14].
26Garfinkel displaced Gurwitsch’s discussions and demonstrations of functional signification, Gestalt contexture, and phenomenal field properties from perceptual displays, and respecified them as praxeological activities. For example, Garfinkel & Livingston [2003], Garfinkel [2002, chap. 8] identified “phenomenal field properties” in their observations of queues at ticket counters and other points of service. These field properties included Gestalt properties of contexture and continuity such as “end-of-the-line” and “next”. Such structures were not limited to visible features, such as a photograph or diagram of a line would show—they were more and other than spatial and temporal details in a visual field. They were praxeological achievements of the bodies whose actions constituted the visibility, continuity, and accountability of the queue and its properties. Garfinkel emphasizes this point in a 1983 seminar:
I want to propose about these ordinary organizational things that the formatting consists of in-course practices of searching for such arrangements, finding, marking, holding, saving, reclaiming them. [...] We’re talking here about the aspectual appearances of activities, practices—not of bodily movements, but of persons looking for, finding places in line, using the arrangement of places with which to find a next place, identify what a next place could look like, take up themselves the place in such a fashion as to be witnessably so joining it as to continue the structure that they used to find the place that continues it. [Garfinkel 1983, 12]
27An understanding of what such a praxeological respecification involved can shed light on how ethnomethodology differs from phenomenology. Although conversation analysts rarely acknowledge Gurwitsch or phenomenology, as Meyer [2022] shows it is also possible to find resonance between CA and Gurwitsch. To elucidate how ethnomethodology and conversation analysis respecify Gurwitsch, we will discuss a series of contrasts.
- Viewing a line drawing to demonstrate a Gestalt phenomenon
Practically enacting a Gestalt phenomenon
- Finding the animal in the foliage of a picture-puzzle
Discovering a phenomenon in a noisy practical field
- Hearing a melody
Playing a melody
- Analyzing an utterance
Listening to an utterance-in-its-course as part of a conversation
- 5 Vertesi [2014] points to this difference when she speaks of drawing-as as the complementary activi (...)
28In Gestalt psychology, reversible figures such as Jastrow’s duck-rabbit and Rubin’s face-vase are commonly used for demonstrating abstract principles of visual perception such as figure-ground. The appeal of such line drawings is that they appear to tease-out variable perceptions of the “same” figure on the page, thus demonstrating that seeing involves an active interpretive relationship to the field of perception, rather than being a mere registration of information from the world. Gurwitsch also used such figures, such as the face-vase drawing reproduced in Field of Consciousness [1964, 118], to demonstrate his phenomenological conceptions of Gestalt principles. While crediting Gurwitsch, Garfinkel transposed the achievement from a perceptual to a praxeological domain. As a simple way to appreciate this point, consider the difference between seeing the Gestalt switch in the black-and-white reversible figure of vase/pair of profiled faces in Rubin’s figure, and drawing the face-vase figure on a particular occasion to demonstrate an argument.5 Where the former instance highlights the way (or ways) the viewer sees the figure, the latter is a singular course of material “lived-work” that artfully makes the reversible figure. The phenomenal field, including the contexture of its organizational details, shifts from the viewer’s apprehension of the two-dimensional figure to the graphic artist’s course of embodied work with the tools and materials at hand.
29In a 1980 seminar, Garfinkel addressed the Gestalt theme of figure-ground as a practical achievement:
So the proposal then was that instead of treating the figure-ground structure as an analytic treatment or an analytic feature of the structure, instead of the figure-ground structure being a way of our speaking generally of what perception must consist of, we would speak instead of their achievement being elucidated in that the figure-ground structure was indeed a practical achievement. Then we proposed that other Gestalt themes would then lend themselves similarly to that treatment as practical achievements, rather than, as for example, the theme of the adumbrated object, and the theme of the object constancy, and the theme of the Gestalt switch, and the theme of the relationships of alternativity, and so on. [Garfinkel 2022, 164–165]
- 6 Garfinkel [2021] highlights this difference in his 1993 lecture on misreading Gurwitsch: “It turne (...)
30When, as we discussed earlier, Garfinkel presented Gurwitsch’s demonstration with the pair of dots, he made a conspicuous show of inscribing the first one on the blackboard, pausing, and then inscribing the second, in a way that was paced along with, and accented by, his commentary. The figures in Gurwitsch’s text, which we reproduced above, are signed literary objects: previously composed line drawings reproduced on a page designed to evoke the visual themes—functional signification, phenomenal field, contexture of details—in the text described. When Garfinkel presented his demonstration of the “same” figures, he did so over the course of an occasion in which the contexture of details included, not only the figures he inscribed on the board, but also the sequential and interactional features of just how he accomplished the demonstration with the audience in just the time and place that he did so.6
31A Gestalt theme that Garfinkel frequently invoked in writings and lectures [Garfinkel, Lynch & Livingston 1981], [Garfinkel 2022, Part II] was “extracting the animal from the foliage”. “Animal in the foliage” alludes to a kind of picture puzzle which is drawn to enhance the difficulty of picking a specific figure from a background. One common type of puzzle instructs readers to locate a series of animals or other drawn objects systematically hidden against the background of a drawing of dense foliage. Readers who recall the popular series of picture puzzles “Where’s Waldo?” will recognize the artful way the artists who construct such puzzles hide the outlines of thematic figures by superimposing them against the background of a very “busy” image. A simple example is Gurwitsch’s example, reproduced as Figure 4 above, in which the letter E is hidden in a line drawing.
32Like other Gestalt figures, these puzzles are presented as literary objects and solved through a visual search over the surface of the page, and in discussions of Gestalt phenomena they illustrate the difference between looking at the page and seeing the figural phenomenon it simultaneously depicts and hides. Accounts of scientific discovery sometimes use the animal in the foliage metaphor; indeed, Garfinkel, Lynch & Livingston [1981] themselves use the metaphor when describing the first observation of an optical pulsar by three astronomers on Kitt Peak, Arizona in 1969:
Their discovery and their science consist of astronomically “extracting an animal from the foliage”. The “foliage” is the local historicity of their embodied shop practices. The “animal” is that local historicity done, recognized, and understood as a competent methodic procedure. The “animal” formulates their embodiedly witnessable astronomical competent practices as the transcendental properties of the independent Galilean pulsar. [Garfinkel, Lynch & Livingston 1981, 132]
33The astronomers in this instance were using an optical telescope, and during their observations they were viewing an oscillograph display that showed the developing shape of a possible pulsating pattern of photon data collected through the telescope from a source object. Visual discrimination of a pattern in a developing and noisy display certainly was at stake, but the “animal” for Garfinkel and his collaborators was not simply extracted from a perceptual field. The field in question was an indefinitely elaborate-able contexture of equipment and practices performed within the horizons of known, imaginable, and imaginably unknown electromagnetic sources of a “figure like that” developing on the oscillograph screen, which also becomes apparent at various sections in the transcript of their “night’s work” of “discovery”, e.g.:
Cocke: You don’t suppose that’s really it, do you?
(2.0)
Ca::n’t be:.
Disney: It’s right bang in the middle of the period. (Look), I mean right
bang in the middle of the (sca::le).
(0.8)
It really looks something (from here) at the moment. [Garfinkel, Lynch & Livingston 1981, 149]
34The praxeological grammar brought into relief by the work of extracting the animal from the foliage can perhaps be illustrated by more commonplace instances of what Garfinkel called “looking’s work”. For example, the metaphor can be taken literally, such as in the popular pursuit of bird watching. As many persons who take up that pursuit can testify, “watching” is a misnomer, since much of the activity consists of anticipatory action and search, occasionally resulting in a fleeting glimpse with binoculars. Over the course of any given instance of the activity, “vision” often is placed in the service of looking for, rather than looking at, where “looking” is done by traveling to a promising locale, staying hidden in a blind, keeping quiet, waiting, listening, playing recordings of bird songs or vocally making “spishing” sounds to bring a member of the target species out of the foliage in which it concealed itself.
- 7 See [Coulter & Parsons 1990] for an elaboration and analysis of the many expressions associated wi (...)
35Even more commonplace instances of “looking’s work” are the, often exasperating, efforts to find a missing set of keys, cell phone, wallet, or eyeglasses in a cluttered house. Again, the embodied work is not limited to the eyes, nor is the search necessarily a matter of visual discrimination. In addition to being a matter of looking under things and feeling inside pockets, it involves local-historical recollections and retracing of steps. Accordingly, Garfinkel [1966, 2] noted with reference to Merleau-Ponty that “ ‘perception’ (and other phrases) are glosses for the work of ‘production’ ”. Therefore, Garfinkel proposed to speak instead of “the work of ‘seeing’, ‘recognizing’, ‘suspecting’, ‘scanning’, ‘noticing’, ‘searching for’, etc.”7
36One of the vivid examples Gurwitsch discusses is the recognition and projection of a melody. As with the pairs of dots, for Gurwitsch each note does not carry a singular meaning independent of the functional significations within the Gestalt contexture that is unfolding in time. Each note gains its qualification “within a system of functional significances, that is, as oriented with respect to, and determined by, functional significances of other constituents” [Gurwitsch 2010, 138]. Gurwitsch transposes Bergson’s notion of interpenetration with his insistence on the autochthonous organization of experience within the stream of consciousness:
Preceding notes may well be said to penetrate, or to intervene in, the present note in that the present note phenomenally exists only in its functional significance, is essentially characterized by references to preceding notes, and exists as that which is experienced only by virtue of those references. From the phenomenal point of view, the present note would not be what it appears had it been preceded by different notes. [Gurwitsch 2010, 138]
37Meyer shows in detail, how Gurwitsch elaborates the continuation of a melody in its sequential organization:
The immediate thematic field consists of three tones: the actual (experienced in the mode of “presentation”), the precedent (“retention”), and the one that is expected to follow (“protention”), while the wider thematic field includes the melody played so far as a whole, which we remember, and the rest of the play that we can anticipate based on our membership in a culture, or when we already know the particular melody. [Meyer 2022, 123]
38Gurwitsch’s analysis remains partly within the phenomenological tradition of time-consciousness, whereas Garfinkel’s analysis transposes Gurwitsch’s contextures from phenomenal qualities of perception in relation to an ideal-typical perceiver to the concerted and recognizable production of sequential organization, as demonstrated in the following exercise.
- 8 Sudnow was a tenured professor in the school of social sciences at UC Irvine, but he resigned his (...)
39Garfinkel [2002] describes a demonstration he attributed to Bill Bryant, a student in the UC Irvine graduate program in Social Sciences who enrolled in his seminars at UCLA during the 1973-1974 academic year. Bryant was an accomplished jazz musician who played bass guitar in combos in the Toronto area. He became interested in ethnomethodology as an undergraduate in Sociology at the University of Toronto and before enrolling at UC Irvine. He attended Garfinkel’s seminars at UCLA, and became interested in Sudnow’s work on improvisational jazz.8 Sudnow’s book Ways of the Hand [1978] was published several years later and provided first-person phenomenological description of his progression from being a novice with playing jazz at the piano keyboard to mastering the embodied production of chords and sequences that were hearable as contextural details of competently produced improvisational jazz. Bryant aimed to pursue what Sudnow originally set out to study, which was the ensemble work of members of a jazz combo as they played and improvised together. One essential requirement of such work was keeping time, and Bryant’s demonstration used an elementary exercise with a metronome. The exercise consisted of setting a metronome to a particular tempo, and then clapping in tune with the sounding of the metronome. The trick to be mastered was to occlude the sound of the metronome with the sound of one’s own clapping. If one tried to follow the guidance provided by the metronome the exercise would fail, as the clap would come too late. This was something of a Zen exercise, since the “listening’s work” was successful only when the sounds heard were the sounds of one’s own clapping.
- 9 Thus far, we have not located a recording or notes from the session, and our account is based on M (...)
40For Bryant, the solo exercise with the metronome was an initial step toward addressing the production of a coordinated tempo with other musicians. He designed another exercise to highlight such work, which he presented during the final meeting of the Garfinkel’s seminar in Spring 1974. This was a marathon session, held at Garfinkel’s house, in which students presented their projects. Bryant began his presentation by distributing bottles, cans, spoons, and other noise-making items to members of the seminar. He then played a recording of a popular song that had a particularly noticeable tempo marked by the bass guitar, “White Rabbit” by the Jefferson Airplane. He instructed the “players” to bang their percussive “instruments” in accord with the beat, and together (more or less) they played through several rounds of the song in a chaotic assemblage of laughter and noise.9 Whether successful or not, the exercise managed to transfer the phenomenal field from the heard beat of the recorded song to the seminar members’ embodied efforts to make the tempo as a coordinated assemblage.
- 10 For published versions, see [Garfinkel & Wieder 1992, 189–192] and [Garfinkel 2002, 150–153].
41When presenting Bryant’s exercise in various lectures and publications10 Garfinkel stayed with the solo metronome exercise, but elaborated it with multiple modes or recording:
Imagine that I have a metronome. I select a tempo and set it going. At the same time I turn on the microphone to an audiotape recorder. I also start a video recorder whose camera is focused on the metronome and me, and plug in a digital clock which enters a visual time signal on the videotape. [...] To try out the whole thing I clap to the beat of the metronome. When I do I hear the metronome beat, I hear it in the speaker, I see it on the video screen, I see me clapping, I take note of the registered time values of the metronome arm’s travel, etc., etc. [Garfinkel 2002, 150–151]
42This set-up was guaranteed to produce a plethora of “signed objects”: written notations, recordings, and measures of the metronome beat and of the clapping. The mechanical renderings and recorded measures are “particular to the recording procedure” and available for formal analysis to “indefinite depths of specifying details” [Garfinkel & Wieder 1992, 190]. And yet, none of the renderings of (retrospectively) marking the time can recover the (prospective) “lived” work of making time—a “sounded doing” [Garfinkel 2002, 184]—by clapping in a way that occludes the sound of the metronome. Garfinkel [1995] advised his seminar students to substitute for the word “lived”, the phrase: “the phenomenon done in any actual case” [1995, 12].
- 11 As Schütz [1951] had pointed out in “Making music together”: “The meaning of a musical work, howev (...)
- 12 Garfinkel’s description in the Purdue Symposium on Ethnomethodology of an improvisational comedy t (...)
43When discussing the Bryant exercise, Garfinkel mentioned a phenomenological characterization of “polythetic objects” [Garfinkel 1995, 26]: objects that are only available by reason of their “in-courseness”, and he identified music as the prototype of such an object.11 Although a musical piece can be scored, and a familiar tune can often be recognized after a few notes are played, the music is necessarily temporal; it can be sung, but not described or summarized in a way that recovers its detail. This is especially obvious with improvisational music, where what comes “next” is open-ended and contingent, even when a familiar tune provides a platform upon which the time-ordered and time-ordering events of improvisation are produced.12
44Conversation analysis (CA) is a field founded by Harvey Sacks (1935-1975) that investigates the production of “naturally occurring” interaction, usually through using audio or video recording technology and a specialized transcription system. Sacks worked closely with Garfinkel, starting in 1962, prominently evident in a collaborative paper [Garfinkel & Sacks 1970], though CA eventually became a largely independent field, with connections with linguistics, communication studies, and social psychology as well as ethnomethodology. By far, the best known and most cited paper was co-authored by Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson [1974]. It is unclear to us what, if anything, Sacks and others in CA derived directly from Gurwitsch and phenomenology. While they occasionally mention Wittgenstein and philosophers of ordinary language, often in a qualified and distanced way, to our knowledge Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson never mentioned Gurwitsch, Gestalt psychology, or phenomenological philosophy in their papers and transcribed lectures. However, Sacks could very easily have picked up from Garfinkel a “phenomenological” sensibility with regard to practical order production. Sacks also was a colleague and close friend of David Sudnow’s, when both were PhD students at Berkeley, and later as members of the faculty in the School of Social Sciences at UC Irvine. In Ways of the Hand [1978], Sudnow acknowledged Merleau-Ponty and Garfinkel as his main intellectual sources for the account he gives of his mastery of the keyboard.
- 13 Garfinkel [1992c] alludes to such a reading in one of his recorded seminars on “misreading Gurwits (...)
45Regardless of how little or much Conversation Analysis may have drawn from Gurwitsch and phenomenology, it certainly is possible to use some of Gurwitsch’s themes to illuminate and supplement the distinctive way CA describes order in conversation. Meyer [2022] shows how Gurwitsch’s accounts of Gestalt contexture, continuity, and closure provide cogent understandings of the orderly interactional phenomena identified in CA, such as adjacency pairs and membership categorization devices. An adjacency pair made up, for example, of a greeting and return-greeting, an insult and a riposte, or a question and answer exhibits properties as a pair and not simply as one item followed by another. Although such paired utterances are composed of words, phrases, and sentences, they are produced and made evident through interactionally oriented practical work. A first pair part is not simply a sentence or token uttered by a speaker, it is a first member of a pair. Moreover, the response is not simply an utterance following the first. Even when it is absent, it is a missing part of the pair. The field is the pair, and the utterances are field properties, and parties place them in sequential organizations when assembling conversations.13
- 14 See [McHoul 2005], and [Button, Lynch & Sharrock In press, chap. 2] for further discussion of Sack (...)
46Aside from providing an interpretation of CA’s treatment of order, a (mis)reading of Gurwitsch can provide a basis for unpacking how conversations are assembled in situ. In present-day conversation analysis (CA) “the phenomenon done in any actual case” has largely become a generalized phenomenon exhibited in one after another instance, with the professionally analyzed properties of collections of cases establishing the relevant properties of each constituent case. Although “single case analysis” continues to be recognized as a legitimate undertaking, the very notion of a single case looks beyond the phenomenal field through which just that case was co-produced in situ. This wasn’t always so. Sacks’ lectures and writings were exquisitely clear in locating analysis within the organizational field of an ongoing conversation; a temporal field constituted by various possibilities for action and for what an ongoing colloquy could contingently become. This is especially clear in a manuscript entitled Aspects of the Sequential Organization of Conversation that he drafted in the late 1960s but never published [Sacks 1970]. Much of the material in that manuscript overlapped with his lectures [Sacks 1992].14 His analysis of recorded conversations took advantage of the ability to play recordings again and again, and to transcribe them in detail (eventually using the system that Gail Jefferson invented for denoting silences, intonation, compressed or expanded pronunciation, and so on). However, his analysis in Aspects delved into the participants’ concerted production of singular conversations. Treated in that way, the talk becomes a field of contingent possibilities for speaking, listening, and transitioning between speakers. Accordingly, a speaker’s utterance is not equivalent to a completed line of transcript; it is an utterance in progress, whose grammar projects possible closure or possible expansion beyond a projected ending.
47Sacks focused on recipients’ attention to the lively possibilities associated with a speaker’s expansion of a current utterance beyond what initially would appear to be a projected completion. For example, Sacks [1970, chap. 3] discusses a fragment of transcript of a conversation at a group therapy session for teenagers. A new entrant (Jim) to the session is introduced to three regular members (Ken, Roger, and Al):
Ken: We were in an automobile discussion,
Roger: –discussin the psychological motives fer
(:) hhh/hhhh hh
Al: –drag racing on the streets
Jim: Hm!
48Sacks makes note of how Ken starts an utterance, Roger continues it, and Al completes it; each contribution expanding the grammatical frame of a single sentence, though hearably and accountably (via laughter) it becomes much different from the sentence that Ken had begun. Sacks compares this with sentence completions that occur when, for example, a speaker pauses in an apparent word-search and the recipient provides a word or phrase to complete the utterance. In the case of Roger’s and Al’s expansions of Ken’s utterance, the initial utterance is possibly complete as it stands, but Roger and then Al find ways to “complete” it further. Sacks suggests that in such a case the parties are engaged in working with possibilities in their sequential analysis and doing so from within developing actions that have projectable trajectories that are open to contingent and surprising moves.
- 15 In his introduction to volume 2 of Sacks’ transcribed lectures, Schegloff [1992, xlvi] characteriz (...)
49Sacks explicated conversations from the point of view of speakers, recipients, or overhearers in the midst of singular trajectories of interaction.15 He treated a “sentence” or “utterance” not simply as a formal grammatical unit, but also (to use Gurwitsch’s and Garfinkel’s terminology) as a temporally organized phenomenal field: an action underway, possibly about to come to completion or possibly to continue further. When treated this way, a speaker’s selection of a next-speaker, or a recipient’s self-selection to speak next, are not only alternative rule-governed actions, they also are contingent possibilities in a conversation underway that parties evidently produce while speaking, and monitor while listening.
50“Sentence” is also relevant, and so is sentence syntax, but only as construction devices that are used flexibly to build and project interactional possibilities. A sentence that a speaker initially projects can differ from the utterance that results, such as when a speaker cuts off a sentence that projects completion and rephrases it in a way that projects a further clause [Sacks 1970, chap. 3, 32–33]. Sacks relies upon a notion of “sentence” that is syntactical in certain basic respects; consisting of clauses that make up an utterance that is recognizably complete or not. But his analysis is performed from the imagined perspective of parties who are acting within the unfolding possibilities of a “sentence-thus-far” or an “utterance-thus-far”. A couple of passages from Sacks’ lectures convey a sense of this treatment of speaking and listening as essential to the organization and coordination of talk.
There are occasions when one knows that an utterance is not going to be one sentence long, and doesn’t particularly know how long it’s going to be—but knows also that its structure could be found. At least on some of those occasions, announcing that “a story” is coming may be a way of getting people to listen, if they will, to a structure that they can find a completion of, apart from listening to its syntax. And you may find, e.g., that it isn’t harder—at least in the sense of it taking any longer—for persons, once they know that a joke is coming, to see the end of a joke than it is to see the end of a sentence. That is, they respond to the end of a joke as rapidly as they respond to the end of a sentence. Indeed, in the case of a joke, the speed at which they see the joke is over is a specifically attended issue. It’s criterial of whether the joke is good, or the hearers have a good sense of humor, how fast or slow they are, etc. [Sacks 1992, vol. 1, 682–683]
That is to say, roughly, somebody can say, e.g., “I heard the most wonderful thing yesterday”. Now, one can apparently listen to find what in the following talk will turn out to have been a candidate “wonderful thing”. When you’ve heard what you figure to be the candidate wonderful thing you can then say “How wonderful!” The beginning clues you into what sorts of things you should watch for so as to recognize the end, and also what sort of thing you should announce, having recognized the end. [Sacks 1992, vol. 1, 766]
51Sacks’ analysis of sequential organization-in-its-course highlights contingent relevancies in addition to conditional relevancy. The singular case is not simply one specimen to be classified along with others like it, but is a phenomenal field in which unfolding actions are initiated and attended in a coordinated way.
52It is clear that Garfinkel drew both content and inspiration from Gurwitsch, just as he did from Schütz in earlier phases of his long career. However, he did not simply apply or appropriate conceptual and theoretical resources from Gurwitsch. Garfinkel’s peculiar characterization of “misreading” signaled something other than a line of influence running from Gurwitsch to Garfinkel. While acknowledging deep admiration, he also introduced an element of disruption and disavowal, that may even be considered to call into question the very grounds of Gurwitsch’s approach and the phenomenological legacy.
53Garfinkel’s misreading transposes various theoretical themes from phenomenology, such as “being-in-the-world”, “phenomenal field”, “embodied action”, and “background skills”, to investigations of practical actions that are embedded and achieved in concerted activities. The praxeological shift from Gurwitsch’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to ethnomethodological studies of practical actions is a fundamental reorientation from the coherence of functional significations in spatial and temporal Gestalt-contextures to the vicissitudes of everyday life and social interaction. For ethnomethodology, such contextures—what Garfinkel [2022, Part I, Appendix 3] later called “details”—are embedded in social settings and practical circumstances within the sequential unfolding of activities, which are coordinated in mutual orientations, and prospectively and retrospectively organized. Such organization is recognized, described and interactionally produced as concerted achievements of embodied work.
54Ethnomethodology does not only aim to account for the production and ongoing accomplishment of phenomenal fields and their Gestalt properties and details in embodied and practically oriented actions. It also addresses the witnessable, describable, and instructable (re)production of such “fields of social practices” in everyday life, and finally elaborates how these two sides are intertwined and constitutively related. The notions of practical reflexivity and accountability (the production of observable-describable-recognizable actions) undermine classical analytical dichotomies of production and recognition and of (re)production and description. It is a crucial point, that leads to what Garfinkel sometimes called “lingo” and appears in a seemingly circular manner, e.g., that praxeological descriptions can be seen as part and parcel to what they describe—or as Garfinkel & Sacks [1970] write in their opening paragraph of their formal structures paper:
These properties are sometimes characterized by summarily observing that a description, for example, in the ways it may be a constituent part of the circumstances it describes, in endless ways and unavoidably, elaborates those circumstances and is elaborated by them. [Garfinkel & Sacks 1970, 337]
- 16 In a seminar on “misreading Gurwitsch”, Garfinkel [1992c] urges the participants to do the “summon (...)
55The point and crux of the matter, however, is that Garfinkel & Sacks do not aim at providing more adequate philosophical accounts than those of Gurwitsch or other phenomenologists. Instead, they show how analytic and generic representations, which are based on reductive procedures (formal methods), imagined, ego-logical, and/or isolated elements (such as a “bag of left-hand-members-of-a-pair-of-dots” as a collection of “signed objects”), as well as inferences about invariant essentials, structures, and categories (that introduce yet additional phenomena, whose achievement would have to be accounted for), actually obscure and lose the very phenomena that ethnomethodology is zeroing in on. It therefore can be seen as part of the “misreading” that Garfinkel, especially in his later work, accomplished by positioning praxeological descriptions and instructed actions in the forefront as “Ethnomethodology’s central phenomenon” [Garfinkel 2002, 185]. One way to understand this sense of misreading is that it involves a translation of general concepts, principles, distinctions or “slogans” (such as, “Existence is the process whereby the hitherto meaningless becomes meaningful”) as instructions for locating and investigating particular “worksites” and their practices through which social coherences are made observable and describable. Such a misreading encourages us to seek “tutorials” that make visible the taken-for-granted, easily overlooked and (theoretically) glossed, ongoing achievements of embodied practical action and circumstances in the social world. Thus, “ ‘making the phenomenon available’ again”:16
Where in the world would you go to see just how it is done? I don’t think that’s a gross version of empirical, since ethno[methodology] very quickly came up with the policy that any and every topic in the intellectual history was to be respecified, was eligible for respecification as the workings of, and to be found in the great recurrences of, immortal ordinary society. That’s where you would go. You’d go to find yourself at work in the practical action of daily life. Well, that’s a strange way to do analytic philosophy, but it’s not a strange way to do sociology, I find, although I’m about to let it go at that. [Garfinkel 2021, 27]