Introduction

Alfred Schütz’s influence on Harold Garfinkel has been discussed and reassessed controversially throughout the years. These discussions have often focused on the topic of rationality. However, there is another shared theme between them which has received less attention; namely the notion of interactive processes as temporally flowing and sequentially organized. In his first book (1967), originally published in German under the title Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt in 1932, Schütz develops a prototypical understanding of the gradual establishment and interpretation of meaning in interaction. Garfinkel creatively builds on this work, as is particularly noticeable in his early manuscript Seeing Sociologically (2006 [1948]), thereby anticipating crucial insights of later ethnomethodology. In this paper, I shall explore some of the connections between Schütz and Garfinkel whilst acknowledging the differences between their respective approaches.Footnote 1

I will start by giving a brief (and non-exhaustive) overview of previous discussions concerning the relationship between Schütz and Garfinkel and introduce some themes from Seeing Sociologically (2006) which have been recognized by some authors as foundational for the development of ethnomethodology. Subsequently, I will revisit some of Schütz’s ideas pertaining to the phenomenology of time consciousness and the notion of sequentiality in interaction (Schütz, 1967; Schütz, 1945) and consider what ‘early’ Garfinkel picked up on. Further, I will reflect upon possible implications of this heritage not only for Garfinkel’s early but also for his later works. As has been stressed by numerous authors, it is apparent that Garfinkel moves ethnomethodology into an entirely different direction from Schütz’s initial perspective. Nevertheless, Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology does make interesting use of Schütz’s early thoughts on sequentiality, and, in certain regards, carries on the phenomenological tradition, with a focus on the temporal flux of sense making and an appreciation of the original and immediate unfolding of practice over disengaged or retrospective accounts.

A Brief State of Research on the Relationship Between Schütz and Garfinkel

Investigations into ethnomethodology’s theoretical ancestry tend not to be encouraged (Lynch, 1999). Instead, students of ethnomethodology are recommended to “misread” philosophical classics, i.e., to engage in practical phenomena in order to discover for themselves what philosophers and sociologists may be talking about as “real-worldly” events (Lynch, 1993: 117; 1999). By contrast, the relationship between Garfinkel and Schütz has been the subject of quite extensive research (Heritage, 1984; Eberle, 1984, 2008, 2012; Bergmann, 1988; Lynch, 1993, 2004; Dennis, 2004; Sharrock, 2004; Psathas, 1989, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2012; Hammersley, 2019; Meyer, forthcoming).

A recurring question is whether, and if so to what extent, Garfinkel adopted Schütz’s distinction between different “provinces of meaning” (1945) with specific forms of rationality, especially between the rationality of scientific theorizing vs. that of common sense reasoning in everyday life (Dennis, 2004; Hammersley, 2019; Lynch, 2004; Sharrock, 2004; Wenke, 2011). Lynch (1993), e.g., argues that this distinction may have informed some of Garfinkel’s “protoethnomethodological” writings, while it evidently dissolves in his “post-analytic” works. These works explore scientific practice as mundane action and, like all phenomena of order, as inseparable from common sense reasoning (Lynch, 1993). Other authors have made similar distinctions between early and late phases of Garfinkel’s work but align themselves with what they refer to as “classic” or “scientific” ethnomethodology.Footnote 2 It may be no coincidence that the question of this particular aspect of Schütz and Garfinkel’s relationship has been so widely discussed, reflecting the fact that there is still much disagreement or ambiguity concerning ethnomethodology’s own aspirations as a social science or as sociology’s “radical” and “asymmetric alternate” (Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992; Sharrock, 2004; Lynch, 2016; Hamersley, 2019). In any case, across the various commentaries on this relationship, many authors loosely agree on the idea that Schütz’s explorations of the everyday life world had a strong impact on Garfinkel’s early thinking (Eberle, 2008; Heritage, 1984; Psathas, 2009) but that he moved away from Schütz in his later works. This is congruent with Garfinkel’s acknowledgments of Schütz in his earlier publications (1967; Garfinkel & Sacks, 1986 [1969]) as opposed to his later admission that he “abandoned” Schütz as early as the mid-fifties (Rawls, 2006: 4) or sixties (Garfinkel, 2021 [1993]: 22).

However, in light of the successive exploration and publication of works from Garfinkel’s archive, the question of Schütz’s influence on Garfinkel is being re-evaluated, even concerning his earliest work. The early manuscript Seeing Sociologically (Garfinkel, 2006 [1948]) has been credited with providing rare insight into Garfinkel’s theoretical perspective, especially regarding interactional time and sequentiality (Eberle, 2008; Rawls, 2005, 2006). In this manuscript, Garfinkel defines “communication” as “the process wherein the actor treats an array of signs […] and in treating these signs generates further arrays of signs for treatment” (2006: 179).Footnote 3 By speaking of “treatment,” he highlights that this process is not a question of passive automated reactions as suggested by ‘stimulus response theory’ but interpretive and active (Garfinkel, 2006: 179). In what has been considered as an early formulation of the notion of “indexicality” (Rawls, 2005:170; Lemert, 2006), Garfinkel further argues that “as far as the problems of communication are concerned, any sign can signify anything” (2006: 106). Hence, when interacting, actors continuously (though routinely and unproblematically) negotiate the meaning of utterances and actions. Time is a fundamental feature of this process:

the actor may attend in simultaneity to the communicating actions as they proceed, found, for example, in two persons engrossed in conversation. In this latter type the signs are conveyed piecemeal, portion by portion […]. While the one actor conveys his thought through this sequential order of actions, the interpreter follows with interpreting actions. The listener experiences the occurrences of the other’s action as events occurring in outer time and space, while at the same time he experiences his interpretive actions as a series of retentions and anticipations happening in his inner time and connected by the intention to understand the other’s ‘message’ as a meaningful unit. […] The communicator’s speech, while it goes on, is an element common to his as well as the listener’s vivid present. Both vivid presents occur simultaneously. A new time dimension is therefore established, namely, that of a common vivid present. Both can say later, ‘We experienced this occurrence together’ (Garfinkel, 2006: 181)

The meaning of signs or communicative acts is thus established in relation to the whole “message,” while simultaneously co-constituting the message as it unfolds. This may be understood as an early version of ethnomethodological “reflexivity,” in the sense that “the next thing being said reflects on the last thing being said and has the potential to show it in a new light” (Rawls, 2006: 34). Anticipating a further central theme of ethnomethodology, Garfinkel presents practices of sequencing in interaction as a core feature of establishing “mutual understanding” and “order”:

When we say that A understands B we mean only this: that A detects an orderliness in these signs both with regard to sequence and meanings. The orderliness is assigned to B’s activities by A. The ‘validity’ of A’s conception of the signs generated by B are given in accordance with some regulative principle established for A when his return action evokes a counter action that somehow ‘fits’ A’s anticipations. Understanding means a mode of treatment of B by A that operates, as far as A sees it, under constant confirmation of A’s anticipations of treatment from B. Understanding is not referred for its ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ to what the other ‘really’ intended; […]. (Garfinkel, 2006: 184)

The question of how closely Seeing Sociologically (2006) corresponds to ethnomethodology, specifically to Garfinkel’s later works, is a matter of perspective. On the one hand, Garfinkel would later significantly revise if not reject numerous themes of the manuscript. For example, Garfinkel would come to criticize the analytical distinction of “meanings” being assigned to or bestowed upon “signs” by processes of interpretation (Garfinkel, 2021: 25, Eisenmann & Lynch, 2021: 11; see also Coulter, 1971). Instead, he would be inspired by Gurwitsch’s notion of “functional significance” within “gestalt coherence” which “emphasizes the autonomy and self-regulation of meaning structures” (Meyer, 2022: 116). Likewise, themes such as indexicality, reflexivity or sequentiality would evolve into more differentiated forms (Garfinkel, 1967, 2002). On the other hand, similar to the way “early glimmers” (Koschmann, 2012) of ethnomethodology have been identified in Garfinkel’s dissertation (1952), it is indeed possible to recognize notions within the manuscript which foreshadow fundamental themes of ethnomethodology (Rawls, 2006; vom Lehn 2019). Amongst them, one that stands out is a basic form of the notion of ‘sequentiality’ in interaction: the sense that actions and utterances acquire their meaning by virtue of their sequential placement, the idea of a temporally developing and mutually constitutive relationship of actions and context and of a ‘next turn’ displaying the practical understanding of a ‘prior turn’ in interaction. On this basis, it has been argued that Garfinkel elaborates “a sequential relationship between actors in a vivid interactional present that provides a unique theoretical foundation for his later empirical studies of situated practice” (Rawls, 2006: 3) and that the difference between the manuscript and Garfinkel’s later work is “more a matter of degree […] than of substance” (Rawls, 2006: 11).

Against this background, some authors have taken the manuscript as evidence of Garfinkel already moving away from Schütz at a very early stage of his career. For instance, because Garfinkel uses some of Schütz’s terminology, Rawls warns the reader not to conflate both positions, explaining that Garfinkel uses Schütz (and Gurwitsch) as a “jumping-off point” but that Garfinkel means specific terms differently (Rawls, 2006: 3, 25). Vom Lehn agrees concerning the foundational character of the manuscript, arguing that it is “one of the starting-points for the development of the concept of ‘sequentiality’ and the emergence of ethnomethodological analysis of interaction in the 1960s” (2019: 306). He also views Garfinkel’s early initiatives as significantly going beyond Schütz’s “idealizations” (vom Lehn, 2019: 309). On a similar note, (though not referring to the same manuscript) Meyer argues that Schütz inspired Garfinkel in some respects but juxtaposes Schütz’s 'egological approach' with Garfinkel’s interest in the “sequential or ‘scenic’ features of interaction” (Meyer forthcoming).Footnote 4 Such readings draw attention to the highly innovative qualities of Garfinkel’s perspective and to crucial differences between the two authors: Schütz’s work, with its strong roots in phenomenology of consciousness as well as his theoretical approach is in many respects indeed very different to ethnomethodology, devoted to the empirical investigation of embodied practices in concrete situations (Garfinkel et al., 1981).

However, some of Schütz’s own advances on communication that Garfinkel adapts in the manuscript and thus certain connections between the two authors are rarely examined (see however Eberle, 2012: 286). A contributing factor may be that Schütz is frequently associated with ‘cognitive’ and ‘subjective’ themes such as idealizations, typifications or individual projects, which are hardly relatable to contemporary ethnomethodology. I would therefore like to offer an alternative reading, with a stronger consideration for points of contact but without ignoring important differences. To this end, I will revisit some of Schütz’s initiatives concerning communication in face-to-face relationships and consider what resonated with Garfinkel, in order to get a clearer picture of where the latter was ‘jumping off from’ (and possibly where to).Footnote 5

Schütz on Time and Sequentiality: From the “Solitary Ego” to “Vivid Present”

Although most of the references to Schütz in Seeing Sociologically (Garfinkel, 2006) concern On Multiple Realities (Schütz, 1945), I will consider his earliest book (Schütz, 1967), in which he first develops many of the relevant themes.Footnote 6 Likely because the book is based on the phenomenology of consciousness and centered on the theoretical premise of a “solitary ego,” it has rarely been considered relevant within the context of ethnomethodology (see however Eberle, 1984; Psathas, 1989) which challenges these very concepts. Ironically, it is from Schütz’s ‘egological,’ consciousness-centered, and classic social scientific orientation that he develops his model of the sequential production and display of meaning in ‘vivid present’. This leads closer to the threshold of ethnomethodology than might be expected from such a starting point. However, it entails a rather involved argument, which requires tracing certain steps to make the transition from Schütz’s ‘egological’ vantage point to his more dynamic notion of interaction understandable.

At the time, Schütz was seeking to develop a scientific foundation for interpretative sociology (“verstehende Soziologie”) in the context of the dispute between the natural and cultural sciences (Endreß, 2006: 66). For this enterprise, he was strongly inspired by Max Weber’s (2019 [1922]) sociology, whose basic vocabulary and questions he adopts for his own framework. Particularly, he agrees with Weber that the goal of sociology “is to study social behavior by interpreting its subjective meaning as found in the intentions of individuals” (Schütz, 1967: 6). At the same time, he criticizes that Weber did not clarify these terms and merely presupposes the notion of a subjective meaning, rather than investigating its constitution (Schütz, 1967: 13ff.).

Schütz, therefore, turns to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology (2019 [1928]), the second main inspiration of the book, providing an extensive body of work devoted to the exploration of the constitution of meaning in individual consciousness. Husserl was, i.a., concerned with understanding how it was possible that objects could be recognizable to us as specific things with an objective reality despite their situationally varying appearances (Held, 1986: 8). In his view, this is enabled by acts of meaning constituted in intentional consciousness through which the “immediately given” sensual data is “transcended” (Held, 1986: 8). Schütz shares Husserl’s phenomenological aim of “minutely describing the processes of meaning establishment and meaning interpretation and extends it to the realm of the social” (Endreß, 2006: 67, translation LC).

Experiencing and Reflecting

As mentioned, Schütz’s discussion is built on the hypothetical assumption of the “solitary ego” (Schütz, 1967: 45ff.). He draws on Bergson’s conception of “inner durée” (2014 [1910]) and Husserl’s “internal time consciousness” (2019), describing consciousness as a continuous flow of “experiencing” which “goes forward in a uni-directional, irreversible movement, proceeding from manifold to manifold in a constant running-off process. Each phase of experience melts into the next without any sharp boundaries as it is being lived through” (Schütz, 1967: 51). Schütz distinguishes between this process of “experiencing,” i.e., living in the stream of consciousness, and having a meaningful and distinguishable “experience”. When experiencing, we live in our intentionality, within a permanent flow from “here and now” to a next “here and now”. This flow in itself is not yet “meaningful” in this particular phenomenological framework. An experience is only endowed with a specific meaning when our consciousness turns its attention towards the process and reflects upon it, retrospectively (Schütz, 1967: 51). Thereby “an experience” is “lifted out” of the stream of duration and constituted as a discrete entity (Schütz, 1967: 47).

This clear distinction between ‘meaningless experiencing’ and ‘meaningful reflection’ may seem strange from an ethnomethodological perspective which perhaps might rather, comparatively speaking, investigate processes of ‘meaning constitution’ in embodied practice. While Schütz’s arguments are not ‘praxeological’ in this sense, it is important to note that the distinction between ‘experiencing’ and ‘reflecting’ is merely analytical. Some authors who consider Schütz as mostly “cognitive” or “focused on projects” appear to read him as suggesting that we are usually deliberately “thinking” or “making active choices,” in the vernacular sense, about what we are doing (Rawls, 2005: 28, Meyer forthcoming). However, a different interpretation is also possible. Firstly, the transitions between experiencing and reflecting are conceptualized as flexible, consciousness is permanently fluctuating between the two modes and a spectrum of pragmatically determined “attentional modifications”. Secondly, the reflective turning towards the flux of experiencing may happen “in varying degrees of clarity, from one of total vagueness to one of maximum detail” and may concern “taken for granted strata of experience,” i.e., occur tacitly (Schütz, 1967: 80). Thirdly, although within a ‘consciousness-centered’ framework, Schütz did in fact have a deep appreciation for and interest in the specific qualities of corporal action or practice (Grathoff, 1989: 8). In any case, he was not suggesting that processes of meaning constitution and interpretation in everyday life could not take place routinely or “thoughtlessly” (Rawls, 2006: 28). More importantly, by conceptualizing the flow of experiencing as “not meaningful” Schütz is not depreciating it. Rather, he is emphasizing the rich, immediate, original flow of experiencing and the way it is modified through endowing it with a specific meaning. The unique quality and details of the original flow are thereby lost. The significance of the original flow is further highlighted by the fact that the constituted meaning not only depends on our previously constituted experiences as a “meaning context” but also on the specific moment in time, the “here now thus,” from which the meaning constitution takes place (Schütz, 1967: 70).Footnote 7 So, while the distinction should not be taken too literally, it is also worth keeping this reasoning in mind because the distinction informs all of the following steps of Schütz’s argument.

The Ongoing Process of Acting and the Accomplished Action

Because actions are a specific type of experience to Schütz, the same temporal conditions come to play, distinguishing the process of ongoing acting and the act as a constituted unit, i.e., the “accomplished action” (Schütz, 1951: 161). When we act, he argues, we anticipate the act, as if it were completed. The completed act is our projected goal, our “in-order-to-motive,” e.g., I open my umbrella in-order-to stay dry. The motions and acts that make up the completed act as a unit are oriented to this goal. Their meaning is tied to this goal, while they are simultaneously constitutive for the act (Schütz, 1967: 88). The in-order-to motive in turn is itself based on previous experience with actions or means-end sequences of similar sorts. This is what Schütz calls the because-motive, e.g., knowing that rain will make us wet and that opening an umbrella will help to prevent this. Due to the unidirectional flow of consciousness, the because-motive can only be reflected upon after the action has been completed which is “lived-through” as a contingent process of experiencing. Schütz would also distinguish “mere thinking” from bodily actions which “gear into the outer world” and thus bring about “irrevocable change”. He calls such actions “working” (Schütz, 1945: 541), derived from the German “wirken” (Grathoff, 1989: 226), meaning “affecting”.

“Understanding” as a Pragmatic Attribution of Meaning

Schütz further argues that the subjective meaning of an action lies within the specific meaning context of in-order-to and because-motive. Understanding the meaning of an action then becomes a question of recognizing and placing it within this context. At the same time, he specifies that we can never definitely ‘know’ the subjective meaning or contexts of another person because their acts of consciousness are strictly inaccessible (Schütz, 1967: 105). On the other hand, Schütz also stresses that in our everyday lives, we do routinely understand each other quite unproblematically. It is this “state of tension” (Heritage, 1984: 59) between a theoretically isolated consciousness on the one hand and our daily experience of ‘successful’ intersubjective understanding on the other that leads Schütz to the decisive question: How might such understanding technically work? Simply assuming “projective empathy” as other scholars had done before, does not meet his scientific standards (Schütz, 1967: 115). Instead, in phenomenological tradition, he attempts to describe the actual process of intersubjective understanding.

Schütz argues that when trying to understand another person’s actions, we are actually merely reflecting upon our own lived experience of the other (Schütz, 1967: 106) and imagining ourselves in their place.Footnote 8 For example, we would ask ourselves “what would I have wanted to do with those movements?” (Schütz, 1967: 114). He thus concludes that our understanding of other people’s actions is actually a process of pragmatic attribution. Our understanding of another person’s subjective meaning, then, can at best be an approximation (Schütz, 1967: 109).

Communication as Sign-Using Acts and Developing Contexts of Meaning

A next important aspect of Schütz’s conception of understanding concerns communication and the placement of signs (Schütz, 1967: 116ff.). With Husserl, Schütz agrees that signs and what they signify are not naturally or inherently connected. Rather, the connection is based purely on habitual use. Only by virtue of being ‘culturally established’ can a sign be said to have a quasi-objective or shared meaning (e.g., the meaning of a word in a dictionary). “Over and above their objective meaning” though, Schütz argues that signs carry a subjective and occasional meaning. Beyond Husserl’s “essentially occasional expressions” such as “left,” or “I,” Schütz insists that all expressions must be understood by taking into consideration the context of their use (Schütz, 1967: 124). Furthermore, he understands communication and discourse in terms of action, i.e., to be communicative or “sign-using acts”. They require the same technique of understanding action, in the previously mentioned sense of a pragmatic attribution of meaning.

Again, these processes of understanding take place in the specific temporal conditions of time consciousness. Schütz argues that we interpret utterances and gestures from the “here and now” of our own experience in a temporal succession, placing each word in the meaning context of the sentence and each sentence in the meaning context of the whole discourse. The acts and processes leading up to the unit of action are intrinsically tied to one another, providing each other with a continuously developing context of meaning:

In understanding someone who is speaking, I interpret not only his individual words but his total articulated sequence of syntactically connected words – in short, “what he is saying”. In this sequence every word retains its own individual meaning in the midst of the surrounding words and throughout the total context of what is being said. Still, I cannot really say that I understand the word until I have grasped the meaning of the whole statement. […] As the statement proceeds, a synthesis is built up step by step, from the point of view of which one can see the individual acts of meaning-interpretation and meaning-establishment. Discourse is, therefore, itself a kind of meaning-context. For both the speaker and the interpreter, the structure of the discourse emerges gradually. (Schütz, 1967: 125, emphasis added)

The Interlocking of Motives in Interaction and Interactive Feedback

So far, we have considered communication from the point of view of the sign user and the sign interpreter, respectively. Both are bound to the limited conditions of imagining what they would have understood or would have wanted to say by using or experiencing such a sign. Yet, according to Schütz, this process of understanding fundamentally changes as soon as we engage in social interaction, because we then have a concrete experience of the reaction of the other which displays his understanding.This still does not enable us to ‘know’ the private meaning of our partner but improves our chances of approximation significantly. Both participants orient towards the other’s reaction from which they can assess how they have been understood. Thereby, our experience of the other person’s reactions affects our own experiences and meaning establishments. By virtue of this mechanism, the partners’ motives become “mutually interlocked” (Schütz, 1967: 180). Through their temporal succession, these reciprocal attributions are consequential for each next turn and the constitutive context for what will happen next. Moreover, they are witnessable: Each interpretation of an action displays itself in the reaction of the interactional partner, in other words, the reaction is the manifestation or embodiment of the interpretation.Footnote 9Thereby from one “now, here, thus” to the next a shared meaning context is built, (re-)signifying what is being said, what might be said next and even what was said before:

“Social interaction is, accordingly, a motivational context and, in fact, an intersubjective motivational context” (Schütz, 1967: 159, emphasis i.o.). […] What is essential is that the person who is interacting with another should anticipate the in-order-to motives of his own action as the genuine because-motives of the expected behavior of his partner and, conversely, that he should be prepared to regard the in-order-to motives of his partner as the genuine because motives of his own behavior. This insight is of great importance, for it indicates the methods which are used in both everyday life and interpretive sociology to disclose the motives of the other person. (Schütz, 1967: 162)

The “We-Relationship” in “Vivid Present”

This notion of the interlinking of motivational contexts remains the same for all kinds of “affectual relationship,” including mediated forms of communication. However, Schütz particularly highlights the face-to-face situation, the “We-relationship,” as providing unique conditions for the process of understanding. The partners share an immediate material environment, and their bodies and faces are present to each other as “fields of expression in a maximum of symptoms of inner life,” including their tone of voice, glances, gestures, mimics etc. (Schütz, 1967: 178). More importantly though, the peculiar differentiation between experiencing and reflecting as distinct modes of consciousness is now dissolved: While we can never reflect upon our own stream of experiencing without “stepping out of it” through reflection, Schütz argues that in face-to-face relationships we interpret whilst “living through” someone else’s stream of experiencing.

This interlocking of glances, this thousand-faceted mirroring of each other, is one of the unique features of the face-to-face situation. We may say that it is a constitutive characteristic of this particular social relationship. However, we must remember that the pure We-relationship […] is not itself grasped reflectively within the face-to-face situation. […] Within the unity of this experience I can be aware simultaneously of what is going on in my mind and in yours, living through the two series of experiences as one series – what we are experiencing together. (Schütz, 1967: 170, emphasis i.o.)

We can thus simultaneously live in intentionality and engage in the cooperative act of meaning interpretation and establishment. In this “shared vivid present” (Schütz, 1945; see also Garfinkel, 2006: 181), the interactional partners partake in a “community of time and space” (Schütz, 1967: 111) and experience each other in a maximum degree of detail (Schütz 1967: 192), providing the conditions for the most immediate and intimate “understanding” of one another.

Summing up Schütz’s argument: Following the theoretical premise of the basic privacy of meaning constitution in an isolated consciousness, Schütz poses the question of how intersubjective understanding might actually work (Bergmann, 1988: 22). Instead of taking the short cut of a, to him, vague and speculative “hermeneutic empathy,” he tries to systematically reconstruct and describe, how the processes of understanding would unfold step by step from the perspective of partners engaging in interaction. Of course, Schütz’s attempt at “describing” might seem abstract or conceptual (Rawls, 2006: 13f.). Nevertheless, he is, albeit theoretically, zooming in and analyzing in slow motion the minute workings of interactions, including their embodied details (see also Eberle, 2008: 153; Garfinkel, 2006: 181). Moreover, he reconceptualizes the process of mutual understanding as routine methods of understanding based on pragmatic attributions of meaning. In interactions, interpretations of another’s actions or utterances become manifest and available in corporal acts of meaning establishment. In the flow of vivid present communicative acts between participants to an interaction sequentially gear into each other like cogwheels. Beyond merely fantasized meaning attributions, interactions thereby continuously produce empirical feedback for partners to orient to. Thus, Schütz develops the notion of a sequentially developing context of action, which is interactively established and to which each new utterance or action is reflexively tied, from one moment to the next.

Implications for Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology

Garfinkel largely builds on Schütz’s interactional model in Seeing Sociologically, including it in the form of lengthy excerpts and literal quotes (Garfinkel, 2006: 181ff.). On the one hand, as many authors have highlighted, this does not mean to say that Garfinkel did not in certain respects move away from Schütz in his early manuscript or even more so as ethnomethodology progressed. Besides dealing with many other topics, Garfinkel introduces some changes to Schütz’s framework. For instance, by “actor,” Garfinkel is not referring to a conceptually isolated ego but rather to a more progressive idea of “performers of situated identities” (Rawls, 2006: 19). Moreover, his distinct interest in the collaborative constitution of “situated order” is already apparent. By the time Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967) had appeared, Garfinkel had further transformed if not dropped the entire theoretical framework that led Schütz to his notion of interaction: Garfinkel’s investigations do not rely on concepts of meaning constitution or attribution in consciousness, projects, motivational orientation, abstract stocks of knowledge, fictionally isolated subjects, or any kind of traditional idea of subjectivity for that matter (Eberle, 2008; Rawls, 2005). And while some of Garfinkel’s vocabulary was still inspired by Schütz, his focus had shifted.Footnote 10

On the other hand, despite such decisive departures, Garfinkel did recognize and bring to fruition certain potential of Schütz’s ideas on interaction; Schütz himself left this potential largely unexploited and eventually the topic receded into the background against other more prominent areas of interest. (Schütz & Luckmann, 1973). It would then appear that Garfinkel does not develop a notion of sequentiality against Schütz, rather he takes up aspects of Schütz’s notion of sequentiality and creatively incorporates it into his own approach. This is an invitation to reflect upon what Schütz’s argument had to offer for ethnomethodology and how Garfinkel proceeded to transform or depart from these aspects in later developments.Footnote 11

From Private Meaning to Public Order

To start with the most familiar theme, Garfinkel was not interested in the hypothetical constitution of a private meaning in subjective consciousness nor in intersubjectivity in a (already innovative) Schützian sense but instead in the practical and cooperative constitution of a publicly ‘shared’Footnote 12 order (Rawls, 2006: 30, 34). The insistence with which Garfinkel emphasized the “observable and reportable” character of social order (Garfinkel, 1967: 1) becomes even more comprehensible when considering Schütz’s initial premise of the fundamental privacy of subjective meaning. However, against this backdrop, it has been argued that Schütz’s “egological approach” would imply a “method of sympathetic introspection” (Meyer forthcoming; Garfinkel 1953), that “we be mind-readers” (Rawls, 2006: 27) or that “intersubjectivity” would be “lodged in people’s heads” (vom Lehn, 2019: 313). Alternatively, I suggest placing the emphasis on the opposing aspects of Schütz’s argument. Although Schütz starts from an ‘egological’ position and draws on hypothetical “idealizations,” the notion of interaction he develops from this position goes beyond a “first person phenomenology” in a narrow sense. For instance, he introduces the figure of an observer to the processes of meaning constitution occurring within communicative situations. This can be viewed as a stepping-stone for what would later be referred to as the “third-person-phenomenology” (Anderson & Sharrock, 2019) of ethnomethodology. Garfinkel rejects the premises of subjective consciousness or idealizations and does not trace the production of mutual understanding back to such premises. At the same time, he is inspired by Schütz’s opposition to a “‘projective’ theory of empathy” (1967: 114) and by the alternative approach of describing how interactive processes might actually proceed in time and space (Garfinkel, 1967: 40f.). Similarly, Schütz indeed assumes the privacy of meaning as a basis but develops the possibility of observability and description of communicative processes through the idea of the pragmatic attribution and displaying of meaning. In fact, it is i.a. because of the premise of the privacy of meaning that Schütz turns his attention toward the observable cues and feedback produced by sequential turns of meaning interpretation embodied in ‘working’ acts of meaning establishment (Wagner, 1982: 33). Again, this is obviously not the same, but a step toward Garfinkel’s notion of the irreducibly public and contingently accomplished meaning of situated order and the “accountable” dimension of practices (Hirschauer, 2016: 56, 59; see also Koschmann, 2012, 2019).

Both Schütz and Garfinkel highlight the complex and routine ways in which participants themselves – prior and foundational to social science – make sense of the world (Meyer forthcoming). However, their respective notions of “methods of understanding” (Garfinkel, 1967: 31) have distinct connotations, Schütz relating them primarily to stocks of knowledge in consciousness, and Garfinkel to shared practices of situated participants. Nevertheless, Schütz’s notion of understanding already had a stronger ‘practical’ implication than his consciousness-centered framework makes it seem. Moreover, the distinction between experiencing and meaning establishment through reflection is relativized by his own notion of interaction, in which they end up fusing (Schütz, 1967: 170). While Seeing Sociologically (2006) incorporates this concept, in later ethnomethodology there is no such distinction between experiencing and “meaning constitution”. Rather, Garfinkel assumes a non-reflective, but inherently understanding and meaningful practice (Garfinkel, 1967: 31), more comparable to a Heideggerian notion of understanding or being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 1996 [1928]; Liberman, 2013). Similarly, Garfinkel’s early manuscript does work with the concept of attribution (or “imputation”) but already refers to it in a broader sense as a “mode of treatment” (Garfinkel, 2006: 184). When “attribution of meaning” (in German “Sinnzuschreibung”) is not understood as an act of consciousness but rather as a practical way of treating people, objects or actions in a certain manner, one can see how it would have been inspiring for ethnomethodology, e.g., consider ‘passing’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 137; Hirschauer, 1993) in the sense of practically being identified as and corporally displaying a certain gender.

The Temporality of Social Order

Garfinkel’s distinct notion of the temporality of social order structurally resembles the flowing quality of time consciousness and specifically Schütz’s “We relationship” and “vivid present” (Schütz, 1967: 189). The assumed temporal structure of consciousness adopted from Husserl and Bergson, over the series of many steps, eventually leads Schütz to the idea of a temporal course of a sequentially organized communicative space between interactional partners. Comparably, from an ethnomethodological perspective, situated participants to an interaction or practice are oriented to and sensitive to one another and the continuous development of a situation. Through their activities, utterances and glances they display their practical understanding of the situation, while “the situation” is reflexively constituted and embodied by those very activities, utterances, glances etc.Footnote 13

While some aspects of ethnomethodology seemed to have developed or changed over time (see, e.g., Woermann, 2011), its distinct interest in the contingent “temporal ‘succession’ of here and now situations” (Garfinkel, 1967: 68) has remained a consistent feature throughout. Garfinkel’s later ‘studies of work and science’ are no exception.Footnote 14 For example, Garfinkel et al. (1981) examine the discovery of a pulsar by a group of astrophysicists who had tape-recorded their interactions and observations on the night of the discovery. In contrast to other approaches in the sociology of scientific knowledge, the ethnomethodologists do not enquire into “social contexts” or “external factors” that could be quasi-causally related to the discovery. By contrast, they are interested in the actual scientific work involved in discovering the pulsar, i.e., the “hands-on procedures,” the “shop talk” etc. Garfinkel et al. (1981) show, i.a., that observations, measurements, or the assessment of data are not achieved through merely ‘applying’ abstract textbook rules and methods (see also Lynch, 1992, 1993). Rather, based on their embodied skills and in their concrete shared material environment, the participants must discover and negotiate the adequacy of their work in “real time” (Garfinkel et al., 1981: 134), as the situation evolves, through a “moment-by-moment display”. This makes the specific flow of practice a unique accomplishment, raising the question of how the familiarity and adequacy of what is being done is achieved “first time through” (Garfinkel et al., 1981: 134; see also Garfinkel, 1967: 32). Hence, the scientists, through “interactionally produced, recognized and understood practices,” are working out a “temporally achieved adequacy” (Garfinkel et al., 1981: 134). One of the most intriguing arguments of the paper pertains to the relationship of this flux of practices to the discovered pulsar. Garfinkel et al. make the case that the discovery and existence of the pulsar are intrinsically tied to the contingent progression of the work and the specific “local historicity” established within and between each episode of observation (Garfinkel et al., 1981: 139). They emphasize the way the pulsar is practically constituted through the astronomers’ concerted actions and how it transforms as it emerges from only being an unlikely possibility in the beginning of the evening, slowly maturing into an “evidently-vague it,” and finally becoming an actual pulsar: “The optically-discovered-pulsar is referenced as a locally embedded phenomenon whose ‘properties’ are come upon in a developing sequence of locally pointed noticings” (Garfinkel et al., 1981: 149). From the perspective of studies of work:

[o]ne is confronted with streams of embodied action simultaneously identified with ‘material’ arrangements and rearrangements accomplished by one or more parties to the respective discipline. This provides an entirely different basis for analytically elucidating reasoning practices than would be the case when reasoning is conceived as a stream of consciousness in exclusively ‘private experience’. (Lynch et al., 1983:206)

Despite this indeed “entirely different basis,” it is interesting to consider the historical relations and the gradual and complex transitions between notions of “streams of consciousness” to the investigation of “streams of embodied action”. Of course, there are further authors with closely related conceptions of time to consider, most notably Husserl himself (2019, 1970 [1936]) and Gurwitsch (1964). Further inspirations include Merleau-Ponty’s (1962; 1968) investigations on the body and “intertwining” and Heidegger’s (1996) notion of “equipment” and “availability” (Garfinkel et al., 1981). These authors were similarly inspiring to ethnomethodology and, more so than Schütz, to the ‘studies of work and science’ (Garfinkel, 2007; Wiley, 2019; Eisenmann & Lynch, 2021). Nevertheless, although Schütz is no longer a central reference, he did lay contributing groundwork by the specific way he extended phenomenological notions of temporality to the study of interaction, allowing ‘situations’ to come into view as a flux of mutually oriented and interweaving actions. At the same time, as the quote indicates, an important point of distinction in contrast to all the aforementioned precursors including Schütz is ethnomethodology’s commitment to the “empirical examination of actual lived activity” (Lynch et al., 1983: 133, FN10). This leads to the final topic of the discussion, namely the methodological implications of Schütz’s and Garfinkel’s respective approaches.

Methodological Implications

In the Phenomenology of the Social World, Schütz appears fascinated by the “pure We-relationship” (1967: 157), amongst other things due to the immediate quality of the experience of and orientation to a partner’s processes of meaning constitution in “vivid present” (Schütz, 1967: 102). Schütz also holds the face-to-face relationship to be the foundation of all our understanding of the social world, including that of sociology (Schütz, 1967: 181, 184). However, he surprisingly does not consider it as a foundation for his methodology (nor as a topic for empirical investigation in its own right). For instance, he does not recommend methods based on direct social experience such as interviews or ethnography (Schütz, 1967: 214; see also Eberle, 1984:86). This is because for Schütz the relationship between sociology and the social world is not one of “direct social experience” (“Umwelt”) but rather of “indirect social experience” (“Mitwelt”). He was therefore trying to develop a scientifically valid form of those processes of understanding which he attributed to the world of indirect social experience, namely second-order constructs and ideal-types (Schütz, 1967: 235, 198). On the one hand, Schütz argued that common sense reasoning was the foundation of sociology. On the other hand, he was concerned with establishing scientific standards and rules for warranting scientific adequacy that were to set sociology as a science apart from common sense reasoning (Psathas, 1999).

Against this backdrop, one of Garfinkel’s many achievements was to discover the potential of Schütz’s theoretical work for the empirical investigation of actual occasions of practical action (Eberle, 2008; Sharrock, 2004) and to develop diverse recommendations and ‘tutorials’ for exploring such occasions (Garfinkel, 1967, 2002). Because to Garfinkel, practices make themselves “accountable” (Garfinkel, 1967: vii; Lynch, 1993: 14), there is no need for analytic tools such as second order constructs. Rather, ethnomethodology strives to study practices or situations as they unfold, as exemplified above in reference to the astrophysical discovery: The astronomers’ tape plays a crucial role because, albeit with limitations,Footnote 15 it makes the contingent “moment-by-moment” process of the discovery available for inspection (Garfinkel et al., 1981:138, 134; Lynch et al., 1983: 206). In particular, the tape brings into relief many details of the discovery which are lost in retrospective accounts: Garfinkel et al. repeatedly contrast the progression of events as they are available on the tape to the way they appear in the astronomer’s article, later published about the discovery. For example, prospectively or “first time through,” the discovery appears contingent and at times highly unlikely, while retrospectively, after the ‘accomplishment,’ the night’s work becomes “naturalized” (Garfinkel et al., 1981: 136) and the pulsar’s discovery appears to have been inevitable. At the same time, by contrasting the astrophysical article to the original situation of discovery, Garfinkel et al. are not calling into question that such reports routinely function as adequate descriptions of situations or actions “for all practical purposes” (Garfinkel, 1967: 186). Rather, referring to the “genealogical relationship of practices and accounts of those practices” (Lynch, 1993: 1), precisely how a specific rendering comes to account for a situation or phenomenon becomes a topic for investigation (Garfinkel et al., 1981: 138 FN24).

On a similar note, a recurring theme in Garfinkel’s work concerns a “gap” which occurs when practical accomplishments of order are translated into disengaged formal accounts (Lynch, 1993: 287). This includes instances in which analytic accounts of social sciences gloss over the original production of social orders (Lynch, 1993: 290). Such “formal” or “constructive analysis” neither appreciates common sense reasoning as the resource for understanding a phenomenon nor the “work” involved in its production (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1986). Rather, analytic methods or theories often imply bringing order into inherently “messy” processes or of ridding them from “contamination” with common sense reasoning (Lynch, 1993: 219, 285). By contrast, one of ethnomethodology’s goals is to show that and how phenomena achieve their own “natural accountability” (Garfinkel, 2002: 174). Instead of orienting towards abstract scientific standards of method and logic Garfinkel understands topics such as adequacy or objectivity to be temporally achieved features of local orders (Garfinkel, 1967: 31; Psathas, 1999: 55), as mentioned above regarding the astrophysical discovery. The idea, then, is to respect and to investigate how such features are accomplished in practical settings. Consequently, and in contrast to Schütz, Garfinkel promotes a deep and practical engagement of the researcher investigating a specific field or practice and learning the embodied skills involved in understanding and (re-)producing a phenomenon (Garfinkel, 2002: 132; Psathas, 1999).

The notion of “natural accountability” informed Garfinkel’s perspective not only on adequate modes of investigation but also on adequate modes of description or accounting for social orders. Different strategies or themes of exploring this challenge can be found throughout Garfinkel’s work. They range from working with detailed transcriptions of situations (Garfinkel et al., 1981), the so-called “rendering theorem” (Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992), the “unique adequacy requirement of methods” (ibid.), “instructed action” and “detailed” or “careful* descriptions” (Garfinkel, 2002). Without going into the details of these diverse themes, they all have in common that they are concerned with avoiding objectifying or “losing the phenomenon” by translating it into analytic constructs. The goal of these recommendations is to acknowledge the processual, contingent, and becoming nature of social practice and to allow phenomena of order to exhibit themselves (Garfinkel, 2002: 70; Garfinkel & Wieder, 1992: 182).Footnote 16

This obviously stands in contrast to Schütz’s perspective on scientific adequacy (Schütz, 1967: 215ff.) and relates back to the different modes of rationality in science and daily life (Schütz, 1943, 1945) mentioned in the beginning of this paper.Footnote 17 As outlined, Garfinkel challenges such a distinction in multiple ways. At the same time, his ethnomethodological perspective including the notion of “adequacy” still shows some traces of his early occupation with Schütz and with concepts of time stemming from the larger traditions of Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness (2019) or Bergson’s philosophy of life (2014; see also Sharrock & Anderson, 2019: 42). Particularly, it is worth considering the distinction between a rich and contingent flow of existence on the one hand, and a secondary retrospection on the other hand. In continuation of said traditions, Garfinkel places great value in the original flow and quality of experience and practice, associating it with notions of life or being alive (Garfinkel, 2002: 71, 99). Disengaged or retrospective accounts fail to recover the lived details of the immediate flow and bring into relief the contingent process of constitution between practices and accounts as a topic for investigation.

Discussion

The goal of the paper is to highlight a historical connection between the works of Alfred Schütz and Harold Garfinkel regarding the temporal and sequential organization of interaction. To this end, I revisit an argument originating from Schütz’s earliest work on interaction and discuss the similarities and departures between Schütz’s approach and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology. While it has been widely acknowledged that Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology adopted and transformed many of Schütz’s ideas (Sharrock, 2004), the topic of sequentiality is rarely examined in this context. Moreover, in some recent publications, there has been a strong emphasis on the ‘cognitive’ and ‘egological’ character of Schütz’s perspective. These dimensions are certainly crucial to Schütz’s approach and – in direct comparison – underline specific qualities of ethnomethodology such as its pioneering focus on ‘embodied practices’. However, the attributes ‘egological’ and ‘cognitive’ do not entirely do justice to the complexity of Schütz’s work which is equally invested in the realms of action and the social (Srubar, 1988; Endreß, 2006). In this context, he himself already travels quite a distance from his premise of a solitary ego’s acts of consciousness to a more practical, pragmatic and dynamic notion of face-to-face relationships. That being said, it is not only in spite of but also by virtue of the ‘cognitive’ and ‘egological’ aspects of his approach that he develops his specific notion of sequentiality, understood as a temporal flux of mutually oriented, meaning establishing and intertwining utterances and actions. In time, Schütz would turn his attention to other topics and did not substantially follow up on these early initiatives focused on interaction. By contrast, Garfinkel builds on and further develops many of Schütz’s questions and themes for the empirical investigation of “the temporal ‘succession’ of here and now situations” while simultaneously breaking with the majority of Schütz’s premises. Garfinkel’s notion of social order as a practical and public “ongoing accomplishment” no longer relies on theoretical detours such as meaning constitution in subjective consciousness. In particular, and in contrast to Schütz’s more conceptual approach, Garfinkel makes a decisive move towards exploring concrete processes of interaction in empirical details. On the one hand, Garfinkel’s work in certain regards successively moves away from Schütz throughout his career. On the other hand, many themes of the phenomenology of time consciousness, including crucial insights developed from this tradition for the study of social action by Schütz, live on in ethnomethodology. (Re-)considering this heritage in Garfinkel’s work alongside that of many other inspirations may help to elucidate and explore some of his challenging thoughts and recommendations.