social theory

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Sat, 30 Dec 95 23:52:08 EST

I was perhaps too (uncharacteristically) compressed in my
reference to what are often considered the limitations of
ethnomethodological approaches, at least by those who also see a
need for more global social perspectives (whether structural,
network, or self-organizational). I'm not going to spell these
out. A look at Bourdieu's (or Giddens') critique will provide the
main idea in more detail. But I did not mean to say that EM or
its offshoot CA (conversation analysis) was overly psychologizing
(its units of analysis are, more or less, acts, not intentions or
thoughts), only that it looks at individual situations without a
systematic way of viewing them in relation to other, especially
unlike situations elsewhere/when. From my point of view, it is
not enough to say (as Latour also would) that such distal
connections are themselves the accomplishments of a local
practice which needs to be described (they are), because some
such system of connections is necessary to account for a variety
of social phenomena (even granting these 'phenomena' are also
construals). I think many such systems are, so I am looking for
_more_ of them, not for a reduction back to localism. In the
history of sociology, E-M, and more generally the
phenomenological turn of which it was one result, was quite
salutary. A purely 'global' macro-structural sociology is also
woefully incomplete, and very much given to reifying its abstract
categories as causal agents and to a lack of reflexivity. Without
a phenomenology of the social, we would have neither notions like
habitus, nor discourse analysis itself.

In partial response to Judy Diamondstone re chap 4 of _Textual
Politics_, yes of course I think we need to include some sort of
'subjective' perspective in social analysis, and even more
emphatically we need to interpret macro-structural relations in
terms of individual lives and individual events; it's just that
we need to go both ways, back and forth (at least) between micro
and macro in these terms. But because both American culture and
most modern intellectuals' folk-culture views are either
individualistic or localistic (all causes of action are present
in the local scene) or both, we need I think to lean a bit in the
other direction to keep our balance. More extended social,
cultural, historical, and non-local models are also more
'unnatural' for our insights and instincts. We do lapse back into
localism and/or individualism whenever possible, I'm afraid.

I know there are many cultures whose focus is the local social
group rather than the individual, and many that have more
consciousness of the role of history in shaping present action
patterns, but I'm not really aware of any (please let me know!)
that predispose analysts from these cultures who work in
something like the present academic community to more non-local
perspectives. It just doesn't seem to be the case that humans
have evolved to pay attention to very large scale patterns (in
space or time) equally with smaller scale, local ones. Latour's
account of the origins of European modernism in the extension of
networks to global scales may be very helpful, but the impact of
this change on how people see the bases of human activity still
seems pretty limited. The perspective associated with Durkheim
(classically in _Suicide_) is really still quite alien to most
people; so is population biology, ecology, self-organization,
cultural 'determinism', and many other modern perspectives that
construe the relevance of phenomena/patterns which are _never_
visible locally.

Trying to reason our way past local causation models may be an
effect of our embedding in more extended modern networks, but we
are still a long way from creating a corresponding cultural
consciousness. JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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