micro - macro

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Sun, 07 Jan 96 19:47:41 EST

Some accumulated responses in our micro-macro discussion:

King Beach seems to me right on track in saying that we need a
unit which looks at 'couplings' of persons and activities (my
'linkages') in a way that goes beyond particular situations. I
have tried a bit in chap 5 of _Textual Politics_ to imagine this
for notions of 'persons', though not very fully since much of
that thinking was done before I'd worked out the more general
issues of self-organization (as in chap6 and subsequently). The
Maturana-Varela autopoiesis notion is of course closely related
to the view of self-organization in networks of coupled or
interdependent actants and activities/practices. But their
version, perhaps with a Buddhist slant, emphasizes the
_negative_: what the system ignores about its environment, i.e.
the source, in their view, of its relative autonomy, whereas the
version I prefer emphasizes interdependence rather than emergent
autonomy. I think the unit of analysis in some ways may be the
same, but used for different purposes.

I am frankly less concerned with the unity and continuity of the
individual as social persona (there's enough of this relative to
the individual as biological system), and more concerned with how
situated our personas are, with how we are _not_ the same from
activity to activity. They are perhaps complementary views.

There may also be something to be said for a notion like 'person-
in-activity', where by activity we mean the social-institutional
activity that is enacted by different actors in different times
and places in the same community and epoch in somewhat the same
ways, and is thought of as a definite activity-type. For now,
when we look at how different activities intersect in various
actors/persons, we get something more like the 'sociotypes' of a
culture or community. That links to what I tried to do in chapter
5.

... I agree with Michael G. that the cycle of need-action-need,
of activity that creates the conditions of possibility and
necessity or desirability of another activity, and so on
limitlessly, is a good way also to link different activities and
situations into their interdependent networks. But I don't think
it will get us the sort of more 'macro' or global relationships
that also 'exist' or at least that we seem to behave and can
certainly construe meaningfully as existing. In some sense we are
_all_ 'analysts' as an aspect of our being 'members', and part of
what we do with semiotic resources is to create possible and
fanciful and purely logical categorical relations among
situations and events which have no physical material connections
that we are aware of. Somewhere in that very large possible set
lie the socially and culturally significant macro-categories of
relationship like class or gender similarities and differences.

... I hope that the sum of what I've been writing this last week
or so makes some dent in Edouard's question, and I'm sorry if it
doesn't. I also did not find [Angel's forwarded quote],
interesting as it was on EM/CA and Garfinkel's trajectory, very
persuasive that the program of ethnomethodology really has a
global/macro perspective to complement its undoubted brilliance
in the micro/local arena of analysis. No doubt as a tool in the
hands of its best practitioners, and probably in its deepest
programmatic aims, it transcends the localist limitations, but
I'm afraid I'm not convinced. I ask of no tool that it do all
things, only that it deserve a place in my toolkit, which EM/CA
certainly does. JAY.

--------------

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU