Abstract
That the issue of racism is a pressing social concern which requires serious and detailed attention is, for ethnomethodology, not a first principle from which its own inquiry is launched but rather a matter to be considered in light of how mundane actors (both professional and lay) treat that very topic. This paper explores how the assumption of an ontological distinction between social structure and individual agency is integral to the intelligibility of racism as formulated in scholarly accounts. In particular, I explore how recent scholarly treatments of racism pose as problematic the diverse formulations of racial identity assembled through the deployment of various measures, and then seek to adjudicate upon the resulting inconsistency with an analytic heuristic that assumes an underlying or foundational source for the various expressions it seeks to resolve. Further, I explore examples of analytic work that makes use of first-person accounts of racially significant episodes and experiences as a means to document the formulation of the events and actions those accounts describe in terms that warrant a reading informed by the assumption of the structure-agency distinction. I relate the corroborative work that takes place in the research relationships between students and teachers with ethnomethodology’s own project to explore how the efficaciousness of analytic readings of racism entail the pervasive assumption of the structure-agency distinction in order to be rendered them with the sense they have for the various participants involved.
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Notes
This includes efforts to formulate some mode of prioritization between the two, as well as efforts to formulate structure and agency as mutually structuring and structured, though nevertheless ontologically distinct (the most elaborate example of the latter remains Giddens 1984). This ranges everywhere from a straightforward reductionist account to an emphasis on unintended consequences whereby the assumption of an ontological distinction between structure and agency remains crucial for an account of individual versus group action. For a review or the related literature, especially as dealt with in the ethnomethodological tradition, see Hilbert (1992, 1995), Heritage (1984).
This conceptual distinction has been explored elsewhere in discussions glossed under terms of the macro versus micro debate (see contributions to Boden and Zimmerman 1991; Knorr-Cetina and Cicourel 1981, as well as Knorr-Cetina 1988; Schegloff 1991). More recently, Anne Warfield Rawls addresses the same issues taken up in those debates in her editorial introduction to Garfinkel (2002), and for a related discussion from within the very different but no less illuminating approach of a neo-Hegelian, Freudian/Lacanian political philosophy, see Žižek (2006), Žižek and Milibank (2009).
This methodological stance is referred to with the term analytic indifference (see Garfinkel and Sacks 1970; Lynch 1993, p. 190). A typical method employed in constructive analysis is to recruit the work of formulation which participants employ as a way of staking out an independent, analytically warranted site for the formulation of structure and agency by way of accounting for what takes place in those sites so recruited. We shall have occasion to consider just such constructive work in what follows. It should be noted at this juncture, however, that such recruitment does not involve showing how participants formulate structure and agency in pursuit their own situated business, but rather, involves pursuing an altogether different order of business (even where that subsequent formulation could be said to warrant the claims in the participant formulations of which it is an analytic reworking).
For the purposes of their investigation, it affords Picca and Feagin a critical, depth-analytic reading of racist intent to regard the latter formulation as a direct expression of genuine sentiment, which is then said to be mitigated in other settings by social structural constraints. This is based on the premise that underlying those variable expressions must be a single and abiding conviction. In spite of this, however, Picca and Feagin themselves offer no principled criterion on which to base their decision to regard the racial slurs and jokes as the more transparent expression of underlying sentiments. In other words, it could just as easily be argued that the formulation of anti-racist remarks is the more direct of expressions while the use of racial slurs and the like is determined by the social structural demands of the setting in which they are used—say, as a result of peer-pressure among friends, etc. (Potter 1996, pp. 134–135). For ethnomethodology, the matter of what someone actually thinks (versus what they merely claim) is investigated for how that issue itself features as a participant concern (for instance, in remarks like “I don't believe you” or “What do you really think?”). If there is critical business to be pursued relative to the topics that social actors take up in the course of accounting for their own and others’ social relations, it is they—those social actors—whose business it primarily is, and any relation that business might have for subsequently enhancing the insights of an analysis of participants' own formulations is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the situated occasions under scrutiny. This is why, in the analysis here, the topic of racism is not at issue, but rather the topicalization of racism. This includes the argumentatively consequential (for participants of the encounters under scrutiny) formulation of analytic particulars that those like Picca and Feagin, and other critical analysts, pursue. Furthermore, this would include, of course, the very analytic practices Picca and Feagin are shown to engage in here as constitutive of just such an occasion—a point that bears out ethnomethodology's own assertion regarding the immanence of the social as an accomplishment of situated practices.
The relevant quote here is (in remarks made after having raised the matter of being charged by white students of unfairly accusing them of racism, p. 220): ‘It is the task of introductory level sociology courses to teach students that we all participate in larger systems, systems that, for instance, create different opportunity structures for workers, women, and minorities. And if we do our job right, our students leave our classes understanding that there are larger social forces responsible for the patterns of inequality in America. Hence, they also realize that individuals are not personally responsible for the existence of a class, gender, or racial order in America. Thus, we help them understand that their individual-level explanations are, for the most part, deficient and incomplete at explaining big national and international issues.’ Elsewhere, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Gianpaolo Biaocchi formulate the relationship more explicitly (2008, p. 138): ‘These two moments in the theorization of racism have functioned as a “discursive formation” (Foucault 1972) and have kept a more structural (or institutional) view on racism at play as an explanation for “racial” outcomes. By failing to grasp racism as a structural phenomenon, racism has therefore been regarded as (1) a disease afflicting certain individuals, (2) a phenomenon that does not affect the social body and its institutions, and (3) a social problem that has to be analyzed “clinically,” that is, by separating the “good” versus the “bad” apples in the population through surveys on racial attitudes (Wetherell and Potter 1992; Sniderman and Piazza 1993).’ Bonilla-Silva and Biaocchi argue here in very much the same way that Nick Hopkins and his colleagues do elsewhere (1997) that the use of research methodologies by which racism is attributed to individual agency downplay the structural sources of racism. In contrast, an ethnomethodological approach would seek to investigate how the structure-agency dichotomy functions rhetorically in accounts of racism (see McKenzie 2003, Stokoe and Edwards 2007).
In his response to Wetherell (1998), Schegloff (1998) points out that the nature of documentary claims produced in research (and other) settings is such that participants are necessarily oriented to the business of providing the evidentiary material which it is the purpose of the interactional encounter to occasion. Similarly, Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1995) develop this same point at some length in their examination of interview data with subcultural group members.
This ambivalence, in allowing for the writer to manage the implications of her account as a feature of their own warrant, exhibits the pervasive reflexivity (or indexicality) that characterizes dialogic interaction generally (Garfinkel 1967).
Elsewhere (McKenzie 2003, pp. 475–476), I have explored similar circumstances in which claims about the social contagion of racism are made available to render speaker accounts of their own prejudice credible as a warrant to underwrite the anti-racist purposes which it is otherwise the business of the interview to pursue. In brief, the argument involved could be paraphrased in something like the following fashion: “I am a racist because the society of which I am a part is racist. Whatever resistance I may or may not have put against this racism is futile because the values of the society in which I live will ultimately infect me as an unavoidable outcome of socialization processes. This state of affairs, however, puts me in the unique position of being better able to oppose racism since it renders me more effective in identifying racism's pernicious effects.” Put differently, one is construed to be a racist to the extent that their status as such entitles them to understand racism, but not to the extent that they are implicated in the morally accountable demands that their expressed opposition to racism entails for their own racist status. In this way, one can have the advantage of being able to warrant demands for moral accountability on the very grounds for which their position would otherwise be rendered discreditable. The structure-agency distinction is crucial to realizing this argumentative potential.
Garfinkel (1967, partially quoted in Mehan and Wood 1975, p. 146, see also Lynch 2009 for related discussion) follows Mannheim (1952) here. Garfinkel explains (p. 78): ‘According to Mannheim, the documentary method involves the search for “…an identical homologous pattern underlying a vast variety of totally different realizations of meaning. The method consists of treating an actual appearance as “the document of,” as “pointing to,” as “standing on behalf of,” a presupposed underlying pattern derived from its individual documentary evidences, but the individual documentary evidences, in their turn, are interpreted on the basis of “what is known” about the underlying pattern. Each is used to elaborate the other.”’
This would also include his related article in Discourse & Society 11 (co-authored by Princess L. Williams) entitled ‘Demanding Respect: The Uses of Reported Speech in Discursive Constructions of Interracial Contact.' These are both republished/reprinted as chapters 4 and 5 of his 2004 book entitled Talking Problems: Studies in Discursive Construction (chapter titles: ‘Reported Speech in Talking Race on Campus,' pp. 95–122; ‘Demanding Respect: The Uses of Reported Speech in Discursive Construction of Interracial Contact,' pp. 123–147).
Of course, one could object here that the significance of the remarks for this speaker is beyond the ken of an analyst to identify, and that it is therefore unwarranted to consider those remarks as so oriented. This, however, would be to overlook how those remarks acquire their status in analytic uptake. In other words, it is precisely in and through the subsequent analytic formulation of those remarks' significance that they have attributed to them (and thereby acquire, for the purposes of the interlocutors who deploy them in the fashion they do) their confessional status. This is no less so in the case of my remarks here (about Buttny's remarks) than it is of Buttny’s remarks about the significance of his students' remarks (or of their remarks about the white speaker whose filmed comments they analyze)—which only serves to demonstrate ethnomethodology's point (realized in its own methodological orientation) concerning how uptake functions to constitute its object of reference with the situated analytic significance it has (see Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008, pp. 11–15; Liberman 2007, pp. 135–148).
For the analysis of a similar occasion in which a complimentary formulation is employed to foreclose resistance to the implications it otherwise furnishes in the laudatory construal of colleagues' professional performance in accounts of among humanitarian aid workers, see McKenzie (2009, pp. 342–344).
That is, the film subject's own formulation, though not reproduced in Buttny's work, would likely function in the same way that the confessional in Picca and Feagin's account does: as reflexively-oriented to foreclosing the potential to be undermined in ways that both exonerate and sanction the speaker's entitlement to remark upon the social structural basis of talk of which his own contribution is taken to be an instance.
Garfinkel (2002) refers to this particular feature of situated interaction with the term natural attitude. While borrowing this term from Schutz (1967), Garfinkel extends its meaning in such a way that the logical precepts of particular interactional domains are regarded as uniquely adequate to the occasions in and on which they are made relevant. About this, Sharrock (2004) remarks: ‘Garfinkel saw a further implication of Schutz’s conception [of the natural attitude], which was that scientific [i.e., systematized] standards of rationality cannot be recommended as standards for the evaluation of practical action.’ In this regard, Garfinkel’s celebrated breaching experiments (in which, for instance, subjects persistently interrogate the meanings and assumptions informing their interlocutors’ conversational contributions, or treat some event as an instance of something it is not otherwise routinely seen to manifest) are meant to demonstrate this point since they involve a pervasive skepticism that disrupts, rather than enhances, understanding. For related discussion of Garfinkel’s scholarly indebtedness to Schutz, see also Sharrock and Anderson (1991).
Where ethnomethodology differs from constructive analyses as well as certain forms of “critical” analysis is that it regards the transcendent social structure in relation to which the phenomenal particulars of social activities appear intelligible (i.e., the documentary method) as a situated accomplishment. In the natural attitude, of course, that tacit background is assumed to be a given, but in ethnomethodology—involving, as it does, a suspension of the natural attitude—the givenness of that assumption is itself regarded as a situated accomplishment, formulated not just in tandem with (or as a precedent to) but as a necessarily co-constitutive constituent of the unique expression that is said to diverge from that given, as the other side of the coin (or Mobius strip, see Žižek 2006) that is necessarily a condition of the intelligibility by which unique particularity emerges.
In other words, Speaker A's claims could be undermined in remarks like: “Well yes, you Blacks clearly are hypersensitive to everything a white person says, and are inclined to construe it as racist. This is demonstrated by the fact that you're making an issue out of it now. You're drawing inferences about what the white guy in the film has to say on the basis of your (implicit, but no less evident) presumption that it's racially motivated.”
That is, reverse racism. At issue here is the question of what criterion should be employed in defining equality of educational opportunity: racial identity or academic achievement. Note that the analysis of related formulations rarely consider how, if at all, participants pursue more nuanced arguments interrogating the relationship between these two.
Kleiner's (1998) analysis of talk in which undergraduate students appeal to egalitarianism in formulating an account of affirmative action programs in the United States is particularly relevant here. In claiming that third-part speaker efforts to invoke equality are motivated by racism, Kleiner's collaborates with his students in undermining the argument that those third-party accounts seek to develop, rather than simply considering how the grounds they work up are related to argumentative outcome. The objection to the affirmative action policies that third-party subjects voice is made on the assumption that the very egalitarian principles which affirmative action policy is directed at realizing are independently operative in the social circumstances to which they refer in their accounts. Kleiner's own analysis assumes just the opposite in his attempt to recover (what he takes to be) speaker’s racist motivation to account for the details of their talk. As with critical discourse analytic work elsewhere, he seeks to establish an external benchmark of judgment, rather than to pursue the question of how typifying criteria are related to the evaluations they make possible in circumstances where they are invoked.
This same insight is made available in the conversation analytic point regarding how the meaning or significance of a turn-at-talk is generated in the uptake it occasions, where that situated activity regards meaning to pre-exist it: its pre-existent status only has existence in the then here-and-now moment where it is asserted to have meant something (or not, as in the case of conversational repair work) (see Sacks et al. 1974; Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008, pp. 11–21). In philosophical terms, this describes a Hegelian negation-of-negation wherein meaning ‘retroactively posits all its presuppositions’ (Žižek and Milibank 2009, p. 72).
Addressing conventional sociology's remit as against that of ethnomethodology, Sharrock and Anderson (1987) note (p. 294 emphasis in original): ‘An investigation conducted under the auspices of the practical management of social order does not and cannot provide an answer to the question ‘what general principle provides for social order?’ If examined from the point of view of an interest in that question then such an investigation would appear to lack an answer to it. However, such a study does not fail to produce an answer, since it does not try to answer it. It has withdrawn that question and substituted another one.’
For instance, Wetherell (2001, pp. 380–399), in an article addressed to the critical significance of discursive research, elides rather disparate approaches, advocating a sort of methodological eclecticism that she identifies with Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). In the process of so doing, ethnomethodology’s project is systematically misconstrued. This takes the form of subtly introducing assumptions which are themselves contentious and on which much of the issues she addresses implicitly depend. For instance, in describing CDA as a project infused with a deep political commitment to social change, Wetherell remarks (p. 384): ‘The [CDA] analyst is in no sense a bystander or dilettante but someone who chooses to work on pressing social and political problems rather than on issues which can be easily funded or are good for careers. The aim is to feed back the knowledge gained into the political process in a way that is most likely to bring about the desired changes.’ Apart from the gratuitous remark imputing self-serving motives to those working outside of CDA's own program (which would include ethnomethodology), her position entails a range of problematic assumptions concerning the relationship between scholarly investigation and the events and actions that it takes up as the object of its inquiry. In particular, her remark concerning the objective of CDA as oriented to feeding knowledge ‘back’ into the political process assumes a relatively direct relationship between, on the one hand, the production of research findings and, on the other, the formulation of policy within the political processes that those findings are directed at altering (as well as in how policy implementation entails the interpretative work of rendering those findings with the significance they have for the situated circumstances in which they are subsequently applied). This fairly begs the question of CDA’s ‘dilettante’ status that Wetherell works to foreclose here. More significantly, this also belies a neglect for proper consideration of the provision that social actors themselves furnish to render the meaning of related vocabularies available to and for one another (see the debate between Wetherell and Schegloff in the pages of Discourse & Society, Wetherell 1998; Schegloff 1997, 1998; as well as related discussion in Wooffitt 2005, pp. 158–185). For instance, participants work to negotiate the very terms of reference relating to equality with questions such as: “What constitutes equal opportunity?” “How is something to be regarded as fair or unfair?” “On what basis should such questions to be decided?” “In relation to what criteria of judgement is one to determine the ethicality of some particular action?” These questions all reference participant concerns, and participant answers to such questions (where they are made relevant by them) render the significance of their own and other’s actions in the circumstances to which they refer immanent to the occasions where they are made available. Wetherell and her CDA colleagues seek to pursue an emancipatory project where oppressed individuals might be liberated through some sort of intervention into a third order or term by which structure and agency are independently related. This is so even (and especially) where the question of how the terms that define an ontological distinction between structure and agency are taken up by the participants whose formulations critical discourse analysts choose to examine (e.g., in van Dijk's 2008 treatment of ‘cognition’ as the ‘missing link’ that relates structure and agency). Addressing the question of how scholarly practice impinges on political activism, Lynch (2000) seeks to ameliorate the claims of the former upon the latter, noting that (p. 48): ‘Hopes for enlightenment and political emancipation would then return to the streets where they belong.’
In her editorial introduction to Garfinkel (2002), Rawls addresses this unfolding in the context of her related discussion concerning rules and rule following (pp. 34–35): ‘Social events that are already accomplished present themselves retrospectively as a series of steps toward a foregone conclusion. Prospectively, however, they are not at all like that. Mills (1939 [1940]), in his writing on accounts, was one of the first to point out the disjunction between the retrospective and prospective character of social accounts. Accounts, which are retrospective, present action as if it had followed rules or norms, according to Mills. But the actions themselves bear only a retrospectively accountable relation to the rules they claim to follow. They are not actually organized prospectively by “following” rules.’
The relation between ethnomethodological studies and constructive analysis (referred to alternatively with the term formal analysis) is a tricky one in Garfinkels' description. Essentially, though, it involves an approach in which the doing of formal analytic investigation is something that ethnomethodology takes as its object of inquiry—something referred to with the gloss ‘Shop Floor Problem.’ Garfinkel’s point is that shop floor procedures—those procedures (often instructional) whereby members work to account for their activities in the course of their doing those activities—are part and parcel of the business of the doing of those activities which they (the procedural descriptions endogenous to the situated circumstances of their use) describe. Thus, ethnomethodological inquiry does not seek to do away with formal method, if for no other reason than that such method constitutes its own object of inquiry. In Garfinkel's (2002) terms (p. 104): ‘The prize [for sociological inquiry] is one for both technologies [formal analysis and ethnomethodology] that ties both technologies, and that neither technology can have by itself. It ties them in that they are incommensurable alternates. To win the prize not only requires the competence of both, but each requires the competence of the other for itself. And then the phenomenon is only revealed in empirical workplace specifics in related collaborated work-site competence of both.’
Woolgar and Pawluch (1985, pp. 216, 218) discuss this in the context of social problems research: ‘The successful social problems explanation depends on making problematic the truth status of certain states of affairs selected for analysis and explanation while backgrounding or minimizing the possibility that the same problems apply to assumptions upon which the analysis depends. […] [E]very example of the empirical literature displays a common feature: one category of claims is laid open to ontological uncertainty and then made the target of explanation in terms of the social circumstances which generated them; at the same time, the reader is asked to accept another category of claims on faith. Some of these latter claims, especially those about the extent of, or warrant for, a condition could be avoided. However, for social problems argument to “work,” authors cannot avoid the claim for the existence and/or constancy of at least one relevant condition.’
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I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions for improvement to an earlier version of this paper.
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McKenzie, K. Structure and Agency in Scholarly Formulations of Racism. Hum Stud 34, 67–92 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9176-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9176-y