Instructed and Instructive Actions: The Situated Production, Reproduction, and Subversion of Social Order [1 ed.] 1032230711, 9781032230719

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Extracts
List of Figures and Table
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Foreword: A Brief ‘Backstory’ to Instructed Action • Douglas Macbeth
Introduction: Instructed and Instructive Actions • Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall
Part I: Foundational Issues
1 Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action • Harold Garfinkel
2 Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations • Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer
Part II: Situated Action and Order Production
3 Phenomenal Fields Forever: Instructed Action and Perception’s Work • Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg
4 Joining the Queue as a Newcomer: The Instructably Visible Order of Queuing • Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin
5 Rules as Instructed Actions: The Case of the Surfers’ Lineup • Kenneth Liberman
6 The Use of Everyday Maxims and Proverbs in At-Sea Sailing Instruction • Graham Button
Part III: Instructively Reproducing Artful Activities
7 Artworks as Instructed Objects: An Ethnomethodological Approach to Artists’ Instructions • Yaël Kreplak
8 Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons • Yusuke Arano
9 Performative Teaching and Learning: On the Instruct-ability of Kin/aesthetic Properties • Chiara Bassetti
10 Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work in Yoga and Taiji Practice • Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell
Part IV: Improvisations and Subversions
11 Bricolage in Astronautics: Talk-in-Interaction in the Construction of Apollo 13’s DIY CO2 Scrubber • Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock
12 When Someone Walks Apart: Instructed Action and Its Fragilities • Eric Laurier
13 Protocol Subversion: Staging and Stalking “Machine Intelligence” at School • Philippe Sormani and Luna Wolter
Afterword: Instructed Action as Wayfinding • Douglas Macbeth
Index

Citation preview

Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis

INSTRUCTED AND INSTRUCTIVE ACTIONS THE SITUATED PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND SUBVERSION OF SOCIAL ORDER Edited by Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall

Instructed and Instructive Actions

The contributors to this volume take up the theme of instructed and instructive actions. Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, initiated the study of instructed actions as a way to elucidate the embodied production of social order in real time. Studies of instructions and the actions of following them provide empirical content to the classical theoretical issue of how rules, norms, and other normative guidelines are conveyed, understood, and used for producing social actions and structures. The studies in this volume address novel technologies of instructed action and non-obvious ways in which ordinary actions turn out to be instructive for participants in immediate situations of action and interaction. In some cases, the studies address specialized practical, artistic, and recreational activities, and in others they address commonplace modes of action and interaction. In all cases, they focus on how the manifest organization of specific activities is organized with and without explicitly formulated instructions. This book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in ethnomethodological approaches to research by contributing to understandings of how specific actions are instructed and instructive in the circumstances in which they are produced. Michael Lynch is Emeritus Professor of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University, USA and part-time Research Professor in the School of Media and Information, University of Siegen, Germany. He received his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, in 1979 and has held positions in Sociology, Human Sciences, and Science & Technology Studies at Whitman College, Boston University, Brunel University, and Cornell University. His major fields are ethnomethodology and social studies of science. He has investigated practical action, visual representation, and discursive interaction in scientific and legal settings and has written extensively about conceptual and analytical issues in the social sciences. He was Editor of Social Studies of Science from 2002 until 2012 and was President of the Society for Social Studies of Science from 2007 to 2009. Oskar Lindwall is Professor in Communication at the Department of Applied IT at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Before that, he held a position in Education at the same university and he received PhD at the Department of Communication Studies at Linköping University. His major fields are ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and the learning sciences. He has been the principal investigator in projects investigating dentist education, YouTube tutorials, surgical training, and feedback in higher education. He has also conducted research on lab work in science education, architect education, simulation training in medicine and maritime education, and the teaching and learning of craft. He was the President of the International Society of the Learning Sciences from 2021 to 2022.

Directions in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis Series Editors: Andrew Carlin, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China, and K. Neil Jenkings, Newcastle University, UK

Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis are cognate approaches to the study of social action that together comprise a major perspective within the contemporary human sciences. Ethnomethodology focuses upon the production of situated and ordered social action of all kinds, whilst Conversation Analysis has a more specific focus on the production and organisation of talk-in-interaction. Of course, given that so much social action is conducted in and through talk, there are substantive as well theoretical continuities between the two approaches. Focusing on social activities as situated human productions, these approaches seek to analyse the intelligibility and accountability of social activities ‘from within’ those activities themselves, using methods that can be analysed and described. Such methods amount to aptitudes, skills, knowledge and competencies that members of society use, rely upon and take for granted in conducting their affairs across the whole range of social life. As a result of the methodological rewards consequent upon their unique analytic approach and attention to the detailed orderliness of social life, Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis have ramified across a wide range of human science disciplines throughout the world, including anthropology, social psychology, linguistics, communication studies and social studies of science and technology. This series is dedicated to publishing the latest work in these two fields, including research monographs, edited collections and theoretical treatises. As such, its volumes are essential reading for those concerned with the study of human conduct and aptitudes, the (re)production of social orderliness and the methods and aspirations of the social sciences. On Formal Structures of Practical Action Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Constructive Analysis Graham Button, Michael Lynch and Wes Sharrock Instructed and Instructive Actions The Situated Production, Reproduction, and Subversion of Social Order Edited by Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Directions-inEthnomethodology-and-Conversation-Analysis/book-series/ASHSER1190

Instructed and Instructive Actions

The Situated Production, Reproduction, and Subversion of Social Order Edited by Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lynch, Michael, 1948- editor. | Lindwall, Oskar, editor. Title: Instructed and instructive actions : the situated production, reproduction, and subversion of social order / edited by Michael Lynch & Oskar Lindwall. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. | Series: Directions in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The contributors to this volume take up the theme of instructed and instructive actions. Harold Garfinkel, the founder of ethnomethodology, initiated the study of instructed actions as a way to elucidate the embodied production of social order in real time. Studies of instructions and the actions of following them provide empirical content to the classical theoretical issue of how rules, norms, and other normative guidelines are conveyed, understood, and used for producing social actions and structures. The studies in this volume address novel technologies of instructed action and non-obvious ways in which ordinary actions turn out to be instructive for participants in immediate situations of action and interaction. In some cases, the studies address specialized practical, artistic, and recreational activities, in others they address commonplace modes of action and interaction. In all cases they focus on how the manifest organization of specific activities are organized with and without explicitly formulated instructions. This book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in ethnomethodological approaches to research by contributing to understandings of how specific actions are instructed and instructive in the circumstances in which they are produced”-- Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023022677 (print) | LCCN 2023022678 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032230719 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032245522 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003279235 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Social interaction. | Action theory. | Social structure. Classification: LCC HM1111 .I576 2024 (print) | LCC HM1111 (ebook) | DDC 302--dc23/eng/20230724 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023022677 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023022678 ISBN: 978-1-032-23071-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-24552-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-27923-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of Extracts List of Figures and Table List of Contributors Acknowledgments Foreword: A Brief ‘Backstory’ to Instructed Action

viii x xiii xviii xix

DOUGLAS MACBETH

Introduction: Instructed and Instructive Actions

1

MICHAEL LYNCH AND OSKAR LINDWALL

PART I

Foundational Issues

19

1 Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action

21

HAROLD GARFINKEL EDITED BY MICHAEL LYNCH AND OSKAR LINDWALL

2 Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations

37

OSKAR LINDWALL AND GUSTAV LYMER

PART II

Situated Action and Order Production

55

3 Phenomenal Fields Forever: Instructed Action and Perception’s Work

57

JONAS IVARSSON AND MÅRTEN FALKENBERG

vi Contents 4 Joining the Queue as a Newcomer: The Instructably Visible Order of Queuing

73

LORENZA MONDADA AND BURAK S. TEKIN

5 Rules as Instructed Actions: The Case of the Surfers’ Lineup

100

KENNETH LIBERMAN

6 The Use of Everyday Maxims and Proverbs in At-Sea Sailing Instruction

118

GRAHAM BUTTON

PART III

Instructively Reproducing Artful Activities

133

7 Artworks as Instructed Objects: An Ethnomethodological Approach to Artists’ Instructions

135

YAЁL KREPLAK

8 Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons

153

YUSUKE ARANO

9 Performative Teaching and Learning: On the Instruct-ability of Kin/aesthetic Properties

178

CHIARA BASSETTI

10 Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work in Yoga and Taiji Practice

201

CLEMENS EISENMANN AND ROBERT MITCHELL

PART IV

Improvisations and Subversions

223

11 Bricolage in Astronautics: Talk-in-Interaction in the Construction of Apollo 13’s DIY CO2 Scrubber

225

PHILLIP BROOKER AND WES SHARROCK

12 When Someone Walks Apart: Instructed Action and Its Fragilities ERIC LAURIER

242

Contents vii 13 Protocol Subversion: Staging and Stalking “Machine Intelligence” at School

259

PHILIPPE SORMANI AND LUNA WOLTER

Afterword: Instructed Action as Wayfinding

279

DOUGLAS MACBETH

Index

293

List of Extracts

2.1 [END100311-00:09:06] 2.2 [END101104-27:13:23] 4.1 C19_20200627_kompost_5_003210 4.2 C19_20200509_kompost_3_003000 4.3 C19_20200627_kompost_5_004035 4.4 C19_20200530_kompost_4_003800 4.5 C19_20200627_kompost_5_004000 4.6 C19_20200530_kompost_4_004220 4.7A C19_20200530_kompost_4_003525 4.7B C19_20200530_kompost_4_003525 4.8 C19_20200530_kompost_4_003305 4.9 C19_20200627_kompost_5_004655 4.10 C19_20200627_kompost_5_004800 4.11 C19_20200509_kompost_3_004140 4.12 C19_20200321_kompost_2_003610 4.13 C19_20200530_kompost_4_011050 7.1 Are you ready to clean it 7.2 What can I do for you 8.1 SL1: mottekuru (teaBd in the transcript refers to the teacher’s bodily conduct; teaGz, the teacher’s gaze; AS refers to a stroking gesture in mid-air, i.e., air-stroking) 8.2 SL1: Kohshite (stuGz represents my gaze) 8.3a SL2 8.3b The continuation of 8.3a 9.1 Dance class, advanced 9.2 Company rehearsals 9.3 Dance class, basic 9.4 Dance class, intermediate 9.5 Dance class, intermediate 9.6 Dance class, intermediate 9.7 Dance class, advanced 9.8 Dance class, intermediate 9.9 Company class

40 42 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 83 85 86 88 90 92 94 138 138 157 161 166 167 182 183 184 184 185 186 187 189 190

List of Extracts  ix 9.10 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6

Dance class, intermediate 193 Protocol formulation 265 Introducing Task 1 266 Introducing Task 2 267 Wall destruction 269 Encircling 270 Trapping 272

List of Figures and Table

Figures 2.1 On the left, the seminar leader points at the mirror while saying “blasting all the time on the mirror.” On the right, he points to the mirror while saying “use it for other things.” 39 2.2 On the left, a magnified view of the thumb and forefinger of an endodontic specialist who is working the file down through the length of the root canal using a rotating movement of the instrument. On the right, the seminar leader is commenting on the procedure. 42 2.3 A video with the title “How to crochet for beginners: single crochet stitch.” The excerpt is taken 43 seconds into the video: https://youtu.be/BCDA44Sijx4?t=43. 45 3.1 A procedure for finding the right angle. 60 3.2 Fluoroscopy. Deployment of the stent graft has been initiated as part of the constraining sheath being retracted. 63 3.3 Top: The sequence of images produced during digital subtraction angiography. Bottom: The surgeon holds the instruments in place during the imaging (left) and the selected frame (right). 64 3.4 Two surgeons (on the left) trying to assess the image on the monitor (right). The image shows fluoroscopy with 60% DSA overlay. 65 3.5 Left: DSA with an added cursor. Right: Fluoroscopy with the same cursor retained. 67 5.1 In order to avoid collisions, surfers organize an orderliness of turns. 101 5.2 Sign-posts propose a code for behavior (New South Wales Sport & Recreation). 104 5.3 The Codigo del Surfing photo was taken by Prof. Raúl Sánchez García, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, INEF. 104 5.4 Collisions are a real and always present threat for surfers: Huntington Beach (left) and Santa Cruz, California (right) (photos by Raúl Sánchez García). 106 5.5 A cutting-in violation in Varazze, Italy. 107 5.6 The right way to cede a wave (Klitmøller, Denmark). 108

List of Figures and Table  xi 5.7 Contesting a wave at Swami’s, California. 110 5.8 Looking, and being-seen looking at Santa Cruz, California (photos by Raúl Sánchez García). 115 7.1 View of the installation during the installation work. 137 7.2 View of the page of the 11th operation (Duchamp 1987, not paginated). 142 8.1 The focused line in the 宇 u character and the stroke order 156 of 宇 (my rendering with a permanent marker). 8.2 The teacher’s air drawing and pointing. 157 8.3 Differences between lines (both drawn by the teacher). 158 8.4 The trajectory of the brush in air stroking (line 4). 158 8.5 The trajectory of the brush in drawing (line 5). 158 8.6 The teacher’s instruction. 159 8.7 My drawing. 161 8.8 A comparison of techniques (my drawings). (a) The nuku technique, which swishes a stroke at the end of a line. (b) The tome technique, which stops a stroke at the end of a line. 163 8.9 A comparison of the calligraphy of the teacher and student. 164 8.10 My pointing. 166 8.11 My drawing 2. 168 8.12 The overall process of my actual stroking presented in Extract 8.3b. 170 8.13 The comparison of my own work (the “–>” line represents the nuku technique and the “–•” represents the incorrect version thereof; the circled numbers show the stroke order). 170 8.14 The embodied correspondence. 171 B8.1 The teacher’s drawing (left). My first drawing (middle). My second drawing (right). 177 10.1 (a, b) Instructions, Yoga Festival Berlin, 2012. 206 10.2 (a–d) An attempt at “Left Brush Knee Twist Step.” From left to right: (a) starting position, (b) weight shift, (c) twist with arms and (d) end position. 210 10.3 (a, b) Fish and correction, yoga teacher training, 2013. 212 10.4 (a–c) Partner exercise, yoga teacher training, 2013. 213 10.5 (a–d) First correction phase. (a) Starting position, (b) hands placed, (c) first adjustment, and (d) “co-relaxing.” 216 10.6 (a–c) Second correction phase. (a) “Setting the position”, (b) hip grab, and (c) “come up!.” 217 10.7 (a, b) Weight change. (a) Grip change and (b) slight shift onto the right leg. 218 10.8 (a–c) Hip openings. (a) Hands on hips, (b) “open hip” instruction, and (c) a new sense of “sinking.” 218 12.1 Part 1 – Sean walking apart from or ahead of Tina. 247 12.2 Part 2 – Sean departing and walking ahead. 249 12.3 Part 3a: How Sean’s “move on” should be understood (Tina’s camera angle). 250

xii  List of Figures and Table 12.4 Part 3b – Peter’s camera angle on Tina and Jenny. 252 12.5 Part 4 – What complimenting Sean does (Tina’s camera angle, apart from panel 2 which is Peter’s). 253 13.1 Lateral desktop view of “Thymio” (nicknamed ed in this chapter), two-wheeled educational mobot. (image credit: Mobsya Media Kit, https://media.mobsya.org/ ) 260

Table 9.1 Instructions and instructive actions in the dance studio

195

List of Contributors

Yusuke Arano is Research Associate at Saitama University. Drawing upon Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, his research focuses on various sense-making practices for action, including language, bodily conduct, and the environment. He conducts research on ordinary conversations in Japanese/ English, multilingual interactions, lessons in Japanese calligraphy art and musical instruments, and interactions in museums and repair shops. Recently, he has investigated perception as it is manifested in communication and in writing, drawing, and figuring in interaction. Chiara Bassetti is Assistant Professor of Qualitative Methods at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento and a researcher at the Italian National Research Council (CNR). She specializes in ethnography, ethnomethodology, and conversation analysis. Her focus rests on the performative, embodied, and affective aspects of interaction, and the role of artifacts and technologies, particularly in the workplace and in learning. Empirically, her research ranges from creative practices and performing arts such as dance and music, to complex socio-technical systems such as medical emergency centers and airport security, to the home, sociable interaction, and intimate relationships. She has also led projects exploring everyday collaboration in grassroots initiatives for socioeconomic innovation. She often works in interdisciplinary teams, contributing to the design of diverse technologies. She is Co-Editor in Chief of the journal Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa. Phillip Brooker is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Liverpool. Having received his PhD at the University of Manchester in 2013, an investigation of the work of computing programming in postgraduate science and engineering research, Phillip has gone on to pursue a number of research interests broadly unified by the application of ethnomethodological thinking to social and collaborative computing and technology development/usage. Domains of study have included scientific research and education, amateur music production, artificial intelligence, human spaceflight, and digital/computational methods in the social sciences. Phillip has published a recent volume on the latter of these – Programming with Python for Social Scientists (SAGE, 2019) – and is currently working on a monograph entitled Living and Working in Space:

xiv  List of Contributors An Ethnomethodological Study of Skylab (Manchester University Press, 2024), which (re)uses legacy materials captured by NASA to explore the praxeological aspects of living and working aboard a space station. Graham Button is former Professor and Pro-Vice Chancellor for Arts, Computing, Engineering, and Sciences at Sheffield Hallam University. Prior to that, he was the Laboratory Director for Xerox’s Grenoble and Cambridge Research Centres. He has pursued ethnomethodological and conversation analytic research since 1973, gaining his PhD at the University of Manchester in 1975. His most recent book is co-authored with Michael Lynch and Wes Sharrock: Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis, and Constructive Analysis: On Formal Structures of Practical Action (Routledge, 2022). Clemens Eisenmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Universities of Konstanz and Siegen (Germany). His research areas range from social theory, sociology of the body, medicine, religion, and media studies to interaction analysis, ethnomethodology, and qualitative methods. His dissertation research at Bielefeld University explored spirituality in contemporary yoga as social practice. He studied Sociology, Philosophy, and Psychology at the University of Augsburg and has taught for many years in the fields of social theory, sociology of culture, and qualitative methods. His recent publications include “Introduction to Harold Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological ‘Misreading’ of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field” (with Michael Lynch, 2021) and “Spirituality as Social Practice” (in German, 2022). Mårten Falkenberg is a Professor of Vascular Intervention at the University of Gothenburg. He is a consultant vascular surgeon and interventional radiologist. He is also a clinical researcher with a focus on image-guided minimally invasive techniques. His educational work includes advanced courses and a methodology book on endovascular interventions. His research interests span from surgery and interventional radiology to microbiology and image analysis. He is the principal investigator of the SWEDEPAD trials. Jonas Ivarsson is a professor of informatics with a background in communication studies and education. He has been the principal investigator of several interdisciplinary research projects in various settings. With a basis in ethnomethodology, he has been working on advancing the methods for using video in ethnographic research and explored topics such as assessment practices in higher education, the role of technologies in architectural education, practices of design research, and expertise and technology shifts in medical imaging. His latest research explores the area of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence – addressing the interplay between humans and machines in the context of artificial intelligence. Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) was Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the founder of ethnomethodology. His best-known book is Studies in Ethnomethodology (Prentice Hall, 1967; Second Edition,

List of Contributors  xv Polity Press, 1974). A recent collection of his writings and lectures on the natural and social sciences is Harold Garfinkel: Studies of Work in the Sciences (edited by Michael Lynch, Routledge, 2022). Yaël Kreplak is Associate Professor at Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, where she holds the Delphine Lévy Chair, attached to the Cultural and Social History of Art research center. She specializes in ethnomethodology, the analysis of situated action, and conversation analysis. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in art institutions, she develops a praxeological approach to artworks that pays attention to processes of publicization and practices of exhibition-making, conservation, restoration, and documentation. In line with her research activities, she is involved in projects with artists and regularly teaches in art schools. She coordinated the “Readings in ethnomethodology” seminar at the EHESS (Paris) for several years and is a member of the editorial board of Ethnographic Studies. Eric Laurier is Reader in Geography and Interaction at the Institute of Geography & the Lived Environment, University of Edinburgh. Currently, he is studying how trouble in public spaces is made and responded to. He has an ongoing interest in personal and public relationships as they manifest in practices such as map-reading, driving, eating, and drinking together. In the past, he has examined café life, film production, and the uses of mobile media. Kenneth Liberman is Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon. He has completed ethnomethodological studies of mundane interaction among traditional Australian Aboriginal people (Understanding Interaction in Central Australia, Routledge, 1985), of the practices of reasoning of Tibetan scholar-monks (Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture, Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), and of coffee tasting by professional coffee tasters in 14 countries (Tasting Coffee, SUNY Press, 2022). He provided a detailed ethnomethodological account and assessment of sophistry based on a video-recorded Tibetan debate in his Husserl’s Criticism of Reason (Lexington Books, 2007). His books More Studies in Ethnomethodology (SUNY Press, 2013) and Tasting Coffee both won the Distinguished Book Award from the EMCA Section of the American Sociological Association. He has been a surfer since he arrived at UC San Diego in 1970. Oskar Lindwall is a Professor in Communication at the Department of Applied IT at the University of Gothenburg. Before that, he held a position in Education at the same university and he received PhD at the Department of Communication Studies at Linköping University. His major fields are ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and the learning sciences. He has been the principal investigator in projects investigating dentist education, YouTube tutorials, surgical training, and feedback in higher education. He has also conducted research on conversational agents, architect education, simulation training in medicine and maritime education, and the teaching and learning of handicrafts. Gustav Lymer is an Associate Professor in Education at Stockholm University. He received his PhD at the Department of Education, Communication, and

xvi  List of Contributors Learning, University of Gothenburg and has also held a position at Uppsala University. His research concerns instructional practices and interaction in higher education and workplace settings, including studies of architectural education, dentistry, radiology, and debriefing in simulation-based training. Michael Lynch is Emeritus Professor of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University and a part-time Research Professor in the School of Media and Information, University of Siegen, Germany. He received his PhD in Social Sciences at the University of California, Irvine in 1979 and has held positions in Sociology, Human Sciences, and Science & Technology Studies at Whitman College, Boston University, Brunel University, and Cornell University. His major fields are ethnomethodology and social studies of science. He has investigated practical action, visual representation, and discursive interaction in scientific and legal settings and has written extensively about conceptual and analytical issues in the social sciences. He was Editor of Social Studies of Science from 2002 until 2012 and was President of the Society for Social Studies of Science from 2007 to 2009. Douglas Macbeth is Associate Professor, Emeritus in Education Studies at Ohio State University. His research pursues EMCA studies of classroom order and instruction as grammars of action. The aim is to write an alternate praxeology of instruction as it is played out in fine durations of material detail and to address the conceptual confusions that continue to haunt discussions of “teaching and learning.” Robert Mitchell is the scientific coordinator at the DFG Collaborative Research Center 1482 “Studies in Human Differentiation” at Johannes GutenbergUniversity Mainz. Previously, he lectured sociology in Mainz and was a member of the interdisciplinary DFG Research Training Group “Self-Making” at Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. In 2019, he completed his PhD in sociology at Oldenburg University which will soon be published as Ballet and Taiji in Practice (Transcript, forthcoming). His main areas of interest are practice theories, sociological theory, and the (auto-)ethnography of movement. Lorenza Mondada is Professor of linguistics at the University of Basel. Her research deals with social interaction in ordinary, professional, and institutional settings, within an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective. Her focus is on video analysis and multimodality, researching how the situated and endogenous organization of social interaction draws on a diversity of multimodal resources such as, besides language, gesture, gaze, body posture, movements, objects manipulations, as well as multisensorial practices such as, touching, tasting, and smelling. She has extensively published in Journal of Pragmatics, Discourse Studies, Language in Society, Research on Language and Social Interaction, and Journal of Sociolinguistics, co-edited several collective books, and published Sensing in Social Interaction (CUP, 2021). Wes Sharrock is Professor Emeritus in Sociology at Manchester University, after having spent his career, starting in 1965, at the university. Troubled by

List of Contributors xvii Sociology’s apparent inability to take a serious interest in the world of daily life, he was influenced by Manchester’s social anthropologists and drawn to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred Schutz, Harold Garfinkel, and Harvey Sacks, regarding them as – even now – largely under-appreciated. In company with collaborators of the same persuasion, he has published on a diversity of sociological/philosophical topics in forms ranging from introductory guides to sociological theory and the philosophy of social research to journal papers on design projects, computer modeling in biology, print work, and mathematicians’ work, inter alia. In addition to the innumerable books and articles of Sharrock’s that are in print, much recent writing in collaboration with Bob Anderson is available on the Sharrock-Anderson Archive: https://www.sharrockandanderson.co.uk. Philippe Sormani is Senior Researcher and former Co-Director of the Science and Technology Studies Lab at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lausanne. Drawing on and developing ethnomethodology, he has published on experimentation in and across different fields of activity, ranging from experimental physics (Respecifying Lab Ethnography, Routledge, 2014) to artistic experiments (Practicing Art/Science, Routledge, 2019). Currently, he is experimenting with “DIY AI,” mobile robots, and media studies, at the University of Siegen, Germany. Burak S. Tekin is a lecturer at Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University. He obtained his PhD at the University of Basel where he examined the social and interactional organization of video game playing activities. His research primarily focuses on human sociality and the interplay of language, bodies, and technology. Luna Wolter is a junior researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lausanne. In the context of her MA thesis in adult education, she developed interaction analysis as a means to explicate the complexity of professional child education. She has published on the subject in the Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances (2022).

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Andrew Carlin and K. Neil Jenkings for their encouragement and constructive criticisms of the prospectus and earlier drafts and Neil Jordon for his comments, support, and advice as we prepared the manuscript for publication. We are grateful to Anne Rawls, Harold Garfinkel’s literary executor, for permitting us to edit and publish Garfinkel’s lecture on “Praxiological validity of instructed action” as Chapter One in this volume. We also thank Jason Turowetz, Clemens Eisenmann, and Jakub Mlynář for locating the original transcript and tape recording from the Garfinkel Archive in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and sending us the digital copy we used as a basis for our own transcription. We acknowledge the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), Project-ID 262513311 - SFB 1187, Collaborative Research Centre: “Media of Cooperation,” University of Siegen, Germany, for funding the archival work and digitization. We also would like to thank the authors of the studies presented in this volume for responding to our call for papers and carefully preparing and revising their draft chapters in a timely fashion. They also assisted in reviewing and commenting on chapters by other authors. We are particularly grateful for comments by members of two international discussion groups that met regularly to discuss theoretical and philosophical topics, as well as exemplary selections of literature, which greatly informed our preparations of this volume. One of the few benefits accruing from the Covid-19 pandemic was that the Ethnomethodology Reading Group, which has met for decades in Manchester after being founded by Wes Sharrock, went online, enabling one of the editors to participate in the lively and informative discussions with Wes, Phil Hutchinson, who currently leads the seminar, and other participants, including several who contributed to this volume. Above all, we have benefitted from regular online meetings over the past eight years with Dušan Bjelić, Jonas Ivarsson, Gustav Lymer, Ken Liberman, Doug Macbeth, Jean Wong, and Wendy Sherman-Heckler.

Foreword: A Brief ‘Backstory’ to Instructed Action Douglas Macbeth

This Foreword offers a brief ‘backstory’ to the interests and production history of this volume. The editors and some of the contributors have been party to a cohort of colleagues engaged in remarkably regular weekly video meetings since the fall of 2013. Following the 2013 meetings of the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (IIEMCA) in Waterloo, Ontario, Wendy Sherman-Heckler was determined to bring a group of us together on more than an every-odd-year schedule, and she did. In time, other colleagues joined, and some left to attend to other life tasks. Several projects have followed (the 2016 special issue of Discourse Studies [Lynch and Macbeth] may be best known). This volume is the most recent, and there are others, both published and in preparation, that are expressions of those ongoing discussions. They have been sustained by readings, writings, and a persistent interest in the life-works of Garfinkel, Sacks, and others. Michael Lynch has been determined in bringing Garfinkel’s corpus to print, producing penetrating and clarifying commentaries on ethnomethodology’s program(s) (Lynch 2019; Eisenmann and Lynch 2021; Garfinkel 2021, 2022; Button, Lynch and Sharrock 2022), often working from materials held in the archive directed by Anne Rawls, with digitization supported by the University of Siegen, Germany. These projects were taken up with the purpose of pressing the insights of our mentors – as well as we know them – and with those who may be new to this conceptual history in mind. EMCA is at an interesting inter-generational moment, doubly so as Garfinkel and Sacks have left us corpora that have no single reading. These efforts, including this volume, were taken up with a sense that EMCA continues to be a work in progress. On various occasions, Garfinkel would say as much, so that others elsewhere may come to understand these topics and formulations better than we do. This volume is an expression of this ongoing project in the particulars of “instructed actions.” They are no single thing. References Button, Graham, Michael Lynch and Wes Sharrock. 2022. Ethnomethodology, Conversation Analysis and Constructive Analysis: On Formal Structures of Practical Action. Abington, UK: Routledge.

xx Foreword Eisenmann, Clemens and Michael Lynch. 2021. ‘Introduction to Harold Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological “Misreading” of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field’, Human Studies 44(1): 1–17. Garfinkel, Harold. 2021. ‘Ethnomethodological ‘Misreading’ of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field’, Human Studies 44(1): 19–42. Garfinkel, Harold. 2022. Harold Garfinkel: Studies of Work in the Sciences. Edited by M. Lynch. Abington, UK: Routledge. Lynch, Michael. 2019. ‘Garfinkel, Sacks and Formal Structures: Collaborative Origins, Divergences and the Vexed Unity of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis’, Human Studies 42(2): 183–198. Lynch, Michael and Douglas Macbeth (Guest eds.). 2016. ‘The Epistemics of Epistemics’, Discourse Studies 18(5): 493–620.

Introduction Instructed and Instructive Actions Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall

Introduction Instructed action was a central theme in Harold Garfinkel’s writings in the decades following the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967). Rather than being a new theme, it was a way to articulate the very idea of ethnomethodology: the study of ordinary and specialized methods through which a society’s members constitute orderly activities. The word methodology is closely, though not exclusively, associated with the sciences. At least by reputation, scientific methods are the epitome of diligent and efficacious procedures for developing and establishing credible knowledge. Scientific methods are often contrasted with “folk” practices that lack rigor and reliability: habitually performed, untested actions that are socially constructed and maintained without rigorous validation. Ethnomethodology treats that contrast with indifference (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970), but without equating scientific knowledge with mere “beliefs” (Coulter 1989) or using analogies with experiments and mathematical proofs to describe and evaluate the organization of ordinary actions and knowledge (Winch 1958). Whether or not they are associated with science, methods are often presented in a formal, generalized way. Various formats are available, often in combination: written directions and diagrams, online “help” functions, instructional videos, specialized maps, and iconic signs. These formal objects are designed with greater or lesser specificity to be used in a range of cases and circumstances. In contemporary social life, instructions are ubiquitous. Increasingly the word “instructions” also is used metaphorically to describe software algorithms that have taken over much of the work of contemporary societies. Names for human clerical and literary jobs are now often assigned to more or less autonomous mechanisms for recording, typing, translating, printing, transcribing, duplicating, filing, calculating, and so on. Consequently, it can seem obvious that formal instructions contain or mechanically cause the actions that follow them. Similarly, it is common in molecular biology to treat genomic DNA sequences as “instructions” that contain plans for the autonomous assembly of organisms. In social theory and philosophy, formal rules provide a canonical way to describe logical reasoning, linguistic structure, and social order.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-1

2  Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall In the face of such emphasis on formal structures, ethnomethodology’s approach to instructed actions treats action as more than a mere consequence of rules and other formalized accounts. Rather than treating generic instructions as proxies for the order they instruct, ethnomethodology locates social orders with the on-theground, here-and-now production of practical activities. Grounds for this research policy can be found in the routine troubles associated with practical efforts to follow instructions and conduct programmed actions on singular occasions. Such troubles provide more than personal frustration; they also can lend insight into the way formal schemes, whether devised to instruct mundane tasks or to provide synthetic overviews of social or cultural organization, continually beg the question of how they are practically realized: how in the world people manage to do (and not do) what the schemes describe and instruct. The practical work and troubles associated with instructed actions provide vivid and variegated reminders of how formal schemes do not encompass the work that goes into their contingent achievement. Instructed actions have a central place in ethnomethodology for a simple reason: efforts to do what instructions say provide vivid access to the relentless and contingent work involved in achieving social order. In addition, embodied actions performed in the presence of others are accountable, and thus instructive in their own right, with or without formal instructions that articulate what to do, and what to do next. An indication of the prominence of the theme is that “Instructed Action” is the title of Part II of Garfinkel’s (2002) Ethnomethodology’s Program. He also devoted numerous lectures and seminars to the topic, starting in the early 1970s and proceeding through the 1990s. An entire seminar series in Spring 1988 focused on instructed actions, and Garfinkel arranged to have the series recorded and transcribed. He assembled the transcripts into a notebook that supplied material and arguments that appear in the 2002 book. Formal instructions and practical actions Garfinkel’s lectures and writings develop an argument on how instructions and instructed actions are fundamental to the production of social order. He begins by distinguishing formal instructions from their affiliated instructed actions. Formal instructions include various literary and other formats for presenting and reproducing rules, regulations, guidelines, directions, maps, and plans, which are independent of the singular occasions on which they are used. Latour (1990) dubbed such objects “immutable mobiles” to highlight the combination of their formal stability and reproducibility with their portability and adaptability to open-ended contexts of use. Texts and images that are inscribed on a reproducible medium can be used, reused, combined, supplemented, and analyzed in an open-ended way, while also retaining a relatively stable form. With the advent of modern technologies for ever-more-rapid reproduction and dissemination, communicative texts and images are caught up in far-flung networks of readers, viewers, practitioners, and communicants. When these formal objects convey instructions, they do more than communicate “meanings,” they disseminate, demonstrate, and integrate practices, standards, and rules; in brief, they provide a basis for producing social order and

Introduction  3 disorder. In the sciences, at least in principle, they are a basis for the establishment and reproducibility of methods. It is no accident that formal texts, images, maps, and rules are a focus of intense interest throughout the academic and administrative disciplines. They can be gathered in libraries, offices, and electronic networks to permit leisurely inspection and erudite interpretation. It is as though the world at large is at the fingertips of the scholar, and that world becomes intelligible as an order of abstract rules, forms, and meanings that stand as proxies for the “practices” and “processes” they inform and instruct. For Garfinkel, however, such formal literary objects are only part of the story: they are part of a pair, analogous to a question that awaits an answer. In cases of formal texts, maps, diagrams, or videos that provide instructions, they are docile objects that are open to variable readings and applications, including readings that in retrospect turn out to be wrong, sometimes disastrously so. Even such ubiquitous and mundane cases as video instructions for unblocking a bathroom sink, a set of rules for playing a card game, or a list of directions for navigating from a point of origin to a destination become interesting and problematic when deployed over the course of a specific repair effort, game, or wayfinding journey. Garfinkel (2002: 197) is careful to point out that he is not interested in “any old thing about instructions and following instruction.” He suggests that ethnomethodology is searching for a different “animal,” with the aim of finding out what “more, other, and different to these marvelous topics” ethnomethodology could offer than classical analyses and vernacular accounts have said or ever could say. This “animal” is at large amid the most familiar activities in our lives and yet eludes formal efforts to capture and contain it. As should be evident from reading the chapters in this volume, like other practical and academic analysts, ethnomethodologists make use of transcripts, images, and summary formulations to examine and exhibit orders of activity. However, they do not treat the formal properties of instructions, sets of rules, and so forth as self-sufficient structures. Instead, the properties of interest to the research arise on occasions of use. For example, when a map is consulted in the course of a journey, not only can it only fail to encompass the entire environment in which it is used, the map itself comes to exhibit “relevant-to-the-user properties of logic, order, meaning, factual adequacy, followability, completeness of instructions, sufficiency of instructions, notational clarity, analyzable format, methodic procedure, and the rest” (Garfinkel 2002: 113). These contingent properties arise during such a journey. They include standing themes in the ethnomethodological literature such as the et cetera provision, indexical expressions, and the inherent vagueness of instructions that arise on singular occasions. As ethnomethodological phenomena, however, they cannot simply be understood as abstractions or generalizations. Instead, they are made perspicuous in connection with specific settings and activities. Bodily troublemakers and perspicuous settings A characteristic feature of Garfinkel’s (2002: 199) investigations of what he called “perspicuous settings” is a series of strange exercises he designed for his students.

4  Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall Although some of them were extensions of the “breaching experiments” he had used in prior decades, many did not involve deliberate violations of norms or customs. Instead, exercises that included inverting lenses or other technological devices were designed to disrupt the student’s perceptual and embodied fluency, and thereby to highlight the fundamental requirement of mundane embodied action, even in the performance of verbal and intellectual activities (see Garfinkel 2002: 207–216). To construct inverting lenses, Garfinkel purchased a set of prisms from Army surplus, which had been used for periscopes on WWII tanks. He then mounted them in welders’ masks or plastic garbage pails to be fitted over the user’s head. With their vision directed through the prisms by the headgear, his students would see an upside-down world. Garfinkel then asked them to carry out ordinary tasks, such as scrubbing a sink, walking around campus, writing on the blackboard, or playing chess. By undermining the “achieved cogency and the achieved coherence of phenomenal details” (Garfinkel 2002: 210) of mundane actions, the exercise was designed to reveal how details of embodied and communicative actions were tied to the lived coherence of the setting. Garfinkel designed and summarized these exercises as part of a pedagogy for “misreading” phenomenological conceptions of perception and action in a way that respecified them from being descriptions of abstract processes to becoming immediate features of embodied practical actions (Eisenmann & Lynch 2021; Garfinkel 2021). Concepts or ideas from the phenomenological literature, such as Gurwitsch’s “contextures” of perceptual details, or Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of “phenomenal fields,” were respecified in terms of endogenous organizations, embodied skills, and worksite-specific details. In the edited transcript of a lecture, presented in Chapter One in the present volume, Garfinkel attributes a procedure to Harvey Sacks that he calls “Sacks’s gloss.” Briefly, this is a procedure for respecifying a theoretical or philosophical term or distinction (in Sacks’s example a legal distinction) as a concrete task embedded in a specific course of work about which it is possible to gain a “tutorial” from practitioners who use the distinction as part of their day’s work. The inverting lenses and other bodily “troublemakers,” as Garfinkel called them, radically disrupted the performance of activities, such as playing a game with rules or writing a simple equation on the blackboard. The use of inverting lenses was one of several “troublemakers” employed by Garfinkel. The reason to use them was to reveal “work’s incarnate social organizational details” by “overcoming their transparency” (2002: 126). Other exercises did not require artificial disruption but could be relied upon to present a student with all the trouble they needed to grasp the contingencies of performing even the most routine enactments of instructions: following a recipe, tying a knot, navigating with a map, and so on. Especially when the tasks to be accomplished are unfamiliar, an effort to follow such instructions is likely to involve false-starts, difficulties with finding materials and appropriate tools, mistakes of all kinds, work-arounds, backtracking, exasperation, and desperation. In the midst of such trouble, one can gain insight into the hiatus between the logic and intelligibility of generic instructions and the necessary conditions and competencies for following them on specific occasions. This “gap” between

Introduction 5 instructions and situated actions exposes a field for observation and description; a field that is shot through with troubles, improvisations, and repairs. Close descriptions of instructed actions are virtually guaranteed to exhibit ordinary human ingenuity in action. A simple but emblematic case, which is mentioned in several of the chapters in this volume, is Garfinkel’s (2002: 199–207) account of his efforts to assemble a chair from parts in a box purchased from a home furnishings store. After reproducing the page of instructions (p. 201) – a wordless series of diagrams that was included in the box that contained the chair’s parts – Garfinkel proceeds to discuss the troubles that arose in his task of following the step-by-step diagrams to complete the assembly job before guests were to arrive a few hours later. His description makes clear that the troubles were tied to an immediate, timepressured effort to make sense of how the sequence of diagrams relates to the embodied work of finding the relevant parts and working out how those parts should be connected with one another and in what order. The case is a simple example that is relevant to a range of other cases that have had a prominent place in ethnomethodology for many years. The theme of instructed actions is as much a methodological frame as it is a common practical phenomenon. Numerous ethnomethodological exercises can be devised for setting up the work of following rules, instructions, and directions (see, for example, Liberman 2014: 45–82). The contingencies that bedevil or facilitate the project of following instructions, the uncertainties that occur about what the instructions are saying, and the many differences between instructions and performances that arise during a singular course of instructed actions have proved themselves to be instructive about the organization of practical actions. An important feature of these cases is that, like many of Garfinkel’s exercises, they are readily adapted to pedagogical situations that provide students with vivid experience with the phenomenon of instructed actions. Garfinkel also draws critical lessons on the limits of social theoretical and administrative programs that treat formal instructions (rules, models, generic accounts) as proxies that substitute for the production of the orderly actions in everyday and particular organizational circumstances. The exercises focus attention on practices performed in contingent circumstances, in contrast to ideal-typical models of rational and non-rational action. The critical implications extend to the treatment of standardized instructions (algorithms) in artificial intelligence and cognitive science programs, where they are construed as a sufficient basis for explaining, administering, and automating “intelligent” actions. Garfinkel’s description of his efforts to assemble the chair has become an iconic instance of instructed action. He uses it to introduce the topic, and readers of this book may notice that the example is mentioned not only in this introduction but also in three of the chapters and the Afterword. The appeal is obvious: the example is simple and familiar, and it easily transfers to other occasions of using a manual or recipe, following a map, and so on. However, as Doug Macbeth discusses in the Afterword, there is much more to the instructed actions than the example brings into relief. As Garfinkel repeatedly insisted in his seminars, it is necessary to do the exercises, and not simply to confirm his accounts of them. Even though we can read Garfinkel’s account of the chair example, and relate it to many other

6  Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall cases like it, much more vivid insight can be gained by performing the exercise in such a way as to attend to the details of just what transpires. Especially when something new is attempted – such as using a diagram and/or video demonstration to tie a complex knot that one has not done before – the “first time through” effort is likely to produce a fund of describable episodes that provide first-hand access to the embodied work and unforeseen contingencies entailed by the task at hand. The “much more” that instructed action involves is not just a matter of developing a first-hand account of an instance. The “paradigm” case of following formal instructions and encountering troubles necessitating improvised solutions is an effective introduction, but it does not nearly exhaust the topic. Note that Garfinkel (2002) quickly moves on from the chair assembly example to an array of other instances, and many of them do not involve an initial set of instructions that are then to be followed. Irony versus order production An interest in the relationship of formal instructions to practical actions is far from limited to ethnomethodology. A regular part of training in many fields emphasizes that “book learning,” standardized guidelines, and fundamental principles are insufficient for mastering the performance and adapting to the vicissitudes of a practice. The topic of instructed actions is, of course, relevant to formal education (Amerine & Bilmes 1988; Lindwall, Lymer & Greiffenhagen 2015; Lynch & Macbeth 1998), but it applies to a much broader array of activities in research laboratories, technological workplaces, and countless scenes of practical communicative actions. The difference between formal instructions and practical actions may seem to encourage taking an ironic stance toward the clear, simple, and logical organization of formal accounts as compared with the “messy” accomplishment of actual practices. For example, in a popular article that was frequently cited for decades afterward in philosophy, history, and social studies of science, Peter Medawar (1964) asked the question, “Is the scientific paper a fraud?” When elaborating upon his affirmative answer, Medawar backed away from the attention-grabbing term “fraud,” saying that he meant that canonical accounts of method in scientific papers are constructed after the fact and cannot possibly describe the twists and turns of scientific “thought.” Such statements by a notable scientist and philosopher were among the resources that inspired the attention to “actual” or “situated” scientific practice that marked the advent of a “new” social studies of science initiated in the 1970s (Bloor 1976; Collins 1974; Latour & Woolgar 1979).1 In ethnomethodology, however, the point is not to show that instructions are incomplete or misleading accounts of the actions they purport to instruct. Typically, instructions are not detached third-person descriptions of observed activities performed by others or first-person reflections on one’s own conduct or thinking; instead, they often are written in the second-person singular, as suggestions and injunctions for “you” to apply in “your” situation. The actions of following instructions always and unavoidably involve ad hoc considerations that are not explicitly stated in the instructions themselves. The sense, adequacy, and completeness of

Introduction  7 instructions are relative to the user’s familiarity with the practice and the availability of “appropriate” materials and tools. In one sense, written instructions are never complete, however precisely they are formulated, but in another sense, their completeness or incompleteness is contingent upon the user’s preparedness to complete the necessary actions (Lynch 2002). Instructions are not Austinian performatives, because the performance of what they say is rarely achieved by doing things with words; instead, it is a matter of doing things with things (Streeck 1996) as well as with words. Furthermore, reading instructions with the purpose of following them does not follow the classic hermeneutic circle of reading and interpretation but instead is circulated through the distinct space of a relevant course of embodied action in which the ongoing action itself comprises an inspectable (if often confusing) material field. To use the example from Garfinkel (2002: 200), it is one thing to read the page of instructions on how to assemble a chair and another thing to read the page in the midst of an effort to find the relevant parts and fit them together. In the latter case, it is not sufficient to get a general sense of what the instructions are saying because just what they are saying needs to be worked out in relation to the practical and material contingencies of the immediate situation. For ethnomethodological studies of instructed actions, the challenge is not to find fault with instructions but to examine how the parties who deploy them integrate them with the actions of following them (if, indeed, “following” is an appropriate way of describing what parties are doing with instructions on any singular occasion). The troubles that arise during efforts to follow instructions are less interesting as technical problems to be overcome, and more interesting as sources of insight into organizational, technological, and interactional resources and expertise of the participants in the local production of social actions. Variations on the theme of instructed actions Numerous exemplary studies of instructed action are available and have been for decades, but the topic is far from exhausted. The aim of this proposed volume is not simply to add more case studies to the existing literature, but to clarify the topic and explore novel variations on the theme and highlight its non-obvious implications for studies of practical actions. One variation on the theme of instructed actions has to do with differences between the technologies of instruction and their relationship to the practices of enacting them. For example, it is now commonplace for drivers and pedestrians to rely upon navigational programs operated through cellphone applications or GPS equipment installed into an automobile dashboard. An established line of ethnomethodological studies concerns the organization of verbal or written directions, road maps, and “occasion maps” (hand-drawn maps for giving directions on how to get from a local point of origin to a destination) and the work of navigating with them (Brown & Laurier 2005; Garfinkel 2002; Liberman 2014; Psathas 1979, 1986: 129–130). Given the widespread use of GPS devices, it is possible to contrast their delivery of directions with those of other forms of navigation instruction (Brown & Laurier 2012; November, Camago-Hübner & Latour 2010;

8  Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall Singh et al. 2019). An issue in such cases is that the running commentary and changing scene presented on the cellphone or navigational instrument screen appears to close the gap between a fixed map or list of directions and the temporal course of a journey, while also presenting contingencies and opening other gaps that require improvisational action and interaction in an immediate setting. Though fashioned as a real-time directional guide, telling the driver what to do now, and where to go next, there is nevertheless a running task of reconciling the GPS display and voice with the unfolding scene of the journey. Similarly, in recent years, video instructions have become available that are readily accessed online with laptops and cellphones. They are designed to provide guidance for an immense variety of tasks and practical problems. Studies of actions performed in accord with such instructions do not simply reiterate the challenges of following a written recipe or step-by-step instruction in a published manual (Amerine and Bilmes 1988; Garfinkel 2002; Livingston 2000). In contrast to printed manuals, video tutorials show a particular instance of an embodied performance in some of its material and contingent details. For instance, where an instructional text states “hold crochet hook in right hand and make a slip knot on hook,” the instructional video also shows how the hook is held, how the slip knot is made, how it is placed on the hook, and so on. In this sense, the tutorials are more closely related to instructional demonstrations found in face-to-face situations (Evans & Lindwall 2020; Lynch & Macbeth 1998) than to written manuals and guidebooks. Nevertheless, although online instructions can avoid some of the conundrums arising from reading written instructions and diagrams, distinctive problems arise with video demonstrations on how to tie knots, perform embroidery stitches, carve a turkey, mount a kayak rack on an automobile, and countless other skilled and not-so-skilled tasks. One challenge is that central aspects of the current circumstances of use can be significantly different from the ones portrayed in the video. When changing the brakes on a bicycle, the tools used in the instructional video are not always available and the exact model of the brake or the bike typically differs. Another issue concerns temporality and timing. As the video unfolds, the person watching the video often needs to segment the instruction into smaller parts by pausing the video, shifting between watching it and doing what the tutorial instructs, rewinding the video to examine a phase in more detail, while skipping parts that are assessed as irrelevant, redundant, obvious, and so on (Tuncer, Lindwall & Brown 2021). Other studies explore the performance of practical actions under personal tutelage (coaching). In some ways, such actions are akin to following the running commentary in a video, but the actions of a coach are contemporaneous or sequentially organized as part of an interaction with the embodied performances they instruct and guide. A coach can both demonstrate how to do a particular action or phase of the action and guide the actions being instructed with verbal correctives, reminders, and direct embodied interventions (Lindwall & Ekström 2012; Mondada 2018; Weeks 1996). Assessment and the ability to recognize the fit between projected achievements and ongoing activities are intrinsic and necessary parts of following instructions (Amerine & Bilmes 1988; Livingston 2008). In following instructions

Introduction  9 and directions, it is central to be able to see whether something has gone wrong, and whether, as a result, it is necessary to rewind, correct, or redo a particular part. This might present a problem for a novice who does not yet know how to perform the skilled action or what the resulting achievement should look like. With a co-present tutor who monitors the performance, these assessments can partly be done by the experienced party. The instructions thereby assume a sequential organization, in which the attempts of the novice are responded to with corrections and directives specifically designed to address displayed problems, as well as to show what to do next and how. Although this gives the instruction and instructionfollowing a sequential organization, it is important to note that this organization, in terms of turn-taking, action formation, management of troubles, and so on, differs from what can be found and explored in ordinary conversations. As noted by Macbeth (2014), it is problematic to associate instructed actions with specific types of utterances, interactional sequences, or activities. Even in contexts of coaching, instructed actions are not to be reduced to sequences consisting of an initial “instructing” or “directing” part and a subsequent “following” or “complying” part. Instructed actions are not limited to instances where a recipe, manual, or coach is available to guide a student or other novice to accomplish a discrete task. Just as rules can be said to apply to fluent performances in which they are not formulated as such, so can instructed actions be performed in situations in which there is no discrete formulation of instructions and no division of labor between instructor and instructed. So, for example, turn-taking rules in conversation do not require a current speaker to use a discrete signal when approaching the end of her turn in order to cue a next speaker to be ready to begin the next turn (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974). Similarly, while questions such as “Are you in line?” and “Is this the end of the line?” are sometimes voiced by new entrants to a queue, prospective members often join the end of a queue after sizing up the arrangement of bodies. In the latter case, the “instructions” for finding the end of the line and joining it appropriately are furnished by the queue itself; that is, they are furnished for those who know of, comply with, and embody the locally relevant “rules” for joining a queue (Garfinkel & Livingston 2003). In such cases, instructed actions also are instructive actions, the performance of which “explicates” what to do next (Pollner 1979). Obvious and non-obvious implications Some implications of studies of instructed actions are, by now, obvious. The gap between formal accounts of scientific methods and the practices of performing such methods provided entry into the topic of “tacit knowledge” in social studies of science (Collins 1974). Similarly, the gap between instructions on how to use a machine or computer program and the “situated actions” (Suchman 2007 [1987]) involved in enacting them has proved to be a major problem for high-tech companies and a source of employment for ethnographers of practical actions. Less obvious implications have to do with recurrent themes in social theory, philosophy of social science, and philosophy of language.

10  Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall The classic ethnomethodological theme of indexicality is a starting point for identifying these implications. Indexicality has to do with the way a communicative expression “indexes” a particular referent, and the “problem” with indexicality is most obvious in cases of pronouns, anaphors, and indicator terms. These are expressions whose reference on any given occasion of use depends upon who is speaking, the immediate environment, the topic, prior references, and many other matters. Although just what such terms “index” on a particular occasion may be obvious to participants, at times it is a source of ambiguity especially for overhearing analysts. When a written instruction is used to guide a singular course of action, even definite nouns can be found to be problematically related to objects at hand in the environment of the action. An instructional video can obviate many of the ambiguities that arise in a standard text of instructions, but material differences between the video and the course of action it is used to instruct can both facilitate and encumber the guidance it delivers. Another familiar ethnomethodological theme that applies to instructed actions is reflexivity. A conventional way of speaking of video portrayals is that they deliver “reality” in a way that a verbal description or a textbook account does not. However, occasions of critical analysis tend to drive a wedge between the form of a video and the “reality” it apparently conveys. Goodwin (1994: 607) observes that an adversary attack on video evidence in a courtroom trial can hold reflexive implications for a naturalistic reliance on video evidence in studies of practical actions. While granting their advantages for performing instructed actions, studies of singular efforts to follow video demonstrations can provide insight into the difference between “multimedia” demonstrations and concrete efforts to work out what they are demonstrating. A related topic of research concerns a problem that arises with instructed actions, which Garfinkel (2002: 95, n.7) sometimes called the “shop floor” problem. The “shop floor” problem is not only a problem in organizational settings where managerial staff attempt to discern how their directives are implemented on “the shop floor,” but it is also a material and rhetorical resource for resisting such directives. The praxiological gap between such directives and their implementation (often glossed as a matter of tacit knowledge) is sometimes featured in labor negotiations as both a problem to be overcome and a collective source of resistance (what Frederick Winslow Taylor dubbed “soldiering”). In such cases, the unavoidable need to rely upon tacit knowledge becomes practically indistinguishable from deliberate withholding. Relatedly, the practice of “working to rule” in collective labor actions is a strategy that dramatizes the necessity to rely upon skills to work around cumbersome formal contingencies and to take shortcuts, including some that are formally prohibited (Lynch 2013). Significance Aside from the significance particular studies can have for the specific types of activity studied, there also is the significance for social science conceptions of how a society works and is organized. In addition, there is relevance to discussions and debates

Introduction  11 in philosophy about rule-following, or actions-in-accord-with-rules. And, further, there are implications for the trust that is invested in mechanisms, algorithms, formulae, and the like. One persistent feature of instructions and instructive technologies is that practical trouble reliably and revealingly accompanies such efforts. Studies of instructed action promise to shed light on the phenomenon of the practical/interactional achievement of what rules and related abstractions formulate. Instructions are not the same as rules, however, though they have similar uses for guiding actions. Instructions take on definiteness of sense in and through the work of enacting what they instruct. However, this is not interpretation in the sense of thoughtful consideration and reconsideration of textual meaning; instead, it is a sense that is achieved in and through action. The issue here is less a matter of interpretation than of “thoughtlessly” concerted actions. A question raised in this volume concerns the pervasiveness of instructed actions: Are all social actions instructed (or instructive) in some sense? Can there be such things as “uninstructed” actions? The question invites the pursuit of how coherent and concerted actions are organized, if not through the instructive reproduction of social order. Again, instructed actions are not limited to actions for which there are specific, coherently identifiable formal instructions. Much of the research on the topic provides insight into the way the performance of actions shows – displays, exhibits, demonstrates – what is being done and what to do next. As noted earlier, instructed actions have methodological and pedagogical value, as well as theoretical significance. There are innumerable varieties of exercises that start with formal instructions and invite close examination of the practices involved in working out how to do what is instructed. Reversing the order also is possible by designing exercises that require the student to write an exhaustive step-by-step set of instructions for a practice they have already mastered with “thoughtless” fluency. Garfinkel (1967: 25) describes one such exercise in which students were asked to explicate “common understandings” expressed in an ordinary conversation; a task that, once started, invites ever-more elaboration, with no end in sight. Finally, as noted earlier, novel modes of instruction promise to close the gap between instructing and performing a growing array of practical actions. As suggested in this proposal, studies of the uses of such instructional technology can provide insight into distinctive troubles and improvisations occasioned by their use on specific occasions. Such insight may be valuable, not only for insight into the practical constitution of social order but also for the design of such technologies (Button et al. 2015). Outline We have organized the 13 chapters that follow this introduction into four parts. Part One is on “Foundational Issues”: arguments and examples that work out some of the central themes in ethnomethodology. The chapters in Part Two on “Situated Action and Order Production” present cases and describe settings that make perspicuous the way instructions and instructional activities produce order, while reflexively drawing upon commonplace practical and discursive resources. The

12  Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall chapters in Part Three provide distinct cases in which instructions are embedded within the enactment of specific arts and cultivated practices, and the chapters in Part Four discuss cases in which parties necessarily or deliberately confront or create unplanned and disruptive circumstances in the course of concerted (and disconcerted) actions. Doug Macbeth, who also wrote the brief Foreword to this volume, ends the book with an Afterword that considers these studies of instructed action as themselves instances of “wayfinding.” Chapter One is an edited transcript of a graduate seminar Harold Garfinkel convened at UCLA in May 1992. As he did with hundreds of other lectures and seminars he gave from the 1960s onward, Garfinkel recorded and arranged to have the seminar transcribed. Many of them, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s, were on the topic of instructed actions, but we chose this one for the volume because it gave an overview of the topic as well as some concise examples. We used a digital copy of the original tape cassette recording to review and edit the transcript and retained the title that was on the original transcript, “Praxeological validity of instructed action.” At the start of the seminar, Garfinkel acknowledges that students often complain about the difficulty with reading ethnomethodological texts (and certainly this applies to his own texts). Rather than propose to explain what he means by, for example, “praxeological validity of instructed actions,” he insists that students should take up the practical exercises he assigns. As he does throughout his various lectures and writings on the subject, he presents instructed actions as a “pair” consisting of “disengageable instructions” and “the work of following those instructions.” Accordingly, what he is saying should itself be construed as “disengageable instructions” that can only be realized through the practical performance of the exercises he assigns. What he proposes is not a procedure for verifying his arguments; rather, it is a procedure for “explicating” key themes, proposals, and maxims with vivid instances that show much more than he can say in so many words. (He does seem willing to take credit, retrospectively, for what his students might find out that he “meant.”) As with many of Garfinkel’s exercises, the ones he suggests in this seminar often involve a direct inducement of trouble (such as with the inverting lens) or an effort for students to systematically place themselves in circumstances where troubles suffered by others resonate with recurrent themes in philosophy and social science. He then provides an example of such a theme with a remark he attributes to Merleau-Ponty: “Existence is the process whereby the hitherto meaningless becomes meaningful.” He then briefly describes incidents in which what had been “meaningless” becomes pregnant with meaning in light of a tragic or nearly tragic circumstance. He does not present these accounts to validate Merleau-Ponty’s generalization as a truism; instead, he suggests a way to read and reread the remark retrospectively as “instructions” that can take on the distinctive meaning on particular occasions. Chapter Two also takes up fundamental issues on instructive action. By focusing on instructional demonstrations such as YouTube tutorials, Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer discuss the relation between instructions, descriptions, and

Introduction  13 embodied courses of action. A central point of the chapter is how instructional demonstrations provide access to lay and professional analyses of action: how the instructions segment the action into constituent parts, how the descriptions provide observers with resources for recognizing what is being done, and how words and actions mutually elaborate the sense and followability of the demonstrated action. As noted by Watson, “a central preoccupation of EM is the relation between laic and professional apprehensions of social orders, and the ineluctable embeddedness of the latter in the former” (2008: 202). Lindwall and Lymer share this preoccupation, and throughout the chapter, there is a discussion of the relation between the laic analyses of “say-shown demonstrations” (Burns 2012: 184) and their own second-order analyses, which include transcripts and images, and which, in contrast to demonstrations, need to be adapted to the printed page. Chapter Three by Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg is the first of four chapters in the section on “Situated action and order production,” and like the other chapters in the section, it is a case study of instructed actions in a distinctive environment of actions. Following an introductory example from carpentry, which illustrates how general principles can be formulated into practical rules of thumb, Ivarsson and Falkenberg examine how a similar “trick of the trade” is developed in image-guided endovascular surgery. Ivarsson and Falkenberg draw on Garfinkel’s deliberate and praxeological misreadings of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of phenomenal fields and Anderson and Sharrock’s (2019) observation that action typically takes place in, and are thus instructed by, environments that are pre-structured for that action. The chapter shows how the surgeons, through actions that involve a creative use of a mouse pointer, organize a phenomenal field that will then instruct them on how to proceed. Chapter Four by Lorenza Mondada and Burak Tekin takes up a phenomenon that has held interest for ethnomethodology for a long time: the local embodied production of order in queues. Garfinkel frequently discussed queues in lectures and seminars (see, for example, Garfinkel 2007, 2022; Garfinkel & Livingston 2003; Livingston 1987; Schwartz 2002), where he used them to exemplify a routine social assemblage that is recurrently achieved by the situated positioning and embodied movements of the constituent members. The recognizable presence of a queue provides instructions for new entrants on such properties as a point of service, end of the line, who is “next,” and so on. Mondada and Tekin use videos recorded at a particular site to analyze the multi-modal (audio-visual-embodied) work of forming queues. In addition to their use of recording technology to enable the analysis and exhibition of such work, Mondada and Tekin provide a distinctive focus on the tentative formation of queues at a point of (potential) service. Such quasi-queues vividly exhibit the achievement of a social organization that otherwise appears as an unremarkable means, and impediment, to a transaction. Chapter Five by Ken Liberman provides an account of queuing informed by his own long-term competency as a participant in the world of surfing. Queues often, though not always, operate in accordance with a first-come, first-served turn-taking rule, but just how they do so, and just how local rights to next-turn are managed is highly variable. Liberman describes the intricacies and occasional conflicts that

14  Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall occur in different locales as surfers position themselves alongside other surfers in the midst of the waves they hope to ride. The phenomenal properties of the orderof-service depend upon what competent surfers recognize as the next wave, the best position to be ready for it, and who has the right to take it. His account makes clear that action production is situated in the midst of a variously competent assemblage of surfers who position themselves in terms of the contingencies of the current surf and the immediate gathering of surfers. Chapter Six by Graham Button also describes instructive actions at sea, though in this case further from shore on board a sailing vessel. Button calls upon his own competency as an experienced and credentialed skipper to describe how novices are instructed in the arts and hazards of recreational yachting. The skills to be mastered require embodied actions, but in this case, Button focuses on proverbs and maxims that are recited and demonstrated through onboard instruction. He draws upon Harvey Sacks’ (1992) lectures on proverbs, in which Sacks proposes that proverbs and maxims are “true for something,” where just what they are true for is found in the local circumstances. Button provides several examples of how proverbial maxims, such as “better safe than sorry,” are delivered at sea in a way that is tied prospectively and retrospectively to the occurrence of hazardous events and possibilities that occur at sea. Chapter Seven by Yaël Kreplak is the first of the four chapters in the section on “Instructively reproducing artful activities.” These four chapters all involve instructions (and instructive situations) embedded in the performance of embodied arts. Kreplak describes instances of collectively produced art installations in which participants use and find instructions in and as the performance. These instructions all make relevant the relation between the artwork as it is conceived by the artist and the artwork as it is locally installed and exhibited in situ. Some instructions have a technical character and aim at the consistent reproduction of autonomous artworks, whereas others are purposely left open-ended and in need of artful resolutions. Some instructions present the delegated task as consisting of mundane actions, whereas others require specific skills and portray the instructed tasks as part of the actual artwork. As emphasized throughout the chapter, however, each exhibition of artwork requires that the congruence between instructions and the installed artwork is worked out for “another first time” (Garfinkel 1967: 9). Chapter Eight by Yusuke Arano describes and illustrates interchanges between an expert and a novice in the arts of calligraphy. The chapter borrows its title from Sudnow’s (1978) autoethnographic account of playing jazz but, unlike Sudnow, Arano is not an experienced practitioner of the art he describes. The expert is his grandfather and the novice is the author himself. The contribution of the chapter is to be found in the description of the intimate interplay between the two parties: how the expert first demonstrates the way the calligraphic character should be drawn; how the novice then attempts to follow the instructions under the guidance of the instructor; and how a model is used as a resource in the instructional interaction. As noted by Macbeth, a world of disciplined practices “must already own methods for teaching and learning the orderly affairs they display” (Macbeth 2010: 393). In this chapter, as well as in the following two chapters, the interactional interplay

Introduction  15 between experts and novices gives us some access to the endogenous pedagogies of competent worlds. Chapter Nine by Chiara Bassetti discusses dance instructions in which an instructor demonstrates moves and monitors a group of dancers as they attempt to perform those moves. The dance study is described as a “pan-visual” environment, where the mirror makes it possible for the dancers to monitor their own movements and the movements of everyone else. The dancers “follow” the instructions of teachers and choreographers, but they also “follow” the positioning, posture, and timed movements of other dancers. Although this is an explicitly instructional setting, designed for the teaching and learning of dance, this chapter, like many other chapters in this volume, shows that instructed actions cannot be conceived simply in sequential terms – as responses to specific types of actions – and why praxeological respecifications of “gestalt contextures” or “phenomenal fields” are relevantly introduced in the treatment of instructed actions. Chapter Ten by Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell describe hands-on instructions in yoga and taiji, respectively. The pairing of the two embodied arts also presents a pairing of perspectives on instructed actions: Eisenmann describes the action from the side of an instructor, and Mitchell from the side of an instructee. Mitchell’s reflections on his difficulties with mastering taiji have an interesting connection with Bassetti’s discussion of dance instruction. Superficially, taiji exercises may seem similar to dance movements, as both involve efforts to perform whole-body movements in a controlled and graceful way, but Mitchell recounts how his prior experience with dance tended to interfere with his mastery of the martial art of taiji. Chapter Eleven by Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock is the first of three chapters in Part Four on “Improvisations and subversions.” Each chapter deals with trouble in very different ways. Going back to Garfinkel’s (1967) breaching experiments, trouble has had a thematic and methodological importance for the way it makes perspicuous how the machinery of social order is a fine-tuned and delicate production. Brooker and Sharrock’s chapter describes a highly dramatic instance of trouble during an aborted, and nearly tragic, moon landing in 1970. Unlike the cozier confines of Garfinkel’s struggles to assemble an item of furniture from instructions, the crew of the spacecraft were faced with having to follow instructions sent from ground control on earth on how to repair a potentially fatal technical problem with the atmosphere on board. The chapter describes some remarkable communicative and instrumental repairs performed literally on the fly. Chapter Twelve by Eric Laurier describes a far more leisurely and earthbound scene involving two couples taking a walk in the countryside while navigating along a path with a digital map and audio guide. Unlike other exercises in following maps, in which practical difficulties with the relationships between maps and immediate terrain are perspicuous, in this instance, relational differences between the parties engaged in the journey also are highlighted when one member walks ahead of the others and seems to be leading them astray from the prescribed path. It all turns out well in the end, but the focus on the conversations and consternation of the three others calls attention to the particularities of the collection of people in addition to the instrumentalities of following directions.

16  Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall Chapter Thirteen by Philippe Sormani and Luna Wolter describes a pair of students who took part in a “usability experiment” designed by social psychologists and administered to high-school students. The experiment involved a mobile robot (“mobot”) and the students were given the tasks of observing and describing the mobot’s autonomous actions. Sormani and Wolter focus on how a pair of students playfully subvert the protocol in ways that “frustrate” and disable the mobot’s functions. The students’ subversion thus becomes a spontaneous “Garfinkel experiment” that disrupts the experiment by breaching the programmatic compliance designed to highlight the inherent capacities of the mobot. Finally, in his Afterword, Douglas Macbeth discusses the contributions of the studies in terms of wayfinding. By writing about the work of instructed action in this way, he distinguishes the contribution of this volume from other lay and professional interests in instruction. As he points out, instructed action is “relentlessly occasioned” but not occasional. Instructed action is fundamental to the local production and reproduction of competent worlds, a topic that covers activities well beyond dedicated efforts at teaching, training, and education. Although wayfinding occasionally includes formal instructions, instructed action is not limited to the subset of actions and activities that rely on maps, plans, directions, guidelines, et cetera. Wayfinding includes the competent discovery of instruction in the landscape during a hike or in the orientations and movements of other pedestrians at a busy crossroad. It also includes finding ways into a conversation, including the instructed production of a relevant next turn at talk. Conceived in this way, instructed action as wayfinding becomes the starting point for a tremendous variety of inquiries about the in vivo production and reproduction of immortal society. Note 1 Incidentally, Medawar elaborated upon his argument during a BBC radio broadcast in 1964 hosted by David Edge, who later became the first director of the Science Studies Unit at the University of Edinburgh, and founding co-editor of the journal Social Studies of Science.

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18  Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall Lynch, Michael and Douglas Macbeth. 1998. ‘Demonstrating Physics Lessons’, in J. Greeno and S. Goldman (eds.) Thinking Practices in Mathematics and Science Learning. Marwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 269–297. Macbeth, Douglas 2010. ‘Ethnomethodology in Education Research’, in P. Peterson, E. Baker and B. McGaw (eds.) International Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford, UK: Elsevier, pp. 392–399. Macbeth, Douglas. 2014. ‘Studies of Work, Instructed Action, and the Promise of Granularity: A Commentary’, Discourse Studies 16(2): 295–308. Medawar, Peter. 1964. ‘Is the Scientific Paper Fraudulent? Yes; It Misrepresents Scientific Thought’, Saturday Review (1 August): 42–44. Mondada, Lorenza. 2018. ‘Driving Instruction at High Speed on a Race Circuit: Issues in Action Formation and Sequence Organization’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics 18(2): 304–325. November, Valérie, Eduardo Camago-Hübner and Bruno Latour. 2010. ‘Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28: 581–599. Pollner, Melvin. 1979. ‘Explicative Transactions: Making and Managing Meaning in a Traffic Court’, in G. Psathas (ed.) Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: Irvington, pp. 229–255. Psathas, George. 1979. ‘Organizational Features of Direction Maps’, in G. Psathas (ed.) Everyday Language: Studies in Ethnomethodology. New York: Irvington, pp. 203–226. Psathas, George. 1986. ‘Some Sequential Structures in Direction-Giving’, Human Studies 9(2/3): 231–246. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. ‘On Proverbs. Lecture 13, Fall 1964–Spring 1965’, in Harvey Sacks, Lectures on Conversation, Vol. I. Edited by G. Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 104–112. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. 1974. ‘A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking in Conversation’, Language 50(4): 696–735. Schwartz, Howard. 2002. ‘Data, Who Needs It? Describing Normal Environments—Examples and Methods’, Ethnographic Studies 7: 7–32. Singh, Ranjit, Chris Hesselbein, Jessica Price and Michael Lynch. 2019. ‘Getting “There” from the Ever-Changing “Here”: Following Digital Directions’, in J. Vertesi and D. Ribes (eds.) digitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science & Technology Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 280–299. Streeck, Jürgen. 1996. ‘How to Do Things with Things: Objets Trouvés and Symbolizations’, Human Studies 19(4): 365–384. Suchman, L. 2007 [1987]. Human Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press. Sudnow, David. 1978. Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tuncer, Sylvaine, Oskar Lindwall and Barry Brown. 2021. ‘Making Time: Pausing to Coordinate Video Instructions and Practical Tasks’, Symbolic Interaction 44(3): 603–631. Watson, Rod. 2008. ‘Comparative Sociology, Laic and Analytic: Some Critical Remarks on Comparison in Conversation Analysis’, Cahiers de Praxématique 50: 197–238. Weeks, Peter. 1996. ‘A Rehearsal of a Beethoven Passage: An Analysis of Correction Talk’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 29(3): 247–290. Winch, Peter. 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Part I

Foundational Issues

1

Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action Harold Garfinkel Edited by Michael Lynch and Oskar Lindwall

Editors’ introduction On May 4, 1992, Harold Garfinkel (1917–2011) convened a meeting of a seminar in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He had been retired from the faculty for several years but continued to teach occasional seminars which were attended by UCLA graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and visiting faculty. This particular meeting was titled “Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action.” He used the same title for short sections of two different chapters of Ethnomethodology’s Program (Garfinkel 2002: 105–108, 185–187). There is some overlap between those sections and the 1992 seminar, but we believe the seminar provides a more extensive and accessible account of Garfinkel’s treatment of the topic. It also provides an appreciation of his inimitable style of presentation. It was the first in a series of seminar sessions devoted to the topic of instructed actions. In it, Garfinkel introduces some basic themes and procedures to be developed in further meetings and he alludes to exercises that the students would perform in later sessions (for example, with inverting lenses). The seminar was recorded on audiocassette tape and was later transcribed. We obtained copies of the transcript and a digital copy of the original audiotape from the Garfinkel archive in Newburyport, MA. We are grateful to Anne Rawls for permitting us to use the materials and for arranging to have the tape recording digitized. We also thank Jason Turowetz and Clemens Eisenmann for locating the tape and transcript, helping with the arrangements, and providing some helpful suggestions and information about its contents. The digitization and some of the archival work were funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 262513311 – SFB 1187, Collaborative Research Centre: “Media of Cooperation,” University of Siegen, Germany. We were able to use the digital copy of the original tape to review and edit the transcript. For the most part, Garfinkel’s voice was clearly recorded and the original transcript was accurate. We were able to correct occasional mistakes in the original transcript and fill in some blank areas, but there were some short segments when Garfinkel moved away from the microphone to write on the blackboard, and DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-3

22  Harold Garfinkel there also was a short gap when the cassette tape ran out and was turned over to record on the other side. We indicate where we made guesses or were unable to decipher what he was saying at those times. Most of the session was made up of a lecture by Garfinkel. We edited the tape to focus on Garfinkel’s presentation, with the exception of an exchange with a visiting scholar at the start of the session. We preserved that exchange because Garfinkel makes a point about the necessity to perform exercises. As much as possible, we tried to preserve Garfinkel’s vernacular usage and inimitable phrasing, but we found it necessary to make occasional concessions to written form and grammar. We also added section headings, endnotes, and references to the text of the lecture presented here. Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action Harold Garfinkel Sociology 271, May 4, 1992 Preliminaries and introduction HG: Tonight (pause) we have an unidentified visitor from far away. Would you introduce yourself, please? FC: Yeah. My name is Finn Collin. I teach philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, and I’m currently writing a book about the social construction of reality – that is the idea that we somehow generate social reality by the way we describe it – and it’s to be published by Cambridge University Press (Collin 1997). One chapter of that book is dedicated to a discussion of ethnomethodology, based on some of your early work. I wanted to sit in on this class, and I hoped that I could do so to see whether your positions today are close to what they used to be – to see whether the discussion or the criticism is relevant to your position at all. HG: You are most welcome, and at the end please be sure to tell me. [Laughter.] FC: Unfortunately, I have a colliding class in the department I am visiting over here, so I’m not certain to what extent I can be here on a regular basis. I’ll have to try to work that out, but I hope I can do so. HG: Well, even being here wouldn’t do because my prejudice is that you must do what I call perspicuous settings, or tutorial problems, or when I’m in a bad mood I call them exercises. [Laughter.] I never call them experiments. But in any case, the idea is that those [are] hands-on settings, research wise, things to do from which there’s something to learn. That those motivate my talk. And so my favorite– it’s not so favorite, but let’s say I have a sermonette, that goes to the effect that if you don’t do the exercises, that you’ll trust your own hearing and your own notes, and your own exquisite ability to interpret what you have in writing, and what you theorize about what you may have heard. And that will never fail to give you some coherent version of what you’ll provide has been witnessed or is available for witness. And that in itself will assure that you have a very clear– you’ll strive

Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action  23 to make it right. And those skills will assure that you’ll miss the point. And it happens not only in this course, but it happens without fail in the ways of reading ethnomethodological texts. It’s a very unpopular thing to tell students. They fall into consternation. Some of them get very angry. They think I have something up my sleeve (and feeling) I’m holding out on them or something of the sort – but their consternation is nothing compared to the academics, who can already hear without even (another step), that I’m everything I’m cracked up to be, by way of the professional notoriety. With that introduction you are more than welcome to sit in. Perhaps we can find the time to talk further. Now, I brought some equipment. Here’s a garbage pail, with a pair of inverting lenses. [Laughter.] I went looking for other lenses, and I picked up these little bits and pieces. You’ll have to forgive me, but this is the only remaining decent piece of equipment. This is very good because you simply put it on your head [laughter] and then you go about doing some very ordinary things, like we’ll start with writing your name on the board. Now it’s not – you’ll find out, then, that we’re not interested in turning you into dummies, into wrecks. It’s not a problem-solving exercise that’s being set. We’re not asking, well, how long will it take before you become accustomed to the thing that’s on your head, and can you go about your daily life hardly knowing that it’s there? The experimental psychologists have gone through that whole problem, and it has a large literature, and the answer is, of course, yes you can. You can, even when you put binoculars on and you are living with binoculars on all your life, and that was demonstrated something like 25 years ago by, in fact, a Los Angeles person – not me. And he wound up wearing the binoculars, driving an airplane, driving his motorcycle through the town. That’s not the problem. What we have with this is a troublemaker. It’s a way of making inspectable the achievement of the most unremarkable, trivial but indispensable ordinary bodily tasks. Under arrangements where we had just 20 and 25 of these things, we could set persons into concerted achievements with these things on their heads. And then, the lenses can turn out to be extremely rich, endless sources of fresh material. Now when I talk about fresh material, I’m talking about sources of the unimaginable looks of things, where their embodied achievement has become pointlessly visible. In any case, so I have some of these things, five of them, you’ll have to share them and, later on then, we’ll get into them.1 I want to bear down on what I’m calling instructions and instructed action. I’m going to introduce you to a bit of lingo. I’m going to be talking about praxeologizing descriptive accounts. And I’ll spend a little time at the beginning telling you what that lingo is all about. And then, I’m going to introduce you to another bit of lingo, really awful. I’m going to speak about the praxeological validity of instructed action.2 I’m going to furnish a high-flown generality with which the praxeological validity of instructed action is made initially an unexamined first segment of a pair of instructions and the work of following them. And that high-flown dogma — let’s call it that; might as well be. But the high-flown piece of advice goes something like

24  Harold Garfinkel this: that given the first segment of a pair – that is to say, if we start with a disengageable collection of instructions – then there will be the work of following those instructions that exhibits the pair, exhibits the phenomenon as a description that the first segment describes. And what we’ll want to know is: How do you take that generality and with it find, in and as of the workings of various practical settings where instructed action is involved, what that bit of talk has led us to learn? So that will be something that is a second topic. Well, not any which way of, I’ll call it, explicating the praxeological validity of instructed action; not any way of explicating that slogan will do. At least ethnomethodologically, what we’d like to do is to find perspicuous settings with which to explicate that slogan. So we want not to be engaged in the textual exercises of explicating that proposal. But we want instead to find in perspicuous settings what that slogan consists of as the locally, endogenously produced work of producing some most ordinary organizational things. What in the world would that achievement consist of? And, in order to search for those settings, we’re going to search – in order to provide what it is that we can have found, we’re going to use what I’m going to call Sacks’s gloss. That’s Harvey Sacks’s gloss. If you’ve had a chance to read the article on summoning phones, then you’ll find that Sacks’s gloss is briefly described at the beginning of the article.3 Now just invoking Sacks’s gloss can leave you at sea, and particularly since the idea, or since the proposal about praxiological validity, can sound really fierce, I’m going to show you how to use Sacks’s gloss, so I’ll give you a bit of ethnomethodological shop practice: a trick, not really a trick, it’s a thing you can do. And what I’m going to do is show you how to use Sacks’s gloss in order to explicate a famous remark that Merleau-Ponty once made. It was an observation of sorts. The observation was short and sweet. And Hubert Dreyfus made a lot of beautiful stuff of it. The observation was: “Existence is the process whereby the hitherto meaningless becomes meaningful.”4 Question: 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. So, I’ll give you several examples. Not examples of what the thing means. It is quite the other way around. What he could have been talking about; what it is he might as well have been talking about given that our job is not to make MerleauPonty available to the professions, but it is instead to misread Merleau-Ponty. To read him for what we need of whatever help we can get, in finding, in getting access to, the inspectable endogenous, locally endogenous, production of organizational things – organizational objects. So, I’ll give you several cases in which changes are run on that remark, with which to find for the actual cases that we use, with that remark, what can have been going on in the cases that we examine with it. And we’ll call that, ethnomethodologically speaking, explication. And then we’ll get to some exercises. And the first exercise that we’ll get to, because we’re going to be explicating the praxiological validity of instructed action, then a first exercise will involve the use of inverting lenses to do ordinary tasks, when instructions are only discoverably involved. That is to say, what the devil instructions, being instructed, doing something as a course

Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action 25 of instructed action, finding of what one could have been doing, that instructions will describe it. Those different enterprises, as practical enterprises, as worldly enterprises, let’s put it that way.5 But there are then several other perspicuous settings, and for the next several weeks then, we’ll start with this, take up whatever else and more we can tonight besides this. And then in the next several weeks, in our seminar, continue with other settings. That’s the agenda. “Praxeologizing” descriptive accounts Okay, the first topic I spoke of was praxeologizing descriptive accounts. What the devil is that lingo about? I first came upon something like this in these studies several years ago of the practices of lab scientists.6 I’m using “lab scientist” to mean persons who make their livings in the natural sciences. As the day’s work, they’re working in labs, and they’re making discoveries in a science. And the thing that I learned is that while these birds were very interested in the truth of things, that, as of the day’s work, they were continually doing things like this: they would read something in the journal, they would take a manual down from the shelf, one would ask another, of such and such a procedure, what did you do, given that so and so criticized it in the last journal? And the thing then that I found that they were doing was that they were rereading these descriptions as instructions, not any which way, but let’s say they would read the stuff off the page, whether or not it was, lexically speaking, readable instructions, they would nevertheless turn the page. They would so read the description that they were dealing with instructed actions; that is, they were reading the descriptions as consisting of two segments that I’m going to call a collection of instructions, their implementation, or the following of the instruction, or the rules in use, or the instructions at the worksite, available as a detail among other details, like equipment and architecture, and instruments, and helpers and assistants and colleagues. These were then the in vivo following of which the instructions were somehow or other incorporated details of that work of following them. They would provide, then, not only for what I’m going to call bracketed stuff.7 I don’t mean bracketed in a phenomenological sense of bracketed; I mean in the fussy academic sense that I’m using it for. Remember, I said, here are instructions, they provide for a distinction, and to make the distinction we call these instructions so read that they can be treated as kind of disengageable. We examine them, do all kinds of fancy things with them, indifferent to what the work of following them might look like, or what they could look like on the occasion, when you are then to incorporate or embed them somehow or other in the setting in which their (call it) implementation would be a vernacular way of speaking. And so, they provided then for this distinction, and they provided as well for a third feature, which was that the two stood in some relationship. And I’m going to say that praxeologizing a description is the most ordinary shop practice in the lab, where a description is so respecified as to provide for what I’m going to call a collection of instructions, their implementation, and how the two are related. For example, they would speak about the followability of instructions for their standing

26  Harold Garfinkel relationship of some adequacy of completeness, of sufficiency. They provide for various relationships of adequate correspondence and so on. I want to add one further feature. It is not only that they provided for this reading of the journal article, and then found the instruction, their implementation, and their relations, but that was a job that they were doing, and they were doing it in vivo. And that’s what I want to insist on. That is to say, that whole job could be done without their ever leaving the desk. But what I want to insist on is: no, the thing that we’re going to be particularly zeroing in on is that job that they do in vivo. And I mean by in vivo, I don’t want to say lived work, because it sounds as if my thoughts are turning to the ones that (Hamburger) would think. So, it’s not (Hamburger-like) lived order we’re talking about.8 Once upon a time, I would talk like that. Right now, I want to insist on the worksite, unavoidable, inescapable doing the work that the instructions, the following of which, turns those instructions into some kind of description of the work that will have been done of the pair. Now, a few remarks about praxeologizing descriptive accounts as a worksite procedure in the labs: first of all, it’s a skill. It’s more than that. It’s a competence. More than that, in the labs, it’s a vulgar competence. I mean by vulgar, anybody in the lab can do it, and the company takes it for granted that in this shop, as well as across the profession, it’s the most ordinary achievement. So that means that, as an achievement, it’s massively available. It’s not found as an occasional, praiseworthy, such a rare skill as to draw immediate high honorifics. It’s done, in fact, as the most ordinary, unremarkable, yet indispensable demand of technical competence. So, it’s not only done; it’s demanded. And it’s specifically unremarkable; that is to say, not worth anybody’s second glance as to just how it’s done. Praxeologizing descriptive accounts by no means is confined to the labs in the natural sciences. It’s in fact at large, common as dirt. So, it’s a very ordinary party game, for example, to draw maps, and then the contest is: Who can turn the map into a recitation of instructions, where to start and how to get there? And who can do that fastest? Then, of course, to do it the other way around. So that, in fact, it’s found again as a massive competence. If we had all the time in the world, then I would put another exercise on you. I would say, “Well, tell you what, take the next half hour, get out of this room and run around this campus, and wherever you find, let’s say instructions, praxeologize them, and keep notes.” Then we would all come back. You had cameras, you will have taken pictures. If you don’t have cameras, you’ll draw it in an instant. So the business of identifying them itself draws attention to, draws a kind of momentary reflection on, a kind of zeroing in on, a just this that you are doing, and making a record of, with which, in return to the seminar, to teach the others: “Look at this! Look at that! Here’s what I found!” And so on and so on. I once set an undergraduate course the exercise: I wanted them, over the weekend, to find two hundred of these things, and not to spend a lot of time writing them. I only ask: “Look I want you actually to witness the thing you’re describing, or you’re telling me about, don’t simply imagine it.” [If] you need to imagine it, you get the job done in no time. So it takes a little work to search them out.

Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action  27 The praxeological validity of instructed action I want to talk about the praxeological validity of instructed action. By the way, I use the term “instructed action” to refer to the pair, in their relationship, some relationship – that just (makes) it easier to speak of the two. Later, as we’ll see, that these – I’ll just use this way of speaking about it (this means “R”; this is “relationship”) – that the instructions and their implementation are in something of a relationship that they make up an instructed action.9 That the way that these are related in formal analysis stands in very sharp distinction, in contrast, in incommensurably alternate contrast, to ethnomethodology, where this apparatus is not used. Instead, ethnomethodology talks of ethnomethodological pairs, and ethnomethodological Lebenswelt pairs. So that these things are related, instead of being related (for example) in the fashion of demonstrating correspondence, (standing in) correspondence, they are related in (the goofy ways I’ve been talking about Lebenswelt pairs). We’ll be talking more about that. Let me propose that there is this about instructed actions that we are going to be particularly interested in getting access to. That is, the thing we want now is access to a phenomenon, an achieved topic of order: such an achieved topic that the topic then disappears and becomes instead an achieved phenomenon. Well, that phenomenon is going to have, for the time being, a funny name: “praxeological validity of instructed action.” By that, I’m going to mean – and now be very careful in putting this in your notes; in a marginal comment, say “Garfinkel insists he’s not offering a definition; he is offering at best a loose remark” – that we’ll find out via our explorations what that loose remark might as well mean by motivating what it could mean through our investigations. Rather than by administering the remark as a definition, for example, as a generic representation of the settings that make up our investigations. So that means then that in fact we are starting with something like a first segment of a pair, first segment of an instructed action. We’ll find out by working on it what it might as well can come to. Well, Sacks’s gloss will bail us out of that initial vagueness, but by praxeological validity the remark goes like this: that the work in vivo of reading the text, say of a description, exhibits the phenomenon that the text describes. I’ll repeat it. Remember, put in the margin: “Garfinkel says be careful, this is a loose remark,” that the motivation for it will be found in the settings that show us what we might as well have been talking about. It doesn’t mean, by the way, that anything goes as we will see. But, in any case, here’s the remark: The work of reading the text of a description exhibits the phenomenon that the text describes. And I’m going to be talking about that as the praxeological validity of instructed action. And I’m not playing fast and loose with “validity.” It’s only that we’ll wait and see what, as a worldly achievement, case by case, and more than that, as the great recurrencies of ordinary society: What does that validity consist of? Unfortunately, we have present a philosopher. I have to talk as if I disrespect the enterprises of philosophy. I don’t. I only have no use for teaching philosophy’s very own topics, among other things, because I’m not competent. My particular prejudices and policies are taken from sociology. It’s a different way of working I’m advocating.

28  Harold Garfinkel Now then, let’s propose about praxeological validity that what we want, now, is a way of finding perspicuous settings with which to explicate that slogan. In the proposal I made before, ethnomethodologically speaking, to explicate that remark will not be illuminated by going to the encyclopedia or to Webster, or to your favorite authors, or to your favorite instructors, in sociology, for example, if their commitments are heavy – as we’re apt to find them, they are commitments of formal analytic social science. It has nothing to do with disrespect. It has everything to do with losing the phenomenon, if you go to your authors. So what we want to ask is: How do we find these settings, with which to explicate the praxeological validity, and that will make up, in our doing these perspicuous exercises, will make up what explication is all about, as worldly work, as examinable work? That is, what is it that we could do, what would we learn that’s teachably the case, that’s instructably-observably so? That’s what we are after. Well, I am going to propose that we are going to be searching for them using Sacks’s gloss. Sacks’s gloss Here’s what I’m proposing. In 1963, Sacks and I had a joint fellowship at the newly established Suicide Prevention Center. That was neither here nor there, the big thing that was nice about it is that we became Assistant Coroners of the County of Los Angeles. You can imagine what that meant; both of us were made sick by the sight of what was on those slabs. So we had to go … [Tape changes sides; brief gap.] … but it would be distracting to get into that right now. Remind me, perhaps at one of our parties, I’ll tell you about the coroner’s problem.10 So here we are at the Suicide Prevention Center, and Sacks has just begun his work; he’s discovered the miracles that can be found in tape-recorded conversation. These are telephone conversations. The director of the Suicide Prevention Center was angry. He did not like the idea that Sacks was secretly recording those conversations. So, he made me promise that I would have him stop. So I made him stop, but of course he didn’t listen. [Laughter.] The director also had other lunacies to administer about Sacks. Sacks would carry his notes around in a pile, and as he would write them and add to them, and as he would talk, he would thumb the pile, and he had also a way of talking so that there were long pauses between utterances. So, he was apt to [pause] be [pause] talking like that. And so the director said to me one day, “You know Harold, I’m sorry to tell you this, but I’m afraid that your friend Sacks is a hopelessly simple schizophrenic.” [Laughter.] I mean, the dangers of this world. [More laughter.] But anyway, here is the idea. He came in one day and he said, “You know what. I’ve come upon a distinction between possessables and possessitives.” Remember Sacks had a degree from Yale Law School. So he said: I’ve come upon this distinction between possessitives and possessables. And I’ll mean by possessitives that you’re walking down the street, you see something, it seems valuable, and you’d like to have It. And you see about it that

Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action  29 the thing you’d like to have, you can have. You want it? It’s yours. And you see this about things in the street. Whereas another, and this is to be a distinction, to be distinguished from … Well, the possessable is this: When you see it, you’d like it, you’d like to have it, but you see of it that you cannot have it, you see it belongs to somebody. Now, he says: I’d like to know what I’m talking about, but I don’t want to go to the usual sources with which that problem would be made decidable. I could go to the library. I’m an adept in the law library. I could find endless cases with which to find that distinction or any of its analogies. No, I don’t want to do it that way. I could ask for advice: “I want somebody to tell me, what would you suggest could be meant by that distinction?” I don’t want to do it that way. I could write definitions. I have the head to do it, why not? But no, I don’t want to do it that way. What I want to do, I want to find a group, a work group, a group whose work somewhere in the city is of this sort: that what they’re doing is such that when I tell them what I’m looking for, they will tell me what I’m really talking about, and they will give it to me out of the ethnography that they’re capable of reciting from their own work experience. So they’ll know better than I what I’m really talking about, and I want to treat the distinction as their knowing better than I. I will not insist, then, that what I could offer, as what I’m talking about, that they would have to respect. No, I won’t do that. I’ll wait to see what it is that they could teach me.11 That was called Sacks’s gloss: meaning, you start with that distinction, you could start with a formulation, you could start with a bit of discourse, you could start with a remark of any which sort. So it really doesn’t make any difference, since you’re going to be using it with which to find a work group, persons at work whose circumstances, as of their work, would be available to them, with which then to teach you as you come to ask them what you are really talking about. The “really,” however, is entirely in vivo “really.” It’s this: as of that group’s competence in responding to, or answering, as itself a worldly achievement, the mutual teaching and learning that could go on. What is it, then, that you might find that that group, whatever it is, might tell you, or might teach you, with which then you could see what you’ve been talking about? We’ll find another version of it that gloss in an article called, “On formal structures of practical action,” by Garfinkel and Sacks. In the appendix, you will find something called the anthropologist’s gloss.12 You’ll find considerable similarity. The anthropologist’s gloss was suggested back in about 1959 by Charles Frake, who created a sensation when he returned from the Subanun by proposing about his glossary of their botanical and medical terms that he had obtained them under a field procedure, in which he did not administer the established, professional botanical terms – not even the established professional ethnobotanical terms – to

30  Harold Garfinkel them, with respect to issues, for example, of sufficient identification, completeness, correctness, the depth of their own practices in using these items, and so on. But instead, he was turning to them to teach him what, in the way of their speaking together, he was asking them to teach him. And was holding them, then, as the origin and final source of authority for what, when he returned to the professional anthropologists in the United States, he would tell them, with the claim, here’s what they really mean, and I’m not the one to say what “really” is, but they are. So that’s what Sacks’s gloss is about. Later, in a study that we did of lab scientists, called “Respecifying the Natural Sciences as Discovering Sciences of Practical Action,” another version of the anthropologist’s gloss, of Sacks’s gloss, and so on, was used as a way of soliciting from practitioners what the contingencies of their work could be by asking them to teach us, by telling us what about these contingencies. And the solicitation was made by offering them stories of these contingencies, asking them if they could identify, in their own practice, in their own work lives, what those stories might possibly be about as it concerned their affairs.13 Now that’s for Sacks’s gloss. And I can tell you right off that I have yet to see a serious comment in, never mind the writings of the professions, that is to say, the established social sciences, let’s say sociology; I haven’t seen anyone pick up the insistence, the early insistence that Sacks and I made, on the use of that gloss. Nevertheless, I want to tell you right off that if you’re going to add to your – I hesitate to call them methods, it’s so pretentious; let us say, here’s a thing you can find yourself doing. Then, Sacks’s gloss is surely an ethnomethodological way of proceeding. Using Sacks’s gloss to (mis)read Merleau-Ponty’s remark Now, I promised that, since our target is the praxeological validity of instructed action, I promised that I would give you some examples of another remark so that you get the hang of what we’re going to be doing with these exercises. So, we’re going to use Sacks’s gloss to explicate Merleau-Ponty’s remark, “existence is the process whereby the hitherto meaningless becomes meaningful.” How would we explicate that? Well shortly after I got here, when I got here – I won’t say when, okay?14 When I got here, it was a joint department, anthropology and sociology. They had some very distinguished anthropologists, people from Chicago, Berkeley, and Harvard, which at the time were premium departments. Ralph Beals15 had been in the Arctic, and while he had been in the Arctic, he had done some archaeology, some digging, and he came up with frozen feces, just absolutely ageless and frozen. And since he was a good anthropologist and a good archaeologist, he was required not to destroy the site. So, he removed the bags, put them in bags, and took these things back to Los Angeles, not knowing what he was going to do with them. And he stored them in the basement. There’s a sub-basement in Haines Hall.16 So he stored them. And so, they were there for years and years, including my tenure, well into my tenure. And then one day, a chemist – What the hell is his name? He discovered carbon dating.17 With the discovery of carbon dating, what was unspeakably worthless became extremely worthwhile. Now let’s say, it was upon the discovery of carbon dating,

Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action  31 and the availability of carbon dating as a technique, that the bags of feces, otherwise worthless, but now witnessably otherwise worthless, because until then, that they had, they were in bags, in the basement, and now upon the possible administration of carbon dating, that both the witnessed, hitherto meaningless, as well as meaningful, takes on their specifiably, instructably observable, demonstrable “meaning”; i.e. you’re in the presence now of these meaningful objects. These objects, these objects, now, that take on, under the auspices of what can be done with them, when now it’s to be seen that before, they simply were Beals’ folly or worse. Well, then, that would be an explication. And the thing I want to call to your attention is that in order for us, as ethnomethodologists, to deal with what explication could be, we have to become, we might as well become, we’re invited to treat the job of explication like this: get really knowledgeable about what indeed Beals had done to bring back the bags, to make them available, to make them available as stored items, the relevance thereby, that the department, in its control over the use of rooms in Haines Hall, was thereby in the position to turn Beals’ stored bags into items that were none of anybody else’s right to dispose of, use, explore, etc. without his explicit – now we’re into the explication of the hitherto meaningless, that is, that existence now takes on the power of, what shall we call it, sociologizing those bags. More than that, I want to insist on the praxeologizing of it, namely, that in the hands of our coming upon that setting, we find in fact that our slogan, say, gives us strong access to the operations of the Anthropology Department, of the career relevance within the corporation, to Beals, of this item, that’s not merely, and casually, and in the vernacular, it’s uninteresting in those ways. That it’s just feces in a bag in the basement. Let me give you another one. Back in the late ‘50s, a cargo plane came down in a schoolyard in Van Nuys.18 And so, there was this catastrophe, and the newspapers of course were simply filled with the story of this awful disaster. The stories were characteristically, repeatedly – you could find in story after story, the awful irony we came to call the “but for” stories. So, you would get it, let’s say, from the mother. Here’s a mother whose child survived: Every morning he runs out of the house. He can’t wait to join his companions. This morning, I called him, “get your lunch before you go.” He was so anxious to go with them, that he ran out without his lunch. He didn’t want to come back. I shrieked at him, “You come back!” He came back, he got his lunch; the others were under the airplane when it fell. Now that would be – I won’t repeat the other variations on the theme. There were the ones then that survived “but for,” and there are the ones that were killed “but for.” The “but for” was always this at-the-time impossible to see what the incredible significance and consequence would be of an invisible trivial matter. Not a trivial, it’s an unaccountable, matter. It gave no indication at the time – this is now, remember, within the story – gave no indication at the time of what this hitherto meaningless, this otherwise meaningless, this at-the-time meaningless item would be, and so it becomes meaningful.

32  Harold Garfinkel Again, the stories provide, in the fashion of the stories, for the organized circumstances within which the hitherto meaningless, otherwise meaningful, is revealed. It is revealed in and as of the story’s very own coherent details as a telling. And over, and over, and over again, like the newspapers were simply filled with it. It leaves us a little uneasy, doesn’t it? That we might have witnessed the arts of the writers for the newspapers. So what we’d like to know then is, well do you find “but for” stories with a similar structure in other circumstances where there’s no question now of the writers; where it’s not a few people who are leading us to think that the city newsroom is providing for everything that discovered structures and stories could consist of, which is of course one of the dangers – no, one of the achievements, not a danger – of culture studies, as you can easily forget, for the achievements of the city (news)room. In any case, let me give you another one, just to answer that last one. There was a faculty member, used to be here, John Davis. He was a great expert on the spinal cord injuries that are found at Rancho Los Amigos [Rehabilitation Center]. And so, I was talking to him one day, and I told him about “but for” stories, and my dissatisfaction, because they ran up against the newspaper story, that is to say, the newspaper article. As newspaper articles, you could assign them to the journalist. He said, “No. don’t do that. All you have to do is spend time down there and talk to any of these people who have incurred spinal cord injuries, as surfers, for example, or motorcycle accidents.” He said they all have “but for” stories: “I was riding along Topanga [Canyon Boulevard]. I made a usual turn. I didn’t see that there had been a slight fall of gravel. The machine slipped in the gravel. Had it not been for the turn just then, but for that small collection of gravel, I’d be a whole man.” And instead, now you have the catastrophe. It was also, then, accompanied by something that the stories (on) the Van Nuys catastrophe did not include, which was, “Sure, everybody knows, if you’re running fast over gravel in your motorcycle, you’re taking your chances it will slip. It can slip. Nevertheless, why me, why now, just now, in light of everything that was in prospect?” So that was an additional piece of the explication, that is the setting, as of which, in and as of which, the slogan is provided the motivated – not only sense, but it is also provided the phenomena that open up the hitherto meaningless that becomes meaningful. And the existence then is again provided with great specificity. Perhaps that’s a way of making Sacks’s gloss available. Let’s say, to find work settings, settings where it’s as of the working that the slogan takes on its, what shall we say, shall we say its definiteness of sense and reference? The definiteness of correspondence of matters spoken or talked or provided for discursively, and the objects that correspond to it? All for their inspectably, their inspectable, further deepening. I want to emphasize that, because what we have is something like, I’ll call this – what I’ve been calling the recurring features of these “but for” stories in the last two cases. I want to call that a scheme of detail, even though I’m very uneasy with that usage. What I mean by the scheme of detail is that it is, in itself, an instructive way of examining the newspaper, the newspaper stories, of spending time at Rancho Los Amigos, with our informants, so called. And it’s a way then of administering an instructed version of the just what that slogan is about. That is to say, where

Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action  33 explicating it means providing for the hitherto meaningless becoming meaningful in existence’s own glossed detail in such a fashion that we are led to find the indefinitely more explorable specifics, without undermining the schema. We can use the notion of “really” as a gloss for that kind of facility, let’s put it that way, that kind of resource. So, what we would like to do, then, is in fact to find of instructed actions that they have similarly a schema, that’s to say, that they’re available as schemes of detail. But now, let me put you on notice, I’ve only been talking about how desirable to have them as schemes of detail, without warning you off any further use of the notion of schemes of detail. That will simply gut the enterprise of ethnomethodology by encouraging you to enter definitional enterprises. Why shouldn’t you, right? Whereas what we want is to be able to use – to examine – these instructed actions in such a fashion that we would have the benefits of what otherwise are available to formal analysts in their endless schemes of detail: their definitions, for example; their typologies; their counting procedures; their pride in formal analytic theorizing that precedes their knowing in any detail the matters they’ve theorized, that are enjoying the benefits of theorized provision. And so, this is then a way of alluding to the fact that our scheme, and I’ve told you about the scheme, only consists of these. Not this. Not the variations on this.19 But we’re going to – could find that there are such things as ethnomethodological pairs. I’m talking about instructed actions. And then there are pairs where the first segment of the pair has certain properties. So far, I’m claiming that those properties are found only for the first segments in the natural sciences. I’m catching some flack about that. There are some people who don’t really trust that, … that I know what I’m talking about, okay. (There will come a time, we’ll hear about the grades, we’ll see you straight.) But the Lebenswelt pair (… the first segment …) that the first segment in its specifications is truly only discoverably the case and can’t be stipulated; can’t be set up, as “well, we’ll just let it go, then,” and so on. However, we’ll get to that later.20 Notes 1 In his seminars for many years, Garfinkel assigned a student exercise with inverting lenses (in this case an Army surplus tank prism mounted in a plastic garbage pail to be placed over the student’s head so that the viewpoint through the prism presents an upside-down spectacle). He does not elaborate further in this particular session on the exercise. For such an elaboration, see Garfinkel (2002: 207–212). 2 Garfinkel (2002: 149n.6) provides a brief gloss on the “praxeological validity of instructed actions” as meaning “that at and as the work site, misreading a descriptive account as instructions, the work of following which exhibits the phenomenon that the text describes.” 3 The article that Garfinkel refers to is Garfinkel and Wieder (1992). Sacks’s gloss is described on pp. 184–187, and the summoning phone exercise is on pp. 192–200 of that article. 4 The quote is taken from the English translation of Phenomenology of Perception in the chapter on “The Body in Its Sexual Being.” The full quote is “Existence is indeterminate in itself, by reason of its fundamental structure, and in so far as it is the very process whereby the hitherto meaningless takes on meaning, whereby what had merely a sexual significance assumes a more general one, chance is transformed into reason; in so far as

34  Harold Garfinkel

5 6 7

8

9

10 11

12

13

14

it is the act of taking up a de facto situation” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 169). In their introduction to Merleau-Ponty (1964), Hubert and Pamela Allen Dreyfus (1964: xvi) present the same abbreviated version of the quotation that Garfinkel recites. We are grateful to Clemens Eisenmann for helping us to locate the sources for the quotation. We deleted a brief, apparently sarcastic, aside Garfinkel made to (and about) one of the students attending the seminar. A series of seminar meetings on the topic of “discovering work in the sciences,” which Garfinkel convened in 1980, is available in Garfinkel (2022, Part II). At this point, Garfinkel walks away from the microphone and is talking while writing on the blackboard. It is difficult to make out what he is saying from the recording, and we have placed words and phrases in parentheses when we are unsure of them. From the context of his remarks, it seems that he was inscribing on the blackboard a version of what he sometimes called a “theorem” that formulates how formal (or disengaged) instructions become embedded in the “lived-work” of following them. Garfinkel (2002) and Garfinkel and Wieder (1992) use various bracket notations to formulate that relationship, such as: [instructions]—>{work of following instructions}. The original transcript spelled “hamburger” and “hamburger-like.” From the context (particularly the mention of “lived work”), we hear it as the name of a phenomenologist but are unable to locate who that might have been. Erik Boström suggested that it might have been a reference to Henry A. Hamburger, currently listed as a Professor Emeritus in Computer Science at George Mason University, whose publications include some on natural language processing . Garfinkel is again writing at the blackboard so that “this” refers to what he is writing. Although we can only guess at what he is writing, it again appears to be a version of a formula for how formal instructions relate to their implementation in situ. One such version is presented by Garfinkel and Wieder (1992: 200–201) with a formula using the notation { }—>( ) to describe how “technologies of social analysis” render in-course, vulgarly competent achievement of activities into “signed objects” amenable to formal analysis. Garfinkel (1967: 11–18) discusses the coroner’s problem. This passage is, at best, a paraphrase of what Sacks may have told Garfinkel in 1963 and is certainly not a direct quotation. Garfinkel told the story repeatedly in his lectures and writings. One of the more elaborate versions is in Garfinkel (2002: 181–187). We know of no written or recorded version of the story that Sacks might have given, although he did discuss the distinction between possessables and possessitives in a transcribed lecture (Sacks 1992, Lecture 16, Spring 1967: 605–609). In the lecture, Sacks briefly mentions the problem of identifying abandoned cars that are parked along the side of a street, just like other cars (p. 607). He notes that a public street is a common place to park as well as (much less commonly) a place to abandon a car. He mentions that someone who was not the original owner, but who wished to possess such a car, could have it towed to a police facility, where it would be stored for a time in case the owner would claim it, and if it was not claimed, it could then be transferred to the new owner. Garfinkel is referring to a section of the appendix on “Anthropological quotes” (Garfinkel and Sacks 1970: 364–365). Charles Frake is not cited in that section (or the article as a whole), but a relevant source on what Garfinkel says about Frake’s elicitation technique is Frake (1964). Garfinkel is referring to a procedure that he called “administering a schedule of ‘coat hangers’” – recurrent themes on which to solicit (and “hang”) stories from practitioners about the contingencies of laboratory practice. The study he mentions is an unpublished manuscript (Garfinkel et al. 1988), which was recently published posthumously. The section on “coat hangers” is in Garfinkel (2022: 33–38). By “here” Garfinkel evidently is referring to the Department of Sociology at UCLA, which he joined in 1954.

Praxeological Validity of Instructed Action  35 15 Ralph Beals (1901–1985) joined the UCLA faculty in 1936 and worked in the departments of Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology, and Anthropology until his retirement. 16 Haines Hall was the location of the Sociology and Anthropology Departments on the UCLA campus. 17 According to a brief online account by the American Chemical Society, Willard Libby (1908–1980), Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago, first proposed the method of radiocarbon dating in 1946. See: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/ education/whatischemistry/landmarks/radiocarbon-dating.html 18 For a newspaper account of a collision between a Douglas DC-7B and U.S. Air Fore F-89 Jet over the San Fernando Valley in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, in which the the crash resulted in the deaths of three junior high school students, see: “From the Archives: Deadly 1957 midair collision over Pacoima,” Los Angeles Times, 31 January 1957, available at: https://www.latimes.com/visuals/photography/la-me-fw-archives1957-pacoima-airplane-crash-20180102-story.html 19 Garfinkel has gone to the blackboard here, and again his voice is less distinct on the recording. It is clear from what we can hear in the recording that he is referring again to a schematic formulation of the “Lebenswelt pair” consisting of two “constituent segments”: (1) a formal account (a “signed object” – an instruction, recipe, direction map, or mathematical formula of a theorem) and (2) the “lived work” of following the rule, enacting the recipe, wayfinding with the map, or demonstrably proving the theorem. His claim is that the first segment cannot possibly encompass the second (materially produced, occasioned, reflexively enacted, ethnomethodological) segment, but he proposes that some of the natural sciences and mathematics are exceptional, insofar as the first segment can be discovered to provide sufficient materials for reproducing an experiment or proving a theorem. He notes that his claim about the natural sciences is contested by unnamed persons. Elsewhere he effusively cites Livingston (1986) in support of this claim (see Garfinkel 2002: 187–190; Garfinkel 2022: 83–87n.12). 20 At this point, Garfinkel proposes to the class that they take a short break, before resuming for the last half-hour or so of the scheduled seminar. The recording ends after those arrangements are made, as the seminar session apparently did not resume after the break.

References Collin, Finn. 1997. Social Reality. London: Routledge. Dreyfus, Hubert and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. 1964. ‘“Translators’ Introduction,” to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’, Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, ix–xxvii. Frake, Charles. 1964. ‘Notes on Queries in Ethnography’, American Anthropologist 66: 132–145. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Edited by Anne Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Garfinkel, Harold. 2022. Studies of Work in the Sciences. Edited by Michael Lynch. Abington, UK: Routledge. Garfinkel, Harold and D. Lawrence Wieder. 1992. ‘Two Asymmetrically Alternate Technologies of Social Analysis’, in G. Watson and R.M. Seiler (eds.) Text in Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology. London: Sage, pp. 175–206. Garfinkel, Harold and Harvey Sacks. 1970. ‘On Formal Structures of Practical Actions’, in J.C. McKinney and E.A. Tiryakian (eds.) Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Development. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, pp. 337–366.

36  Harold Garfinkel Garfinkel, Harold, Eric Livingston, Michael Lynch, Douglas Macbeth and Albert B. Robillard. 1988. ‘Respecifying the Natural Sciences as Discovering Sciences of Practical Action, I & II: Doing So Ethnographically by Administering a Schedule of Contingencies in Discussions with Laboratory Scientists and by Hanging around their Laboratories’. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Sociology, UCLA. Livingston, Eric. 1986. The Ethnomethodological Foundations of Mathematics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Humanities Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Sense and Non-Sense. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sacks, Harvey 1992. Lectures on Conversation, Vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell.

2

Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer

Introduction The overarching interest of the present chapter is in the description of embodied courses of action. More specifically, we focus on the instructional descriptions of what sometimes is referred to as manual or instrumental actions; that is, actions done by the hands and for other purposes than communication. The three examples that we use are taken from two different settings: an introductory course in endodontics and a YouTube tutorial on how to crochet. The instructional demonstrations found in these settings make perspicuous several themes central to this volume: how demonstrations rely on what “any member would know”; how they are contingent on competences that are yet to be instructed; how they constitute members’ analyses of skills and practices; how they are hopelessly incomplete; how they provide “mock-ups” of the activities they set out to demonstrate; and how they, therefore, are specifically useful for instruction. Although the chapter touches on each of these themes, the cases that we focus on are chosen because they show distinct relationships between descriptions and embodied courses of action. In all the examples, instructional descriptions are occasioned by manual actions, but they vary in the extent to which the sense of a description relies on the details of the displayed actions, and while instrumental actions in some demonstrations are produced independently of their description, there are other situations where descriptions and embodied courses of action mutually elaborate each other. In addition to this interest in descriptions as part of instructional demonstrations, we also turn to our own practices of description. The next section begins by situating our interest in the description of actions as a standing concern within ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. Throughout this chapter, we discuss how professional sociological analysis trades on and differs from the analysis produced by members themselves in the course of demonstrations: how our analyses of action are shaped by the fact that “ordinary cultural members are the first analysts on the scene” (Macbeth 2007: 200), and how the visual and embodied details of “say-shown demonstrations” (Burns 2012: 184) unavoidably are different from those that fit the printed page.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-4

38  Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer Descriptions and the recognizable sense of actions and activities The relation between descriptions and actions has been central to ethnomethodology from the outset. In Studies in Ethnomethodology, Garfinkel (1967) discusses a task in which students were to provide descriptions of the common understandings implicit in the actions making up everyday conversations. For each submitted attempt, Garfinkel urged the students to develop their descriptions further, to make them more detailed, and to iron out any ambiguities. The students soon realized that the task was endless, and they complained about the fact that each addition to the descriptions yielded further material for explication: “the writing itself developed the conversation as a branching texture of relevant matters” (Garfinkel 1967: 26). For Garfinkel, the exercise demonstrated, among other things, the essential incompleteness of accounts, and how the “recognized sense” of an utterance in conversation cannot lie in an explication of meaning abstracted from the action, but in an appreciation of the particular way the action was executed, the evident “method of speaking.” Consequently, such descriptions should not be treated as approximations of a substantive content – “what the parties talked about” as underlying “what they said.” Instead, Garfinkel treated the students’ descriptions as instructions: [T]heir written explanations consisted of their attempts to instruct me in how to use what the parties said as a method for seeing what the conversationalists said. I suggest that I had asked the students to furnish me with instructions for recognizing what the parties were actually and certainly saying. (Garfinkel 1967: 29, emphasis added) The notion of instruction introduced by Garfinkel in this passage provides a useful entry point to the substantive topic of this chapter: instructional descriptions of actions. His students engaged in attempts to explicate “what any member knows.”1 These explications were instructions for recognizing something that was already plainly visible to the competent member, for whom the recognized sense of an action does not depend upon, or require, descriptive elaboration. In instructional demonstrations addressed to novices, however, descriptions of actions serve more substantive ends, such as guiding the novice to see what is “actually and certainly” done. As an object abstracted from its circumstances, any description or account is hopelessly incomplete (see Garfinkel & Sacks 1970). As illustrated by Garfinkel’s exercise, each added element to a description provides material for further elaboration. In almost any other circumstance, however, the task is not to provide endless elaboration, but to furnish descriptions specifically designed for that occasion. With “person reference” as an initial example, Schegloff (2000a) points to the relevance of studies that examine how members refer to or formulate elements of their immediate environment or past experience. A speaker refers to a mutual friend, for instance, not by providing an exhaustive description of who that person is, but by using a first name or some other category

Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations  39 or description that shows that the two parties know whom they are talking about. In a footnote, Schegloff offers the following quotation taken from a story told by a man to two friends: “He said, ‘well I drove it down to this car show, uh someplace in Ohio.’ And uh, he got down in it, and the engine heated up and blew on the way back. Took it up, tore the damn thing apart, and found a rag stuffed in the radiator hose.” (Schegloff 2000a: 718, note 8) Schegloff notes how the story changes during the telling. Before the point where the engine blew, the whole trip is glossed as “I drove it down to this car show,” whereas the latter part, “took it up, tore the damn thing apart, and found a rag stuffed in the radiator hose,” represents a finer granularity, which coincides with the point and climax of the story. Schegloff argues that examining how members formulate elements of their environment, including actions and activities, and the varying granularity with which this is done, gives access to some of the terms and orders of relevance that shape the experience of this environment. Following the recommendation to examine how members formulate their immediate environments, but in ways adapted to our interest in embodied courses of action, we now turn to a set of examples of members’ descriptions of manual activities. Consider first Figure 2.1 and Extract 2.1, taken from a recording of a demonstration seminar in a course in endodontics – or root canal procedures – for students at a dental education program. In Figure 2.1, there are two frame grabs where a seminar leader uses a stylus to point at a live stream of the early phases of an endodontic procedure that is taking place in an adjacent room. Extract 2.1 is an English translation of the Swedish original and provides explicative descriptions of the ongoing actions visible in the live video.

Figure 2.1 On the left, the seminar leader points at the mirror while saying “blasting all the time on the mirror.” On the right, he points to the mirror while saying “use it for other things.”

40  Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer Extract 2.1  [END100311-00:09:06] INS: You see the dental assistant, she’s blasting all the time on the mirror. Because when I now drill with this speed-drill a lot of water is spurting. And then I must have the mirror because otherwise I can’t see. And then if the assistant blasts on the mirror she is blasting away the film of water so then one can see well in the mirror. ((8 second pause)) And the mirror, here you can see that you can use it for other things: keep the tongue away […] All of us who have worked as a dentist for a couple of years have drilled at least one patient in the tongue. […] The patient swallows, then the tongue goes up, swish. It heals, nothing much happens.

While Schegloff’s example illustrates how members describe past experiences, and how the granularity of the description is correlated with the production of the story climax, this instructor’s description is occasioned by the ongoing performance: in the details of the video, the seminar leader continuously searches for and finds topics that can be turned into instruction. One could note that the instructor initially describes the visible actions of the dental assistant in plain terms: “blasting all the time on the mirror.” “Blasting” (Sw. blästra) is an action categorization, and thus the description indicates in a preliminary fashion how to see a visible element in the video: that is, how the dental assistant is using the air water syringe to continuously “blast” air on the mirror. Although not going very far in furnishing the audience with “instructions for recognizing” what the assistant is doing as a transparently motivated and functional action within the procedure, this scenic account tells the students what to look at and sets up the relevance of listening to what is said next, as further instructions on how to see and recognize what is done. In line with this, something further, similar to what Garfinkel’s students produced in “explicating common knowledge,” immediately ensues. The instructor moves on to expand the reasons for and motivations behind the action, as embedded within the relevancies of the procedure: that the blasting is done to clear the view of the operating dentist and that the problem addressed through “blasting” arises because of the use of a particular type of drill. After the first description, and following a longer pause during which the seminar leader inspects the video, a second descriptive segment follows: “And the mirror, here you can see that you can use it for other things. Keep the tongue away.” Although brief, this description characterizes the action in terms of its effect: the tongue is kept away. Already in this brief gloss, then, we find elements of an analysis in terms of recognizably accountable motives. As in the prior segment, the instructor expands shortly after, explicating and contextualizing, among other things, what the tongue is kept away from, and why this is important. In both these segments, the narrowly descriptive part of the account is relatively brief, in comparison to remarks that situate the described action in terms of its motivation, typicality, and various contextual ramifications. Apparently, members in this instructional setting treat explications of motivations and the rest as necessary for

Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations  41 their descriptions to operate, paraphrasing Garfinkel (1967), as instructions for recognizing what the dentist is actually and certainly doing. Returning to the issue of granularity raised by Schegloff (2000a), the level of detail in these members’ descriptions becomes finer when explicating what is not immediately visible in the jointly observable action. Categorization of visible actions is done relatively briefly; once pointed out, anyone can see the “blasting” as plainly and transparently what the nurse is doing. It is also plainly visible (again, once pointed out) that the mirror is used to reposition the tongue. With the aid of the instructor’s description, this repositioning can be understood as done to “keep the tongue away.” Granularity increases, however, in the ensuing expansions. Here, we are reminded of Garfinkel’s exercise discussed above and the essential incompleteness of the accounts that his students produced; just where to stop in explicating endodontic context and competence seems to be an open-ended question for the members of this scene, moderated perhaps by the practical concerns of “keeping up” with the ongoing operation. To further illustrate the availability to the expert observer of “the invisible,” we would like to draw attention to the recurrent use of a psychological vocabulary in these narratives. The instructor repeatedly (in the larger data set from which the example above is drawn) describes the dentist’s actions in terms of what they “want,” “know,” “intend,” and so on. Of course, it is not individual motivations that are explicated, neither in the use of a psychological lexicon nor in the categorization of instrumental actions. The dentist need not be interrogated to enable this kind of narration. Rather, it is the recognizable sense and instrumentality of actions that are unpacked; that is, those aspects of actions that adhere to the normatively expected actionable order of the professional procedure. The seeming transparency of “mind,” also evident implicitly in any use of an action category, is really the public observability of accountable action. There are, however, limits to professionally shared vision (Goodwin 1994), as illustrated in the following section. Access and constitutive detail In the dental seminar, it is not only the seminar leader who provides descriptions of actions, but often the dentist performing the operation as well. These two perspectives produce two different layers of verbal explication. As Extract 2.2 illustrates, the parties’ access to details of the procedure differs, as do the kinds of descriptive accounts they offer. For a competent onlooker, it is possible to see that the dentist in Extract 2.2 (and Figure 2.2) is examining how far down he can get into the root canal. The details toward which the dentist orients while doing the procedure, however, are not all available from the perspective of an observer. Although some degree of shared competence is a prerequisite for seeing what the members are doing, the question is also one of perspective: of access to temporally evolving phenomenal fields and constitutive details. As Macbeth (2012: 200) observes in his notes on the play of basketball in its circumstantial detail, there are phenomena that “cannot be found from anywhere off the court,

42  Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer Extract 2.2  [END101104-27:13:23] 01 DEN:

02 03

deR: deL: deR: deR:

04

deL:

05 06 07 08 INS: 09 10 11 DEN: deR:

då känner ja 

*efter #lite grann, om man kommer, hur långt-

then I feel a bit, if one gets, how far#moves file to tooth--> >>moves mirror*holds mirror at root canal---> (1.2)#(0.4) -->#positions file in root canal—> ner man *skulle kunna *komma #sådär spontant. down one should get like spontaneously. --> #watch-winding movements--> -->*removes mirror* ja, där tar de ju emot, yeah, there is some resistance, (1.4) direkt känner man. immediately one feels. (7.0)

ser ni försiktiga såna här watch-winding-rörelser va. 

 you see, these careful watch-winding movements y’know (0.4) [väldigt försiktigt.] [very careful. ] [lirkar lite grann ] #så. [twiddling a bit ] there. -->#removes file

no matter how closely you sit to the sidelines” (see also Garfinkel 2022, Part 1, Appendices 2 and 3). In addition to showing that issues of access and constitutive detail are not only critical to the production of descriptions in instructional demonstrations, the extract

Figure 2.2 On the left, a magnified view of the thumb and forefinger of an endodontic specialist who is working the file down through the length of the root canal using a rotating movement of the instrument. On the right, the seminar leader is commenting on the procedure.

Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations  43 also serves to illustrate some of the interplay between our analytic accounts (e.g., descriptions of actions in transcripts) and the analyses produced by members. As noted by Mondada (2016: 361), “multimodal transcripts” raise questions about relevant description, “both for the co-participants and for the overhearing/seeing/ sensing observer.” In Extract 2.2, we find transcripts of the verbal contributions of the operating dentists (DEN) and the seminar leader (INS) based on the conventions developed by Jefferson (1984). Besides the transcription of the talk, and English translations of the talk, two lines are added for the manual actions of the dentist (see Mondada 2016): one for the left hand (annotated as “deL” in the transcript) and one for the right hand (“deR”). Throughout Extract 2.2, the operating dentist provides an online commentary on his own unfolding actions that reflexively build the procedure. This work does not involve the execution of a formal plan but is an incremental and tentative exploration of an endodontic scene. The dentist’s talk is highly indexical in its relation to the context of the ongoing, incremental, and embodied exploration of the tooth. It refers to the minute details of how it “feels” to move the file in the tooth (lines 1–6). Laminated over the dentist’s verbalized exploration of the tooth, the seminar leader’s contribution provides a categorization of visible professional conduct, which enables the dentist’s actions at that point to be recognizable as the endodontic technique known as “watch-winding” (lines 8–10). The seminar leader makes evident that she has performed the technique innumerable times herself and can appreciate what it means that there is some resistance. Nevertheless, it is not possible for her to produce a moment-to-moment commentary on the ongoing procedure in the same way as the operating dentist would do. Extract 2.2 thus provides two different accounts of the embodied actions of the dentist: first, we have the operating dentist’s online commentaries, and second, we have the seminar leader’s categorization and characterization of the visible actions as “careful watch-winding movements.” The dentist has access to a first-person perspective on the cavity, which strongly relies on tactile experiences, whereas the seminar leader comments on a gestalt consisting of recognizable endodontic actions in context. In relation to Extract 2.1, we noted that the instructor’s descriptions emphasize what is not immediately visible in the observed actions. In the dentist’s descriptions in Extract 2.2, we can see the articulation of the embodied movements in terms of their instrumental, tactile, and explorative character; while the file is inserted into the canal and rotated, the dentist says that he is feeling “how far down one should get.” He also articulates the relevant sensation in relation to this project: that he encounters “resistance” at a certain point. While the first segment would be visible and accessible to the competent observer, the precise sensation of resistance is tied to the first-hand perspective of the operating dentist. Still, the sensation is central to understanding the development of the action sequence; most notably indicated by the fact that the file is removed shortly after it is mentioned. This raises the issue of how we as analysts show and describe manual actions in the extract. What we have at our disposal is, first, conversation analytic transcription conventions and, second, still images or other graphic means of showing “nonverbal” aspects of the interaction. Conversation analytic transcription techniques

44  Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer can be said to aim for a transparent rendering of conversationalists’ “methods of speaking,” to recall Garfinkel’s point discussed above. Furthermore, conversation analysis also adheres to an analytic language that avoids explicating “content” in Garfinkel’s sense, that is, intentions, psychological traits, background knowledge, motivations, and so on. Instead, transcriptions and analytic accounts explicate and provide access to the sequential embeddedness of turns and their structural organization so that the “recognized sense” of conversational actions is hopefully discernible to the reader. Embodied aspects of interaction have been subjected to the same treatment in the development of multimodal transcripts, most notably the system introduced by Mondada (2016). This system has been highly generative for those who take an interest in the ways in which gesture and gaze are finely synchronized with verbal action. With embodied courses of action, however, the question arises as to how these actions are to be described. While talk can be transcribed verbatim, without directly imposing a particular categorization of the actions at the transcription stage (e.g., whether the turn-at-talk is a question, request, or something else), other actions will have to be described in some way, picked from a range of possible alternatives.2 One problem that confronts us is thus, simply put, what to include in the “multimodal” lines of the transcript. After the file has been moved to the tooth and positioned in the root canal, the dentist starts to manipulate the instrument in a way we categorize as “watch-winding movements,” beginning on line 3 and continuing to line 11. The transcript marks the onset and offset of the activity in relation to verbal actions. We could start to elaborate on these descriptions, for instance, by attempting to produce a transcript that captures how the thumb and index finger move clockwise and counterclockwise, the degree of the rotation, and even, to some extent, the force that is applied. This would provide lengthy, but in Ryle’s (1971) sense thin, descriptions of bodies, limbs, and tools that move in a three-dimensional space. Alternatively, we could aim for thicker descriptions that would explicate the sense of the actions, how watch-winding movements are different from other reaming and filing actions, how they are used to reach the working length of the root canal, what “working length” means in this particular context, et cetera. In principle, and as we have noted above, our analytic explications of actions could go on indefinitely. Apart from the essential incompleteness of any such account, which by no means detracts from their possible usefulness in ethnographic work,3 we want to point to a recurrent problem that we run into when producing our analytic descriptions and representations of these instructional activities. This is the chronic sense of absence, on the written page, of the “indexical ground” which provides members’ descriptions with their “gestalt coherence”4: the actual activities being described, as they play out in real time. The members’ categorizations and descriptions in the endodontic seminars provide observers with resources for recognizing what is being done in front of them. As analysts, we can offer additional resources to the reader, thereby engaging in an activity somewhat parallel to the seminar leader. Still, there is a sense in which the “say-shown details” (Burns 2012: 184) of the demonstration are impossible to recover through descriptions or

Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations 45 static images. In Extract 2.2, we saw how the instructor categorized the actions as “watch-winding” and characterized them as “careful.” The students should know about watch-winding as a technique from lectures and textbooks, but this is the first time that they have seen it done live. The classification (“watch-winding”) and the assessment (“careful”) thereby gain their relevant sense when here applied to the details of the visual field to which students and the instructor have shared access. This central point of the demonstration – that the “carefulness” is to be seen in the dentists’ performance as it unfolds on the video screen – can be said but not shown regardless of how extensively we expand our analytic accounts, and regardless of whether we do so “thinly” or “thickly.” Segmentation, redundancy, and followability We now shift focus from seminars in dental education to an online video tutorial on handicraft techniques. Figure 2.3 is taken from a video called “How to crochet for beginners,” and it shows how the yarn is held as a preparatory step before demonstrating how a single crochet is made. As stated in the title of the video, the demonstration is designed for novices. Anyone with some competence in crocheting would already know how to hold the yarn and how to make these stitches. The orientation to a novice audience is reflected in the granularity and pace of the instructions, in the use of repetitions, and in the exaggerated movement of hands, tools, and material. Besides the obvious fact that this demonstration is about handicraft

Figure 2.3 A video with the title “How to crochet for beginners: single crochet stitch.” The excerpt is taken 43 seconds into the video: https://youtu.be/BCDA44Sijx4?t=43.

46  Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer techniques and not endodontic procedures, some further organizational differences between the next case and the prior ones can be noted: the video has been recorded and uploaded to YouTube; it is not a demonstration done for a live audience; the activity is produced as a “mock up” (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970: 363) designed for instructional purposes and not as a display of the “real” procedure as it naturally unfolds; and it represents a step-by-step analysis of a certain component procedure. The instructor introduces this part of the demonstration by saying that this is just one of several ways of holding the yarn, whereafter she repeats the demonstration of the technique two times. In Figure 2.3, the first demonstration is represented on the first line and the second on the second line. Also, note how the achievement of the holding of the yarn is segmented into two parts. The first part is the “wrapping around the pinkie” and the other part is the “yarn going behind the pointer.” In both cases, the two parts are separated by “and then.” If one looks at a skilled craftsperson who weaves a strand of yarn between his or her fingers before starting to crochet, this does not come across as an action with clearly defined subparts. In the production of a step-by-step demonstration like this one, however, embodied actions are formulated as distinct steps in a sequence, and these formulations, in turn, shape how the actions are done and, as a result, seen. There is here a reflexive relation between words and manual actions: not only do the manual actions constitute a basis for what is described, but the instructive descriptions also shape what is done and shown with the hands. In the short sequence represented in Figure 2.3, the hands are first found in a waiting position; the fingers of the left hand are then spread widely before the yarn is wrapped around the little finger; the movements are segmented into parts with a recognizable beginning and an end; there is a slight pointing gesture with the left index finger when “your pointer” is mentioned the first time; and so on. In the case of the dental specialist, the seminar leader commented on the “careful watch-winding movements.” This can be contrasted with the exaggerated character of the movements and gestures in Figure 2.3, which rather than displaying expert performance in its natural context are produced as “mock-ups” of the technique, so as to allow the viewer to visually discern the formulated steps as distinct phases. Although the images in Figure 2.3 are unable to capture the actions as they unfold moment-to-moment in the video, they give some idea of what the video is showing and how words and displayed actions are organized as a coherent whole. As noted in relation to Extract 2.2, the instructive potential of a demonstration can be found in the coherence of embodied displays and verbal characterizations – the meaning of “careful watch-winding movements” derives from watching what the dentist is doing, and, interchangeably, the dentist’s embodied actions are understood with reference to verbal descriptions. The video tutorial in Figure 2.3, like innumerable other demonstrations found on YouTube and elsewhere, is characterized by a tight connection between speech and action reminiscent of what, in Swedish schools of film production and TV journalism, is referred to as “Orange-TV” (Swe. “Apelsin-TV”). The maxim that comes with this concept is that holding an orange while saying “I’m holding an orange” is bad TV, the idea being that gratuitous verbal explicitness makes the production less watchable. While this might be true for

Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations  47 films and TV shows, instructional videos are not primarily produced or consumed for their watchability, but for their followability. In these cases, the talk and video have complementary roles: the verbal commentaries describe what is shown while the visual details specify what is said, which partly explains why “Apelsin-TV” is an omnipresent feature in instructional videos. The seeming redundancy of the verbal description parses and highlights relevant parts of the visual field. In that sense, the description articulates facets of what is already visible, the relevance of which might otherwise be missed. Differently put, the issue of redundancy arises only when the audience is watching from the sidelines, without any intent to follow what the demonstration instructs, or when they are already competent to see without prompting what was “there all along.” The sense of redundancy might also emerge in a transcript of the demonstration; for example, if the instructor’s verbal formulation “you’d wrap this around your pinky” were tied to a description of the embodied performance, such as “wraps yarn with right hand around little finger of left hand.” The fact that demonstrations are produced for their followability rather than their watchability raises issues tied to transcription and our own practices of looking, listening, and describing. In a response to a post on an electronic newsgroup discussing transcription, Schegloff (2000b) argues that the greatest value of transcription does not attach to the resulting transcript, which he thinks should be treated as a “mnemonic device for what is best engaged on tape,” but to the “practice and process of transcribing itself.” According to this argument, the value of the transcript is mainly to be found in the hearing that transcription makes possible and the intimate observational access to the data which it fosters. As a conversation analyst, Schegloff argues that there is “no better way of coming to hear what was actually said and done than listening closely and repeatedly under the discipline of committing to paper what you hear, at the level of detail that has become characteristic of good work in CA.” When we are investigating instructional demonstrations, the practice of closely watching and listening to the demonstrations is central for us to understand what is happening. In this specific regard, our position might not be that different from the dental students who are following a demonstrated procedure through the instructive comments of the dentists. Like the users of video tutorials, and unlike the students in the dental class, we also have the possibility to replay the video repeatedly in order to figure out what is said and done. That these tutorial videos are produced for their followability and not their watchability, however, points to the relevance of other ways of engaging with them. Instead of merely listening and watching, an alternative way of coming to understand what is said and done would be to also follow the instructions. This suggestion has a close affinity with prior work in ethnomethodology which involves a “tutorial” orientation to phenomena (Bjelić 1995; Bjelic & Lynch 1992; Garfinkel 2002), in which one “discovers the rule of the practice through one’s own work with relevant material fields” (Bjelić 1995: 191). Applying this perspective to video analysis, Sormani (2016) contrasts traditional transcript-based approaches with what he calls a practice-based approach. In his characterization, transcriptbased video analysis tends to focus on the coordination of multiple resources and

48  Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer how these resources are deployed in different circumstances, but they do not necessarily address how these resources are used in the achievement of practical tasks. The alternative suggested by Sormani is for the researcher to reenact what the video shows and to treat the various difficulties encountered in the reenactment as “tutorial problems” (Garfinkel 2002, Ch. 4) with the potential of informing the researcher about the practices and achievements involved.5 According to Sormani, this practice-based approach could be applied to any video recording of social activities, but we would argue that it acquires particular significance in cases like ours, when the videos, as such, are produced to be followed. In real-world settings, the actual following of a particular tutorial is unavoidably situated in a larger context of practical problems that set up the relevance of online resources. In these cases, there is a close relationship between the watching and the doing. As demonstrated by prior studies (e.g., Garfinkel 2002; Lindwall, Lymer & Greiffenhagen 2015; Livingston 2008), instruction-following involves turning a set of instructions into embodied actions and, in doing so, figuring out what corresponds to what, what to do next, and how to overcome difficulties that arise. In other words, the instruction follower needs to work out an “embodied correspondence” between the instructions and the local context of the activity (Livingston, 2008). This introduces concerns and issues that simply cannot be found in the video itself.6 As previously pointed out, a central feature of instructions, including video tutorials, manuals, and recipes, is the decomposition of skills, actions, and activities into steps. In Figure 2.3, the decomposition of the crafting technique into steps and the repetition of the same steps twice are produced for the recognition and followability of the demonstrated procedure. In turning the demonstration into actions, however, another segmentation is introduced when the watching of the demonstration and the doing of what the instructions instruct is coordinated in a stepwise manner (see Tuncer, Lindwall & Brown 2021).7 Some tasks require that the watching and the following are done in an alternating manner: first, you watch a segment of the demonstration; then, you pause the video and attempt to do what the segment instructed. In other circumstances, it is possible to watch the video and do the task at the same time. In these cases, the video is paused as a way of keeping up with the demonstration and securing the ability to follow what comes next. In both cases, however, the segmentation of the video into parts involves an analysis of what is demonstrated, which relies on, but is not determined by, the decomposition found in the production of the demonstration. Through the decomposition that is endogenous to the demonstration, it is possible to project when one step begins and the other ends, and therefore where it might be relevant to pause. As the purpose of the watching is to follow what is shown, however, the relevance of this segmentation does not emerge from the demonstration itself, but from a gradually emerging understanding of the task, just what is needed to move on, and the contingencies that arise. What we want to highlight here is a difference caught by two related senses of the word follow: following as seeing-and-understanding versus following as reproducing in action. The contingencies that emerge in the work of following stepby-step instructions, like the need to parse a tutorial video into segments in order

Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations  49 to keep up, are not necessarily recoverable through repeated viewing or detailed transcription. The distinct ways in which the two forms of instructional demonstration relate to followability and instruction-following place the analyst in different positions vis-à-vis the description of action. In the endodontic data, through “members’ action category analysis” (MACA; see Lindwall & Lynch 2021) we get access to professional classifications (“watch winding”), assessments (“careful”), and rationales (“to keep the tongue away”), which makes it possible for us to “follow” what the dentist is doing. In this respect, we as analysts are in a similar position as the students watching the seminar. Indeed, the recommendation to watch and listen to what one sees and hears, and to do so “closely and repeatedly under the discipline of committing to paper,” would be equally valid for a student of dentistry as it is for the conversation analyst. For the analyst, moreover, the recommendation provides an entry point into the work of root canal procedures as well as to studies of “professional vision” (Goodwin 1994) and similar topics. Regardless of how closely the demonstrations are observed, however, a different set of issues will emerge when students later attempt to do what the demonstrations have shown. Our analysis of the crocheting tutorial points to some of these issues. Taken together, the two settings suggest that instructed observation – as one kind of orientation in instructional demonstrations – can be contrasted with instruction-following, where the demonstrated technique is to be reproduced in its constitutive details. These are not hard-and-fast categories, of course, but they point towards differences in orientation, relevant for the organization of instructional activities, and for the work of producing descriptions of embodied action. Concluding comments: Instructed observation and following instructions Sacks’ (1963) metaphor of the “commentator machine” introduces distinctions between different types of encounter with social objects. The metaphor casts social life as being akin to the kinds of machines found “at industrial and scientific exhibitions” (p. 5) – with a doing part and a saying part, where the latter describes what the former is doing. As pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, ethnomethodology starts with the observation that the subject matters of social science – social objects of various kinds – are always already described and interpreted by the parties to their production. Sacks explicates this notion in terms of differences and parallelisms between commonsense and sociological descriptions. What Sacks terms the “common sense” perspective is exemplified by his brief description of the machine: the saying part describes what the doing part is doing. From such a perspective, “[a] successful encounter consists […] in using one’s background to learn what the object is doing and how it proceeds (its means and its ends). The payoff of such success consists in a perceived adaptation to its activities” (1963: 8). Regarding the adequacy of the descriptions offered, they “need only be ‘good enough’ to permit the encounter to proceed. Possible misunderstandings may be left until they actually raise difficulties, and when they raise

50  Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer difficulties, they need only be solved as far as is necessary for the encounter to proceed” (1963: 9). A quite different kind of encounter is produced when the observer is someone who knows the language and knows what the machine is doing. Such a person has for the most part no need for the “saying part” as a resource for learning about the object. Instead, the possibility is opened of assessing the correspondence between the saying and the doing. The observer can see errors in the description and errors in the doing, note verbal ambiguities and actions in need of clarification, and so on. Sacks ties this perspective to the typical sociological orientation to “remedy” noted problems in order to reconcile the observed doing with the flawed understandings embodied in the endogenous descriptions provided by the saying part. For sociology, adequacy becomes a principled problem to be resolved through theory, and not a practical problem to be resolved over the course of the encounter. In our endodontic seminars, we might say that the operating dentist is a commentator machine, of sorts, performing the operation while describing their own actions. There is clearly a category of observers corresponding to Sacks’ commonsense perspective, that is, the students who use the offered descriptions as resources for learning “what the object is doing.” There is also, however, an observer clearly competent in both the activities and in the natural language produced by the object, namely, the seminar leader. The latter notes possible ambiguities and things that may need to be clarified and also, at times, irregularities in the performed activities (e.g., the omission of taking an X-ray image when it is normally required, see Lindwall & Lymer 2014). The descriptions provided by the seminar leader, however, are still oriented to criteria for adequacy that are practical; they need only be “enough” for the students to follow the procedure. Another difference between the seminar leader and Sacks’ account of the sociological observer is that there are aspects of the observed procedure that, as noted above, elude even the most competent “professional vision” (Goodwin 1994): visual details and tactile dimensions available only from the first-person perspective of the operating dentist. A further difference between our setting and Sacks’ metaphoric one can be noted: we, as professional analysts, are not competent in any strong sense in the endodontics that underlies both the doing and the saying of the “machine,” as well as the seminar leader’s elaborations. As analysts, we learn what the object is doing through ethnographic work, and on the basis of members’ descriptions, in a way that aligns our perspective most of all with that of the students. Leaving the parallel to Sacks’ metaphoric setting, and returning to our distinction between two ways of following instructional demonstrations, it is possible to argue that ethnomethodology has little interest in such seminars or tutorials in themselves: that instructional demonstrations make up just one kind of item in an open-ended list of “docile objects” (Garfinkel 2002), where manuals, recipes, and rules would belong to the same family; that these demonstrations therefore only are relevant as the first part of a pair, where the practical activity of instructionfollowing would be the second part; and that, in order to investigate instructed action ethnomethodologically, we need to turn to settings where instructional demonstrations are being actively followed in the sense of doing what these demonstrations

Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations  51 instruct. To meet this requirement, we could set out to follow tutorial videos ourselves; we could record people who come to terms with the instructions as part of some practical project; or we could record the instructional interaction between a teacher and a novice. As testified by several chapters in this handbook, there is much to learn from such approaches. For Garfinkel, however, instructed action is a more encompassing formulation about the praxeologies of social worlds than is instruction-following. In line with prior ethnomethodological studies (e.g., Burns 2012; Garfinkel 2002, Ch. 7), we thus believe that there are lessons to learn from these instructional demonstrations that do not require us to attempt endodontic procedures ourselves, or to study video records of novices being instructed in doing them; that the demonstrations are not mere docile objects since they consist of the in vivo work of say-shown demonstrations; that such settings are perspicuous in that they provide us with laic and professional analyses of embodied courses of actions; and that members’ instructional descriptions, including the use of action categories and the varying granularity employed, give access to some of the terms and orders of relevance that shape not only experience but also the production of everyday and professional worlds in common. Acknowledgment The work being reported here is financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (P190667:1). The research project on dental education was supported by the Swedish Research Council (VR2010-5225) and the project on online tutorials was supported by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg (2015.0075) foundation. We would like to thank Clemens Eisenmann, Michael Lynch, and Douglas Macbeth for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this chapter. Notes 1 The notion of “what any member knows” (Garfinkel 1967: 24) or the “socially-sanctioned-facts-of-life-in-society-that-any-bona-fide-member-of-the-society-knows” (Garfinkel 1967: 76) is recurrent in the writings of both Garfinkel and Sacks. Garfinkel expands on the issue in the following way: With respect to the problematic character of practical actions and to the practical adequacy of their inquiries, members take for granted that a member must at the outset ‘know’ the settings in which he is to operate if his practices are to serve as measures to bring particular, located features of those settings to recognizable account. They treat as the most passing matters of fact that members’ accounts of every sort, in all their logical modes, with all of their uses, and for every method for their assembly are constituent features of the settings they make observable. Members know, require, count on, and make use of this reflexivity to produce, accomplish recognize, or demonstrate rational–adequacy–for–all–practical–purposes of their procedures and findings. (Garfinkel 1967: 8) 2 Clearly, the transcription of verbal action must also be done in some way, picked from a range of possible alternatives (e.g., Ochs 1979). As this chapter hopefully makes clear, however, the description of action involves other issues and considerations than those that applies to the transcription of talk-in-interaction.

52  Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer 3 Ryle’s (1971) distinction between “thin” and “thick” descriptions brings us further to possible points of contact between members’ descriptions and the kinds of analytic accounts we produce as professional analysts. For instance, Crabtree et al. (2012), in a discussion of the kinds of description that are necessary to produce praxeological accounts in design ethnography, argue for Ryle’s notion of thick description, meaning a description which provides a “recognisable account of what a person or persons are doing” (p. 193, italics in original). For Crabtree et al., the goal is to produce ethnographic descriptions which unpack and convey the accountable recognizability of work activities. Such a description would include a very high level of detail, going beyond brief glosses. The authors’ example relates to “searching the internet,” where “typing in words” would be a “thin description.” A thick description, by contrast, explicates the various practices that go into searching and the projects which motivate particular acts in a larger contexture of relevant activities. Ryle’s version of thick description is then contrasted with Geertz’ use of the same term, which emphasized abstraction, “scholarly artifice” (Geertz 1973, cited in Crabtree et al. 2012: 193), and “the constructions we imagine [members] to place upon what they live through” (ibid.). 4 The idea of a “gestalt coherence” as it is used here draws on Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological “misreading” of Gurwitsch (see Eisenmann and Lynch 2021; Garfinkel 2021). 5 Garfinkel (2002, 248) introduces “tutorial problems” as “the empirical grounds for Ethnomethodology’s central claims,” which “are used to look for the local, endogenously produced, and accountable appearances of social facts.” 6 In fact, these concerns begin even before an actual video is consulted. The first step is to find a relevant video for the task at hand. In many cases, the selection of the video is unproblematic, but in the attempt of fixing a broken dishwasher, for instance, just writing “dishwasher repair” does not suffice. It is necessary to assess whether the model shown in the video is the same as, or sufficiently similar to, the one that is to be repaired. In cases where the problem is unclear, it might be relevant to watch a video where the problem first is diagnosed; for a dishwasher that does not drain, it could be the drain pump and motor, the belt, the piston and nut assembly, the drain hose, et cetera. Some of these issues will require specific tools or replacement parts, and before starting the process, it is therefore relevant to skim through the video just to see whether it is at all possible to follow the tutorial, or if extra tools or parts need to be ordered in advance. In larger repair jobs, there is typically an expectancy that these issues will emerge and that substantial time will be spent looking for tools and makeshift objects. In watching a video on how to crack an egg with one hand, in contrast, there would clearly be an expectancy that eggs are required, but that two ping pong balls and a coin would be required for practicing the technique would probably come as a surprise. 7 There are, of course, several ways of watching online tutorials. Some people watch these videos purely for entertainment, with no intention of ever doing what the tutorial shows, much like the way cooking shows are normally seen on broadcast TV. The videos might be watched for inspiration, or for broadening the understanding of some activity or interest. Even when the videos are watched to be followed, these activities are often separated in time; after one or more videos have been watched, it might take minutes, hours, or days until any attempt at doing what the tutorial instructs takes place. The discussion of “pausing” we describe later in this chapter exhibits one of several ways in which video instructions are parsed in the act of following them.

References Bjelić, Dušan. 1995. ‘An Ethnomethodological Clarification of Husserl’s Concepts of “Regressive Inquiry” and “Galilean Physics” by Means of Discovering Praxioms’, Human Studies 18(2–3): 189–225.

Detail, Granularity, and Laic Analysis in Instructional Demonstrations  53 Bjelić, Dušan and Michael Lynch. 1992. ‘The Work of a (Scientific) Demonstration: Respecifying Newton’s and Goethe’s Theories of Prismatic color’, in G. Watson and R. M. Seiler (eds.) Text in Context: Contributions to Ethnomethodology. London: Sage, pp. 53–78. Burns, Stacy Lee. 2012. ‘“Lecturing’s Work”: A Collaborative Study with Harold Garfinkel’, Human Studies 35(2): 175–192. Crabtree, Andy, Mark Rouncefield and Peter Tolmie. 2012. Doing Design Ethnography. London: Springer. Eisenmann, Clemens and Michael Lynch. 2021. ‘Introduction to Harold Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological “Misreading” of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field’, Human Studies 44(1): 1–17. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Edited by E.W. Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Garfinkel, Harold. 2021. ‘Ethnomethodological Misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field’, Human Studies 44(1): 19–42. Garfinkel, Harold. 2022. Studies of Work in the Sciences. Edited by M. Lynch. London: Routledge. Garfinkel, Harold and Harvey Sacks. 1970. ‘On Formal Structures of Practical Action’, in J. C. McKinney and E. A. Tiryakian (eds.) Theoretical Sociology: Perspectives and Development. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, pp. 338–366. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture’, in C. Geertz (ed.), The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, pp. 3–30. Goodwin, Charles. 1994. ‘Professional Vision’, American Anthropologist 96(3): 606–633. Jefferson, Gail. 1984. ‘Transcription Notation’. In J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage (eds.) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. ix–xvi. Lindwall, Oskar and Gustav Lymer. 2014. ‘Inquiries of the Body: Novice Questions and the Instructable Observability of Endodontic Scenes’, Discourse Studies 16(2): 271–294. Lindwall, Oskar, Gustav Lymer and Christian Greiffenhagen. 2015. ‘The Sequential Analysis of Instruction’, in N. Markee (ed.) The Handbook of Classroom Discourse and Interaction. New York: John Wiley, pp. 142–157. Lindwall, Oskar and Michael Lynch. 2021. ‘“Are You Asking Me or Are You Telling Me?”: Expertise, Evidence, and Blame Attribution in a Post-Game Onterview’, Discourse Studies 23(4): 652–669. Livingston, Eric. 2008. Ethnographies of Reason. Aldershot, UK: Routledge. Macbeth, Douglas. 2007. ‘Sequential Analysis in an Ethnomethodological Key: Order Without Theory’, in L. N. Berlin (ed.) Theoretical Approaches to Dialogue Analysis: Selected Papers from the IADA Chicago 2004 Conference. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, pp. 199–213. Macbeth, Douglas. 2012. ‘Some Notes on the Play of Basketball in Its Circumstantial Detail, and an Introduction to Their Occasion’, Human Studies 35(2): 193–208. Mondada, Lorenza. 2016. ‘Challenges of Multimodality: Language and the Body in Social Interaction’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 20(3): 336–366. Ochs, Elinor. 1979. ‘Transcription as Theory’, in E. Ochs and B. B. Schieffelin (eds.) Developmental Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 43–72. Ryle, Gilbert. 1971. ‘The Thinking of Thoughts. What Is “Le Penseur” Doing?’ in G. Ryle, Collected Papers, Vol. 2. London: Hutchinson, pp. 480–496.

54  Oskar Lindwall and Gustav Lymer Sacks, Harvey. 1963. ‘Sociological Description’, Berkeley Journal of Sociology 8(1): 1–17. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2000a. ‘On granularity’, Annual Review of Sociology 26: 715–720. Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2000b. ‘Post from Manny Schegloff Re: CA Orthography, Sacks, etc.’, COMSERVE’s Ethno Hotline, #4040 (9 March). Sormani, Philippe. 2016. ‘Practice-Based Video Analysis: A Position Statement’, SocietàMutamentoPolitica 7(14): 103–120. Tuncer, Sylvaine, Oskar Lindwall and Barry Brown. 2021. ‘Making Time: Pausing to Coordinate Video Instructions and Practical tasks’, Symbolic Interaction 44(3): 603–631.

Part II

Situated Action and Order Production

3

Phenomenal Fields Forever Instructed Action and Perception’s Work Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg

Introduction: The Pythagorean carpenter “Every schoolboy knows …” was a phrase used somewhat ironically by Bateson (1979) to introduce elementary ideas about nature and science. For example, the Pythagorean theorem is one of the elementary formulae that should be known by every schoolchild, as it has been made a part of the curriculum of the later years of compulsory education. This theorem, a2 + b2 = c2, formulates the invariant relationship between the sides (a & b) and the hypothenuse (c) of a right triangle. Accordingly, given any two values, we should be able to find the third value through a calculation using the formula. If the lengths of all three sides are known, they can be used to assess whether the triangle is truly right-angled. In carpentry, the creation of (near) right angles is often of central concern, for instance, when joining studs and plates to construct a wall frame. Thus, it constitutes a case where the practical application of the Pythagorean theorem should be warranted. However, calculating the square root for any random number, without access to calculators, and perhaps while holding on to other tools or parts of the construction, is too much of a challenge for most people. To overcome this, some carpenters work with a specific instantiation of the general formula. When operating within the metric system, the values of 60, 80, and 100 centimeters are used. As a series, these values are known as a Pythagorean triple, or a series of natural numbers (a, b, c) that satisfies the condition a2 + b2 = c2 (Livingston 1999). There are many possible such series, and the most commonly recognized triple is probably (3, 4, 5). In carpentry, however, as a matter of practical execution and to minimize errors, the described set of values offers a sizable triangle that is still manageable; the corners can be reached and checked with a wooden rule or a tape measure held in one hand. The carpenters’ reformulation of a general principle into a practical rule of thumb is now a part of their trade in a way that may or may not be presented in formalized accounts of that practice. Used as a technique for assessing the status of the construction thus far (are these parts skewed or not?) that allows for work to proceed, this reformulation of the Pythagorean theorem is useful in the day-to-day operations of carpenters. We believe that many practices that rely on similar methods or tricks of the trade regularly fly under the radar when it comes to descriptions of the practice. DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-6

58  Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg Even when such accounts are intended as explicit instructions and geared toward the transmission of skills across members and generations, some techniques are considered too trivial or idiosyncratic. Understood as “just a thing we do,” they fall outside the canonized descriptions of the practice and may be considered as unremarked-upon matters. Over time, some of the techniques developed to deal with practical problems can become formally acknowledged or even instantiated in practice-specific tools. Presumably, they may also be lost should the continuity of apprenticeship be disrupted. Beyond the product version of instructions In the preliminaries to his chapter on instructions and instructed action, Garfinkel (2002: 200) makes use of the distinction between the “product” version of instructions and the in-course, lived work of “following” instructions. Garfinkel’s story of how he struggled to assemble a functioning chair from separate pieces with the aid of a series of diagrams has become emblematic of the discussion on the problem of following instructions. We learn that, for someone assembling this chair for the first time, an understanding of the diagram – as a set of complete and factually correct instructions – will only be discovered over the course of the assembly work. Furthermore, understanding what the outcome should look like is also central to comprehending the instruction completely. In a study of thirdgraders conducting science experiments, Amerine and Bilmes (1990) addressed this reflexive relationship and concluded that “It is in this way that the meaningfulness and coherence of instructions is grounded in the perceived relationship between course of action and projected outcome” (p. 338). Accordingly, instructions prepared by others will only take on their full meaning when one is done carrying out the instructions. This insight into how competence renders instruction intelligible is perhaps ethnomethodology’s most important message to pedagogy, and it has mostly been overlooked. We tend to use instructions when much of the needed competence is still lacking. Hence, the reflexive relationship between competence in a task and the instructions’ followability becomes a pedagogical paradox. For our purposes, however, we wish to pursue a slightly different line of inquiry – one in which competent action also requires guidance. Regularly, we organize work in ways that help us keep our place in what we do (cf. Livingston 2008). This organization can also be understood as a form of instruction. One example of this effect is the perspicuous setting of Helen’s kitchen (Garfinkel 2002: 212–216). Helen was one of Garfinkel’s students, and she was afflicted with congenital night blindness. As Garfinkel tells us, she was about to get married in the fall, and in preparation for her husband moving in, she wanted to learn how to cook some new recipes. Her limited field of vision posed an unusual challenge unfamiliar to those with normal sight. In anticipation of the recipes that she was preparing to please him she had to spend the summer, taking up one recipe after another, and for each working out for pots, utensils, ingredients, stuff in the fridge and cupboards just where item

Phenomenal Fields Forever  59 by item, a next needed item in a developing sequence would be found, and where being found it would be picked up, transported to a collecting area, and within the holding area so placed that she could zero in on each for the last steps that made up the achieved recipe. (Garfinkel 2002: 212) A photograph displaying the pans and tools neatly organized on Helen’s kitchen wall showcased a “residue account of the summer’s work” (Garfinkel 2002: 213). Her summer’s work consisted of finding this organization, a task that is in line with our specific interests. Had we been there that summer to observe her work, we would have witnessed the ways in which “Helen turned the dishes into transparently achieved, embodied, customized, locally analyzable, locally historicized, rule-governed activities.” (Garfinkel 2002: 213) The work that enabled her to achieve her desired kitchen arrangement points to certain procedures with objects and their places, in terms of how they were being fitted to afford specific sequences of embodied action. Based on this description, we will attempt to provide a provisional characterization of instructed action. We do not aim to provide a general definition, but rather a delineation for current purposes. In the following, our treatment of instructed action will borrow from the verb to prepare and its meaning of creating readiness for a particular end. This notion stems from the Latin praeparare, which translates to “make ready beforehand.” In adding to this concept, we also want to bring in something that follows – some action owing to these earlier preparations. In this sense, we aim to approach instructed action by focusing on the prospective and retrospective orientations of actions. Our primary example will thus concern a sequence of events wherein the initial operations set the stage for some anticipated subsequent step, and where the preparatory moves are carried out to help guide, i.e., instruct, the actions that ensue. This stage-setting character of the addressed activity will also make it possible to align our discussion with the investigative field, which Anderson and Sharrock (2019) have dubbed “Third Person Phenomenology.” We will later examine how these authors consider uniquely tailored work arrangements as establishing preparedness for action and how the configuration of local specifics, in turn, enables distinctive social production processes. The details of the shop floor work – some of which we will provide in the following sections – should therefore be regarded as facilitating the discussion of how witnessable and recognizable properties of social phenomena are produced. Thus, while our specific case may be of interest as an ethnography of work, its main goal is to help us grasp how instructed action is connected to the accountable coherences of phenomenal field details. First, however, let us use our preliminary delineation and revisit the Pythagorean example in more detail. As noted, our carpenter lacking access to a dedicated tool for this purpose, such as a speed square, wants to join two studs at a right angle (see Figure 3.1A). When placing the studs in position, the assessment of the resulting angle must be done as a series of actions. First, a measure is taken from the inner corner and along one side. The carpenter creates a marking at 60 cm (B). Next, the same procedure is repeated in the other direction. Starting from

60  Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg

Figure 3.1  A procedure for finding the right angle.

the corner, the position of 80 cm down the other stud is located, and a second marking is made (C). Through these actions, the two studs are now annotated (D), and the stage has been set for the assessment proper. The carpenter can now locate the 100 cm position of the tape measure and place it on top of one of the markings. The tip of the tape measure should then match with the opposing mark. If the test is successful, the carpenter can proceed with confidence, knowing that the angle between the two studs is close to 90 degrees. Should the hypotenuse turn out to be too long or too short, however, the 100 cm measurement between the two markings will offer additional guidance on how to tilt the wooden members to achieve the desired outcome. In this way, the procedure is not merely a test; it is incorporated into a sequence of actions for finding the right answer. This procedure thus instructs a carpenter on how to discern if or when these parts are, for all practical purposes, joined at a right angle, facilitating the next step of construction. In this practice, we can also find a somewhat unanticipated relationship between carpentry and the Pythagorean triple. The fact that carpenters may draw on geometry is not a novel idea. Mathematics pointing directly to carpentry, however, is perhaps less expected. In his examination of mathematics and the material practices of constructing proofs, Eric Livingston (1999) argued that we should understand mathematics not as an abstract discipline, but as a concrete part of material culture. Similarly, in “The Origin of Geometry,” Husserl (1970: 375) posited a general argument for how the idealized products of mathematics are rooted in concrete material practices involving physical objects. Livingston is more specific, however, and showed how practitioners arrange many proofs visually and sequentially so that they can see through these configurations and discover the properties of mathematical objects. One of his examples concerns the Pythagorean triple and two related theorems (i.e., statements outlining methods for generating such triples). The visual proof that accompanies these theorems is constituted by an array of dots (representing the natural numbers) and an L-shaped subset of this array known as a “gnomon.” According to Livingston (1999: 875), the name “gnomon” was taken from a carpenter’s tool for making right angles. Thus, embedded in this mathematical proof, we find the same tool that the carpenter does away with when a triplet is used instead.

Phenomenal Fields Forever  61 When carrying out this sequence of measurements, the carpenter relies upon the Pythagorean triple in and through the embodied work and material organization that make available the observable evidence of a right-angle construction. Similarly, through the material array of dots inscribed with the L-shaped gnomon, a mathematician can find the theorem that the proof claims to reveal. Both practices build procedural arrangements for identifying searched-for evidence. We will return to discussing how such gestalts of reasoning and practice can be understood and characterized. In what follows, we will allow the case of the Pythagorean triple to serve as an analogy for our main example collected from endovascular surgery. We will draw on a case within image-guided intervention – surgery that is performed with the use of minimally invasive techniques and where the actions, similar to laparoscopy (Mondada 2003), are guided by visualizations on screens. In this practice, surgeons primarily use two imaging techniques: fluoroscopy and digital subtraction angiography. The surgeons repeatedly face the challenge of having to shift between the images provided by these different technologies while still remembering certain visualized features that are now lost from view. The medical literature and the technology vendors’ technical manuals provide instructions for overcoming this challenge, and these will be examined. Furthermore, we outline one unique method that is de facto used in practice and frame it according to our initial characterization of instructed action. The method relies on the creative application of a computer cursor as a visual aid for marking locations in images. This workaround is built on local practices and technologies, and it has become an integral part of how the work is performed by practitioners. In addition to describing the method itself, we also discuss how it resides outside of endovascular surgery’s formally accepted techniques – that is, how it can be regarded as an intermediate technique. While it gets the job done, it is not formally accountable as a technique worth reporting upon to audiences beyond the local hospital. However, the method occurs regularly and is not entirely idiosyncratic. In our closing argument, we relate the empirical example to the larger discussion on instructed action and the management of orders of disciplinary and workplacespecific details. Details of endovascular surgery Our central case was the surgical practice of endovascular repair of an aneurysm in the abdominal aorta (commonly abbreviated EVAR). An aortic aneurysm is caused by a weakening of the aortic wall, which then begins to bulge out due to the high arterial blood pressure. If aneurysms are left untreated, the patient risks rupture, a potentially fatal condition. The EVAR procedure involves the placement of a selfexpanding stent graft with the aid of medical imaging techniques. Once in position, this internal stent graft alleviates the pressure of the weakened area and allows the aneurysms to contract gradually. In percutaneous EVAR, punctures are made in the femoral arteries, in the groin on both sides, and vascular sheaths are introduced. Through these sheaths, the surgeons pass guidewires, catheters, and stent grafts and place them into the right position with the help of X-rays. Getting the placement correct is critical. If the

62  Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg positions are misplaced, there is a risk of occluding other branching arteries that support vital organs, such as the kidneys. Another issue is to create enough seal, which is done by letting the stent graft overlap a healthy section of the aorta proximal and distal of the aneurysm. If the sealing is deficient, blood will leak into the damaged section and the pressure will not be reduced as it should. The stent graft comes compacted within a sheath; when first introduced, it can be moved back and forth in the vasculature. The stent graft is wider than the aorta in the sealing zones. Once released (i.e., unfolded), it attaches itself to the inside of the aorta through its radial force, which is reinforced by small hooks in the proximal end. This so-called deployment is therefore an irreversible process and is preceded by several checks. For visual guidance, surgeons are aided by two types of X-ray imaging techniques. The primary type – fluoroscopy – is a form of live image that is used while wires and stents are manipulated and moved. Fluoroscopy requires little radiation and can be employed for extended periods. However, the images produced do not display information about the blood vessels themselves due to their low attenuation (as soft tissues). The secondary technique is digital subtraction angiography (DSA), which is used to visualize the location of the vessels. Here, a radiocontrast fluid is injected for a few seconds, and as it flows through the system, snapshots are created of the structure of the blood vessels. During this quick acquisition, which lasts only a few seconds, the tools or wires are typically not moved or repositioned. The varying requirements of the separate X-ray techniques, therefore, necessitate the sequential coordination of visual information from different points in time. The location of the branching vessels (information collected from the static DSA image) must be harmonized with the location of the stent graft (information provided by the live fluoroscopic feed). Our analysis aims to describe some of the practices through which this coordination is accomplished. On these grounds, we then consider how this work is illustrative of the general discussion of instructed action. Our example targets the most critical moment in abdominal endovascular aortic repair: the deployment of the proximal stent graft below the level of the renal arteries. Since this is an irreversible process, surgeons must first ensure that the stent graft is in the correct position before they release it. How they acquire and validate this knowledge is our topic of interest. How is evidence for the precise location of the stent graft gathered? Moreover, when more than one surgeon is involved, what are the procedures for establishing a shared understanding of this location? Outlining the task at hand Minimally invasive vascular surgery is very much a visual practice in which large monitors guide the work. The data we collected consist of videotapes of the entire surgical suite as well as the video feed of the main surgical monitor (for an overview, see Figures 3.3 and 3.4). We will present this analysis through the information gathered on this working monitor, as it provides the most detailed depiction of the surgery and the decisions examined here.

Phenomenal Fields Forever  63

Figure 3.2 Fluoroscopy. Deployment of the stent graft has been initiated as part of the constraining sheath being retracted.

The description departs from the main technique of fluoroscopy. In Figure 3.2, several objects are visible. There is a measuring wire coming in from the bottom, slightly to the right. It has markers spaced at one-centimeter intervals. At the center is the stent graft that is still mostly compacted within its sheath. The most proximal, upper stent is uncovered and has barbs to secure the location once it is fully released. The top of the uncovered stent is still attached to the delivery system. The stent graft is constructed out of a thin metal wire mesh wrapped in a strong fabric. With fluoroscopy, it is only possible to see the metal parts. The fabric is not radio-dense, and it cannot be seen. Instead, the upper end of the fabric is identified by a row of small, stitched radiopaque markers (see the topmost inserted arrow in Figure 3.2). When these markers are aligned in a straight line, the projection of the fluoroscopic image is optimal and perpendicular to the axis of the stent graft. This function guides the surgeon and the line of markers to be placed immediately below the lowermost renal artery. Some anatomical details are also discernible in Figure 3.2. The lighter regions are the result of air or gas inside the intestines, and the spine comes into view as a darker shadow in the vertical direction. The spine provides some guidance on the selected view’s orientation, where the top of the image points toward the patient’s head. The lumbar region of the spine has five vertebrae (L1–5), and the center image shows L1 and L2.

64  Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg Additional anatomical knowledge also informs us that the branching arteries that supply the kidneys with blood may be found in this region. Given this visualization, however, it is not possible to determine their location. Therefore, a stent graft is tentatively introduced, which surgeons will reposition at a later time. Next, the surgeons will change to the secondary imaging acquisition technique, and their team will perform a digital subtraction angiography. This imaging process involves the coordinated efforts of several participants and presents its own communicative challenges (Ivarsson & Åberg 2020). As an injected radiocontrast fluid flows through the vascular system, a series of DSA images are captured (Figure 3.3, top row). These can then be replayed as a moving sequence or paused to display individual frames. The surgeons will select the recorded image that best captures the region of interest to work from (Figure 3.3, bottom). Technically, digital subtraction angiography operates by first establishing a reference image at a moment before the contrast is injected (see the top-left image in Figure 3.3). All subsequent images are then processed such that they will only visualize the difference from this baseline. This is accomplished by having the reference image’s pixel values subtracted from those of the newer images. The result is a view that mainly displays the flowing contrast agent. A map of the vessel structure is thus created. However, the process is sensitive to movements. Without any movements, the stent graft will also be subtracted and hence made invisible. In practice, particularly in this part of the body, there are regular small movements, even during the DSA acquisition. Therefore, structures such as stents and bones become imperfectly subtracted, with remaining edge effects, and can often be discerned.

Figure 3.3 Top: The sequence of images produced during digital subtraction angiography. Bottom: The surgeon holds the instruments in place during the imaging (left) and the selected frame (right).

Phenomenal Fields Forever 65 The production of a useful DSA is itself a deliberate task. The angulation of the Xray tube and sensor will affect the image and which anatomical details become visualized. For the purpose of locating the branching renal arteries, the surgeons must select the angulation that most clearly depicts the lowermost renal artery in cross-section (here in the coronal plane). The takeoff of the renal arteries varies, and operators should always check this on the preoperative CT and adjust the C-arm accordingly. In the selected frame in Figure 3.3 (bottom-left), the right renal artery (connecting the aorta with the right kidney) is located approximately one centimeter above its left counterpart. This makes the left renal artery the critical focal point in this particular patient. Once such clear evidence of where the renal artery branches off from the aorta has been assembled, the material can be brought to the next part of the procedure. The surgeons’ task is now to position the top level of the covered part of the stent graft at the bottom of the left renal artery orifice. Given the provided view (in Figure 3.3), the position can be assessed as close to the desired one, albeit slightly too low. Here we have reached a critical moment in the surgical procedure. The surgeons are now facing the problem of making fine-tuned adjustments. To observe the effects of the manual manipulations of the stent graft system, however, they must switch back to using fluoroscopy. But when that is done, the visualization of the arteries will disappear from view. The key feature of where the left renal artery is located must therefore be remembered somehow. Two methods and a hack One technical method that has been developed to support this task is the possibility of blending the two views. The chosen DSA image can be digitally overlaid on top of the angiography view by selecting a suitable opacity value. Such an overlay is depicted in Figure 3.4.

Figure 3.4 Two surgeons (on the left) trying to assess the image on the monitor (right). The image shows fluoroscopy with 60% DSA overlay.

66  Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg With the overlay method, it becomes possible to see both the live movements of the wires and the stent graft and the previously produced depiction of the aorta and renal arteries. Past actions and current actions become aligned so that the two modes now populate the same image. In this way, the overlay can be understood as a map that guides or instructs surgeons’ further actions. As an organized whole, the overlay renders the correct placement visible to the professional gaze. Much of the preceding work has been done in preparation for this situation to enable informed adjustments so that the surgeons can position the stent graft correctly. Practitioners commonly object to this view, however, due to the clutter involved. While all central components are featured in the visualization, the act of overlaying information simultaneously reduces visibility. Put simply, it becomes harder to identify the relevant details. For surgeons, who rely on their vision to make critical medical decisions, this presents a problem. When the overlay function is activated in most setups, a separate feed showing the raw fluoroscopic image is simultaneously shown side by side. Shifting the gaze back and forth between the two views is one way to counter the clutter problem. Another approach is to use the overlay only as an intermediate step before switching back to fluoroscopy. In the view that the overlay provides, both the renal artery’s soft structures and the much harder spine are discernible at the same time. Both belong to the anatomy of the patient and remain relatively fixed in relation to each other. This opens the possibility of using bones as a landmark for locating the artery once the latter is erased from view. Furthermore, some structures near the artery can be singled out to act as an anchor point for reference. This solution makes it possible to work with a clear fluoroscopy view while still in possession of some procedural memory of the previous work. Despite its advantages, this method of using the spine for reference also has its drawbacks. It may work well if a distinct and unambiguous bony structure, such as the proximal or distal endplate of a vertebral body, is aligned with the target position in the aorta. Still, this is too often not the case, and the exact bony structure first spotted may not become clear only a few moments later. Furthermore, the location specified by the bone landmark is only collectively realized when overt verbal remarks describe some relation. This form of memory is open to unwanted vagueness. Another problem arising from the use of this method is the lack of material persistence. Other pressing medical events may interfere, and if a location is not documented, it could quickly be forgotten. We understand these complications with the overlay method and the bone landmark method as central to what is outlined below. In the surgeries that we examined, a third alternative was regularly practiced. The method can solve both the visibility issue of the overlay method and the memory problem of the bone landmark ditto. After the surgeons produce the DSA sequence and select the frame that most prominently features the renal artery, they introduce an opportunistic resource. As part of the interface for the visualization software, there is a cursor that can be moved around freely. This cursor is now brought in and placed at the critical location of the renal artery, which is precisely at the point over which any fabric would occlude the flow of blood to the kidney.

Phenomenal Fields Forever  67

Figure 3.5  Left: DSA with an added cursor. Right: Fluoroscopy with the same cursor retained.

The work of producing, selecting, and validating the DSA image is thereby turned into an instruction for cursor location. The entire preceding sequence of actions is folded into this single point. This trick immensely reduces the complexity of the body’s anatomy. All that the renal artery now means for the procedure is contained within this annotation (i.e., the cursor): “Keep the stent graft below this pointing finger.” Once the surgeons return to the fluoroscopy view, the cursor guides the work ahead (Figure 3.5, right). As the stent graft is adjusted and slowly opened, the top line of the markers is continuously assessed against the position of the cursor. As for the carpenter, the annotation instructs the surgeons to determine if or when these essential components are correctly aligned. This constructed view allows for the discovery of discrepancies and facilitates their rectification. As illustrated in Figure 3.5 (right), the stent graft was pushed up too far. If positioned in this location, it now risks occluding the renal artery; therefore, further adjustments are necessary.1 Surgery, each next first time To take stock of what is happening in this example and relate it to the general discussion on instructed action, we will first step out of the work on the screen and examine the larger scene. Surgeries are complex organized endeavors that rely on a suite of standardized and vetted protocols and practices, drugs, and equipment. Nevertheless, even planned elective surgery may present staff members with a unique challenge on each occasion. Within a familiar field of play, surgical teams may run up against an unknown number of unknowns, and they will be tasked to craft a bespoke solution to this patient’s medical condition. An example of the delicate placement and fixation of a stent graft is but one point in a succession of moves to such an end.

68  Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg The series of actions that render the scene coherent and recognizable for the surgical team is neither an entirely fixed sequence nor completely open to improvisation. Specific sequences of actions arise as a consequence of earlier moves and act as precursors of ensuing steps. Due to certain findings, new relevancies may be opened, and other options become untenable. Probing questions can be raised along the way, uncertainties can be pointed out, and measures may be initiated to elucidate what is deemed unclear. Checks on the veracity of the team’s current understanding can be repeated, or they can be dispensed with. As viewed from the outside, it is in these selections, repetitions, and omissions that we find the treatment’s progression. The picture of practice that emerges – sketched at this intermediate descriptive level as patterns of moves and considerations – is what we regularly find in practical guidebooks (e.g., Falkenberg & Delle 2014). Such descriptions are presented to practitioners who are already familiar with the abundance of the details and contingencies that are necessarily left out of the accounts. Alternatively, for newcomers who are yet to find out what, exactly, a world of endovascular details looks like, the guides will offer some landmarks and pointers on how this task may be approached. If we follow the reasoning in Ethnomethodology’s Program (Garfinkel 2002), the interior configuration of these courses of action can only be specified “downwards to the details of actual cases” (Anderson & Sharrock 2019: 38). So, how are such configurations achieved in the first instance? What is the place of instructed actions in the conceptualization of this achievement? To answer these questions, we will take a brief detour to philosophy and experimental psychology. The phenomenal field In philosophy, the issue of how an object comes to appear before consciousness has been of long-standing concern. To put the question in more procedural and active terms, we could ask how a specific object is made, on this occasion, to be seen in just this way. In pursuit of such questions, Garfinkel (2002) built on phenomenological ideas and concepts, such as Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) notion of the phenomenal field, but he did so through a deliberate “misreading” of phenomenology and, in particular, Aron Gurwitsch’s treatise on the Field of Consciousness (see Garfinkel 2021). The purpose was to give a reading that would transform this general theory of the coherence of objects into ways that, in actual cases (in their worksite-specific details), would demonstrate just how order became concertedly achieved. I’m going to use the term phenomenal field to speak of organizational objects specified as the produced coherence of objects in phenomenal details. The problem is always to provide for the achieved produced coherence of organizational objects. (Garfinkel 2021: 33; emphasis in original) Why was this philosophical tradition of interest in a sociological investigation? Gurwitsch (2010) located what he regarded as an anticipation of one of the

Phenomenal Fields Forever  69 fundamental tenets of gestalt theory in William James’ (1893) discussion on the temporality of consciousness. For Gurwitsch, the perceptual gestalt’s coherence was seen as an interdependent web of constituent details; the current experience is shaped by prior experiences and takes part in shaping upcoming ones. The constituent parts themselves would not suffice to explain the gestalt. In this idea, we can also observe parallels to the sequential organization and its role in the achievement of intersubjective understanding (Garfinkel 1967). By the same token, locating meaning in words or sentences alone would fail. Phenomenology also acutely emphasizes the embodied character of action. For Merleau-Ponty (1962), the activity of perceiving was always understood as perceiving with the body – an idea that was not necessarily new. Gestalt psychology has long explored the role of action in perception. The psychologist George Stratton pioneered the experimental study of visual perception using lenses that would invert or distort the visual field in different ways (Stratton 1896, 1897). These experiments indicated that once breached through the lens’s intervention, the visual field’s appearance would eventually find its normal state if one continued to be actively engaged with the world. Some subsequent studies that prolonged the experimental conditions from days to weeks would also confirm these findings (Kohler 1964). Others, like Katz (1925), explored the role of active engagement in the perception of touch (for a discussion relating to sensorial aspects of touch in surgery, see Kuroshima & Ivarsson 2021). The ecological psychology developed by Gibson (1966, 1979) similarly addressed self-motion and visual perception. On the other hand, Garfinkel (2002) devised a different conceptual register for the work needed to produce accountable coherences of phenomenal field details. Not only was action to be understood, as we would expect, in terms of social moves back and forth between partaking members, but there is also the added determiner of “instructed” action. Anderson and Sharrock asked, “Why throw in the notion of instruction?” (2019: 38). They offered the following explanation: We suggest it has to do with the coherence requirement. Given the in-thecourse-of-the-action production of shared understanding, there appear to be just two alternatives for creating the internal coherence experience has. Either actors have to be tasked with trading descriptions (somehow) to provide ‘accounts’ of what they are doing as an integrated part of the performances of their ‘turns’ with such descriptions being recognised and understood (a line of thinking which just pushes the whole problem of understanding and collaboration back to shared expectations and normative compliance) or they must ‘exchange’ instruction and competent performance in a rolling serially organised way. The advantage the latter has is its termination of the regress on the action pairing. The conception of an ‘instruction’ and ‘performance’ exchange is the central move in the ‘instructed action’ conceptual play laid out in Ethnomethodology’s Program. (Anderson & Sharrock 2019: 38)

70  Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg With this move, Garfinkel locates the instructive character of action as what produces witnessable and recognizable properties of social phenomena in that they come together in the achieved gestalt coherence. Preparedness for action When focusing on the temporal flow of action, especially when analyzing the sequential organization of social action, the conditions that enable this activity to occur may recede from view. In their analysis of work, Anderson and Sharrock (2019) called for a discussion on how the work task and the worksite are arranged to enable work to be performed in the ways that it is. They speak of these arrangements as “preparedness for action” (p. 51). A central insight here is their observation that “the open possibilities of the field of consciousness are reduced by the choice of structured arrangements for the workflow” (p. 51). Part of the structure is given by the collocation of machines and other resources. We want to emphasize the efforts that go into achieving this preparedness. As this has been our recurrent topic, to clarify the concept further, let us briefly return to the carpentry case used in the introduction. In Figure 3.1 (B–D), we described how the carpenter made annotations on the studs to enable a subsequent measurement. As the construction work progresses, however, these annotations will remain. Covered up by plasterboards and layers of paint, they become hidden from view, and no occupant of the finished building will ever notice their presence. Nevertheless, residing in the structure’s shadows, the simple pencil markings tell of actions now long past but with a lasting effect. The walls’ rectilinear shape and structural integrity are due, in some part, to these signs. Not all actions enabling the next step in an activity leave visible traces, however. Similarly, with the example of endovascular treatment, we can observe how a large portion of the surgical activity is made up of actions that will not immediately treat the patient. These are rather actions that are oriented to the medical staff – actions organized to produce a phenomenal field that will help the members keep pace with their work and instruct them on how to proceed. In this respect, these activities establish preparedness for action, as Anderson and Sharrock suggest. Expressed differently, these complexes of action and equipment organize perceptual space into local orderings of referential details and visible relations, or what Lynch (1991: 53) called “topical contextures.” In the case we discussed, the trick that relies on a computer cursor to bridge the gap between two types of X-rays is one of these orderings. It is a method for achieving the produced coherence of vascular surgery’s central organizational object – the established relation between the stent graft and vascular structure. As this worksite’s job uses only this specific set of equipment with just this select group of people, the technique of using the cursor will help extract the phenomenon from the array of surgical instruments and monitors. Coda In slip casting, a hollow plaster mold is filled with a liquid form of clay – the slip. The porous plaster sucks water from the slip, resulting in a layer of clay on the

Phenomenal Fields Forever  71 inside wall. Excess liquid is then poured out, after which the mold can be carefully removed to reveal whatever shape it has given to the clay. If the notion of instructed action is the fluid, formless slip in this metaphor, our provisional characterization is the mold that should now be set aside. Still, it has helped shape our discussion, and through it, we can point to the profusion of work that is primarily instructive – actions produced such that the members, to the best of their knowledge, should be able to find what is to be observed and what should be done next. One line from the song Strawberry Fields Forever tells us that “living is easy with eyes closed.” With eyes open, the work of perception begins. It can be hard work, especially for professionals operating under visually austere conditions, such as when treating patients suffering from aneurysms in the abdominal aorta. Regardless of the stakes involved, coherence must be recurrently achieved in all situations. Failure to meet this end may result in feelings of confusion, bewilderment, anxiety, or guilt, which have been discussed extensively elsewhere (Garfinkel 1959, 1963, 1964, 1967). Nonetheless, “the work involved in the coherence of phenomenal field is massively taken for granted” (Garfinkel 2002: 97). By focusing on members’ methods in a work’s discipline-specific constituents, we can begin to appreciate the monumental character of this work. The task is without end, and we will be forever occupied with producing the coherence of objects in phenomenal details. Note 1 Nowadays, a third option in almost all cases of EVAR is to use image fusion based on the preoperative CT angiography (CT with contrast in the arterial phase). At the time of the study, this method was used mostly for complicated, fenestrated, or branched procedures, and not routinely for standard EVAR as described in this text. The reason is that the fusion procedure was somewhat cumbersome then, involving rotation acquisition (cone beam computed tomography, CBCT), and added little to standard cases. The fusion process is now easier and quicker, based on two single images of projections >60 degrees apart, and can be done by a radiographer before the start of the procedure. Previously, essential anatomical features, such as origins of the renal arteries, were manually marked in the CT images, and these markings (rings) were displayed on the fluoroscopy screen. In this way, this is also a kind of overlay. With access to newer equipment, the renal orifices’ markings can be made automatically by special software. Fusion technology is now widely used. While it gives additional information regarding anatomy, it still suffers from the limitations that come with superimposition. Based on images of the past (preoperatively for CT, earlier during the procedure for DSA), the information must be continuously updated or checked for reliability.

References Amerine, Ron and Jack Bilmes. 1990. ‘Following Instructions’, in M. Lynch and S. Woolgar (eds.) Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 323–336. Anderson, Bob and Wes Sharrock. 2019. The Methodology of Third Person Phenomenology. Unpublished paper, available online on the Sharrock-Anderson website. Retrieved from https://www.sharrockandanderson.co.uk/ Bateson, Gregory. 1979. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. London: Wildwood.

72  Jonas Ivarsson and Mårten Falkenberg Falkenberg, Mårten and Martin Delle (eds.). 2014. Endovaskulär Intervention. En Praktisk Vägledning [Endovascular Intervention. A Practical Guide]. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Garfinkel, Harold. 1959. ‘Aspects of the Problem of Common Sense Knowledge of Social Structures’, Transactions of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology, Vol. 4. London: International Sociological Association, pp. 51–65. Garfinkel, Harold. 1963. ‘A Conception of, and Experiments with, “Trust” as a Condition of Stable Concerted Actions’, in O. J. Harvey (ed.) Motivation and Social Interaction. Cognitive Determinants. New York: Ronald Press, pp. 187–238. Garfinkel, Harold. 1964. ‘Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities’, Social Problems 11(3): 225–50. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Garfinkel, Harold. 2021. ‘Ethnomethodological Misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field’, Human Studies 44(1): 19–42. Gibson, James Jerome. 1966. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gibson, James Jerome. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Gurwitsch, Aron. 2010. The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901–1973), Vol. III: The Field of Consciousness: Theme, Thematic Field, and Margin. Edited by R. M. Zaner and L. Embree. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ivarsson, Jonas and Mikaela Åberg. 2020. ‘Role of Requests and Communication Breakdowns in the Coordination of Teamwork: A Video-Based Observational Study of Hybrid Operating Rooms’, BMJ Open 10(5), e035194. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2019-035194 James, William. 1893. The Principles of Psychology, Vols. 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Katz, David. 1925. der Aufbau der Tastwelt [The world of Touch]. Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth. Kohler, Ivo. 1964. ‘The Formation and Transformation of the Perceptual World’, Psychological Issues 3(4, Monograph No 12): 1–173. Kuroshima, Satomi and Jonas Ivarsson. 2021. ‘Toward a Praxeological Account of Performing Surgery: Overcoming Methodological and Technical Constraints’, Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality 4(3). Livingston, Eric. 1999. ‘Cultures of Proving’, Social Studies of Science 29(6): 867–888. Livingston, Eric. 2008. Ethnographies of Reason. Hampshire: Ashgate. Lynch, Michael. 1991. ‘Laboratory Space and the Technological Complex: An Investigation of Topical Contextures’, Science in Context 4(1): 51–78. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mondada, Lorenza. 2003. ‘Working with Video: How Surgeons Produce Video Records of Their Actions’, Visual Studies 18(1): 58–73. Stratton, George Malcolm. 1896. ‘Some Preliminary Experiments on Vision without Inversion of the Retinal Image’, Psychological Review 3(6): 611–617. Stratton, George Malcolm. 1897. ‘Vision without Inversion of the Retinal Image’, Psychological Review 4(4): 341–360.

4

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer The Instructably Visible Order of Queuing Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin

Introduction Within the perspective of ethnomethodology, this chapter examines queuing practices in public space, on the basis of video recordings of a community service. It identifies and describes the constitutive details of queuing practices as a members’ phenomenon. It shows the order, production, accomplishment, regularity, structure, and dynamic features of the queuing phenomenon, as well as some of its contingencies. Queuing has been a topic of investigation since the inception of ethnomethodology as a scholarly field, and it has even been a regular and classical assignment while teaching ethnomethodology and demonstrating its principles (Garfinkel 2002; Livingston 1987, 2008). Queues constitute an attractive example of artful and collaborative production of social order and a perspicuous setting for studying the empirically observable and publicly visible details of this production. Queue members, and even non-members such as passers-by, manifest and orient to the existence of a social order, which is visibly and witnessably exhibited and enacted by them within their situated practices of glancing, watching, and inspecting. Specifically focusing on the emerging and evolving nature of queues and their self-instructable character, this chapter deals with the practical issues newcomers face when identifying a queue, recognizing its last members, positioning themselves in a way that aligns with them, and being recognized by them, thereby reflexively constituting and expanding the queue. By exploring the temporality, embodiment, and mutual perception characterizing the queue made accessible in detail by its video documentation, this analysis contributes to the ethnomethodological studies of social organization and social order, as well as the accountable and instructable character of practical actions. Naturally accountable and locally instructable observability of queues Queues have attracted the interest of sociologists, anthropologists, historians, psychologists, and marketing scholars (Ayass 2020; Furnham, Treglown & Horne 2020; Gibson 2008; Mann 1969; Schwartz 1975) as a phenomenon revealing numerous features of social life. Queues have been treated as evidence of how people DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-7

74  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin and institutions treat scarcity of goods or services and the difficulty to access them (Bogdanov 2012). Queues are also addressed in terms of time experiences and temporal morality (Furnham et al. 2020; Schwartz 2002). Queues exhibit organizational characteristics treated as a “miniature social system” (or rather “anything but a system” [Schwartz 2002: 15]) implementing order, norms, and equalitarian principles (Mann 1969) and also (un)fairness and (in)justice (Schwartz 2002) as well as variable tolerance regarding violations (Corbridge 2004; Milgram et al. 1986). Normative rules governing queues can be guided and constrained (Ayass 2020) by queue management systems, exhibited in various spatial arrangements of queues (Gibson 2008; Mann 1969; Schwartz 1975). The organization and optimization of queues have been mathematically modelized (in queuing theory, see Gross & Harris 1998), but issues of order in queues are also addressed in a mundane way by participants orienting to rules of sequencing. Queues exhibit phenomena of order, some of which are similar to other sequencing systems working with principles such as “one person at a time” (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974), or “first come, first served” (Ball & Smith 1986) for accessing the good/floor/position in a way that is normatively regulated by rights and obligations (Sacks 1992: 524). This is the case of traffic, systems of exchange, and turn-taking systems in which people’s access and contributions are linearized and sequentialized, awaiting their turn, one after another (Sacks et al. 1974). However, not all the phenomena organized by turn-by-turn procedures are queuing – and not all waiting situations are queues (see Ayass 2020; Schwartz 2002). In the ethnomethodological tradition, queues are viewed both as social objects that tacitly guide and instruct people’s behaviors and as situated achievements produced by interactional and organizational collaborative and concerted work. Queues are relevant to ethnomethodological studies of social order, like fruit flies are relevant to the study of genetics (Garfinkel 2007: 15). As Garfinkel puts it, “[…] over the ground of its ongoing production it is just this social fact that the order producing staff is making; and they are doing it in such a way as to make it accountably this thing, just this thing evidently” (2002: 250). Queues constitute an example of the self-instructable phenomenon in the sense that people commonly, regularly, and ordinarily queue and exhibit the existence and the order of the queue without explicit instructions, recipes, guidelines, manuals, descriptive schemes, etc. Thus, the emerging queue, its shape and trajectory, and the position and spacing of its members are a) recognizable within an “immediate, spontaneous, glance-based recognition” (Sudnow 1972: 260) and b) understandable as instructions on where and how to queue (see also Brown 2004; Garfinkel 2002; Lee & Watson 1993). The queue itself and the queuing practices are instructive to its members, and outsiders as well, in ways that index its order as ongoingly produced and accomplished. For members of society, people lining up in a particular way – building a specific shape and trajectory and holding up positions in a mutually related fashion – establish the queue’s local relevance to be seen and witnessed as that queue within that activity. The exhibited order of queues has observable properties such as the existence of a queue, the head of the queue, people’s displays of their membership in the

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  75 queue, etc. (Garfinkel 2002; Garfinkel & Livingston 2003; Livingston 1987). Therefore, the members of the queue are recognizable as belonging to various categories, such as first/head/front/last/end/tail of the queue, next-in-line, behindthat-member-in-line, etc. The members dynamically transit from one to another category within the lively advancement of the queue. Members of the queue display and exhibit the orderliness of the queue through particular interactional practices, such as searching for a place, finding a place, taking a place, holding that place, moving up along with the other members of the queue, monitoring and inspecting the others and their actions, positions, and movements in the queue. All these practices constitute the “instructably observable properties of the queues” (Garfinkel & Livingston 2003: 26) that reflexively establish the natural accountability of queues. Members of the queue witnessably engage in visual practices such as watching, observing, monitoring, and inspecting others’ actions in the queue (Ball & Smith 1986; Garfinkel 2002; Livingston 1987). They organize their own actions accordingly within the queue by taking steps forward and constantly adjusting their positions within the dynamic character of the queue and sometimes filling emptied positions in the queue. This concerns newcomers joining the queue, as well as members already queueing and witnessing how newcomers join, both reflexively achieving the queue. All embodied, visual, and temporal details of these practices deserve specific attention and demonstration, though this is seldom addressed and explicated in the literature. Drawing on video recordings and multimodal transcripts, this chapter provides and discusses such vivid details. Data and phenomenon The question of how to approach queues has been discussed in Garfinkel’s and Livingston’s pioneering studies: they advise studying various queues (not just one), by “touring” in different places (Garfinkel 2002: 256; Garfinkel & Livingston 2003: 26), taking notes and possibly photographs. Moreover, Livingston made drawings for representing the constitutive features of queues and used circles with noses to show the orientation of the members of the queue. A variety of queues (for instance, in supermarkets, bookstores, and other business establishments) have been observed in this way. However, the use of static modes of documenting queues (such as photographs) has favored the study of long queues. Rather, the use of video materials makes available the dynamic temporal, emergent, and changing character of queueing, which we discuss by focusing on incipient queues. Although Garfinkel (2002: 255) evoked film for documenting queues, he did not actually use this approach, working instead on the basis of ethnographic observation and possibly photographs – mostly for use in tutorials instructing how to observe queues rather than in studies of queues per se. In this chapter, we use video recordings, which reveal temporal features of the local practices of queuing, subtle details of adjusting positions and body postures, and minimal ways of orienting and responding. In order to demonstrate on which details the analyses are based, we also use multimodal transcripts, including a textual notation of temporal details

76  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin and visual representations in the form of a series of figures taken from videos. The video-based study of queues makes available the work of engaging in the queue, constituting and sustaining it. Thus, the focus on incipient queues is a way to particularly demonstrate the instructable character of queuing. This chapter studies queues, drawing on video-recorded community-based composting activities in an urban neighborhood in Basel (Switzerland). Recordings took place between March and May 2020 (five sessions, total 8 h). The compost area is an enclosed space, situated along a pedestrian pathway. It is operated on a voluntary basis, which opens for an hour once a week, and where neighbors can bring their vegetal waste. The waste is collected and brought by people in apposite green boxes and sometimes in plastic bags. It is recycled by the members of the local compost-community, who cut it into smaller pieces before placing it in large containers to allow for its natural decomposition, producing natural fertilizer of high quality, then reused for private and public community gardens. The place is considered an important space for the neighborhood sociability, as well as ecological activism. Given that the place is open only for an hour on Saturdays, queues often emerge in front of its entrance. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the place continued to operate regularly following a brief suspension. Prevention measures included a limitation of the number of people co-present inside the enclosed area, and relatedly people often queued in front of the entrance with some distance between them (on how Covid-19 affects human social life, see Mondada et al. 2020a, 2020b). “Queues tend to follow and adapt to specific environmental features” (Ball & Smith 1986: 34), and we show in the analysis how they adjust to the specifics of this context – during the pandemic, in relation to voluntary service of waste management, in a place of sociability – which impinges on the composition (shape, trajectory, distance between members, etc.) of the queue. At the same time, the queue makes observable some features such as the situatedness, malleability, and transcendence of its order, as well as the methodic practices achieving it. In this chapter, we address the orderliness and contingencies of the queue, as well as the methodic character of queuing, by focusing on the practical problem of the newcomer taking a place in a queue, that is, recognizing who is last and aligning with them in a way that reflexively contributes to the contextual production and expansion of the queue. Focusing on newcomers, we highlight the dynamics of incipient queuing as particularly revealing the instructable character of the queue. We study various configurations and their methodic accomplishment. In the first one, a newcomer smoothly aligns with a previous one, positioning themselves next (Extracts 4.1–4.8). The ordered production of the formatted queue is also observable in a deviant case (Extract 4.9). This enables us to formulate some observations about the queue as a self-explicating phenomenon but also as a local accomplishment of its members who orient to its relevant situated production as well as to deviant conduct (in line with Garfinkel 2002; Garfinkel & Livingston 2003; Livingston 1987). In the last configuration considered, a newcomer assumes a position as “next” with respect to a possible prior who might a) present some indeterminacy or ambiguity, or b) later reveal themself to be a non-member of the queue (Extracts 4.10–4.13). This will enable us to point to possible contingencies

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  77 affecting queuing practices, the importance of the evolving temporality and accountability of the queue, and their consequences – as they are addressed by the participants and also as they affect (or not) the ordered principles and properties of the queue. Recognizing who is last and aligning with them The queue is an emerging phenomenon that is produced as a lively object in real time, moment-by-moment, and step-by-step by newcomers positioning and moving as members of the queue. Positioning is a way of exhibiting the order of the queue (Garfinkel & Livingston 2003: 22) and a key aspect of its self-instructed character, both displaying and constituting its visibility and recognizability for people approaching it without any need to explicitly instruct them on how to queue. In the following analyses, we focus on the conduct of the newcomers while approaching the compost entrance, how they orient to and recognize the waiting and queuing persons in front of the door, and how they position themselves, contributing to the establishment and expansion of the queue. Positioning after a first in an incipient queue

The focus on newcomers to incipient queues enables the observation of the instructable character of the queue in fieri, that is, as it emerges before the moment in which the queue is already constituted and visible as such. In other words, it enables to describe the self-instructed practices through which the queue is being established, when it does not yet exist. The queue emerges when a person/party waiting is treated, and reflexively constituted as such by a newcomer, as first in a queue, when aligning behind them as a second. The first extracts show one person waiting in front of the entrance of the compost area. A second person approaches and positions himself/herself in a way that constitutes the first as the beginning of a queue. Extract 4.1  C19_20200627_kompost_5_003210

Norman approaches the pedestrian pathway along the compost area (fig. 1), walks forward, and positions himself behind Mia who is waiting in front of the compost door (fig. 2). By taking that position, he visibly aligns with her, treating (and constituting) her as the head of the queue, and he builds a line, perpendicular

78  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin to the entrance, now visibly recognizable as a queue. The visibility of queuing is further displayed by the posture of the members in the queue, who are standing, both feet parallel, and firmly on the ground, in a waiting posture. Moreover, Norman positions himself at some distance from Mia, orienting to the current Covid-19 circumstances, the regulations responding to the pandemic (we can notice two persons talking in the background, also holding distance). Although there is some distance between Mia and Norman, the existence and order of a queue are visible. Furthermore, Norman, like Mia, holds a green box, which is recognizable by members of this community as a compost box containing the waste and which works as a category-bound object. The box further enhances the visible membership of the person as not only queuing but also belonging to the group of people who bring their compost to be processed there. These visible details build the instructable character of the compost queue for further newcomers and passers-by. The next extract shows a similar phenomenon. Extract 4.2  C19_20200509_kompost_3_003000

Ulla is standing in front of the compost entrance. Vic arrives nearby with her bike and parks it on the side of the pathway (fig. 3). Vic walks forward, gazing toward the compost area (fig. 4). This distinguishes her from other passers-by, who walk forward without orienting toward the compost and without stopping. Vic continues to walk until she stops behind Ulla, aligning with the directionality of her body and gaze, facing the entrance (fig. 5). By so doing, she manifests that she recognizes Ulla as next to enter the compost area and she constitutes her as head of the queue while positioning herself as next in the queue. In this case, too, she holds a significant distance from Ulla. This distance not only responds to Covid-19 recommendations (and exhibits complying with them), but also enables possible

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  79 passers-by to walk along the pathway. Despite the distance between its members, the recognizability of the queue in front of the compost entrance is achieved by their respective positions, their postures, and their holding a box – building a visible Gestalt that secures their self-instructable character. In these two extracts, the queue is reflexively constituted by a newcomer aligning with the position and posture of a previous person, thereby building a line. The person standing and waiting is thereby constituted as first-in-line. In some cases, the emergent head of the line may also adjust themself to the person approaching and to the emerging formation of the incipient queue, as observable in the next two extracts – which are transcribed following Mondada’s conventions (2018). Extract 4.3  C19_20200627_kompost_5_004035

80  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin Carola is waiting in front of the compost entrance while Denise walks on the pathway with a baby stroller (fig. 6). Carola turns her head toward her and can see her approaching (fig. 7). As Denise comes closer, Carola begins to move: when Denise stops, Carola makes two steps forward and looks forward (fig. 8). The two movements – stopping and stepping – are precisely timed together. Moreover, Carola completes her movement by placing the box she has been holding on the ground. When Carola positions herself closer to the entrance, Denise moves forward with the stroller (fig. 8). Again, these two movements – standing and approaching – are perfectly timed. This shows not only how the newcomer aligns with the waiting person, thus configuring the line, but also that the waiting person adjusts to the newcomer, with a movement that highlights their position, now established as the head of the queue. The emergence of the queue is oriented to by both participants, who mutually adjust to its incipient unfolding. Likewise, in the next extract, Irene, together with her daughter, is waiting in front of the compost’s entrance, having a compost box on the ground (fig. 9). Upon his arrival, Jonas takes two boxes out of his bike and walks toward her, stopping at some distance. In this way, he displays his alignment with her in the emergent queue (fig. 10). A detailed transcript shows that Jonas is not just stopping as next behind Irene. They mutually adjust one to another in the emergent queue. Extract 4.4  C19_20200530_kompost_4_003800

Irene briefly glances at Jonas while he grasps his boxes from his bike. When Jonas stops, trampling on his new position, Irene immediately takes one step further. He positions himself as the next witnessable position in the queue just emerging; she

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  81 orients to him as taking that position, in a way that generates a revision of her own. Her stepping toward the compost entrance is a movement-with-a-box, in which she takes her box from the floor and holds it (fig. 11). In this way, she approaches the gate and projects the delivery of her waste (fig. 12). This movement is responsive to Jonas’s approach (and his way of aligning with her), both consolidating and confirming her position as first in the queue and next to enter the compost area. In both cases (Extracts 4.3 and 4.4), the arrival of a newcomer occasions a readjustment of the person now head of the queue. Moreover, the arrival and the readjustment are perfectly timed, displaying mutual monitoring and responsiveness. We could see these adjustments as a way to enhance the instructability of the queue as a collaborative achievement of both parties, the newcomer and the now-first-in-line. More generally, the emergent building of the queue is witnessable (for the participants as well as for the analysts) when a newcomer queues with a person waiting: one person waiting does not yet define a queue (Ayass 2020); the newcomer is crucial in establishing the queue. Newcomers sketch the initial shape of the queue, which works as an instruction on how to expand it, increasingly configuring it in its order and linear Gestalt. Moreover, participants orient to this emergent shape, and its directionality, possibly enhancing their relative positioning as now accountable as a series of places in line, displaying relations of head/end, first/second, prior/next, and the rights associated with them. Joining a queue

The visible accountability of the queue is further increased when a third person joins it, like in the following cases, in which a newcomer joins two other parties queuing. Extract 4.5  C19_20200627_kompost_5_004000

When Carola approaches the compost area with a box in her hands, Anna and Barbara are visibly queuing at the entrance (fig. 13). Carola continues her walking trajectory and stops behind them (fig. 14). In doing so, Carola displays a recognition of the queue at the entrance and noticeably positions herself in relation to the end of this queue. In the next case, Celia is waiting as a next person to access the compost area (fig. 15). She is positioned quite far away from the gate, which might display an orientation to Covid-19 regulations of distance, as well as to the pathway as a pedestrian space in which other pedestrians are passing by (see the person with a bag transiting across that space, figs. 15–17).

82  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin Extract 4.6  C19_20200530_kompost_4_004220

Celia has been joined by Doris and Daniel who stopped at some distance. In this case, their positioning contributes to build the queue as a line parallel to the compost area, at some distance from it (fig. 15). Next, Elinor approaches the area (fig. 15). She walks past the two persons standing at the beginning of the pathway (fig. 16) and stops behind Doris and Daniel (fig. 17), which indicates that she recognizes them as a “with” (Goffman 1971: 19). By way of walking past the other two persons, Elinor orients to them as not doing queueing and as not being members of the queue, and by way of stopping behind Doris and Daniel, she displays recognition of them as the end of the queue for that moment. The way in which Elinor joins the queuing persons prolongs the shape and the directionality of the queue, parallel to the compost entrance (vs. perpendicular to the entrance, as shown in some previous cases). In this way, Elinor orients to the instructable character of not only the last member of the queue but also to its global shape and directionality. Differentiating between queue members and non-members

As demonstrated in the last extract, newcomers orient in space toward both possible members of the queue and possible non-members (“who is in the queue, who is not, and who may just be visiting,” Livingston 1987: 12). They treat passers-by as not relevant for the queue business and as not taking a place in the queue. They align with persons recognized as members of the queue. Respectively, passers-by display by their walking trajectory that they do not belong to the normative order of the queue (see the transiting person in Extract 4.6, who adapts her trajectory in such a way to walk in the middle of the free space between the fence and the queue). The queue as an instructable phenomenon is addressed by the incipient members of the queue as well as by those outside it, who also organize their ongoing activities by

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  83 considering it: in this way, the queue also instructs broader aspects of the public space in which it is located. This distinction between members and non-members of the queue is locally established, as further observable in the next two extracts, in which the persons in the emergent queue do not treat as problematic, i.e., as not cheating, overtaking, or “butting-in” (Livingston 1987: 15), the fact that other persons approach the entrance of the compost without aligning with the queue-in-progress. In the next extract, Eva is waiting in front of the entrance (fig. 18). Fee arrives with her daughter and positions herself behind Eva at some distance, creating a line perpendicular to the entrance (fig. 19). Extract 4.7A  C19_20200530_kompost_4_003525

A more detailed transcript integrates the action of another person, Walter, holding his baby, who approaches the compost entrance although not belonging to the queue. Extract 4.7B  C19_20200530_kompost_4_003525

84  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin The accountability of Walter as not-being-a-member-of-the-queue is instructably achieved both by Eva and by him. As Walter comes closer to Eva and passes by her, walking to the entrance, he begins to point forward (fig. 20A/B). This is not just a pointing gesture produced within the activity of showing something to his baby; it is also a gesture made observable for Eva (fig. 21), displaying a kind of activity that is not related to the waste (Walter does not hold any boxes) but that is something else – thus not concurring with the queue, its order, and its rights and obligations. This is visible in the fact that Walter’s pointing begins precisely when he passes by Eva: this timing makes the gesture as both addressed to the baby and witnessable by Eva. Eva looks at him and makes a step back (fig. 22), giving space to him without orienting to this as modifying the order of the queue (vs. the step forward of those who reassure their position in the queue in Extracts 4.3 and 4.4). Around the queue in a public place, there might be several other people: passersby who do not stop and do not orient to the composting activities, as well as people who go to the compost, but for other purposes than accessing the service for which the members of the queue are in line. The way people queuing orient to them displays whether they interpret them as part of the queue conduct or not. A case in point is Extract 4.8 below, in which Rudi walks directly to the compost area, and Annabel and Britta do not treat this as overtaking the queue. Annabel is waiting at the entrance door, holding a box next to her baby trolley. Rudi and Britta, from different trajectories, approach the compost area (figs. 23 and 24). As Rudi comes closer, he just continues his walking trajectory, without orienting to Annabel waiting at the entrance. As Rudi passes by Annabel, she briefly gazes at him (fig. 25). Rudi goes on and enters the compost terrain (fig. 26). When Britta approaches, Annabel directs her gaze toward her (fig. 27). Britta reciprocates this gaze and stops behind Annabel, a bit to her right side, facing the entrance (fig. 28). Rudi displays that his entrance to the compost ground relates to a different sort of activity than Annabel’s waiting at the entrance. He does not treat his access to the compost area as related to queuing, that is, to the access to the service; this is also visible in the fact that he is not holding any waste container. Moreover, his further activity can be possibly monitored by those outside the compost area, displaying him as a member of the staff team. By contrast, Britta acknowledges the presence and waiting of Annabel by stopping and positioning behind her. In doing so, she recognizes Annabel as first-in-line and aligns with her, building a queue with her. In sum, this section has demonstrated how the order of the queue emerges and is sustained by the members of the queue, in a way that crucially relies on the recognition of who is last/at the end of the queue, and also on the display of who is first/ ahead of the queue. Under Covid-19 circumstances, members queue at some distance: this often does not affect the order of the queue, and for the analysts it even enhances the features that make the queue visible, such as positioning, adopting a waiting posture, and exhibiting category-bound objects. Moreover, the witnessable and watchable accountability of the queuing activity as a self-instructed phenomenon enables the participants to differentiate between members and non-members of the queue and thus interpret activities such as passing by and entering the compost

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  85 Extract 4.8  C19_20200530_kompost_4_003305

area as not related to the relevancies of the queue and thus as not recognizable in relation to the order and normativity of the queue. A deviant case: Joining the queue in a “disorderly” manner The previous section has demonstrated some methodic practices of the newcomer joining what they reflexively contribute to establish as a queue, aligning with a recognizable last in line. These smooth ways of joining the queue contrast with ways of positioning with respect to the queue which does not align with its emergent witnessable order – which is treated as deviant by the members of the queue.

86  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin In the following example, Jan arrives at the compost area, which is quite crowded: Ava is standing in front of the entrance and holding a box, Ia is standing behind her with two boxes in front of her feet, while Micha is projecting to enter the terrain, and a family with dispersed members are passing by. Extract 4.9   C19_20200627_kompost_5_004655

As Jan walks forward, holding a plastic bag and a box, Ava and Ia are positioned in a perpendicular line with respect to the compost entrance, which can be seen as a queue (fig. 29). Jan stops in the middle of the pathway, next to Ava, and looks at the compost area. His position cannot be interpreted as aligning with the queue: he does not orient to Ia and stands to the left of Ava (fig. 30). At the same time, he projects to enter the compost area as his body orientation is directed toward the entrance and he holds a bag and a compost box.

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  87 As Jan is stopping, Ia bends down and takes her two boxes, makes two steps forward, and put them on the ground again, producing a hearable sound (figs. 31–33). This step forward (see Extracts 4.3 and 4.4 supra) is a methodic practice through which she claims her relative position in the queue; the displacement of the boxes, audibly knocked together, enhances the publicly noticeable character of her claim. Jan immediately looks back/at her (fig. 34); moreover, he makes a step back, orienting to his position as inadequate or at least revisable (figs. 35 and 36). His stepping back can be seen as a response to Ia’s action. Still, the fact that now he is repositioned to the side of Ia still locates him ambiguously in the queue. This will have some consequences for the next newcomer (see Extract 4.10). In this deviant case, the instructable character of the queue particularly refers to its normativity, in being re-established and enhanced by the corrective audiblevisible movement of one member orienting to another one as not respecting its order. This correction contrasts with the smooth cases observed in Extract 4.1 and constitutes a deviant case: the first positioning of the newcomer can be seen at least as ambiguous, and eventually as projecting bypassing the existing queue order. It is addressed as deviant by the participants themselves (in particular, Ia’s step forward, which embodies her normative response) and ends up with a revised positioning of the newcomer. The repositioning of the newcomer, aligned with the initial repositioning of the last member in the queue, acknowledges his “disorderly” approach to the queue (Livingston 1987: 15) and misplacement. Indeterminacies, uncertainties, and ambiguities of the order of the queue The order of the queue can be unproblematically recognized and aligned with by the parties (Extracts 4.1–4.8) or can be contested and revised in deviant cases (Extract 4.9). This shows that in some cases the visible order of the queue is troubled: either it is not entirely recognizable at a glance or it retrospectively results at some point as being not what it seemed to be. In this section, we focus on queues that include some features that affect their accountability. However, people queuing preserve the constitutive aspects of the queue, its order, and its normativity, despite possible recognitional troubles and possible revisions. Garfinkel and Livingston (2003: 21) speak of the certainty of the details of the phenomena of order, of their exhibition in an immediate and direct way – the contingent blurriness of the queue shows that this certainty is not always at hand. Yet, as Livingston (1987: 15) writes, this has the effect of making the phenomena of order even more visible – the implicit instructable character of the queue becoming clearer in some cases. The order of the queue is not constantly and uniformly displayed for those who join it: it is not equally available within all the possible perspectives on it. At some moments, portions of the queue might be less visibly ordered than at others: the queue is a lively Gestalt that dynamically evolves in time. Participants accommodate to these dynamic features: on the one hand, they try to make sense of the queue as they discover it when they approach it; on the other hand, they shape their local contribution in a way that reflexively preserves the basic order principles

88  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin and normativity of the queue. This happens in the smooth cases observed above (Extracts 4.1–4.8) and also in cases that are more problematic, in which some trouble arises, for example, concerning the recognizability of some particulars of the queue-as-it-stands-when-they-join-it (Extract 4.9). We discuss here some possible ambiguities, related to the recognition of who is last in the queue, either in cases in which the order of the queue is not clear (Extract 4.10) or in cases in which the presumed last is possibly not a member of the queue (Extracts 4.11–4.13). The next extract shows that even in cases in which the order of the queue might be partially unrecognizable, the newcomer joins it in a way that preserves various possible alternative interpretations and their normative accountability. We focus on Till joining the queue that emerged in the aftermath of the deviant case (Extract 4.9) examined above. Extract 4.10  C19_20200627_kompost_5_004800

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  89 Till approaches from the other side of the road holding a box; he crosses it and enters the pathway. Coming closer to the compost area, he can see a group of people. Ava is visibly the next person to enter the compost ground, ahead of the queue. Two other persons, Ia and Jan, are standing behind her, next to each other (fig. 37). Although their order is possibly not clear – their positions are not drawing a queue in the form of a straight line – and although they do not seem to queue as a “with” (each of them has boxes), they are recognizable as members of the queue with their bodies oriented toward the compost entrance. As Till approaches further, all members waiting in the queue maintain their positions. Till slows down his walk (fig. 38), begins to turn toward the entrance and does the last step with a big movement of his leg. He stops, positioning his body in such a way that he stands behind both Ia and Jan, forming a triangle with them (fig. 39). With this positioning, Till seems to be orienting to the indeterminacy of who is the last member of the queue, while at the same time adopting a position that can be seen as the next/last one after Ia and Jan, no matter who is at the end. When approaching a recognizable queue whose last member is possibly indeterminate, a newcomer may take a position that makes it unproblematic which one is the last, constituting their own position as the new last in the queue. Over the course of the development of the queue, ambiguities and indeterminacies may arise, which may be allowed for the time being (until and unless they are oriented to as practical problems) but are usually resolved over time. In this extract, the indeterminacy concerns the order and who is last among different persons visibly queuing. In the next one (see Extract 4.11 below), it also concerns who is last, but the issue is rather whether the person is a member of the queue or not. Here too, the newcomer aligns with the possible queue by preserving the possibility that the person in front of her is actually queuing – thereby also preserving her place and associated rights within the queue. Rea is waiting in front of the entrance, and Stine and Steve, who have arrived together, are standing a bit behind Rea with some distance between themselves, and Tilda is parking her bike. After Tilda parks her bike (fig. 40), she moves to the center of the pathway and stops there (fig. 41). She positions herself at some distance behind Steve, thereby recognizing him as the last member of the queue. However, she positions herself a bit on the left of Stine and Steve (as opposed to being directly behind them) and this contributes to configuring a half-circle shape from the head of the queue to its end. This position enables Tilda to monitor the entire passage, all the persons in the queue, and even the compost terrain. After Stine takes a few little steps to her right (fig. 42), Tilda also takes two steps forward (fig. 43) – aligning with the queue’s progression. Shortly afterward, Stine takes more steps to her right (fig. 44), while Steve maintains his position and begins to engage with his phone (fig. 45) and the distance between Stine and Steve visibly increases. As Zoe and her baby – who have been inside the compost area for a while – leave, Rea enters the door (fig. 45). As Rea enters, she produces a pointing gesture inviting Stine to enter too. Stine starts to walk forward, and slightly later Tilda starts to move forward as well (fig. 46). Tilda walks relatively slower and produces noticeably shorter steps until she arrives at the same height as Steve. Thereby, she exhibits

90  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin Extract 4.11  C19_20200509_kompost_3_004140

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  91 an orientation to the possibility that Steve might also walk forward and claim to be the next in the queue. As Steve stands immobile, still engaged with his phone, Tilda walks past him. She continues walking, stops in front of the entrance, and puts her box on the ground – displaying herself as next in the queue (fig. 47). For newcomers, it is a practical issue to assess which of the people in the vicinity are queueing to enter the compost area. In this case, Tilda is faced with the possibility that Steve might be the last member of the queue. Although Steve has a position that might be seen as next, following Stine, and adopts the waiting posture observed in other cases, he does not have a compost box. Thus, his membership in the queue is possibly ambiguous. Although Tilda as a newcomer regards him as possibly in the queue, Steve’s immobility and disalignment with the gradual progression of the queue enhances this ambiguity. Eventually, as Steve maintains his stationary position and engagement with his phone, even when Stine steps forward in readiness to enter the compost area, his immobility can be seen to confirm that he is not being part of the queue. However, as she moves forward, Tilda visibly exhibits care and caution, both providing opportunities for Steve to claim his position if he is indeed a member of the queue and presenting herself as not doing jumping the queue. This shows that the order of the queue is not just constantly monitored, but revised and re-appreciated moment-by-moment by its members and newcomers assessing their respective positions, orientations, and engagements in relation to its normative expectancies and requirements. Members in the queue organize themselves in a way that they constantly monitor each other’s actions in and as the progression of the queue. Moments of progression are key for inspecting the accountability and the self-instructability of the queue. Tilda’s positioning enables her to monitor the entire queue and its possible members. When Stine moves, Tilda moves too, aligning with the progression of the queue. While this shows a collective alignment with the advancement of the queue, it also enables her to detect the non-members of the queue. Similarly, in Extract 4.12 below, the ambiguity is related to the recognizability of a possible prior as a member of the queue or not. This produces trouble visible in the hesitations of the newcomer (Helen) as well as revisions of her positioning in the line. We focus on how Helen orients to a group of people (Karla and Kay, recognizable as a “with” on their bikes, and Sue standing) talking with each other in front of the entrance. After talking with a member of the recording team (fig. 48), Helen walks toward the entrance (fig. 49). She stops behind Sue (fig. 50), who is talking with Kay and Karla. By way of positioning behind Sue, Helen displays that she recognizes her as the next to enter the compost terrain; thereby she reflexively constitutes her as the head of the emerging queue (fig. 51). After having waited for some time, however, Helen shifts weight on her legs, abandoning the waiting posture (with two parallel feet equilibrated on the ground, see Extracts 4.1 and 4.2), and bends her knee projecting to walk forward (fig. 52). She keeps this asymmetric posture for a couple of seconds. Then she starts walking forward, heading toward the left side of Sue (fig. 53). At this point, Sue is still in conversation with Kay and Karla; she makes a little step, approaching them (fig. 54) – a movement that might be responsive of Helen approaching,

92  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin Extract 4.12  C19_20200321_kompost_2_003610

strengthening the interactional space of their conversation. As Helen gets closer to Sue, she slightly turns her upper body to the right and turns toward the group. When Helen approaches and finds herself at Sue’s level, her walking pace becomes noticeably slower. By slowing down her walking and bodily and visually orienting to the group of people talking with each other, Helen exhibits that Sue could be the

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  93 next to enter the compost terrain, thus preserving Sue’s right to that place in the queue. Her circumspect and hesitant stepping tentatively preserves Sue’s priority, but when the group continues their conversation, Helen turns toward the entrance and begins to walk forward (fig. 56). She thus moves to be the next to enter, while displaying her attention to Sue’s apparent position as next, and to the whole group as not members of the queue and not doing queuing at all. As a newcomer, Helen is seeing a group of people close to the entrance talking with each other, and more specifically a person holding a compost box standing in front of the entrance, adopting what can be seen as a waiting posture while talking with others. Their position, close to the entrance, makes it ambiguous whether they (and especially one of them) are waiting and queuing to enter the compost terrain or just standing and chatting there. Though Helen recognizes the possibility that they might be queuing, their continuous engagement with their conversation enhances the possibility that this might not be the case. Attentively walking forward and exhibiting bodily and visual orientation toward the group, Helen manifests an orientation to the moral order of the possible queue, preserving the rights of its possible members, and displays her attentiveness to being seen as overtaking them. Only after observing the group not manifesting forthcoming displays to be next, Helen revises her initial recognition and categorization of their assembled position and walks forward as legitimate next. As Livingston (1987: 15) observes, disorders in a queue are “a disturbing, but order-productive phenomenon.” This case shows, like the previous one, how the positioning of a newcomer is formatted in a way that preserves various interpretations of the possible queue and aligns with its normative order. Indeterminacies and ambiguities are first handled in a way that preserves the possibility of (membership in) a queue, and is revised only later on, upon closer and durable inspection. This initial positioning is publicly witnessable; it also displays the newcomer as a morally respectable participant (as other than a cheater who is jumping the queue). However, the embodied “interpretation” of the queue also adjusts to its temporal becoming, occasioning revisions and repositionings, which are also publicly displayed, in a way that continues to build the entitlement of the participant. This extract shows how sociability in the queue can generate trouble for its order. It also shows how distancing – which is often not a problem in smooth cases (see supra) – can blur the accountability of positions in space, losing the visibility of interactional spaces and participation frameworks (here Sue began to talk after leaving the compost area at some distance from the entrance and also maintaining distance with Kay and Karla). The queue as a dynamic temporal Gestalt affords different interpretations depending on the position and the timing of queuing. Members confronted with possible indeterminacies tend to visually exhibit even more the morality and accountability of their queuing conduct. The revision of an initial positioning and interpretation is achieved by the newcomer in the previous two extracts; in the next extract, the revision is initiated by the participant with whom the newcomer aligns. In this case, too, the participant reveals not being a member of the queue and orients to this as a morally loaded issue. Leo approaches the compost terrain with a box in his hand, while Alexa is standing near the entrance and Aron is depositing his box inside the terrain.

94  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin Extract 4.13  C19_20200530_kompost_4_011050

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  95 When Leo is approaching the compost area holding a box in his hands, Alexa is standing at the entrance (fig. 57). Leo walks forward and stops behind Alexa at some distance (fig. 58). Orienting to the traffic of passers-by, he moves to his left, and in this way, he also spatially aligns with the position of Alexa, along the compost fence (fig. 59). Alexa’s position could be seen as either possibly queuing to enter, close to the door (though she does not hold a box), or possibly waiting beside the entrance for somebody else. However, Leo does not treat her position as ambiguous; rather, he recognizes her as the head of a queue, which he joins and reflexively constitutes. Here Alexa’s position and posture are treated as an instruction about how to find “next” and build a line along the fence (vs. perpendicular or parallel to the entry point, as in the other cases). While waiting, Leo leans forward and looks over the fence into the compost area (fig. 60). In the meanwhile, Alexa glances back, toward Leo (fig. 60), as he is looking into the compost terrain. Then, Alexa addresses Aron who is depositing his compost box. When Aron moves to go out, Alexa steps back (fig. 61). In doing so, she adjusts to Aron’s movement, rather than entering the area, which makes it possible to treat her as “with” Aron. Noticing that he has forgotten the lid of his box, Aron turns back and enters the terrain again (fig. 62). In the meanwhile, Alexa, now facing the entrance, can notice Leo still waiting. At that point, she suddenly makes a quick and large step back, almost jumping (fig. 63): its temporality and shape exhibit a sudden noticing. This may express her discovery that Leo has not just been looking into the terrain but was waiting behind her. Furthermore, by moving back, Alexa indicates that she is not queuing, and this opens the way for Leo to move forward. Yet, Leo maintains his position, and only after Aron goes out displaying the completion of his deposition, Leo starts to move forward (fig. 64). He, therefore, shows that he has been treating Alexa and Aron as being together. In this case, the organization of the queue composed by Alexa and Leo is revised from two perspectives. Leo orients to and aligns with Alexa, recognizing her as queueing; later on, he realizes that she is just waiting for someone else. Alexa sees Leo behind her, but realizes only later that he has been waiting and treating her as the first member of a queue: consequently, she withdraws from the queuing position in an accountable (and kind of apologetic) way. Even if both revise their respective categorization and action, they still preserve the order of the queue, thereby displaying an orientation to its moral accountability. Conclusion This chapter examined a collection of queues and queuing practices and their constitutive details, offering a video-based contribution to the study of “the lived-work of producing social order” (Livingston 1987: 15) through the “instructably observable properties of the queues” (Garfinkel & Livingston 2003: 26). For doing so, the analyses focused on the practical problems of the newcomers, treating them as a perspicuous category revealing the self-instructable character of the incipient emergent queues: how to appropriately join the queue, how to recognize the queue

96  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin and its members, how to search and identify the last in the queue, and how to detect who is in the queue and who is not. The extracts show how the embodied details of approaching, positioning, orienting the body, moving forward, etc. align with the queue-in-progress and reflexively contribute to its establishment. These analyses cast some light on the emergence of the queue: the queue is reflexively established and built by a newcomer positioning behind a person witnessably waiting for a service. In turn, the person waiting also responds to the newcomer by adjusting their position and posture. By focusing on cases of incipient queues (vs. on longer queues, favored in the literature), we have sketched how the self-instructed character of the queue is established. The extracts further show how the accountable order of the queue might not always be evidently present, having to be worked out, either by actively checking and revising positions or by just waiting to see how the queue progresses. Possible indeterminacies of the queues have been studied, with a focus on how they are solved by the last member of the queue, and how their methodic practices for addressing these uncertainties and multiple possibilities actually preserve the normative and intelligible order of the queue, despite its local contingencies and unclarities. Specificities of the queue have been addressed in relation to a particular activity: queuing for composting. Composters bring their waste to a processing area and queue by orienting to its entrance. They are particularly recognizable as holding compost boxes, as category-bound objects, exhibiting membership in the related community. Another aspect of compost queues studied in this chapter is concerned with the Covid-19 pandemic. Queuing at a distance exhibits orientations to risks of contagion and compliance with relevant preventive regulations. Though it often does not affect the order of the queue, it might sometimes enhance the ambiguity of some spatial configurations and physical arrangements of bodies possibly treated as a queue and its local exploitation by possible cheaters. Thus, the specific circumstances created by Covid-19 further reveal both the sustainability and the malleability of the queue. The cases examined show the importance of the temporality of queuing. The queue is a lively, locally, and constantly enriched Gestalt which evolves dynamically in time. Temporality implicates both the indexicality and transiency of the queue and its “immortal” and “transcendental” character (see Garfinkel 1988, 2002). Video analysis (and its corresponding transcripts, finely elaborating on the sequential-temporal details of the practices of queuing) enables us to capture these temporal features and their consequentiality. In particular, we have shown that the observable and visible appearance of the queue depends on when the newcomer joins it. Its visual accountability is not an immutable characteristic: it changes all the time and might be more or less clear depending on when it is witnessed, witnessed at a glance or experienced for an extended period of time (e.g., it is less clear when the queue is incipient, it is clearer when the queue is longer, and it often has a clear linear Gestalt). Its situated interpretations, and consequently the local adjustments to it, can vary. These various interpretations display various possible orders of the queue: they belong to the work of addressing and maintaining the queue. The indeterminacies of the queue are solved within time, by waiting, inspecting, and seeing, re-appreciating the organization of the queue as it progresses. Possible

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  97 ambiguities also are treated on the spot, typically through positionings that preserve possible multiple interpretations, and thereby the moral order, of the queue, waiting for the queue to progress: the movement of the queue is one locus in which its accountable character becomes visible, as evolving instructability. Indeterminacies are allowed, for the time being, but tend to dissolve as the queue is witnessed for some time, as a continuously unfolding temporal phenomenon that secures, in its temporality, its accountable instructable character. Thus, indeterminacies, ambiguities, as well as deviant cases, further reveal and exhibit the normativity of the queue. Among the practical problems of the newcomer joining the queue, there is the recognizability and categorization of the members of the queue. The queue can be achieved in a crowded public space (a passage where other people can pass by, stop without queueing, engage in sociable encounters, talk, and queue), but oftentimes people interested in the business of the queue differentiate between members and non-members (and this has moral-normative implications: the same movement in space is not morally judged in the same way for both categories – e.g., approaching the entrance). However, in other circumstances, it is not clear whether a person is queuing or not: in these cases, we have shown that the newcomer adjusts in a way that takes various possibilities into account while waiting, monitoring, and inspecting for the uniform and coherent next movements in the queue. These phenomena and practical problems show the dynamic character of the queue, which occasions constant watching and related embodied adjustments as well as situated reasonings. The ongoing and changing (e.g., in revisions) interpretations are publicly observable in the embodied conduct of participants consisting in visual practices such as trampling, stepping forward, moving cautiously, withdrawing, and repositioning. This casts light on the fact that despite the “immortal” character of the queue, there are always multiple locally and temporally embodied perspectives on the queue (e.g., the newcomer just discovering the queue vs. the person in the queue having already witnessed its history). In this sense, it is not so clear that “[t]he naturally accountable orderlinesses are available to all the parties” (Garfinkel 2002: 257). The queue is a Gestalt that offers the inspectability of the order at a glance, but also an incipient, progressive, changing living format that occasions various local adjustments and interpretations. In particular, our video-based study enables us to reflect on various spatiotemporal perspectives on the queue, the local contextures of relevance, and the conditions of the availability of its instructed order within multiple changing perspectives on the queue. This occasions problems of understanding the queue for its members and also problems of description for its analysts. Queuing can be described from different perspectives, each evolving specifically in time, and each presenting specific evidences or disturbances; nevertheless, the instructably visible order of queuing is always there, oriented to within the situated conduct of people. Transcription conventions The extracts are transcribed following the conventions developed by Mondada (2018).

98  Lorenza Mondada and Burak S. Tekin Acknowledgements This chapter has been written as part of the projects The five first words: Multilingual cities in Switzerland and Belgium and the grammar of language choice in public space (funded by the SNF, project number 100012L_182296/1) and Human Sociality in the Age of Covid-19 (see https://www.lorenzamondada.net/ humansociality-covid19). References Ayass, Ruth. 2020. ‘Doing Waiting: An Ethnomethodological Analysis’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 49(4): 419–455. Ball, Michael and Gregory T. Smith. 1986. ‘The Visual Availability of Queuing’s Local Organization’, Communication & Cognition 19(1): 27–58. Bogdanov, Konstantin. 2012. ‘The Queue as Narrative. A Soviet Case Study’, in A. Baiburin, C. Kelly and N. Vakhtin (eds.) Russian Cultural Anthropology after the Collapse of Communism. New York: Routledge, pp. 77–102. Brown, Barry. 2004. ‘The Order of Service: The Practical Management of Customer Interaction’, Sociological Research Online 9(4). Available at: http://www.socresonline.org. uk/9/4/brown.html Corbridge, Stuart. 2004. ‘Waiting in Line, or the Moral and Material Geographies of QueueJumping’, in R. Lee and D. Smith (eds.), Geographies and Moralities. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 183–198. Furnham, Adrian, Luke Treglown and George Horne. 2020. ‘The Psychology of Queuing’, Psychology 11(3): 480–498. Garfinkel, Harold. 1988. ‘Evidence for Locally Produced, Naturally Accountable Phenomena of Order, Logic, Reason, Meaning, Method, etc. in and as of the Essential Quiddity of Immortal, Ordinary Society, (I and IV): An Announcement of Studies’, Sociological Theory 88(6): 103–109. Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Garfinkel, Harold. 2007. ‘Lebenswelt Origins of the Sciences: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism: Book Two: Workplace and Documentary Diversity of Ethnomethodological Studies of Work and Sciences by Ethnomethodology’s Authors: What Did We Do? What Did We Learn?’, Human Studies 30(1): 9–56. Garfinkel, Harold and Eric Livingston. 2003. ‘Phenomenal Field Properties of Order in Formatted Queues and Their Neglected Standing in the Current Situation of Inquiry’, Visual Studies 18(1): 21–28. Gibson, David R. 2008. ‘Doing Time in Space: Line-Joining Rules and Resultant Morphologies’, Sociological Forum 23(2): 207–233. Goffman, Erving. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper & Row. Gross, Donald and Carl M. Harris. 1998. Fundamentals of Queuing Theory. London: Wiley. Lee, J. R. E. and D. R. Watson. 1993. Interaction in Urban Public Space: Final Report to the Plan Urbain. Paris: Plan Urbain. Livingston, Eric. 1987. Making Sense of Ethnomethodology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Livingston, Eric. 2008. Ethnographies of Reason. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Mann, Leon. 1969. ‘Queue Culture: The Waiting Line as a Social System’, American Journal of Sociology 75(3): 340–354.

Joining the Queue as a Newcomer  99 Milgram, Stanley, Hilary J. Liberty, Raymond Toledo and Joyce Wackenhut. 1986. ‘Response to Intrusion into Waiting Lines’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51(4): 683–689. Mondada, Lorenza. 2018. ‘Multiple Temporalities of Language and Body in Interaction: Challenges for Transcribing Multimodality’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 51(1): 85–106. Mondada, Lorenza, Julia Bänninger, Sofian Bouaouina, Guillaume Gauthier, Philipp Hänggi, Mizuki Koda, Hanna Svensson and Burak S. Tekin. 2020a. ‘Changing Social Practices: Covid-19 and New Forms of Sociality’, Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 13(2): 217–232. Mondada, Lorenza, Julia Bänninger, Sofian Bouaouina, Laurent Camus, Guillaume Gauthier, Philipp Hänggi, Mizuki Koda, Hanna Svensson and Burak S. Tekin. 2020b. ‘Human Sociality in the Times of the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Examination of Change in Greetings’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 24(4): 441–468. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, Vols. 1 and 2. Oxford: Blackwell. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. 1974. ‘A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn Taking in Conversation’, Language 50: 696–735. Schwartz, Barry. 1975. Queuing and Waiting. Studies in the Social Organization of Access and Delay. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schwartz, Howard. 2002. ‘Data: Who Needs It? Describing Normal Environments – Examples and Methods’, Ethnographic Studies 7: 7–32. Sudnow, David. 1972. ‘Temporal Parameters of Interpersonal Observation’, in David Sudnow (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction. New York: The Free Press, 259–279.

5

Rules as Instructed Actions The Case of the Surfers’ Lineup1 Kenneth Liberman

Introduction Surfing is an unorganized sport, but it is not disorganized. There is no rule book, although there have been many attempts to compile “rules” for surfing etiquette, which are posted online and on signs at surfing locations, and circulate by word-of-mouth. When one speaks about “rules” in surfing, many surfers will laugh. Unlike most sports, there are no arbiters such as umpires or referees, and surfers are left to resolve any disputes themselves. What is more, surfers are congenitally anti-regulatory and possess “very different and conflicting ideas of which rules are the right ones and which ones are secondary” (Corte 2013). It is not that rules are missing in the lineup; rather, many rules overlap and compete with each other, requiring sorting out on each occasion. Rules for surfing behavior exist, but only when surfers need them; however, as surfing has grown in popularity, these needs have been increasing (see Figure 5.1). Rules in surfing have their life not as diktat but as resources that are employed if and when they can be made pertinent for organizing the local interaction. Their pertinence for organizing contributes to motivating their application. Only rarely do they operate as a regime of strict governance. Perhaps their protean character reveals an unspoken truth about social rules, a truth that Harold Garfinkel (1963: 199) came upon during his studies of games-with-rules: “I have been unable to find any game whose acknowledged rules are sufficient to cover all the problematic possibilities that may arise.” There are many problematic situations in surfing, and there are efforts to apply rules to them, but as scientists we do not want to be engaged in imposing fictions, although this would fairly characterize social scientific analysis that resorts to imposing rationalist versions of norms, customs, and “generically theorized rules of principled action” (Garfinkel 2002: 107). Rules-in-use are not formal rationalities, and sociologists should beware of over-conceptualizing them; they are situated resources that parties have available for use in coordinating their own actions with the actions of others. It is my interest here to explore how surfers use rules for taking turns and to use this example as a basis for a naturally occurring tutorial on rules as instructed actions. What are rules, exactly? We sociologists have had it mostly wrong about how rules function in the world, and we have had it wrong largely because we have adopted uncritically DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-8

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Figure 5.1  In order to avoid collisions, surfers organize an orderliness of turns.

common-sense notions about rules as principles for our inquiries. Zimmerman and Pollner (1970: 81) suggest that too frequently “common-sense recognitions are pressed into service as fundamentally unquestioned resources for analyzing,” and Howard Schwartz (2002: 7) observes, “Sociology as a professional group is interested in finding and imposing normative standards.” What does common-sense recognition consist of? It consists of forgetting the reality that we are the ones who have organized the orderliness of the rules and then reified the results of our local organizational work, to the point that we too believe they exist independently and prior to our achievement. Instead of adopting and imposing common-sense ideologies, sociologists need to re-envision and re-specify rules as radical phenomena by capturing and describing them in the ways they are actually used and developed. When we do so, we discover that rules are employed as directions or instructions to our fellow actors regarding how to understand the intelligibility of some shared circumstances and how to behave in those circumstances. As Rod Watson (2009: 480) proposes, “Rules are sense-making instruments employed in situ.” Garfinkel (1956: 181) warns, “If you interpret the sociologist’s favorite term as common sense indicates, you will be misled. Closer inspection reveals that the term ‘an organization’ is an abbreviation of the full term ‘an organization of social actions.’ The term ‘organization’ does not itself designate a palpable phenomenon.” Rules are not palpable phenomena in that they do not come ready-made, and they are protean; we mislead ourselves when we believe in our own construal of “rules that specify for the actor the use of the area.” Rules are interpretative schema that are available for use as resources for coordinating social action, and they can be used to make salient any coherences that already exist but may be unnoticed or unrecognized. An ideal prevalent in lay and professional circles alike is that daily affairs are governed straightforwardly by rules and that the rules people follow already possess a coherent order prior to the moment that people apply them, but this is little more than a Just-So story of good organization. Hegel (1977: 96) has even suggested that people prefer “the tranquil kingdom of laws” that makes matters appear

102  Kenneth Liberman as if there is always a secure order close at hand; however, a preexisting rational order is not where the coherence of our mundane affairs originates. Coherences are generated and sighted in the course of the local work that composes them, and they are not external principles. Once a coherence is observed, it becomes available for being made a social object. When elucidated by a rule, it can even be incorporated into a local social structure; the serious social work of everyday actors lies in noticing naturally occurring coherences, teaching them to each other, and coordinating their use of them. Garfinkel (1956: 183) summarizes Talcott Parsons’ account of rule behavior: “‘Rules’ that govern their interaction are characterized as particular types of uniformities of these expected and recollected events that the interacting parties treat as maxims of conduct, and that they teach each other, hold each other to respect, and use in controlling each other’s actions.” This is not an inaccurate statement about rule-governed behavior, but it reads like a description composed while looking through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. We need to turn those binoculars around and describe just how parties teach each other rules. When we do so, we cannot justify the assumption that the local situation proceeds according to a determinate rule-governed structure because rules reflexively define the actions that they are employed to govern, and what we discover with and by the use of rules affects each situation. It is not Rules → Actions, as in the Parsonian model; rather, it is more like Actions → Rules, since the actions lead to rule selection and rule definition. Because using rules can transform the meaning and the context of actions, in truth the situation is more like Actions ←→ Rules. The idea that rules and reasons ground reality and always precede actions is a false rationalist model: in the way that Merleau-Ponty (1968: 50) describes perception, “the conclusion comes before the reasons.” Reasons are often afterthoughts, and anyway, according to Wittgenstein (1958: §211), “Reasons will soon give out.” Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2017: 7) argue that the main function of reason is to produce justifications for ourselves and arguments to convince others. That is, reason is used more frequently to defend what we have already done than to guide what we will do. In surfing, rules work the same way. They do not exist in a fully completed form before they are used to service practical actions; hence, they are not independent of those actions. One of the radical discoveries in ethnomethodological research has been that “in any case of rule-governed actions, the completeness of a collection of rules” (Garfinkel 2002: 105) is an achievement of local parties who are engaged in the task of teaching each other the local orderliness. Rules gain their relevance and their specificity from the local circumstances of their use. Rules have the capacity to lift out and make salient an aspect that is already implicit but unnoticed in a situation. That is, each invocation of a rule gets affiliated to a local coherence. Usually, this coherence preexists the rule application, but the coherence is strengthened by the application of a rule, and such application assists parties in communicating the perceived coherence to consociates, making it intersubjectively observable. To accomplish this, rules need to possess some pliancy. Garfinkel (1963: 200) argues, “The boundaries of a set of rules are essentially vague.” Here “essentially” means that for the rules to work effectively in all of

Rules as Instructed Actions  103 the practical circumstances for which a set of preexisting rules could not possibly anticipate, there must be some open indeterminacy to them. Indeed, Watson (2014) recognizes that “Rules are open-textured,” and his colleagues Greiffenhagen, Mair and Sharrock (2015) speak of the necessary “open texture of practices.” Similarly, the German phenomenologist Günter Figal (2010: 192) observes, “Rules do not form a rigid, closed system but are rather combined anew with every expression.” Life itself has an open texture, and “the et cetera principle” described by Garfinkel (1967: 73–74) hardly does the matter justice. Garfinkel himself used to say that frequently the et cetera can be a case of the tail wagging the dog, and organizing principles always exceed themselves. They lead us into a future where even we ourselves are uncertain what the results will be, as is the case with every future. This situation causes the sorting out of the correct application of rules to be fraught with problems. Wittgenstein writes (1958: §201), “This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule.” Garfinkel (2002: 205) describes a complaint about a manual of instructions made to an IT helpline: “The manual doesn’t discuss my problem.” He observes that the “complaints will go to the manual’s incompleteness, ambiguity, equivocality … gaps, omissions.” But the incompleteness, ambiguity, equivocality, etc. – which Garfinkel calls the “curious properties” of instructed actions – are essential to the success of instructions and rules. This is to say that in every situation, rules (even when they are “the” rules) require local clarification and elaboration if they are to be pertinent to an occasion; nevertheless, “In all those enterprises, in all those promises, they are not only problematic; they are intractably problematic” (p. 207). Because the problems are persistent, instruction is needed, and without relief. Rules are “tangled in circumstantiality” (Garfinkel 2002: 65). Any set of formal guidelines and workplace activities are entwined, and what we really have are “real chiasmically embodied congregationally workplace-specific coherences” (p. 111). Or, as Wittgenstein describes (1958: §125), “The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique … then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore as it were entangled in our own rules. This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand.” Rules are entangled in local circumstances and require endless sorting out in situ; moreover, the rules of surfing are not employed with any more impartially than when one tries to justify a claim to a parking space on a city street. Rules are organizational items. The surfers’ lineup Wittgenstein (1958: §85) tells us, “A rule stands there like a sign-post. –Does the sign-post leave no doubt about the way I have to go?” Yes, there are doubts, because we do not know the future. In the case of surfing, sometimes the rules are a sign-post (Figure 5.2). The key features of these instructions from Australia are (1) don’t “drop in” on a surfer who is already riding on one’s outside, closer to the wave’s peak; (2) when paddling out, stay out of people’s way (even if this means one must eat the

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Figure 5.2  Sign-posts propose a code for behavior (New South Wales Sport & Recreation).

whitewater and endure a longer paddle) and always hang on to your board; and (3) communicate. This instruction to “communicate” is something given emphasis in many sign-posts of surfing rules. This next sign-post is from Spain. Its design in the shape of a surfboard is intended to reduce the typical surfer’s cynicism regarding rules. Its key message is that the surfer closest to the peak has priority, and one should never “drop in” on that surfer. It also emphasizes the need to communicate (see Figure 5.3). Rules in surfing play an important pedagogical role because many novices begin to surf without having the slightest notion about how to conduct themselves in a safe manner in their interaction with other surfers. This sign offers novice surfers (called “grommets”) an initial orientation to what may happen and what they must

Figure 5.3 The Codigo del Surfing photo was taken by Prof. Raúl Sánchez García, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, INEF.2

Rules as Instructed Actions  105 learn to do. “Rules” in surfing are really advice, suggestions, and instructions, and they are commonly welcomed by novices because they are set against a context of the action that is unfamiliar to them and that context is just the thing they want to learn. Such signs are studied as much for the context they reflect as for their message. For many grommets, these rules are lesson number one. Although they are called a “code” or “rules,” the recommendations they contain are more aspirations than they are regulations. A problem that novices face is working out just what these instructions mean. At the outset, any effort to comply with rules is complicated by the fact that grommets do not yet fully understand them. In fact, that is the case with the majority of rules in our mundane lives. It is not that there is too much ambiguity in the wording or that it is difficult to understand the word-meanings. And the signs cannot be faulted for shortcomings. The difficulty is that neither the novice nor the intermediate surfer can fully appreciate in the abstract why they are so important, how they are to be used, and all of the consequences they will entail. These features are to be learned, a learning that occurs by engaged and embodied experiences. Novices lack an understanding of how the rules must be fitted to actual situations. Especially, they do not recognize how and under what circumstances rules can be violated. Neither do they know how a complaint about a violation is to be made. They will need to learn all this, and it can take a year or more of surfing before novices appreciate the situated contingencies that countenance occasional violations. This puts them at a disadvantage and keeps exposing them as “grommets,” hindering the success of any claim to surfing rights they may want to present. The signs are only the beginning. While they appear to be straightforward and often come in cleanly numbered lists, complications immediately present themselves, and the work of sorting out the rules in vivo becomes a fundamental project. The world in vivo is not a neat and tidy thing but a serendipitous hodge-podge of contradictory and conflicting events that require some sorting out on each local occasion. As Garfinkel (2002: 205) emphasizes, “There is no way in the world of prespecifying the conditions under which [an instruction] is going to intrude upon your local island of order. That means that you have to be in the course of the action, and just there” for it to have sufficient specificity to be meaningful. The novice surfer must suspend the resolution of the rules until he or she paddles out and begins to search for them in the course of surfing. It is like the way notations on a map work, whether the map is a casually sketched map (Liberman 2013: 45–82) or a topographical survey map: until one uses the map in an actual landscape, the marks or elevation line indications will not possess sufficient specificity to give them practical value. The surfing rules sign-posts are necessarily incomplete, which is why every year there are new efforts to codify these instructions. Live More Magazine, an online journal, comments, “These rules are made to keep surfers safe, to be respectful of one another, and to keep a good vibe in the water.” Figure 5.4 illustrates the kinds of difficulty that the instructions are intended to help surfers avoid. Without some coordinating and concerting of actions, substantial damage can occur. The very name “lineup,” in common use throughout the world, including

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Figure 5.4 Collisions are a real and always present threat for surfers: Huntington Beach (left) and Santa Cruz, California (right) (photos by Raúl Sánchez García).

the non-English speaking world, implies that there exists an order of turns, but it’s not quite like that: an order needs to be created for each wave. Each wave poses a unique situation, and that singular situation keeps disassembling as the wave arrives and breaks. Further, the ways that an order of turns is created are set against a backdrop that can vary from one surfing location (or “break”) to another. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Willian Finnegan (2015: 322) observes, “The surfing social contract is a delicate document. It gets drafted every time you paddle out.” The different ways that surfers custom fit the rules to their local break resembles the work of laboratory scientists, as described by Garfinkel (2002: 186), who teach each other how to “custom fit” to their labs scientific protocols that traveled to them from other labs. The rules A Portuguese website for surfers (Surfer Today 2021) offers a list of rules: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

The surfer closest to the peak gets priority. Don’t drop in. The furthest out gets priority. Don’t snake. Don’t get in the way. Do not throw your board. Communicate what you will do. Give respect to get respect.

The first three rules offer similar advice. Dropping in, or cutting in, is shown in Figure 5.5. To “snake” (see rule 4, “Don’t snake”) is to deliberately paddle around outside a surfer who has been waiting at the wave’s peak (where the wave is breaking); by sneaking around to that surfer’s outside, the one who is “snaking” thereby nullifies the other surfer’s entitled priority. It usually happens at the last moment before a wave arrives and before the surfer with priority can notice what is happening.

Rules as Instructed Actions  107

Figure 5.5  A cutting-in violation in Varazze, Italy.

It permits the surfer who snakes to defend his right to the wave, but it is basically cheating, like a driver who brazenly cuts in front of a queue of cars. The fifth and sixth rules are nearly equivalent, and the final two are the most interesting since, while they are general, they possess far-reaching efficacy. Waves break right or left (or both), presenting “shoulders” that can be ridden. If a wave presents no shoulder, but simply heaves up and crashes down across its face (sometimes a hundred yards across), there will be no wave riding. Here is my own comprehensive list of rules: 1 The surfer closest to where the wave is breaking has the longest and most powerful ride and so has priority. As surfers are sitting on the shoulder of a wave facing the direction in which they hope to ride, the surfer who is riding behind (or “outside”) the others has priority. A surfer who takes off while an outside surfer is riding may crash on top of that surfer or collide with the surfboard, creating a dangerous situation for everyone. Determining the rider who is closest to the potential peak or breaking point is complicated by the elastic, ever-shifting disposition of any wave: no one knows for certain just where, or even if, the wave will break until it breaks. 2 The surfer who is in position to get the best ride has some priority. The novice surfer will not even know how to judge this “best,” since it is related to the power of each wave at the takeoff point and the potential length of the ride; the “best position” convention excludes riding while stuck in the whitewater just outside the clean section of a wave. 3 The first person to stand up in a wave can claim rights (“I stood up before you did!”) and attempt to nullify other rules. 4 Expert surfers have priority over surfers who lack ability. This may be lamentable, but it is a widespread rule, enforced mostly by those surfers who have the most talent and aggression. This rule makes it necessary to make a good showing on one’s first ride because deference will be allocated on that basis. 5 Locals have priority over visitors. As Finnegan (2015: 212) remarks, “Each spot has its crew, its stars, its old lions.” This priority is cohort-enforced and also a natural consequence of knowing how waves typically perform at a spot at every level of tide and swell direction.

108  Kenneth Liberman 6 One cannot run up the surf count too greedily, aka “Don’t be a wave-hog.” One manager of a surf shop in Hawaii reported, “If someone is being a wave-hog, the lineup regulates that.” Such self-policing is a part of the instructing. 7 Communicating can increase the number of opportunities for everyone, although few surfers communicate adequately since generosity of spirit can be lacking. While these are called “rules,” they really act as instructed actions: the significance of rules develops not through any literal examination or thoughtful consideration of the words, but also through the actions they guide. Rules are not the primary matrix, the actions are. Rules are tangential resources whose pertinence waxes and wanes during any session of surfing. In surfing, what comes first are what Aron Gurwitsch (1964: 31) calls (after William James) “saliences.” These are gestalt coherences that naturally separate themselves from a flow of events: “By ‘gestalt’ is meant a unitary whole of varying degrees of richness of detail, which by virtue of its intrinsic articulation and structure, possesses coherence and consolidation and, thus, detaches itself as an organized closed unit from the surrounding field” (Gurwitsch 1964: 115). These unities “organize themselves” (Gurwitsch 1964: 289) or are “self-organizing” (Garfinkel 1967: 33), and they do not necessarily depend upon any intentional agency; however, these saliences (such as “my turn”) do become clarified by applying a rule, which can extend or otherwise transform the meaning of a gestalt coherence. Rules-in-action Ceding the wave to the rider who is closest to the peak is illustrated in Figure 5.6. It is the opposite of cutting in.3 The surfer ceding the wave is not only complying with a rule but also establishing a history of his compliance that makes it more likely that the surfer who is riding will be willing to cede a wave to him when the situation is reversed. Rules are often affiliated to local historicities. Many of the embodied actions of surfers

Figure 5.6  The right way to cede a wave (Klitmøller, Denmark).

Rules as Instructed Actions  109 are done for the sake of establishing and making observable a local historicity of events. Let us consider these rules along with some of their local details. Rules are so encumbered (and enabled) by local circumstances that clear cases of their application are not so common. An unspoken rule, one which will not be found on any sign-post, directs that no wave should lack a rider. If surfers scrupulously keep deferring to the surfer to one’s outside, when the outside surfer fails to catch the wave, it can happen that too many waves will go unridden by anyone; this is unthinkable and causes surfers to compete for waves. In such circumstances, they are permitted to drop-in in front of a surfer so long as they are able to pull out quickly (most effectively done with a public show of humility) in the event that the outside surfer succeeds in catching the wave. A surfer riding too far outside may not be able to keep up with the wave’s curl and get stuck riding in the whitewater, and riding whitewater affords no priority. One can cut in front of such a surfer if it is certain that the surfer will get stuck in the whitewater; however, that is a judgment call that requires intimate knowledge of the behavior of waves at each surfing location and each swell, as well as how waves at that place typically perform at each tide level. Live More Magazine’s “Surf Etiquette” (2021) stipulates, “If you are 100% certain the surfer to your outside will never make it past the whitewater, you can theoretically catch the wave.” “Theoretically” here means that one is courting trouble because if the wave does not close out and fails to produce the expected whitewater, one cannot claim the right that one has claimed already, and so one will be accused of “cutting off” the outside surfer. This is what is meant by saying that the actions produce the rule governance. One can attempt to invoke the “best position” rule, but that is unlikely to be successful; further, this sets up a local historicity that will give that surfer license to cut one off later in the session of surfing, reducing one’s capability to claim a violation. It can happen that the outside surfer will struggle to get through the whitewater, and finally make it into the curl, more for the sake of producing the other surfer’s violation than for the pathetic joy of such a ride. As soon as that happens, what was a permissible drop-in loses its authority and is transformed instantly into a violation. Violations like these are gestalt coherences, observable by all, and they emerge out of nowhere. By complaining, the outside surfer can thereby objectivate the transgression, another instance of rule application contributing to the intelligibility of a violation. An application of a rule contributes to the clarity of a violation; the rule and the action clarify each other. Figure 5.7 is a photo of an outside surfer (lower surfer), who rose to his feet a halfinstant after the inside surfer (the upper surfer) stood up; the outside surfer made it past the whitewater and then complained, a complaint that is rejected. Rules for turn-taking run up against the dynamic and always developing nature of waves, and the rules do not always have their way in the way rules might in more stable environments (such as skateboarding; cf. Ivarsson & Greiffenhagen 2015: 420–421). Surfers’ actions are taken in the face of uncertainties; i.e., the situation may not yet be clearly defined. In fact, rules help to define the situation. In Figure 5.6, the rule that the outside surfer always has priority came into conflict with the rule that the person who is in position for the best ride (especially since

110  Kenneth Liberman

Figure 5.7  Contesting a wave at Swami’s, California.

he was the first to stand up) has priority. Amidst the developing shape of the wave and the developing position of surfers relative to it, wave-ownership will arise out of nowhere. This abiding ambiguity of wave position and wave priorities lays the ground for justifiable “shoulder riding,” which is systematically cutting in on another surfer’s wave but remaining poised to pull out if and when the fellow surfer catches it, or at least being ready to back off into a less desirable section of the wave (a situation that is more common when the two surfers are friends, and in Brazil). On another occasion at Swami’s in Encinitas, California, a surfer sitting on the shoulder of a wave took off in front of two surfers who were riding closer to the peak; however, the two surfers were engaged in such intense competition with each other that they barely noticed him. The surfer riding closest to the peak challenged the surfer who had cut in front of him, finally forcing him out of the wave; however, the violating surfer’s movements in the water slowed the progress of the surfer with priority and created much additional foam (an angry surfer may even try to blind the initial rider with the spray from his whitewater as he or she pulls out). There was so much whitewater that the surfer with priority was forced to abandon the ride, leaving the third surfer, who had the least priority of the three, with the wave. Since such things happen, surfers frequently take off on the shoulder, although they must be ready to back out when things do not serendipitously develop their way. The idea is to not allow a single decent wave to go to waste. The rule regarding ability and expertise is one of the consequences since in most situations expert surfers can successfully claim priority. Expert surfers know how to catch waves, and they are not confused or intimated by the considerable commotion of takeoff competition. They are reluctant to cede waves to a surfer with lesser ability, except as an act of magnanimity, and this is a source of many problems in the lineup since it is a variety of blaming the victim. Waitt and Frazer (2012: 239) comment, “The right to access a surf-break anywhere, and at any time, may also be achieved by a highly skilled surfer who exerts their authority through breaking the unwritten rules of surfing, including those of the line-up, snaking or dropping-in.”

Rules as Instructed Actions  111 At many surfing breaks, there is more than one “pod” of surfers. There is a primary pod (usually set up at the largest and most outside break) and one or more secondary pods (often an inside break that features a smaller wave and/or a secondary break off the main line). The right to sit in a primary pod is earned by a combination of surfing prowess and localism (or some other distinguishing feature, like being Kelly Slater’s friend), but one must surf very well, or one will be thrown out of the primary pod. The means of throwing someone out is having highly skilled surfers repeatedly cut in on the transgressor’s waves until he or she finally departs the pod. One’s ability is being scrutinized continuously. This scrutiny is reciprocal, and when each new surfer paddles out, the surfers already in the lineup immediately assess the surfer (all of this takes place without any staring) and mentally assign him or her a location in the pecking order. Especially, the first ride will be observed and evaluated, and if the surfer lacks competence s/he will lose rights to any deference. Feeling this exposure causes a newly arriving surfer to experience some pressure, which can affect his or her performance during that first takeoff. A surfer who brings off a first ride with aplomb will win tentative rights as a skilled surfer. Waitt and Frazer (2012: 239) report, “Each time a surfer enters the ocean, they must actively negotiate their position within a surfing fraternity and hierarchy.” Having gained some status, after one has been waiting for the longest, the next wave will be yours, and you can claim it by paddling ostentatiously in a display of “my wave.” Paddling this way is a social action, and it instructs adjacent surfers that a course of rule governance is being initiated. However, if a surfer paddles for it that way and misses it, the surfer will be forced to return to the end of the queue and suffer a reduction of status. The rule “Give respect to get respect” includes not taking off on the very first wave after paddling out, when others have been waiting. Once at a break in Baja California Norte, two burly surfers from Arizona, who were surfing at the location for the first time in their lives, paddled directly into the primary pod without saying hello to anyone or looking at anyone. They took positions just outside of three veteran Mexican locals who had been waiting in a fraternal spirit for a set (i.e., large) wave. “Respect” entails that an unknown surfer who paddles out to occupy a space in the primary pod where an already established crew of surfers is operating must display some deference. Further, surfers who enter the primary pod are making a claim about their abilities, and they must be prepared to have those abilities scrutinized. To show no respect at a new break is to ask for trouble. When one of the local surfers was unable to take off, in compliance with the closest-to-the-peak rule that gave the right to the wave to one of the disrespectful Arizona surfers, the Arizona surfer was able to snag the set wave that the others had been waiting for. When that happened, the local surfer just sat in his place motionless, forcing the disrespectful surfer to surf around him. The Arizona usurper was not skilled enough to manage that, and he wiped out in the whitewater when he tried to skirt below the local surfer. It was one way for the local surfer to finally procure recognition. It was not an illegal obstruction, since he never paddled and had been there first. Another of the locals challenged another of the usurpers on a wave, pointing his board right

112  Kenneth Liberman at the brazen surfer, daring him to drop in. A local later commented, “Who do they think they are? They are not even that good surfers.” This “that good” carries the implication that if their skills were genuinely at the expert level (for example, by that first surfer maneuvering around the stationary surfer above him rather than below him), they might have gotten away with it. In the absence of cooperation and friendliness, there will be fewer waves available for everyone. This is the import of “Give respect to get respect,” and here this too was an instructed matter. Communicating is necessary for riding waves optimally. If a surfer realizes that he or she will not be able to catch a wave to which they have rights, and for which a fellow surfer has ceded, one can help out the other surfer by shouting, “Take it! It’s yours.” This can set up a local history of showing respect and consideration. Communicating is most essential at A-frame breaks, which are breaks that feature peaks that can be ridden in both directions at once. That is when one should shout one’s intended direction (“Right!” “Left!”) and “communicate” as the sign-posts advise. More waves will be ridden this way. The rule to communicate seems like it would be straightforward, but surfers are a greedy lot, and they may be uncertain about which direction will afford the better ride, so they may choose to defer committing themselves until it is too late for the other surfer to react. Of course, this is another aspect of respect, and what goes around comes around; however, it does happen that one regrets communicating early when the direction one has called for fails to develop in the way that was anticipated. It can also happen that a surfer who fails to communicate will be punished by other surfers who may commence taking off in front of the surfer. Here again, the rules do not guide the action as much as the actions steer the rule usage. Surfers do not “follow rules”; they utilize rules, and rules and reasons are applied a posteriori. The verbal complaint, “Don’t cut me off again!” produces out of fleeting and indeterminate actions the salience of a perhaps unnoticed violation that occurred prior to the rule’s invocation. A rule can be used to make something concrete by seizing a passing coherence and transforming it into the basis for alleging a transgression. Rules are details in a setting, and the setting is primary even as it is being defined by the rule. For the most part, rules are used to formulate the sense of an occasion and are resources for organizing local orderliness. Rules make what is going on more publicly visible. Harvey Sacks once observed that if a violation of conversational turn-taking rules is not noticed, it is not a violation. Sacks (1970: 40) writes, “Doing a complaint like ‘You interrupted me’ sets up a sequence” that leads parties to make more public that a violation has occurred, and complaints in surfing operate in a similar manner. On one occasion in Costa Rica, I found myself surfing at a remote break with two 13-year-old twins. They used a practiced routine whereby they would take turns holding the outside priority position to prevent me from taking off, while the other twin sitting on the shoulder would steal my wave. Since the feigning twin would be sitting where the whitewater started, it was pointless for me to move to his outside. This went on for about 20 minutes as if everything was natural until I figured out their trick and complained about it, whereupon their father shouted at them from the beach to cease their trickeries. My complaint made their actions

Rules as Instructed Actions  113 publicly witnessable. In many cases, the invocation of a rule produces the saliency that justifies its application. “You cut me off!” offers a coherent account, as does the reply “You’re a wave hog,” which can suddenly make coherent a previous hour of surfing behavior, magically transforming it into a breach of surfing etiquette. Rules as a system for communicating A rule is used as a tool for cooperatively producing clear communication, and generally surfers will introduce a rule only when there is an action to which it can be attached clearly. If the action that the rule is intended to explicate is ambiguous, the rule will not be invoked since it is pointless to assert a rule when the relationship between the rule and the action is obscure and hard to make publicly visible. Accordingly, a rule and the action it explicates form a pair, and each elaborates the other (Garfinkel & Sacks 1970: 338). When there is little opportunity for clear communication to occur, the attempt to apply a rule will normally be abandoned. Which “violations” end up getting articulated depends less upon the degree of misbehavior and more upon the likelihood of articulating a complaint in a clear manner. Here the micro-social structures of interaction influence rule selection and rule governance more than macro-social structures do. This parallels an important conclusion I discovered about Tibetan philosopher-monks: there the use of formal logic has as much to do with keeping the local interaction orderly and the lines of communication clear as it has to do with truth (Liberman 2004). Surfers use rules in the way philosophers use logic to assist clear communication. Garfinkel (1956: 182) suggests that esteem for formal analytic schema proceeds from the clarity they offer, and the success of rules rests more upon the clarity they provide than upon their correctness or their moral compass. When situations are complex and unclear, rules can contribute to the clarity and offer parties mechanisms for communicating about what has just happened. Of course, rules are susceptible to being transformed by local contingencies, and so they are open to their future. They do not possess a finished, ready-made sense but gain their specific sense from how and when they are applied in specific contexts. Most successful applications of rules are oriented to some practical, immediate effect (often in the self-interest of the person who invokes a rule) rather than to satisfy general principles, although the discourse often drifts in the direction of moralities; however, here “morality” is invoked as a structure for communicating, which usually prevails over a genuine interest in ethical behavior. In surfing, the center of the action is continually shifting with the approach of each new wave, so there is not a great deal of time for formulating and delivering a complaint. In any event, surfing is not a talking sport, and the best surfers almost never complain. In most situations, it is not “cool” to invoke a rule, and too much discussion can cause surfers to lose their focus, which they require as soon as a succeeding wave approaches. For this reason, any transgression that becomes a topic for deliberation must be simple to communicate, and sometimes using a rule can make the communication tidier. Importantly, the selection of a rule and the decision to invoke it is guided more by the clarity of the rule’s pertinence than by the

114  Kenneth Liberman seriousness of the transgression. Many serious violations go unmentioned because they are too complicated to clarify during the short interval that exists between waves, and rule application is more frequent on days that have small waves than on days when the waves are large. Consequences for transgressions may be imposed later, without anything ever being spoken. Rules need to be made witnessable, and this public witnessability drives rule selection and rule application. As Zimmerman and Pollner (1970: 96) note, whatever rule is applied must be “displayed and detected.” This is the work of surfers who are instructing each other. Both the actions and the rule that is pertinent to those actions must be exhibited and gain public acknowledgment: “the instructably observable achieved coherent detail of the coherence of objects” (Garfinkel 2002: 61) must be made evident. According to Garfinkel, this is what produces social structures. Rules require public acknowledgment in order to become active – a sign on the beach is insufficient; however, the sign provides some resources to those who are surfing. A consequence of this structure of affairs is that what gains public acknowledgment can be a pale version of what provoked a surfer to complain. Garfinkel (1963: 215) writes, “There is a characteristic disparity between the publicly acknowledged determinations and the personal, withheld determinations of events,” and nearly always the publicly acknowledged determinations are given priority. Looking, and being looked-at Soliciting public acknowledgment of a rule-relevant course of action often involves looking and being looked at. However, in surfing this work is complicated by the fact that surfers pretend to never look at each other, even though they must look at each in order to avoid collisions, to evaluate each other’s abilities, to sort out priority in the lineup, etc. It is a strange sort of looking since no one appears to be looking while everyone is looking all the time. Looking is a dense phenomenon. It is complicated: there is seeing, being seen, seeing you’ve been seen, and beingseen seeing that you’ve been seen. The public acknowledgment occurs at the fourth and last of this series of interactional works. Once this has occurred, a fellow surfer is rendered vulnerable to sanction by rule. When someone cuts in on a surfer and steals the wave, frequently the best response is to plead ignorance: “Sorry, I didn’t see you,” and it is much easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. Given this situation, a considerable part of the interactional work of the surfers’ lineup involves trying to capture the recognition of a fellow surfer, i.e., that “beingseen seeing that one is being seen.” This can sometimes become an exercise in futility. One older native surfer at a very crowded A-frame wave at El Sunzal, El Salvador, rides a longboard on which he is very skilled. Every day, he lines up way outside since his board is very long (and so he can catch waves early), and he makes every wave he tries for. Further, it is difficult to predict which direction of the A-frame he will take, and the younger surfers riding shorter boards always find themselves having to dodge out of his way. The key to his success is that he never looks at the other surfers, much like the pedestrians I once described at a busy city intersection (Liberman 2013: 21–33);

Rules as Instructed Actions  115

Figure 5.8 Looking, and being-seen looking at Santa Cruz, California (photos by Raúl Sánchez García).

instead, he expects them to get out of his way. Since he is a native, any collision is never his fault. Surfers at the A-frame wave in Klitmøller, Denmark, experienced similar problems soliciting public acknowledgment. One female surfer was repeatedly being dropped in on by a competing male surfer who never looked at her once all morning long. During one wave, she ostentatiously looked at this surfer repeatedly, looking in order to be seen looking, i.e., to solicit a recognition that would assist them in coordinating their taking off together, but she was completely ignored. She never caught a single wave that this male surfer was also vying for, even though she possessed decent intermediate skills. When the wave is larger, the gazing becomes more evident. At this A-frame from Santa Cruz, California, all six surfers are regarding each other (see Figure 5.8, left photo). They are searching for which one will be closest to the peak and which directions they will need to take. Three surfers pull out, leaving three surfers to sort out which two will get to ride the dual-direction A-frame wave. The two leftmost surfers pull out, appropriately surrendering the rightward-breaking part of the A-frame to the surfer who is third from the left in the left-hand photo. The surfer second from the right (in the left-hand photo) sees all those surfers outside him to his right and also pulls out; however, the rightmost surfer, who is riding on the wave’s shoulder, takes off, making it a wave with two riders traveling left along the wave’s left-hand side. The surfer who takes off on the shoulder must look back in order to avoid a potential collision on what is a vigorous wave. But when he does, the surfer closest to the curl with priority has an opportunity to see him looking; and worse for the shoulder riding surfer, the latter sees that he is being-seen seeing, which at once obligates the shoulder rider to conform with the rule against dropping in. It is because his drop-in became a publicly acknowledged event this way that he is compelled to surrender the wave to the rider with priority. He can no longer claim, “Sorry, I didn’t see you.” The look of the middle surfer (right-hand photo), who has priority, is an “evidential look,” i.e., a look that is done in order to be seen seeing. Working fellow surfers into this sort of acknowledgment is a task that surfers face continually, and only when the coherent details of an action are made evident for fellow surfers like this, and observed, can rules become relevant and be used to coordinate interaction. Rules are available to surfers, but it takes local work to make them available for service. Rules do not possess such powers by themselves.

116  Kenneth Liberman Notes 1 The initial version of this chapter was presented at an annual meeting of the International Association of Surfing Academics. 2 Many theoretical insights about rule-governed behavior in surfing were developed in discussions with Prof. Raúl Sánchez García during visits he and the author made to surfing locations in California and Spain. 3 I would like to express my gratitude to Southern Denmark University, and especially to Prof. Johannes Wagner, for sponsoring the field visit during which I was able to study rule compliance among surfers in Denmark.

References Corte, Ugo. 2013. ‘A Refinement of Collaborative Circles Theory: Resource Mobilization and Innovation in an Emerging Sport’, Social Psychology Quarterly 76(1): 25–51. Figal, Günter. 2010. Objectivity: The Hermeneutical and Philosophy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Finnegan, William. 2015. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. New York: Penguin Random House. Garfinkel, Harold. 1956. ‘Some Sociological Concepts and Methods for Psychiatrists’, Psychiatric Research Reports 6: 81–198. Garfinkel, Harold. 1963. ‘A Conception of, and Experiments with, “Trust” as a Condition of Stable Concerted Action’, in O. J. Harvey (ed.) Motivation and Social Interaction: Cognitive Approaches. New York, NY: Ronald Press, pp. 187–238. Garfinkel, Harold. 1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Edited by Anne Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Garfinkel, Harold and Harvey Sacks. 1970. ‘On Formal Structures of Practical Actions’, in J. C. McKinney and E. Tiryakian (eds.) Theoretical Sociology. New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, pp. 337–366. Greiffenhagen, Christian, Michael Mair and Wes Sharrock. 2015. ‘Methodological Troubles as Problems and Phenomena: Ethnomethodology and the Question of “Method” in the Social Sciences’, British Journal of Sociology 66(3): 460–485. Gurwitsch, Aron. 1964. The Field of Consciousness. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ivarsson, Jonas and Christian Greiffenhagen. 2015. ‘The Organization of Turn-Taking in Pool Skate Sessions’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 48(4): 406–429. Liberman, Kenneth. 2004. Dialectical Practice in Tibetan Philosophical Culture: An Ethnomethodological Inquiry into Formal Reasoning. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Liberman, Kenneth. 2013. More Studies in Ethnomethodology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Live More Magazine. 2021. ‘Surf Etiquette’, https://barefootsurftravel.com/livemoremagazine/surf-ethics-10-rules-beginner-needs-know (accessed February 26, 2021). Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber. 2017. The Enigma of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and Invisible. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Sacks, Harvey. 1970. ‘Aspects of the Sequential Organization of Conversation’. Unpublished manuscript, School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. Schwartz, Howard. 2002. ‘Data: Who Needs It?’, Ethnographic Studies 7: 7–32. Surfer Today. 2021. ‘The Basic Rules of Surf Etiquette’, https://www.surfertoday.com/ surfing/the-basic-rules-of-surf-etiquette (accessed February 26, 2021).

Rules as Instructed Actions  117 Waitt, Gordon and Ryan Frazer. 2012. ‘“The Vibe” and “the Glide”: Surfing Through the Voices of Longboarders’, Journal of Australian Studies 36(3): 327–343. doi: 10.1080/ 14443058.2012.703685. Watson, Rod. 2009. ‘Constitutive Practices and Garfinkel’s Notion of Trust: Revisited’, Journal of Classical Sociology 9(4): 475–499. Watson, Rod. 2014. ‘Trust in Interpersonal Interaction and Cloud Computing’, in R. H. R Harper (ed.) Trust, Computing, and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 172–198. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Zimmerman, Donald and Melvin Pollner. 1970. ‘The Everyday World as a Phenomenon’, in J. D. Douglas (ed.) Understanding Everyday Life. Chicago: Aldine, pp. 80–103.

6

The Use of Everyday Maxims and Proverbs in At-Sea Sailing Instruction1 Graham Button

Introduction Ethnomethodological studies of instructed action have often focused on the work of following written or verbal instructions. For example, instructions for assembling flat pack furniture or following directions for arriving at a destination require ad hoc, improvised practices not covered by the instructions or the directions in order to arrive at the outcome the instructions or directions are intended to achieve. Ethnomethodological studies have surfaced how reasoning through what the instructions could mean and how they apply “here” and “now” is part and parcel of following written and verbal instructions.2 Rather than examining the work of following instructions, this chapter is concerned with the flip side: the work of instructing, focusing on how sailing instructors at sea teach the principles and skills of yachting. In particular, it draws upon a training scheme run by the Royal Yachting Association (RYA) in the UK, which is the “gold standard” for training amateur, leisure sailors, with RYA accreditation being recognized worldwide.3 This chapter examines how the sailing activities undertaken in at-sea courses are designed so that students and accredited RYA instructors can use everyday maxims and proverbs to draw out lessons from them as a method that makes yachting activities account-able (observable-reportable, in Garfinkel’s sense) as everyday matters. Maxims and proverbs include phrases or sayings that express general truths, principles, or rules for behavior. As defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, “Maxims can be of experience or science.”4 Maxims of experience are packages of everyday knowledge of everyday experiences available to “anyone,” examples of which are “every cloud has a silver lining,” “blood is thicker than water,” “it takes two to tango,” and “beggars can’t be choosers.” Maxims of science are packages of scientific knowledge available to anyone within a specialized scientific domain. For example, “Unexplained amenorrhea calls for X-ray study of the skull for pituitary tumor” (Reveno 1961: 93, quoted in Bursztajn & Hamm 1979: 484). They are known-in-common within a particular community of practitioners rather than known-in-common in the everyday world. As Bursztajn and Hamm note, they are used in teaching. In this instance, medical students use them in their learning “on the job.” They can be used to make action account-able DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-9

The Use of Everyday Maxims and Proverbs in At-Sea Sailing Instruction  119 by, for example, determining or justifying action: “When the maxim has the tone of scientific authority, it is easy enough to use it to justify one’s decisions, and to consider one’s practice to be on a par with the use of the deterministic causal laws that scientists discover” (Bursztajn & Hamm 1979: 484). Yachting draws from several domains of science and engineering: aerodynamics, meteorology, physics, mathematics, mechanics, electronics, medicine, and others. However, it is a leisure activity, and students of yachting derive from many “walks of life” and are not confined to being members of the scientific communities that generate knowledge of the “natural forces” that play upon a yacht at sea. This means that, although many of the sailing actions that feature in at-sea instruction are shaped by an understanding of “natural forces” developed within relevant scientific domains, such instruction does not delve into, for example, aerodynamics or meteorology in a detailed way; instead, the focus is on how to sail efficiently and safely. Students may be given rudimentary understandings of some scientific domains, but only in a highly superficial way, and even that may be unnecessary. For example, students of yachting need to know how to “trim” (adjust the shape of) sails to accommodate different wind conditions. The actions done to trim the sails may accord with aerodynamic theory but teaching trimming does not involve delving into that theory. The nearest a student will approach the science of aerodynamics is to be told that the windward side (the side of a sail facing the wind) of a sail will be subject to a lower pressure than the leeward side (the side downwind), because a sail is like an airplane wing, and thus the yacht will be “sucked” forward or will “lift” in the same way as a plane wing lifts. Consequently, although the sailing activities they are learning to perform are marbled through with understandings of “natural forces” that have been developed within scientific domains, yachting students do not address those domains as part of the teaching curriculum. Consequently, the supporting pedagogic infrastructure of science, such as the maxims of science noted by Bursztajn and Hamm (ibid), cannot be utilized in instructing people on how to sail. Sailing, however, has been undertaken for centuries and it might be supposed that it was not predicated upon any scientific knowledge of the “natural forces” that play upon a yacht; that it was “instinctive” or “naïve.” Yet, even if laws governing these forces had not been formulated as such, nevertheless, a general and systematic understanding of the forces can be found throughout documented sailing history. Thus, although aerodynamics, for example, is a relatively recent development, even in early records of sailing it is possible to see a generalized and systematic knowledge of what we now call aerodynamic forces at work. For example, drawings and carvings of triremes depict a type of “gaff rigged” boat, where the sail has four sides and is suspended from a support at the top – the bridle. This arrangement is effective for “downwind” sailing but not for “windward” sailing, as it would make ships less maneuverable to windward. Designing ships with oars to make them more maneuverable in different wind conditions displays knowledge of that fact. Even the early navigation feats of the Polynesians display knowledge of how “heavenly bodies” seem to move in the

120  Graham Button sky (Lewis 1972), and navigational calculations throughout nautical history are based upon the mathematical principles formulated in ancient Greece, and as we will see, Archimedean laws underwrite some taught sailing skills. As scientific knowledge of “natural forces” has developed, so too have sailing techniques. For example, ropes are an important tool for a sailor. In the 18th century, they were made from natural fibers and all ropes on a ship would be composed of the same material, with variations only in thickness. Today, on a modern yacht, ropes are made of different synthetic materials which are fitted to different purposes, and thus “sheets” (ropes that control the boom) hardly stretch, while mooring lines do. The development of new fibers which derive from chemistry has allowed sailors to become more efficient in the deployment of ropes, and students need to know what ropes to use for which purposes. Although the chemical properties of a rope provide for its proper use, students have not been taught that chemistry when, for example, they choose which rope to rig when coming “alongside” (tying up to a pontoon or other structure). For illustrative purposes, we will take two examples of “first principles” that are relevant for the “analysis” of the use of maxims and proverbs in the at-sea instruction provided below. The first concerns aerodynamic laws. Sailing a sail-driven yacht is all about the interaction of the sails and the wind, and students must learn how to organize that interaction so as to sail the yacht efficiently and safely. A simplified (for this chapter) formula for the interaction between sail and wind can be expressed in terms of aerodynamic laws governing the total aerodynamic force (Ft) of the direction of the apparent wind (Va) over the water. Accordingly, the driving force (Fr) is a function of lift (L) acting on the sails minus drag (D) caused by the keel, and the lateral lift (Flat) is a function of lift minus drag. Fr = L . sin( a ) − D.cos(a) Flat = L . cos( a ) + D.sin( a ) These and other formulas associated with aerodynamic and hydrostatic laws will, for a given Va, provide for different values at different “angles of attack” (the positioning of the yacht’s sails relative to the apparent wind). There are three positions relative to Va where the wind has aerodynamic effects on the sail5: a fine reach being approximately 45 degrees off the wind; a beam reach denotes that the wind is at right angles to the course of the yacht; and a broad reach when the yacht is approximately 135 degrees off the wind. The behavior of the yacht is determined by the aerodynamic effects of the wind passing over the sail at these different points of sail, and the boat will move in accordance with the formula that takes these effects into account at any one point of sail. The shape of the sail must be controlled in such a way as to maximize the aerodynamic effects of the wind on the sail in order to achieve the desired result, which is safe, efficient forward movement. Students of yachting must learn how to maximize aerodynamic effects for any point of sail by adjusting, and trimming, the sail relative to the point of sail. Later in this chapter, we will encounter an example of not doing so.

The Use of Everyday Maxims and Proverbs in At-Sea Sailing Instruction  121 The second example of the way in which scientific knowledge lies behind sailing activities concerns a law of physics that relates to the buoyancy of a yacht. Yachts “heel” (tilt) when sailing to windward, or when hit by a large wave or strong gust of wind; however, they are designed to resist being tipped over. If in rare circumstances such as when a freak “breaking wave” (the crest of the wave gives way) knocks them down (a “knock down”), they are designed to right themselves, and in very rare circumstances such as in “heavy weather” (gale and storm force winds) roll through 360 degrees. Yacht designers maximize a yacht’s stability by balancing the “center of buoyancy” (B) with the “center of gravity” (G). Buoyancy is determined by the Archimedean law that states that the weight of an object (a yacht) is exactly equal to the weight of the water it displaces when it is placed in water (the sea) and is calculated using a mathematical formula.6 The center of buoyancy in effect pushes the boat up. The center of gravity is dependent on the weight of the yacht and in effect pushes the boat down. When a boat heels, say to starboard (the right-hand side of a boat when looking toward its bow), the center of buoyancy moves outward to starboard and the yacht will be knocked down if B overwhelms G. The point at which this occurs is the “point of vanishing stability” (PVS). It is rare for a yacht to reach its point of vanishing stability; however, this can occur if a skipper is inept in their sail management or does not know how to react to extreme weather conditions, as in an example that follows later. Given that, as described in the above two examples, the behavior of a yacht at sea is determined by the aerodynamic effects of wind on sails, as well as laws of gravity and buoyancy, and that the correct actions to take in sailing a yacht depend upon understanding them, a practical question then exists for yachting instruction at sea: How can instructors teach students how to sail a yacht that takes account of how, in the examples above, “natural forces” determine the behavior of a yacht at sea so that the aerodynamic effects of wind on the sail are maximized, and yachts are not put into danger such as with a knockdown? Instructors teach “anyone” who turns up and pays, not members of the scientific community drawn upon to understand how yachts behave at sea. Yachting students do need to know about the aerodynamic forces that play on a yacht’s sails, in order to achieve the forward movement of a yacht, and they need to know the correct aerofoil shape for any angle of attack, that, for example, a “full” sail (where the sail is let out so that it is loose as opposed to pulled in tight) on a fine reach will not enable efficient forward movement. But they do not need to know about them in the way the aerodynamicist diagrams and calculates them. So, for the purposes of providing instruction on how to sail, the question is how do novices need to know about aerodynamic forces, and correspondingly, how can they come to know about them outside of the pedagogic methods of aerodynamics that impart the relevant maxims of that science? The answer is that yachting at sea is not taught as, and through, the principles of science, but through the everyday experiences of yachting. Learning the skills of yachting such as those of sail trimming, which are accounted for by scientific principles, is a core requirement, yet for purposes of instruction such principles are not used to make the actions of trimming account-able. Rather, at-sea instructors design yachting activities so that lessons can be drawn from them. Instruction is

122  Graham Button embedded within the actual in situ unfolding experiences of sailing and does not stand outside of the actual doing of sailing. One way in which this is evident is that instructors draw out lessons when in the midst of unfolding experiences of sailing by reciting everyday maxims and proverbs of experience, which unlike the maxims of science are available, familiar, and understandable to anyone in a culture. Such everyday maxims and proverbs are situated in, and occasioned by, the unfolding experiences of yachting. That is, students of yachting come to know about, for example, aerodynamics through doing yachting activities that are designed by instructors to make visible the aerodynamics involved in sailing. That is, they make these matters account-able in terms of “what everyone knows,” and not in terms of what the student of aerodynamics is taught.7 Making yachting account-able through everyday maxims and proverbs Maxims and proverbs of everyday experience provide members with ready-tohand, known-in-common packages of everyday knowledge; they can be situationally applied to make account-able past, projected, and contemplated actions of themselves and others. Their pre-formulated, ready-to-hand character provides members with a common currency through which they can accomplish a range of activities such as to excuse, finger-wag, draw a lesson, encourage, commiserate, determine, justify, learn by, and in other ways account for actions in ways that are immediately understandable in vernacular terms. As Sacks (1992a) observes, maxims and proverbs have been faulted by sociologists in order to justify replacing them with sociological analysis.8 He uses the example of Homans (1961: 1–2), who treats proverbs as propositions that offer up unsubstantiated “lay” sociological (mis)understandings of social arrangements; “knowledge” that needs confirmation or replacement by methodically developed professional sociological knowledge. However, Sacks makes the point, using the Hericlitean phrase “we never enter the same river twice,” that proverbs are not impoverished, but are indeed powerful accounts because they “are correct about something,” meaning always available to be right about an unspecified something. (Could this be claimed for sociology?) The fact that water in a river flows means the water encountered on entering the river again will not be the same water as previously encountered. This is incontrovertibly true. But so too for social situations which however generalizable and recognizably repetitive can never be exactly the same even if they involve the same people doing, seemingly, “the same thing.” Something will be different (at least the context will vary temporally). In that respect the proverb is incontrovertibly true: no two situations are exactly the same. Further, there are also no grounds for disputing the truth of the proverb because, as Sacks points out, the robust truth of the proverb has little to do with its literal use as a proposition that states a general fact about river water. He makes the point that you would never even think of calling for evidence to prove that it is true. However, for just about every maxim or proverb, there is another one that contradicts it (many hands make light work/too many cooks spoil the broth) and it might therefore seem

The Use of Everyday Maxims and Proverbs in At-Sea Sailing Instruction  123 that one undermines “the truth” of the other. As Shapin (2001) points out, though, to view such contradictions as undermining their reciprocal “truths” would be to miss Sacks’ point, which is that their “truth” resides in their occasioned use, in how they are fitted to the occasions in which they are used, and how they rely upon their recipients to find how they are instructive on the particular occasion. Sacks goes on to suggest that the knowledge expressed in proverbs is even more powerful when it is considered that some of them persist through millennia and are used across different cultures: the Heraclitan proverb is just as true in contemporary America as it was in ancient Greece. Sacks goes even further by describing how some proverbs embody rules that can be invoked to govern particular situations, but which can also be applied to other relevant situations, and consequently, the rule becomes applicable to many occasions.9 The telling issue for Sacks is, though, how the generalized proverb is fitted to, and for, the occasion of its use, to express “wisdom” for just that occasion. At-sea instructors can be observed to engage in certain sailing activities in ways that make them amenable to being leveraged through everyday maxims and proverbs. The properties of maxims and proverbs described by Sacks make them a useful resource through which instructors can actively draw out a lesson from a sailing experience that instructs a student in a particular sailing activity. As mentioned, sailing instruction at sea is, in the main, done in the very actions of sailing, rather than by taking time out from sailing to engage in a set piece of instruction.10 Instruction is thus done through providing sailing experience within which opportunities for particular instructions and lessons can be found in the course of relevant sailing actions. One way in which lessons can be drawn out of experience, and instruction concomitantly provided, is through the use of a maxim or proverb from which, as indicated by Sacks, a rule can be demonstrated on how to act in a particular situation and others like it. Students can then be instructed in the “seaman-like” activity (the “rule”) to be used in a range of circumstances made relevant by the proverb’s use. For example, a proverb was used on one occasion during a training course11 for drawing a lesson from an experience caused by the way the wind and sails interacted. As mentioned above, the aerodynamic effects on a sail diminish when a yacht is “running before the wind” (the wind is blowing directly over the yacht’s stern). This can be a dangerous point of sail because the boom of the yacht will be hanging over one side of the yacht so that the sail is as “full” (loose) as possible to catch the wind and push the yacht forward. An extreme example of this is when the main sail (the sail attached to the yacht’s mast) boom is out as far as possible on one side of the yacht and the head sail (the sail attached to the yacht’s bow) is let out as far as possible on the other side. This sail configuration is known as a “gull wing” and can be extremely dangerous if the person on the helm is inexperienced, or if any of the crew do not realize that they need to “watch out.” The danger resides in the wind shifting (either through a directional change or by the person at the helm incorrectly positioning the yacht with respect to the wind or not reacting to the wind changing direction) and moving around the main sail, such that an aerodynamic effect is engaged as the wind catches the sail and whips the

124  Graham Button boom across the deck so that it moves, often suddenly and comparatively violently to the other side of the yacht. The swing of the boom can seriously injure or even kill a crew member standing in its path. This is known as an “accidental jibe.” A controlled jibe is when a yacht running before the wind changes course by moving the stern through the wind so that it flows over one of the yacht’s quarters (the part of the yacht that extends from its midpoint to its stern, thus being a starboard or a port quarter) or moves from one quarter to the other quarter. The change in course is managed by progressively hauling in the boom, so that as the yacht turns through the wind the boom is centrally positioned, and then letting the boom out as the yacht completes its maneuver. To prevent accidental jibes when running before the wind, a “preventer” can be rigged which is a rope attached to the end of the boom and made fast to a fixed standing so that if the sail does catch the wind, it is prevented from moving. An example that was witnessed of a skipper instructing a student in this regard occurred during the training course. The yacht was running before the wind in “light airs” (force 1 or 2 on the Beaufort scale) with the main sail out as far as possible on the starboard side. A student was sitting on the port side in line with the main sail sheet that controlled the movement of the boom. The instructor mentioned that “I wouldn’t sit there if I was you,” but rather than moving, the student looked quizzically at the instructor, who said no more. A short while later the helm accidentally caught the wind and the boom moved from the starboard side to the port side of the yacht, but because of the light wind, the movement was a lazy sweep across the cockpit, and the sheets controlling the boom were loose as the boom swung. Even so, however, the boom and sheets clattered into the student who was sitting in line with the movement, knocking his glasses awry and startling him. The instructor then said to the student, “I told you so, now imagine if there had been a strong wind blowing.” Then to one of the experienced crew members, he said, “John fix a preventer,” and as John was doing that, the instructor turned back to the student, indicated that the rest of the crew who were nearby should pay attention, then nodded toward John and said “better safe than sorry.” “Better to be safe than sorry” is advice on taking a precautionary action now to avoid something unpleasant in the future. It is a general “rule” covering how people should act. The instructor, however, fits it to the occasion in which he produces his utterance, having demonstrated its relevance to the occasion by reference to what had just happened, as marked by “I told you so.” In so doing he uses the maxim to draw out the lesson demonstrated by the experience, by tying the proverb to an object lesson. Fitted to the occasion of its use, the maxim does this in a number of ways. First, its use within the context of “I told you so” locates the relevancy of taking the action of fitting the preventer to the student’s own prior (in)experience. The student now knows something about the way the wind works on sails, something that his (in)action of continuing to sit suggests he was oblivious to. Presumably, he now knows that there are precautions to take in anticipation of an aerodynamic effect. Second, the maxim’s “wisdom” and incontrovertible “truth” and relevancy, here, are made vividly evident by a startling, but not-too-traumatic, lesson. Third, the maxim is suggestive of a rule of sailing and in that sense is instructive. Fourth,

The Use of Everyday Maxims and Proverbs in At-Sea Sailing Instruction  125 it provides for instruction as embedded in everyday experiences of yachting. Fifth, it provides a “common-sense” account of yachting activities, but not as a maxim that stands outside of yachting or is particular to a specialized domain of knowledge such as aerodynamics. In this example, the instructor drew out a lesson from a yachting event which he formulated with a commonplace maxim fitted to the occasion. However, this is not to say that instructors have a pocket full of maxims and proverbs they can pull out and deploy that they have been supplied with as part of their training as instructors. Rather, the emphasis in at-sea instruction on being grounded in the actual doing of sailing, in the actual everyday experiences of yachting, means that the design of at-sea sailing activities is such that they provide the occasion for lessons to be drawn out through the use of maxims and proverbs available to anyone and understandable by anyone. They are embedded within the occasion and become part of the occasion and thus make learning part of the very process of sailing as opposed to standing outside of the actual hands-on doing of sailing as is done in classroom instruction. In another instance, witnessed while the author was working in support of an accredited instructor, a student cut himself and left traces of blood on the yacht’s coamings (the extant structure around the yacht’s cockpit that is often sat on or handled). He left it there, and after a couple of hours, the instructor cleaned it away, saying that it is best to keep things ship-shape and Bristol fashion.12 This commonplace maxim (despite the inclusion of the word “ship”) was not part of an instructional toolbox specific to sailing that awaited appropriate deployment, any more than the proverb “better safe than sorry” was. Instead, its use made the cleaning demonstratable rather than incidental and was instructive for how to “run” a yacht. Presumably, the student should hear the maxim not only retrospectively – to be saying that they should have cleaned up the blood – but also prospectively as advice for keeping a yacht tidy and clean, with everything in its proper place ready at hand. With such commonplace maxims, yachting instructions are made accountable to the particular activity at hand without delving into specialized language. It is the case, however, that engaging in activities as a matter of plain common sense can be provided for in ways other than using maxims or proverbs. Consider the following example. Navigating a yacht requires the location of the yacht to be regularly “fixed” and marked on a chart. The chart is then an available resource for passing on the knowledge of the yacht’s passage to a new navigator when a shift occurs. Charts are marked up with a number of tools such as dividers, plotters, pencils, and rubbers/erasers. Keeping these tools in one place, knowing where they are placed, and returning them to that place after use is regarded as good practice, with particular saliency for yachting. In calm conditions, searching for the dividers because they have not been returned appropriately may not be a problem, but in rough weather, at night, not having them to hand can be more problematic. Instructors and experienced skippers will go through their own mundane practices, making a witnessable point out of what they are doing, and through their chiding of others who forget, or cannot be bothered, to observe good practice, instill in crew

126  Graham Button members the need to make sure that yacht is in an organized “ship shape” environment. When doing so, they do not necessarily deploy proverbs, maxims, or other instructional formulations. During a day’s sailing, it is also not the case that maxims and proverbs are bandied about as a matter of course and that instructors are waiting or looking for opportunities to deploy them. While instruction is embedded in the experiences that have unfolded during the day, there are other ways in which sailing lessons can be drawn out of them that do not involve the use of maxims and proverbs. In the pub, in the evening after a day’s sailing, instructors (and skippers for that matter) may review what went right and what went wrong that day, or after completing a successful maneuver, they might cement it by announcing what has been learned – “now we know how to jibe,” or they might make visible that a mistake has occurred – “why hasn’t the at-anchor ball been hoisted?” or “where are those blasted dividers.” However, using maxims and proverbs to draw lessons from experiences is a particularly powerful instructional tool in sailing. The reason for this resides in Sacks’ point that they are transcultural in nature. In the same way, as he noted, that a proverb originating in Russian history is just as relevant for being used in contemporary America, the lesson of “better safe than sorry” can be fitted to many sailing activities, not just the occasion of setting a preventer. “Better safe than sorry” suggests applicability to other occasions in which dangerous situations at sea (or anywhere else) may be avoided by taking precautions, and the maxim is a highly efficient method of instruction because it instructs the student in a number of aspects of “yachting lore”: i) keep your eyes open and be aware of what is going on around you – you need to be safe; ii) wind is not a constant – unpleasant things can happen if you take it for granted; and iii) there are activities you can engage in to guard against dangers and mishaps – to be safe rather than sorry. Thus, the instructor’s utterance “better safe than sorry” does not just provide a specific instruction, such as to set a preventer; rather, the utterance contains an instruction about how to consider similar occasions (in the sense that unpleasant consequences can occur if action is not taken now) when encountered. The use of the maxim is even more powerful because it makes the category “activities that can have unpleasant consequences” open ended. That is, anything done at sea can have unpleasant consequences. Who would have considered that just sitting on the cockpit bench watching others could have an unpleasant consequence? For example, something as simple as making a passage comfortable for the crew can have unpleasant consequences. Often instructors and skippers when under sail will engage the gearing on the propeller shaft to stop it from turning (which it would do if left in neutral because the force of the water over the propeller blades would cause them to rotate), thus stopping the loud and annoying rumbling noise its turning would produce. It is a routine matter for anyone who has sailing experience. However, on one occasion when the author was skippering a yacht on passage around Corsica, there was a very unpleasant consequence of his trying to make his crew comfortable. Running fast before a gale force wind, and approaching the harbor for the night, it became time to engage the engine so as to be ready

The Use of Everyday Maxims and Proverbs in At-Sea Sailing Instruction  127 to drop the sails. However, it was found that the gearing could not be returned to neutral because of the pressure exerted on the propeller by the speed of the water flowing over it. In other words, it was jammed, and consequently, the engine could not be started. This was made more problematic because the yacht was moving at high speed toward a lee shore (meaning that unless the yacht could maneuver away from the shore, it might be wrecked). However maneuvering under sail would be difficult because of the close proximity of a large anchored Club Med passenger ship, with which it was almost certain the yacht would collide if turning through a gale force wind failed.13 After a tense few minutes during which the yacht was turned to head into the wind (which would stop its movement toward the shore) and the crew readied to deploy the anchor (which would hopefully hold it in place), it was found that the corresponding decrease in speed enabled the propellor to be now returned to neutral, and all was well. In the pub once on shore, the skipper remarked to the crew, “Who would have thought that? You just learn something new every day.” Sailing is fraught with contingencies; if you can guard against any of them, it is better to be safe than sorry. The maxim, “better safe than sorry” does not, then, just draw a lesson concerning the need to rig a preventer. By itself, the maxim is not very instructive, but it takes on content when used in particular circumstances, and in this sense becomes an omni-relevant instruction in how to sail. Embedding the instruction in the very experiences of students is an effective instructional device for teaching the effects of the wind on the sail and the aerodynamics of sailing to people who otherwise may have little or no interest in understanding aerodynamics in itself. Maxims of science may well be used to appeal to those studying aerodynamics as a specialized subject but may leave students of yachting cold. Explaining the theory of aerodynamics and why that theory would suggest a course of action such as, in this case, fixing a preventer, may gain less purchase on the student than drawing out a lesson from their experiences. It is also a more powerful method when done through the use of an everyday maxim or proverb inasmuch as the instructor has provided a lesson that is transitional across sailing activities, and is available for the student to apply to other sailing contexts they may confront, not just the situation in which it was used. It makes sailing a matter of applying common sense to what is done at sea; whatever is done; not the principles of science, though here the principles of aerodynamics provide a technical account of the context in which the lesson was drawn. In this respect, proverbs and maxims can be used as much by students as by instructors to make yachting activities accountable, and students also can use them to display an understanding of what they have just witnessed or learned. Again, there are other ways in which this can be accomplished, but doing so through a maxim or proverb can underscore what has been learned. In the following example, the skipper who has undergone “a learning experience” underlines the event as a “light bulb” occurrence. A certified coastal skipper assembled a crew made up of four of his friends for a week’s sailing around islands off mainland Croatia; the author being one of them.

128  Graham Button Leaving the berth on passage to the day’s destination, he had the yacht’s sails fully deployed, despite the fact that the forecast was for a force 6 (39–49 km/h) with gusts of force 7 (50–61 km/h). The passage started in a river, which moderated the force of the wind so that the full deployment of the sails was appropriate for the immediate conditions. However, once at sea the amount of “canvas” (sails) was too much to hold the course to the destination that the skipper had set, and an inexperienced crew member who was on the helm lost control of the wheel and put the yacht onto a beam reach (with the wind blowing directly across the side of the boat). The center of buoyancy, described above, moved sharply to leeward (downwind), loose objects crashed to the cabin floor, the crew were pitched onto the cockpit floor, the wheel was wrenched out of the helm’s hands, and the yacht was almost knocked down. The yacht, as would be predicted by aerodynamic theory and the drag force exerted by the keel, then started to “round up” – its bow started to move toward the wind – and (thankfully) the yacht started to right itself. The skipper then took the correct action for that situation, which was to head into the wind and reef (reduce sail), and then, in order to get back to a course toward their destination, he put the yacht on a heading with the wind directly over the stern and fixed a preventer. This heading, however, would take the yacht to a point five nautical miles to the west of their destination and when they reached that point, the skipper explained to the crew that he intended to make a course alteration to gain the harbor for the night. Because the yacht was now running before the wind, the motion of the yacht became gentler, and the crew settled down. The skipper asked the author (as noted above, a yacht master ocean and auxiliary instructor), what he would have done. Following a description of appropriate action, it was added “but we shouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place, given the forecast we should have reefed before setting out to sea.” The skipper was then asked if he was happy with the course set, and when he asked why, the following was pointed out to him: 1) the current wind strength which had nearly knocked the yacht down was forecast for the day, and if anything seemed to be building; 2) on the course set, which would require a later course change to reach the harbor, the yacht would be placed, once more, on a beam reach. Was this wise given the recent experience, even if the yacht was now reefed, especially as the wind was becoming stronger, possibly reaching gale force (62–74 km/h)? The skipper was asked if it might be better to approach the destination directly from the current position which would put the yacht on a safer broad reach and obviate the need to turn to a beam reach with the potential of repeating the problem just encountered. In effect, the skipper was being given instruction on how to sail. Following this “instruction,” the skipper said, “Ah, now I know the difference between yacht masters and coastal skippers, you think ahead.” In so doing, he was drawing a lesson from the recent experience and the questions posed to him. The skipper was making visible the wisdom of a stitch in time saves nine (doing something now would mean less work in the future) or look before you leap (consider future actions before doing something). Although he did not provide a preformulated proverb or maxim to draw out a lesson learned from their experiences,

The Use of Everyday Maxims and Proverbs in At-Sea Sailing Instruction  129 he nevertheless was bringing to those experiences an understanding of them in terms of everyday common-sense knowledge expressed in the two proverbs – a situated formulation of them. He certainly did not make the recent experience, and the potential for repeating it, accountable in terms of the physics of buoyancy and gravity. Further, he provided that formulation as a revelation, as something he now understood which previously he had not, underscoring that he had learned something – a “light bulb” moment. The proverb “better safe than sorry” could also be fitted to this occasion. If the skipper had checked the forecast for the wind conditions at sea, he could have taken action in order to prevent the unfortunate occurrence. In this respect, it is the lesson to be drawn out of the experiences that is the point, not the actual proverb or maxim used to draw it out. That lesson was expressed as a matter of common sense, underscoring the wisdom of common-sense knowledge. It might be argued that one maxim can be better fitted for the occasion than another, but that would be to miss the point, which is that sailing activities, as they are engaged in, are inspectable by those involved, students or instructors, for what can be learned or taught about how to sail, and that the lesson can be drawn out by the use of a proverb or maxim and how it, whatever it is, is fitted to the occasion. Whichever proverb is used for expressing the wisdom of looking ahead (better safe than sorry/a stitch in time saves nine/look before you leap), it will draw out the relevant lesson, such as in the two cases of the initial sail configuration and then the “angle of attack.” In either case, there is a need to take into account the force of the wind and other aspects of the sailing context. The use of those proverbs transcends particular occasions and can be applied in other contexts of sailing: such as, when on passage to St. Peter Port on Guernsey look ahead to see at what time the height of the tide will allow you to cross over the bar at the harbor entrance (a barrier erected to keep sufficient water in the harbor for boats to stay afloat at low tide), or that if we leave “now” it will be necessary to anchor off Southwold in order to catch the “flood” tide (an incoming tide), and it might be better to leave in two hours’ time. The coastal skipper displayed that he had learned a general lesson, not just one appropriate to the occasion: look ahead and take action now if necessary. For many, if not all, proverbs and maxims, there are, as noted above, others that are contrary to them. There is, indeed, an alternative to taking action involved in looking ahead. If the skipper, knowing the weather forecast, had indeed “looked ahead,” he would have reefed his sails in the river. But this would have meant that the sail configuration would have been inappropriate for the first leg of the passage, which was in the shelter of the river, and, further, you really do not know what the actual conditions at sea will be; forecasts are just that, they do not always come about, and not doing anything until you’ve actually experienced it (“suck it and see” or “kick the can down the road”) can be just as viable an option as engaging in some action now because you have “looked ahead.” Consequently, it is the use, the fitting of the proverb or maxim to the occasion, and fitting the occasion to the proverb or maxim, that provides for the lesson to be drawn, and it is the in situ use of maxims and proverbs that makes the knowledge of experience they express relevant and ring true.

130  Graham Button Conclusion Everyday maxims and proverbs provide everyday truths about, and principles for, acting. From a professional sociological standpoint, however, as Sacks notes, they may be considered insubstantial, inconsistent, and even contradictory, with one undermining the wisdom of another. But Sacks’ further point is that they are used in particular contexts, and in their use are fitted to and for those contexts. The appropriateness of the knowledge about the action they express is tied to the contexts of their saying. However, in the context of understanding “natural forces,” they may indeed seem insubstantial and imprecise in the face of scientific analysis. The many compendiums of maxims and proverbs include numerous ones referencing wind: “fear blows wind into your sails,” “if I peddle salt it rains, if I peddle flour the wind blows” (www.listofproverbs.com), “raise your sail one foot and you get ten feet of wind,” “be in readiness for favorable winds” (www.special-dictionary.com), and many more. However, although these everyday maxims reference wind, they do not provide any understanding of wind as a “natural force.” When set against aerodynamic explanations of wind as a natural force that plays on objects in its path, they may indeed appear insubstantial, inevitably so because the work they do concerns human action and how to engage in it, not how “natural forces” work. Consequently, the use of wind in these expressions is metaphoric and incidental to the context of use. However, wind is familiar in everyday experiences, and engaging with it requires commonplace as well as extraordinary social actions. Thus, the way wind plays upon objects in its path can necessitate taking actions, such as playing with the string on a kite to keep it aloft, or taking precautions such as boarding up the windows of your house when a hurricane threatens. Wind is pervasive and continually relevant in the context within which yachting is done, and understanding this “force of nature” and how it plays upon a yacht is a core requirement for sailing safely, efficiently, and enjoyably. The way in which instructing people in how to take action in the face of different wind conditions at sea is done in terms that situate the “natural forces” of wind in the everyday sailing experiences of it, rather than in accounting for it through the principles of a science. Situating an understanding of wind within the unfolding experiences of sailing provides instructors with occasions to draw lessons for actions to be taken in the face of particular situations. Everyday maxims and proverbs of experience are useful tools through which to do this. This is because their use involves fitting them to the occasion of that use, thus making an occasion into something that anybody can understand as a common-sense matter. However, they are particularly powerful because they provide instruction for engaging in actions that transcend particular occasions and are adaptable to an open range of other contexts. The maxims and proverbs of science may not be so readily fitted to understanding wind as it presents itself as an everyday occurrence in people’s experiences, whereas the maxims of experience can be well fitted to the contexts of their presentation to provide practical instruction in how to act.

The Use of Everyday Maxims and Proverbs in At-Sea Sailing Instruction  131 Notes 1 I would like to thank Mike Lynch and an anonymous reviewer for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. The reviewer made an interesting recommendation that the chapter could be positioned with regard to the literature in science studies, especially ethnomethodological contributions such as Lindwall and Lymer’s (2008) study of physics lessons in the classroom. This is something worth exploring in depth and therefore will be reserved for another occasion. 2 See Garfinkel (2002, Chapter 6) for an introduction to a range of analytic issues relevant to ethnomethodological interests in instructions and instructed action. 3 The RYA has developed a range of shore-based and at-sea courses. The latter are normally provided by sailing schools and run over five days of actual sailing with, on average, one instructor and five students, often with different levels of experience and wanting to achieve different levels of accreditation from the course. Shore-based courses are assessed through a written examination, and at-sea courses are assessed through the instructor’s evaluation of the students’ performance during the course. 4 Other dictionaries (e.g., MacMillan, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, and Collins) provide somewhat different definitions. The Merriam-Webster dictionary, for example, conflates maxims and proverbs, saying that a proverb is a popular epigram or maxim. For the purposes of this chapter, the terms maxims and proverbs are used interchangeably. 5 If a yacht is directly headed into the wind, the yacht will not move forward because there are no aerodynamic effects; the yacht is said to be “in irons,” and when the wind is directly over the stern, the wind pushes the yacht rather than lifting or sucking it. 6 Multiply the water line length (of the boat) by the water line beam, by the draft amidships (the midpoint of a boat), by the block coefficient (the ratio of the immersed volume of the hull to the volume of the cube formed by the water-line length, the maximum beam and the draft [not including the keel]) and divide the result by 35. 7 RYA instructors do not need to have an understanding of, for example, aerodynamics that is equivalent to the aerodynamicist’s understanding to become instructors, but they will probably have much more than an average understanding of the scientific principles that govern the relationship between wind and sails. Mostly they are keen sailors who have become instructors in order to earn a living from their passion for sailing. Popular almanacs and sailing journals delve into the science of sailing and, at least the instructors observed, read these and were able to explain in at least basic terms the scientific propositions they articulate. 8 Also see Sacks (1992b). 9 Consider, for example, the proverb “Ne'er cast a clout till May be out.” It expresses the adage, the general truth, the rule in Sacks’ terms, that you should think before you discard your winter clothing because frost can occur in May. But it is also generalizable to other occasion in which you might think before doing something to ensure you do not get caught out, such as waiting to “shake out” a reef (undo the shortening of a sail) until you are quite sure the wind has moderated. 10 Some at-sea instruction, however, may be done as a set piece, such as how to turn a yacht in restricted spaces. In this case, the instructor may describe, before engaging in the maneuver, how inducing “backwash” (turbulent water) on the rudder by a short burst of the engine in reverse may turn the yacht. But even here, instructors normally build the instruction into the actions of entering or exiting a marina in which the yacht is to be, or has been, berthed for the evening, thus making it an in-sailing experience. At-sea instruction is thus not so much about providing lessons in how to sail, but instead is about drawing lessons from actual practice. Even if a lesson-type format is occasionally used, it can be integrated with practical experience for students. 11 The author is a RYA and UK’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) certified Yachtmaster Ocean which endorses him to skipper a sailing yacht with an auxiliary engine up

132  Graham Button to 200 tonnes anywhere in the world. It is the last rung of the amateur scheme and the first rung of the professional scheme. He has sailed for decades and has logged many thousands of miles at sea. He has also acted as a part-time auxiliary instructor for a RYA accredited sailing school. In addition to formally logged passages, the author has also kept a personal log of his experiences and witnessed activities at sea. This log, together with his noted observations of the sailing instructors he has worked with, the technical competency he has developed in sailing yachts (see Garfinkel’s remarks on the “unique adequacy requirement” for ethnomethodological studies) and his participation in the occasions he has witnessed as a student, skipper, crew member, or auxiliary instructor acting in support of a full-time professional instructor (see Anderson and Sharrock [2018] on “third-person phenomenology”) underpin the examples which follow. In this example, the author was a student at the time. 12 At-sea instruction normally involves five days at sea with the crew and instructor living onboard, preparing meals in close quarters, and using the yachts’ heads (toilet) often close by the galley (the kitchen area). Cleanliness at sea can easily be overlooked, especially by students, yet maximizing cleanliness is important for such close quarter living to ensure good health and comfortable experiences for others. Clearing up a mess such as smeared blood in an area that is frequently touched would be obvious to experienced sailors and provides an object lesson to the less experienced. 13 It is the legal responsibility of a skipper to avoid collisions, and if they do occur, they are open to investigation with fines and imprisonment as possible consequences for skippers found to be at fault; charges of manslaughter can be brought if death occurs due to the collision.

References Anderson, R. J. and Wes W. Sharrock. 2018. Action at a Distance: Studies in the Practicalities of Executive Management. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Bursztajn, Harold and Robert M. Hamm. 1979. ‘Medical Maxims: Two Views of Science’, The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 52: 483–486. Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Edited by Anne Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Homans, George C. 1961. Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Lewis, David. 1972. We the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Lindwall, Oskar and Gustav Lymer. 2008. ‘The Dark Matter of Lab Work: Illuminating the Negotiation of Disciplined Perception in Mechanics’, Journal of Learning Sciences 17: 180–224. Reveno, W. S. 1961. 771 Medical Maxims, Volume 2. Springfield, Illinois: C.C. Thomas. Sacks, Harvey. 1992a. ‘On Proverbs, Lecture 13, Spring 1965’, in G. Jefferson (ed.) Lectures on Conversation: Volume 1. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 104–112. Sacks, Harvey. 1992b. ‘Lectures 1 & 2’, in G. Jefferson (ed.) Lectures on Conversation: Volume 2. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 419–430. Shapin, Steven. 2001. ‘Proverbial Economies: How an Understanding of Some Linguistic and Social Features of Common Sense Can Throw Light on More Prestigious Bodies of Knowledge, Science for Example’, Social Studies of Science 31(5): 731–769.

Part III

Instructively Reproducing Artful Activities

7

Artworks as Instructed Objects An Ethnomethodological Approach to Artists’ Instructions Yaël Kreplak

Introduction In their documentary Spiriti (2015), Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine film the preparations for the opening of the Prada Foundation in Milan, dedicated to contemporary art. We see the workers working on the site, tearing down partitions, painting the walls, and then installing the works that will be part of the inaugural exhibition. At one point, the film shows a man in a diving suit, fully immersed, handling various objects: a white coat, a gynecological bed, surgical instruments … The focus widens, and we see that he is arranging these objects in a sort of large showcase that reproduces a medical practice. He refers to the indications given to him by another man, who guides him from the outside by showing him pictures through the glass, on which he points to this or that detail, and giving him indications with his hand (further left, further right, stop…). What we are witnessing in this scene is the installation of Lost Love, a work by the English artist Damien Hirst, famous for his more or less spectacular showcases – that he exhibits furniture, laboratory elements, or stuffed animals. Certainly, seeing such works, one suspects that they do not arrive in one block in the exhibition space and that they had to be installed in accordance with the artist’s project, which is more or less easily done: this is what the sequence in this film shows, with a certain humor. In fact, like many objects in our daily lives, works of art, as experienced when they are exhibited, are the result of a set of actions, the product of a work that consists, in large part, of giving and following instructions: to determine the right height for hanging a frame on the wall, to find the right angle for placing a sculpture on its base, to assemble the various elements that make up an installation. In order to be correctly installed in the exhibition, so as to produce the intended effect, each work comes with its own set of instructions – whether these take the form of photographs, diagrams, or verbal formulations, whether they are given orally, gesturally, or transmitted formally in documents. In this chapter, it is the way in which the instructions guide the installation work that I would like to examine. Specifically, I will be interested in how the relationship between the instructions, the actions that consist of following them, and the product of those actions – the installed work – manifests itself during the installation process. What is the nature of this work? What is being instructed in DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-11

136  Yaël Kreplak this context? How is conformity determined between the artwork-as-it-is-beinginstalled and the artwork-as-it-should-be-installed? How are circumstances likely to affect this process, and how do those involved remedy any difficulties? And what does this tell us about the artworks thus instructed? This chapter draws on Garfinkel’s original intuition, which he tells in his account of his experience assembling a chair in kit form (Garfinkel 2002: 197–207). He recalls, in this passage, that it was in the light of the circumstances in which he was brought to assemble this chair, at the request of his wife and for a dinner planned for that evening, that the inseparability of the pair formed by instruction and instructed action appeared to him. In particular, he underlines how the vague, incomplete, difficult to follow, inadequate nature of the instructions given on the leaflet is revealed in these circumstances, causing problems which must inevitably be remedied, in the situation, by whoever seeks to follow them so as to follow them. These “curious properties” of instructions have been the subject of numerous developments, in various settings, which have contributed to refining the perspectives opened by Garfinkel on the irremediably situated nature of the action.1 It is to this field of research that I would like to contribute here, by examining the specificity of the problem of instructions in art from an ethnomethodological point of view. Following Garfinkel and his invitation to find “real world settings with which, or in and as of which, to learn what more there is to instructions” (Garfinkel 2002: 207), I suggest that art, and in particular contemporary art,2 can be a perspicuous setting to discuss Garfinkel’s original intuitions. Examining some of the ways in which artists produce, use, and even play with instructions and their properties will allow me to open up these avenues of reflection. The entire chapter proposes to consider artworks as “instructed objects” (Koschmann & Zemel 2014),3 a characterization that seems to me to introduce new perspectives for analyzing the sociality of artworks. In doing so, it also aims at describing contemporary art as an instructed domain. Discovering an installation as an instructed object: Formulating instructions for the first time The preparation of a contemporary art exhibition presents itself in many ways as a complex working environment: the practical reality and task is that artworks must be installed in exhibition spaces, in a limited time (usually a few weeks) and with a strict deadline imposed by the opening date. Depending on the scale of the exhibition, this work can mobilize a fairly large staff, which is minimally composed of the curators and their collaborators, who supervise the whole, and the technical staff. When they can participate, when they are invited to do so, the artists are also present to install their work. This is the case during the installation of this work of art (Figure 7.1), which I was able to film in its entirety (or almost entirely) during fieldwork I carried out in a contemporary art center in 2009–2010. The work in question is an installation, composed of two drawings hung on the wall and a central table, on which various elements are arranged.

Artworks as Instructed Objects  137

Figure 7.1  View of the installation during the installation work.

Entitled Apis mellifera’s Boogie Woogie, it deals with the language of bees and takes the form of a kind of experimental laboratory for studying their behavior. At the time I was filming this work, I must say that I was unaware of all this – as were the art handlers who were assisting the artist and who were discovering the work on that occasion. This exhibition was the first public presentation of the work, which had never before left the studio. In other words, it was the first time the work had been installed, and therefore it was also the first time the artist had to explain how to install it to the handlers who came to help him. There were five of them, working in parallel on other set-ups: they were rarely all together and took turns assisting the artist, sometimes with the drawings, sometimes with the work on the elements of the table. Part of the work consisted for the artist in organizing the work, in time and space, and in giving things to do to his occasioned collaborators, as can be seen below, in Extract 7.1. In this first case, the artist takes advantage of the availability of one of the art handlers to entrust him with the responsibility of cleaning one of the elements, a glass box. He asks him if he is “up to cleaning it” so that he can “move on to something else.” The art handler answers in the affirmative, and together they place the glass box on a workspace dedicated to cleaning: on this occasion, the artist gives additional instructions, not strictly speaking on how to clean, but on the attention to be paid to the object to be cleaned, referring to the fragility of one of its elements. This instruction is relatively mundane: it presents the task being delegated as not requiring any particular skill on the part of the handler to follow it, except his ability to pay attention. The artist indeed points to a fragile feature of the object and his instruction singles out a feature requiring care: his subsequent actions show, therefore, that some specific skills are nevertheless needed. Afterward, he indeed comes regularly to check how the handler actually cleans the glass box, which leads, each time, to clarifications of the initial instruction: one must be careful with the fragility, but it is useless to pay attention to such and such a trace or such and

138  Yaël Kreplak Extract 7.1  Are you ready to clean it

such a scratch spotted by the handler on the box while he is cleaning it. The initial instruction is thus specified in and by the course of its realization, which also helps to specify the object being instructed, about which we understand that it has to be “clean-but-not-perfectly.” 4

Extract 7.2  What can I do for you

Artworks as Instructed Objects 139 In other cases, the artist proceeds differently, by prefacing at the outset the instruction and characterizing the action to be performed as “delicate” (as can be seen in Extract 7.2). In this sequence, it is the art handler who solicits the artist, asking “what she can do for him.” To answer her, the artist evaluates the situation in order to determine a relevant task to delegate to her at this point in the work process. He begins by thinking about cleaning up the space, before dismissing it in favor of another activity, which he gradually introduces in a turn that projects its complexity, by evoking “small, somewhat precise tricks” for which “one must not screw up.” The task in question consists of screwing elements onto the table in a specific way: from below, making marks with tape, placing the elements well over the table, and doing all this with the appropriate tools. However, as these tools are not at hand at that time, the instruction is postponed to later (and the artist himself will do it). These two examples demonstrate how, through instruction, a delegable task is constituted, the properties of which are as follows: it is localized and concerns one element of the artwork; it can be done in parallel with other courses of action; and it does not require any particular technical skill, but it implies supervision or anticipation by the artist of its nevertheless delicate nature. Although in both cases these are ordinary tasks (cleaning, screwing), which the handlers have certainly already had to perform in other contexts, they are not generic, in the sense that they must be carried out in relation to singular, unique objects intended to be exhibited. Unlike the chair assembled by Garfinkel, which is primarily made to be seated on, it is not simply a matter of screwing elements together so that they do not unscrew, but also so that they produce a certain visual effect. Therefore, what instructions do or do not specify takes into account the (inferred) ease of the task in relation to the recipient’s competency, in that particular context. In so doing, the artist manages a division of labor that marks some tasks as mundane (for anyone, with no special competency necessary) and others as delicate (reserved for him). Indeed, only the artist, in this context, knows what the desired effect is, and this is for each of the tasks he delegates: for him, through these various operations, it is a question of redoing the artwork, but for his collaborators, it is a question of carrying out the said operations without knowing in advance their specificities and finality. Only the artist has an overall view and masters the meaning (the direction) of the process. Because of this mode of progression of the set-up process, with a series of tasks distributed in a contingent and emergent way, his collaborators rather occupy the position of executors – which is absolutely not problematic in this context, since they are also busy with other artworks. The installation work is nevertheless relevant to examine how the artwork is gradually being shaped as an instructed object: the situation in fact encourages the artist to share, to publicize, what until then were private ways of seeing and doing, in the sense that he was not in a situation where he had to share them. This is why, in my view, this first collaborative installation makes it possible to “discover” the artwork as an instructed object – a discovery that is as much the artist’s here as it is mine, as an analyst. These initial observations have indeed made me aware of the fact that the context of the installation work makes manifest the need for artists to determine how to share their shop work. More precisely, the sharing of this shop work is the condition of possibility of the public life of the artwork and of its

140  Yaël Kreplak autonomy from the artist: without this sharing, it may be impossible to reinstall the work in his absence to his satisfaction. Another particularity of works of art is that while they are undeniably linked to their creator, they are designed (in general) to last longer than s/he does and to be able to be installed and reinstalled repeatedly. Precisely, the installation instructions are the instrument of this autonomy – or, at least, the instrument of a reflection on its modalities and stakes. Below, I examine two exemplary cases of these problematics through two models of artists’ instructions: those of Marcel Duchamp and those of Sol LeWitt. Making the artwork’s reproducibility achievable: The curious properties of an artist’s manual of instructions In the summer of 1969, the Philadelphia Art Museum caused a sensation by unveiling the last work of Marcel Duchamp, who had died shortly before. This work, entitled Étant Donnés: 1° la chute d’eau, 2° le gaz d’éclairage … (Given: 1° the waterfall, 2° the illuminating gas…), was created by the artist in the secrecy of his studio in New York during the last 20 years of his life (when he had stated that he no longer made art and devoted his time to the practice of chess). In a room of the museum, visitors discover this ultimate creation, which appears to them in the following way: “a wooden Spanish door, framed by a brick archway set in a plaster wall” (D’Harnoncourt 1987: 2). This door is pierced by two holes, through which the visitor discovers “a brilliantly illuminated landscape, in which the nude figure of a woman lies supine, raising in her left hand a little, glowing gas lamp, with a waterfall sparkles in the distance” (ibid.).5 By virtue of this device, the work can only be seen by one person at a time, who is then placed, publicly, in the position of a viewer. Like other works by Duchamp, this one, by its very form, instructs the visitor, offering only a single perspective from which to visually experience the interior.6 The effect of surprise linked to its posthumous discovery, combined with the prohibition to circulate any image of the interior for 15 years, provoked many comments. In 1987, once this ban was lifted and the surprise effect had subsided, the Philadelphia Art Museum decided to publish a book by Marcel Duchamp, which is nothing more than the instruction manual for the installation of the work. Formally, the book looks like a reproduction of the original manual: it imitates the appearance of a binder and contains handwritten pages, some of which are illustrated with schemas and diagrams, and a large number of photographs, some of which are annotated by the artist’s hand.7 It details the process of assembling Étant donnés, which is structured in 15 steps. More precisely, the book reproduces the second, so-called final, version of the manual: Duchamp indeed began by elaborating, for his personal use, a first version when, in 1965, the lease of his studio expired and he had to disassemble and reassemble the work in a temporary storage space. When he received confirmation that, as he wished, the Philadelphia Museum would become the owner of his work, and when he anticipated that, given his advanced age, he would probably not take part in the move from New York, he wrote a second version of the manual

Artworks as Instructed Objects  141 in 1966. According to Michael R. Taylor, curator at the Philadelphia Museum and responsible for an in-depth study of the work, this version would be more detailed and better structured, as it would build on the first experience of reassembly, and “more user-friendly,” as it would be designed from the outset to be read and used by others than him. Michael R. Taylor describes the variations between the two versions as follows: This second manual follows the same format as the manuscript Duchamp wrote for the original, but adds three operations to the initial twelve, for a total of fifteen. He also changed the order of some of the instructions, no doubt based on his experience disassembling and reassembling Étant donnés at the end of 1965. […] In preparation of the expanded second version, the artist revisited, revised and renumbered his earlier manuscript. In the first manual, the manuscript was followed by the photographs, arranged in no particular order and placed in plastic sleeves. This format provided the blueprint for the final version, which began with the textual instructions but then deviated from the original, by integrating photographs with the text for each of the fifteen steps, so that the reader could follow Duchamp’s instructions more precisely. […] Bound in a three-ring black-plastic binder and annotated with a series of drawings and precise written instructions and specifications, the photographs in the final Manual of Instructions combine views […] reused from the first manual with new shots […]. [T]his practical, loose-leaf notebook contains thirty-five handwritten pages of notes, plans, sketches, and diagrams, again housed in plastic sleeves. (Taylor 2009: 138) The design of the manual is obviously made to facilitate its reading in situation: the binder allows to turn the pages easily; it protects the photographs and notes from repeated manipulations by placing them in plastic sleeves, and the flap system allows to consult, in parallel, the formulation of the operation and the views of the detail elements to operate on. Its structuring also considers its future uses. On the first page is a black and white photograph of the arrangement of the interior of the artwork – of which it offers a unique view, since it is normally inaccessible to the visitor. This is followed by four pages, which present the “general order of the assembly operations” (“opérations de montage général” in Duchamp’s words). The 15 operations to follow are listed one after the other and give an idea of the general path to take to reinstall the work: first place the floor, then the landscape, the board that supports the brick wall, the bricks, the door, the black velvet, the electrical system, the table, the bushes, the aluminum strips, the nude without its forearm and leg, its leg, its forearm, the last bushes, and finish with the “general adjustment” (“réglage général”).

142  Yaël Kreplak Each of the operations is then taken up again, titled, sometimes developed, and put opposite the photographs that concern it. For example, operation n°11 is formulated in the following way: Placement of the nude without the forearm or leg. It is best to be two to gently lift the nude and place it exactly at the three points of impact. An important detail: First introduce the neck on the wooden stick which must then support the forearm, while holding the whole nude in the air. Finally descend the nude gently on the three points of impact (A, B, C). (photos and details for this 11th OP in front of the photos) When the nude is well placed, raise, below the nude, the small hinged flap that should support the iron bar (the backbone of the nude) without forcing too much. (Duchamp 1987, not paginated)8 In front of the text, Duchamp placed two annotated photographs, which indicate the points of impact to pay attention to (see Figure 7.2 below). The sequential properties of the manual are those that were most appreciated when it was actually used, in 1969, to organize the transfer of the work to the museum. The artist’s nephew, Paul Matisse, took charge of the project, working closely with Anne d’Harnoncourt, a specialist in Duchamp’s work and curator at

Figure 7.2  View of the page of the 11th operation (Duchamp 1987, not paginated).

Artworks as Instructed Objects  143 the Philadelphia Museum, and Theodor Siegl, a conservator. Together, they supervised a small crew of handlers and construction workers. The process is reported as follows by Michael R. Taylor: Black ring-binder in hand, d’Harnoncourt made continual reference to Duchamp’s exacting yet matter-of-fact directions in the Manual of Instructions, while Matisse preferred to solve problems without recourse to Duchamp’s notes. D’Harnoncourt later recalled that the “instruction manual proved essential to the task of moving the assemblage,” and described her relief at having such a detailed notebook to follow during the tense moments “when what to do next was not immediately apparent.” Prior to the installation, Matisse had told Sielg that he had found the photographic notebook to be “a great help, very clear, and very well done,” and was optimistic “the move will reflect the clarity of these remarkable instructions.” Shortly before the move to Philadelphia, however, Matisse revised his estimation of the manual’s usefulness after encountering technical difficulties associated with the complex wiring and lighting systems, as well as the hanging arrangement for the wooden door. Unable to find solutions to these problems in the Manual of Instructions, Matisse began making his own detailed notes, sketches, and diagrams for dismantling and packing Etant donnés in New York and reassembling it at the Museum. Despite the different approaches adopted by Matisse and d’Harnoncourt, or perhaps because of them, the installation of Étant donnés on June 11, 1969, went smoothly and was completed in a single working day. (Taylor 2009: 167) From the circumstances of its conception to its situated uses, the Duchamp case is exemplary in various respects. First of all, it seems that, with his manual, Duchamp anticipated what has since become a major trend in the institutional functioning of artworks: artists, when their works are acquired by a museum, are now encouraged to provide their instructions for maintenance and installation. If some artists, like Duchamp, provide proper manuals, often these instructions are collected several times, through exchanges aimed at specifying the initial information collected in the forms set up by institutions in recent years.9 And, when the information has not been collected in time, or in a too imprecise way, the work of reconstructing the instructions for use is left to the responsibility of the museum.10 In Duchamp’s work, the specificity of the instructions and the format of the chaptered and illustrated manual are intimately linked to the formal principle of the work and to the way in which he envisages it. It should not be forgotten that it took him 20 years to create it, and it was over the years that he determined precisely the visual effect he wanted to produce. Through the sequence of steps, the manual teaches us how to reproduce this effect exactly: by the inclination of the panel at the back, which must not be “completely vertical,” and by the arrangement of the two left-hand panels of the door, which “must form a very slight concave angle with

144  Yaël Kreplak the two right-hand panels when viewed from the front of the door.” Not without irony, no doubt, Duchamp qualifies his work, in the manual, as a “dismountable approximation” (“une approximation démontable”); however, it is obvious on reading that the margins of maneuver left for those who reinstall it are very limited.11 Despite all these precautions, the uses made of the manual reveal its constitutive incompleteness. Duchamp had experienced this himself, as shown by the fact that he wrote a second version to correct the first. In fact, since the work was never disassembled again after 1969, it is not known what details would have been revised in version 3 – but there is no doubt that there would have been a new version, by virtue of what I have described elsewhere as the “open process of specification” that characterizes this literature (Kreplak 2018b). Perhaps because it is no longer in use, or because it is signed by Duchamp’s hand, the manual has had a particular fortune: originally designed to be the instrument of autonomy of the artwork, it has become autonomous itself, by being published. Usually, indeed, these documents are confidential and do not leave the museums without the artworks they instruct. This publication has had curious consequences. First, it makes possible a disengaged reading regime, detached from the practical purposes for which the text was designed, which provides a particular reading experience. The originality of this text inspired John Cage’s unrealized plan to turn it into an opera – by reading it as a score.12 On the other hand, due to its autonomous existence, it can be consulted and read as a generic instruction manual, allowing the production of Étant donnés … in series. This is the experiment that the artist Richard Baquié made: without ever having seen the original, he produced another version, in which he chose to exhibit the interior.13 But, as he himself admitted, the experiment proved to be rather disappointing (Taylor 2009: 212). First, the process of producing the visual effect was undermined by its exposure and the resulting work lacked the aesthetic, experiential appeal of the original. Second, following Duchamp’s instructions, he was not in a position to re-live the creative process at the origin of the work: he was following its retrospectively reconstructed logic.14 In other words, in this particular case, the process of re-creation is radically distinct from the creative process:15 following the instructions of a work remains, here, a technical activity. In other cases, however, following instructions may engage a different relationship to creative action. Describing a drawing, instructing how to draw: Artful instructions In November 1969, an exhibition entitled Art by Telephone opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The principle, formulated by its curator Jan van der Marck, was as follows: I would like to invite a number of artists to cooperate with the museum in “phoning in” a work of their choice. The museum would explore the craft and manufacturing situation in town and line-up first rate craftsmen in various manufacturing areas (wood, plexiglass, metal, fiberglass, etc.). Artists would be given their phone numbers, a budget and a time schedule […] and

Artworks as Instructed Objects  145 they would be given an absolute free hand in determining what to do and in what manner. The museum would receive the various works from their manufacturers and exhibit these works with proper identification. (quoted in Pluot & Vallos 2014: 28–29) This radical proposal, which invited artists to fully delegate the production of their works, can be resituated in an intellectual context marked by developments in cybernetics and information theory, and in an artistic context characterized by the development of conceptual practices, held to privilege the idea of the work over its realization. Among the 37 invited artists was Sol LeWitt, who was then beginning to develop his practice of wall drawing, for which he is famous today (with 1200 wall drawings created between 1968 and 2007). The principle of wall drawings can be defined as follows: 1) the artist conceives the drawing, draws a diagram, and writes a few lines of instructions; 2) these are communicated to a team of draftsmen, in charge of making the drawing on a wall. For example, the instructions are as follows: “On a wall divided vertically into fifteen equal parts, vertical lines, not straight, using four colors in all one-, two-, three- and four-part combinations” (Wall Drawing#95) Or: “Within a four-meter (160”) circle, draw 10,000 black straight lines and 10,000 black not straight lines. All lines are randomly spaced and equally distributed” (Wall Drawing #1180) Or: “Lines not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random using four colors, uniformly dispersed with maximum density covering the entire surface of the wall” (Wall Drawing #65) As can be seen in the videos shot by the institutions (usually time-lapses),16 the realization process is quite spectacular, due to its duration (usually several days), the necessary equipment (including scaffolding to work on the full height of the wall), and the number of people that can be involved, depending on the complexity of the drawing to be done (sometimes up to ten people). These works are emblematic of in situ practices, since the drawings are made each time in a particular, unique context and must be destroyed once the exhibition is over. Between two exhibitions, they exist only in the form of a certificate drawn up by the artist: only those in possession of the certificate are authorized to have a wall drawing made by a team of authorized draftsmen. When a wall drawing is exhibited, it is composed, on the one hand, of the drawing and, on the other hand, of a notice on which the instructions, the date and

146  Yaël Kreplak place of the first realization, and the names of the first drawers are written. In front of a wall drawing, the spectator is thus put in a position to make the instructions coincide with the drawing – the description of the object exhibited. But, for those who draw, the experience of wall drawing is very different: for them, the notice describes an intended object, which they have to create by interpreting the statements as instructions. The draftsmen’s job is to collectively determine how to follow these instructions. The incompleteness of the instruction and the resulting variability of the result are at the heart of the work, as LeWitt explains: The artist conceives and plans the wall drawing. It is realized by draftsmen (the artist can act as his own draftsman). The plan (written, spoken or a drawing) is interpreted by the draftsman. There are decisions which the draftsman makes, within the plan, as part of the plan. Each individual being unique, given the same instructions would carry them out differently. He would understand them differently. The artist must allow various interpretations of his plan. The draftsman perceives the artist’s plan, then reorders it to his own experience and understanding. The draftsman’s contributions are unforeseen by the artist, even if he, the artist, is the draftsman. Even if the same draftsman followed the same plan twice, there would be two different works of art. No one can do the same thing twice. The artist and the draftsman become collaborators in making the art. (LeWitt 1971, not paginated) The issues raised by Sol LeWitt’s work have been considered above all from a theoretical point of view, through reflections on the transformation of authorship or on the contingency of the artwork as an object (Buskirk 2005). However, within this framework, the practical work of following these instructions has not been examined as closely. As one of the draftswomen explained to me, however, the instructions are obviously about only part of the work of following them: they do not tell you where to start on the wall, how to coordinate with the other draftsmen, how to hold the pencil so as to draw the lines, or even which pencil to use – among other problems that emerge in the course of the work, and which are not unlike Garfinkel’s dismay at the elements of his kit chair. “Following instructions” here, therefore, means developing artful solutions that will make it possible to carry out the drawing designed by the artist in the circumstances in which it is to be made – to make abstract instructions the description of a particular object. These solutions are discovered collectively, in discussions among drawers, considering the particularities of the wall to be drawn and relying on the experience of those who participated in the realization of previous versions. As John Hogan, a long-time LeWitt collaborator, writes, “the experienced draftsman,” that is, one who is able to explain the artist’s “vision” to others, shares his or her skills and knowledge with the other draftsmen, “from the most basic level,

Artworks as Instructed Objects  147 how to draw a straight line of equal tonality, sometimes of terrifying length,” to the most specific, such as “the language of mathematics, geometry, color theory, the peculiarities of printing inks, color treatment” (Hogan 2012: 71). Each drawing can thus be perceived as a collective production, as “an assemblage of competencies, materials, and other procedures” (Lynch 2002: 206). With his instructions, LeWitt places the draftsmen of his works not in the position of executors, but of co-creators. His instructions are indeed themselves artfully done, so as to withhold from, as well as dictate to, the draftsmen what they are to do. In this case, therefore, having to remedy the incompleteness of the instruction is not only a technical problem: it is also an artistic process. Conclusion: The sociality of artworks In this chapter, I focused on instructions in art, based on an examination of three types of artist’s instructions: instructions given orally during the assembly of an installation, by which the artist delegates the realization of certain tasks to his occasional collaborators; a detailed instruction manual, elaborated by an artist and intended to make it possible to reassemble, identically, his work; an artistic practice that consists in giving instructions for drawings and delegating their realization entirely. For each of these cases, I examined the context in which the artists were led to produce these instructions; how they addressed them to their recipients and what position they gave them, as instructions may impose variable degrees of subordination; and what problems could emerge in the course of their realization and what aspects of the artwork were then instructed. These three examples, among countless others available, dealt with as three in vivo work sites, allowed me to bring to bear an ethnomethodological approach to contemporary art and to engage in its respecification as an instructed domain. Beyond the heterogeneity of the artworks and situations studied, it appears indeed, at the end of this journey, that artists are first-rate producers of instructions. An important part of their work consists in giving recommendations and instructions, explaining how their works work and sharing ways of doing things, and even writing protocols – in short, adequately instructing the actions of those who, at one time or another, intervene in their creation. While contemporary art practices (installations, site-specific works, and what is sometimes called “instruction pieces”) make this dimension of the artist’s work particularly visible, I argue that this can be extended to any other art forms as long as the work is specified in terms of how it is presented or maintained. For example, the painter Claude Monet thus provided in 1922 very strict instructions concerning the placement of the eight panels of his series Les Nymphéas in the rooms of l’Orangerie in Paris and demanded that the layout he had decided on should never be modified, whereas the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova provided with instructions on how to dismember and rebuild one of his colossal statues as part of the statue’s structure itself (his instructions, however, were not followed, which caused major damage to the sculpture).17 It is in this sense that artworks appear to me as “instructed objects”: because they are the product of a set of instructions and instructed actions, and also, as

148  Yaël Kreplak Koschmann and Zemel insist in their definition, in the sense that these ways of seeing them can (and must) be taught and transmitted. According to them, an object can be qualified as instructed when “the way in which [it is] appreciated can be taught” (Koschmann & Zemel 2014: 359), when “the means by which the intended object is made discoverable is treated as a form of instruction and […] its perception is seen as a form of instructed action” (Koschmann & Zemel 2014: 374). In their terms, an instructed object goes hand in hand with “a disciplined way of seeing” (Koschmann & Zemel 2014: 359) – which strongly echoes, for instance, the abilities explicitly expected from the experienced draftsmen in LeWitt’s case and also, yet differently, those of artists’ occasional collaborators, as in my first case study. As we have seen, instructions are the instrument by which, under given circumstances, a certain way of seeing the artwork is elaborated. More precisely, one of the main functions of instructions in art is to ensure congruence between different ways of seeing the artwork: between the the-artwork-as-conceivedand-wanted-by-the-artist and the-artwork-as-presented-here-and-now, between the-artwork-as-it-is-to-be-installed and the-artwork-as-it-is-in-the-making-tobe-installed. Precisely, considering the “Lebenswelt pair” formed by instruction and instructed action makes it possible to examine how this relationship is elaborated, how it is perceived by those involved, and how it is susceptible to redefinition in situation. In fact, these characteristics of instructions, and the problems arising from them, are well known to members of the art world who are grappling with the question of ensuring the reproducibility of a work or the transmission of its principle. As Garfinkel writes, the discrepancy between an instruction and the action that consists in following it is an ordinary phenomenon (“you don’t have to go to college to learn it”) (Garfinkel 2002: 198). More specifically, by following Lynch, assuming that these properties of instructions are known to members avoids any ironic interpretation that would seek to point out the contrast between, in his case, scientific protocols and the laboratory practices that consist in following them, or, more generally, between a representation of an action and an action performed. As he writes: Analytic philosophers and sociologists have long held out the hope of using protocols (and related artifacts like rules, laws, plans, maps, propositions, norms, and programs) as stable, reproducible, and adequate accounts of individual reasoning, social action, and social structure. This theoretical hope has to do with the advantages of treating orders of text as proxies for (or even privileged representations of) orders of lived activity. (Lynch 2002: 204) And further: Molecular biologists tend to be less strict than positivist philosophers in their insistence on descriptive completeness and exactitude. […] Unlike positivist philosophers, laboratory scientists also are more attuned to the necessity to

Artworks as Instructed Objects  149 “interpret” a protocol in relation to the context of its performance. This sense of the word “interpret” is exhibited in a performance, much in the way a concerted musical performance “interprets” a familiar composition. (Lynch 2002: 205) The challenge is then to understand how members of the community under study cope with this contrast and to get something from it in order to better understand what is occupying them. So, if biologists interpret the protocols as musicians, how do artists do it? My examples show that, sometimes, instruction is seen as an instrument for delegating an activity that is considered purely technical: this is notably the case when a work is designed to be identical from one exhibition to another. From this point of view, following an instruction to install a work of art is essentially no different from following an instruction to assemble a chair in kit form. In this context, as elsewhere, an instruction never comes alone: it is always supplemented by others (orally, by rewording as the interaction unfolds; in writing, by successive revisions and versions), and the specification of the instruction is intended to best reproduce the effect that the work should produce in a stable manner from one time to the next. In other cases, the use of instructions seems more creative: this is notably the path opened by Sol LeWitt, who does not advocate a specific way of doing things and leaves open the possibility that the draftsmen discover, while drawing, what following the instruction to make the drawing means. In fact, Sol LeWitt’s practice is close to what is done in the so-called “performing arts” (music, dance, theater), which do not seek to produce stable objects but integrate into the very principle of performance the variability and availability of the score or text to multiple interpretations.18 It would be interesting to continue this exploration, with other forms of artworks and other formats of instruction, to describe other modes of organization. It is clear, in any case, that artists’ instructions can be very technical – while nothing prevents us from imagining that technical instructions are written artistically, as suggested by the narrator of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, himself a writer of instructions, who deplores the excessively strict nature of this literature: These rotisserie instructions begin and end exclusively with the machine. But the kind of approach I’m thinking about doesn’t cut it off so narrowly. What’s really angering about instructions of this sort is that they imply there’s only one way to put this rotisserie together… their way. And that presumption wipes out all the creativity. Actually there are hundreds of ways to put the rotisserie together […]. Rotisserie assembly is a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous. (Pirsig 1974: 168–169)

150  Yaël Kreplak More precisely, these examples show how instructions are always uniquely adequate, in the sense that they are indexed to the principle of the work – more precisely, in the sense that they manifest it, that they make it observable and accountable. In other words, each work produces its own set of instructions, distributes the responsibilities and actions of each, and determines the relationship between process and product. Considering art as an instructed domain and artworks as instructed objects, in this sense, makes it possible to make visible and describe their constitutive sociality. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Max Baddeley, Cyrille Bret, Nicolas Doutey, Franck Leibovici, Albert Ogien, Philippe Sormani, the editors, and the reviewers for their enlightening remarks and comments on this chapter. Notes 1 For a state of the art on that topic, see that volume and its introduction. 2 In general, works produced from the 1960s onward are considered to be contemporary art. More precisely, however, the category covers a heterogeneous set of artistic practices engaged in a process of “de-defining” art, to use the term coined by art theorist Harold Rosenberg (1972), in the sense that these productions affect a set of features previously considered to identify works of art, such as uniqueness, artifactuality, permanence, authorship, or the distinction between the work and its environment. 3 Koschmann and Zemel elaborate on this concept in a discussion of Garfinkel’s “phenomenologically-based theory of objects” and propose to offer “to the rich variety of descriptors that Garfinkel applied to objects across his writings, […] one more, instructed, to emphasize that objects cannot only be intended/meant/oriented, but that the way in which they are appreciated can also be taught” (2014, 359). 4 See Kreplak (2018a) for an analysis of this same extract that deals more specifically with how relevant details are constituted in the course of the activity. 5 For pictures of the artwork, see http://centenaireduchamp.blogspot.com/2018/01/8-toutetant-donne_5.html 6 I think in particular of To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918), which can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and whose title is quite explicit in terms of the instructions Duchamp recommended for watching it. Of course, it is well known, thanks to studies by Dirk vom Lehn (e.g., 2012), that the way in which the public experiences artworks is always a situated achievement, but in the case of Étant donnés..., one must admit that the modalities are very controlled, or at least anticipated by the artist! 7 As the curator Anne d’Harnoncourt writes, “without Duchamp to offer guidance in the format of this publication, it seemed best to settle for the most straightforward color reproduction, in actual size, of the pages of the original ring binder, rather than to attempt a facsimile of its complex collage of photographs and manuscript texts on papers, which are pasted between (or taped to) plastic sleeves” (1987, 2). 8 Original version below: “Placement du nu sans l’avant-bras ni la jambe. Il vaut mieux être deux pour soulever délicatement le nu et le placer exactement aux trois points d’impact Un détail important :

Artworks as Instructed Objects  151 D’abord introduire le cou sur le bâton de bois qui doit ensuite soutenir l’avant-bras, tout en tenant l’ensemble du nu en l’air. Enfin descendre le nu doucement sur les trois points d’impact (A, B, C) (photos et détails pour cette 11ème OP en face des photos Quand le nu est bien placé, relever, au-dessous du nu, le petit volet à charnière qui doit soutenir la barre fer (épine dorsale du nu) sans trop forcer” 9 For several years now, such forms have been circulating to collect, for each work, the artist’s “intention” and his practical recommendations to ensure its proper functioning. In general, a simple paragraph is left blank for “technical information” – which, of course, is not enough for complex works. These forms would deserve a full-fledged analysis, which could draw on Lisa Gitelman’s (2014) work on administrative document formats. 10 This is what I observed in the case of Le Magasin de Ben, one of the most complex artworks in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris: it was the curator responsible for the work who, over the course of its re-hangings, developed a detailed manual, which she continues to revise at each new opportunity to improve it. See Kreplak (2019) for more details on these issues. 11 “Those who scrutinize the volume will find that the position of cotton clouds in the sky is ‘ad lib’, and that the degree of brilliance of the little waterfall can be adjusted by slight shifts in the position of the wooden bar that supports a biscuit box containing a round fluorescent light” (d’Harnoncourt 1987, 2). 12 See what Cage said about the instructions in the manual: “They resemble modern music a lot, because they are directions for taking something down and putting it up. And a good deal of avant-garde music is directions for ‘doing’ something. It is the underlying principle in music: telling someone, by writing it down, how to do something” (quoted in Jouffroy 2005, 126). For examples of works with partitions in contemporary art, see Leibovici (2019: in particular 163–165). 13 See http://www.galeriethomasbernard.com/fr/artistes/oeuvres/23361/richard-baquie 14 “In fact, it seems evident that the probable order in which Duchamp himself worked upon elements of the tableau overt two decades – first the landscape background and the nude figure, then the overall construction and the lighting – is not particularly reflected in the order of the fifteen ‘operations’ that Duchamp set down for its reassembly” (d’Harnoncourt 1987: 2). 15 For an ethnomethodological approach to re-enactement, see Sormani (2020). 16 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc-c-pYGCrw; https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jEoT-LieqHQ; or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvOpvam8CSM 17 For a detailed analysis of this case, see Lowe et al. (2020) that also provides many other examples to rethink the relationships between works of art’s authorship, reproducibility, and preservation. 18 On these questions, and in particular on the status of the theater text as a score, see Doutey (2016).

References Buskirk, Martha. 2005. The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: The MIT Press. D’Harnoncourt, Anne. 1987. ‘Introduction’, in A. d’Harnoncourt (ed.) Manual of Instructions for Marcel Duchamp: Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau: 2° le gaz d’éclairage. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, pp. 1–4. Doutey, Nicolas. 2016. ‘La partition et son silence’, in J. Sermon and Y. Chapuis (eds.) Partitions. Objet et concept des pratiques scéniques (20ème et 21ème). Dijon: Les presses du réel, pp. 419–427.

152  Yaël Kreplak Duchamp, Marcel. 1987. Manuel d’instructions pour Étant donnés: 1° la chute d’eau: 2° le gaz d’éclairage. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art. Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gitelman, Lisa. 2014. Paper Knowledge. Toward a Media History of Documents. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hogan, John. 2012. ‘Les dessins muraux de Sol LeWitt. Le point de vue d’un dessinateur’, in B. Gross (ed.) Sol LeWitt. Catalogue de l’exposition au Centre Pompidou Metz. Metz: Éditions du Centre Pompidou Metz, pp. 70–71. Jouffroy, Alain. 2005. ‘Hearing John Cage, Hearing Duchamp’, Étant donnés Marcel Duchamp 6: 118–135. Koschmann, Timothy and Alan Zemel. 2014. ‘Instructed Objects’, in M. Nevile et al. (eds.) Interacting with Objects. Language, Materiality and Social Activity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 357–377. Kreplak, Yaël. 2018a. ‘Artworks in and as Practices: The Relevance of Particulars’, in P. Sormani, P. Giesler and G. Carbone (eds.) Practicing Art/Science: Experiments in an Emerging Field. Abingdon/New York: Routledge, pp. 142–163. Kreplak, Yaël. 2018b. ‘On Thick Records and Complex Artworks. A Study of RecordKeeping Practices at the Museum’, Human Studies 41(4): 697–717. Kreplak, Yaël. 2019. ‘Quelle sorte d’entité matérielle est une œuvre d’art? Le cas du Magasin de Ben’, Images Re-vues [https://journals.openedition.org/imagesrevues/6321]. Leibovici, Franck. 2019. Low Intensity Conflicts. un mini-opéra pour non-musiciens. Paris: Éditions MF. LeWitt, Sol. 1971. ‘Doing Wall Drawings’, Art Now, 3(2), not paginated. Lowe, Adam, Elizabeth Mitchell, Nicolas Béliard, Giulia Fornaciari, Tess Tomassini and Guendalina Damone, eds. 2020. The Aura in the Age of Digital Materiality. Rethinking Preservation in the Shadow of an Uncertain Future. Milan: Factum Foundation & Silvana Editoriale. Lynch, Michael. 2002. ‘Protocols, Practices and the Reproduction of Techniques in Molecular Biology’, British Journal of Sociology 53(2): 203–220. Pirsig, Robert M. 1974. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York: Bantam Books. Pluot, Sébastien and Fabien Vallos. 2014. Art by Telephone – Recalled. Paris: Éditions Mix. Rosenberg, Harold. 1972. The De-definition of Art. New-York: Horizon Press. Sormani, Philippe. 2020. ‘Re-enactement as a Research Strategy. From Performance Art to Video Analysis and Back again’, in H. Borgdorff, P. Peters and T. Pinch (eds.) Dialogues Between Artistic Research and Science and Technology Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 184–200. Taylor, Michael R., ed. 2009. Marcel Duchamp, Étant donnés. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art. Vom Lehn, Dirk. 2012. ‘Configuring Standpoints: Aligning Perspectives in Art Exhibitions’, Bulletin suisse de linguistique appliquée 96: 69–90.

8

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons Yusuke Arano

Introduction The art of (Japanese) calligraphy is oriented toward the beauty of simplicity and unicity, which is realized by its four vital instruments: brush, paper, black ink, and ink stone. A drawn character is organized in and as the connections relative to other lines and/or other characters in the work. The lines as the componential properties of calligraphic artworks are drawn and viewed as a lived relation within a character and between characters. When drawing, calligraphers thus locally judge ways of the brush, which is a gloss for holding the brush, performing stroke techniques, putting strength into drawing lines, moving the brush, dipping the brush in a certain amount of ink, deciding the level of the blackness of the ink, and so forth. The stroke order is a constituent property of the standardized, or normative, ways of the brush (i.e., what, where, when, and how one should and should not do calligraphy). Without exception, each Japanese character has unique stroke orders. That they have distinct stroke orders renders a drawn character perceivable and accountable to the competent practitioners of the art. Following the stroke order keeps the balance of a character, which helps to maintain its legibility (or more precisely visual recognizability) and also makes a character aesthetically pleasing. The drawn line/character itself consequently becomes an instruction for drawing the next line/character. Competent calligraphers not only assemble the normative ways of the brush to configure the character but also add their interpretations and historicity, and sometimes breach the ways of the brush to make their artwork (i.e., for creativity; see Nakamura 2007). To this end, one sensibly uses the entire body to appropriately draw the lines in a character in a particular size on the paper with a fair amount of ink and depth of blackness to ascribe intention and feeling to the characters (Yen 2004). Hence, doing calligraphy is accomplished and understood through the realization and the interpretation of standardized ways of the brush. In other words, the drawn characters not only materialize ways of the brush; they also reflexively create and transform possible ways of the brush, thereby expressing original intentions. The calligraphy arts are, in this sense, multisensorially indexical. When looking at an artwork, master-level calligraphers can see and relive the details of the ways of the brush (Arano 2020; Ingold 2007; Nakamura 2007; Nishizaka 2020), DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-12

154  Yusuke Arano including the sensation of the brushstroke, the calligrapher’s intention and feeling in drawing, and the motility of muscles to realize brushstrokes and the line. This is because the calligraphic lines are embodied as, realized by, and tied to one’s own bodily and perceptual experience during the act of drawing. The calligraphic lines are thus accountably reproducible for practitioners of the calligraphy arts (Arano 2020; Nishizaka 2020). This is key for the art of calligraphy. In Japan, “learning methods based on mimicry, imitation, and copying have been vital for creativity in literature, visual and performing arts” (Nakamura 2007: 81). Through such learning methods, novice calligraphers acquire “ownership of reality” or “entitlement” (see Sacks 1992: 479ff) to the ways of the brush. Accordingly, imitating is the first step to achieve a correspondence between the current work and its model, thereby learning the organization of the characters, the balance within and between the characters, the stroke techniques deployed in the model, the ability to see the traces of the manual ways of the brush in the artwork and to draw the characters in the same way, and ultimately to interpret the intention of the brush beyond the impression of the model.1 Thus, novice calligraphers are in this way instructed to produce an accountable correspondence between the model and their drawing. This correspondence is not only to be found in the produced objects. There is an “embodied correspondence” (Livingston 2008: 97ff) that goes beyond the characters themselves. Like the experienced jazz pianist, who can move their hands fluently from chord to chord, the advanced calligrapher has an “incorporated sense of place and distances” (Sudnow 1978: 12) in their movements with the brush. Drawing on ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies on instruction and instructed action (Garfinkel 2002; Lindwall, Lymer & Greiffenhagen 2015; Nishizaka 2020, among others), this chapter provides an auto-ethnographic account of actions and inference in and through lessons in Japanese calligraphy where the teacher and the student (myself) deal with the same character over a series of lessons. In the previous ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies, auto-ethnographic accounts are tied to individual practice where no instructor is available (e.g., Garfinkel 2002: Chapter 6; Livingston 2008; Sudnow 1978, 2001). In the lessons analyzed in this chapter, however, a teacher is present, and the practical reasoning is therefore made visible in the interaction. Nevertheless, this chapter does not proceed with exogenous accounts of such interaction; it describes the endogenous accounts of knowledge and competence (1) as a topic for the in situ analyses of the instructions by the practitioners and (2) as a resource for the post-event analyses offered by the video records. I will return to this point in detail after presenting the analysis. After a brief introduction to the analysis, this chapter focuses on (a) the instruction of a detailed movement of the hand for the drawing of a character, (b) how I followed the instruction, and (c) how I progressively improved the drawing. The analysis shows that the ways of the brush demonstrably instructed by the teacher and embodied in the model are structured as an in situ resource for further instructions and as a lived criterion for evaluating, determining, and improving the student’s ways of the brush in the lessons. I argue that the instructed actions in the calligraphy lesson are oriented to achieve an embodied and accountable correspondence

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  155 between the model and the being drawn character at hand. My understanding of the instructed property is consequently accountably embodied in and through the drawn characters in the lessons. This chapter is thus oriented not only toward the interactive process of the instruction but also the outcome of that process (i.e., drawings themselves). By doing so, I reflect on the “topically relevant” property (Garfinkel 2002: 115n) of ways of locally and ecologically achieving, seeing, instructing, and learning the brushstrokes as situated but recurrent phenomena in lessons for drawing Japanese calligraphy art. This chapter contributes to both studies on instruction and instructed action, specifically of calligraphy by demonstrating that drawing as a phenomenological achievement is a “missing what” in empirical studies (see also Mondada & Svinhufvud 2016). The calligraphy lesson This chapter draws on video-recorded data from Japanese calligraphy lessons. I recorded the lessons for over half a year; the lessons are held every two or three weeks at the teacher’s house or in his atelier. Each lesson runs approximately from 30 minutes to two hours. In the analysis, I focus on the first calligraphy lesson (Extracts 8.1 and 8.2) and the next lesson held two weeks later (Extract 8.3). The lessons in which the teacher introduces new work are composed of the following phases: greetings, teacher’s drawing, student’s drawing, and closing. In the teacher’s drawing phase, the teacher draws the model artwork in front of the student (myself). This phase itself is instructional for the way it demonstrates the brush movements, while the teacher explains, compares, and otherwise elucidates those moves (Extract 8.1). Upon completion of the teacher’s drawing phase, the teacher and I change sitting positions, initiating the student drawing phase in which I attempt to draw from the model produced by the teacher (Extract 8.2). In the second lesson, the teacher does not draw in front of me. Instead, only I draw in front of the teacher (Extract 8.3). I had been taught calligraphy between the ages of 6 and 12 through the primary school curriculum, as well as through after-school activities (calligraphy is one of the most popular after-school activities that pupils take in Japan). However, I held a brush for the first time in 18 years during the first lesson from which Extracts 8.1 and 8.2 were taken. I was and am still a novice calligrapher. The teacher, my grandfather, is a professional calligraphy artist and a poet who has been teaching calligraphy for more than 70 years. Regardless of our kinship relation, the category pair [teacher]–[student] is omni-relevant as the interactional relationship between us during the lessons (see Sacks 1972, 1992: 312ff). Since I could not discern ways of the brush in drawn characters and lacked basic drawing skills when I started the training, the ultimate purpose of the lessons was to instruct me in becoming competent to draw characters correctly and appropriately in balance. In the lessons, 宇宙洪荒 uchu koh koh (in Japanese) from the ancient Chinese poem Thousand Character Classic is taught and drawn. The four characters each describe aspects of the universe. I translate them as: “everything in the universe overflows and seethes.” 宇宙 uchu signifies everything: the universe, or space,

156  Yusuke Arano

Figure 8.1 The focused line in the 宇 u character and the stroke order of 宇 (my rendering with a permanent marker).

above heaven and earth. 洪 koh means strongest, large, or enormous, and 荒 koh is stormy, rough, or wild. Throughout this chapter, I focus on the instructions and follow the instructions produced through the actual drawing of the first line in the character 宇 u/ɯ/(see Appendix B, Figure B8.1 for the teacher’s drawing and my drawings). Figure 8.1 depicts the focused line in 宇, u and its stroke order.2 The teacher’s instruction The first lesson was initiated by the teacher making a model drawing from printed materials in a calligraphy journal, thereby demonstrating how to draw artfully while explicating how the characters were drawn. The following is extracted from the segment where the teacher introduces the first short line of 宇, u after preparing the drawing brush, the papers, and the inkstone.3 It could be argued that the teacher would not need to draw the model because the printed model from the journal is already at hand. Accordingly, it would seem superfluous for the teacher also to draw the characters. However, the analysis reveals how the teacher’s drawing of the model achieves a rather special effect by demonstrating the ways of the brush on the spot. First, he makes a model uniquely used in the lessons (see Extracts 8.2 and 8.3). Second, he shows the temporal process of configuring the characters by using the relevant drawing techniques (see Appendix A for the transcription conventions). Note that the teacher’s instruction in Extract 8.1 is composed of a twofold procedure: (i) pre-drawing instructions using gestural demonstrations in lines 2 and 4 and (ii) the actual drawing in line 5. Through this construction, he demonstrates his procedure for drawing the first line of the character. Each pre-drawing instruction at lines 2 and 4 orients to different properties: what and how to draw. The first pre-drawing instruction at line 2 defines the shape of the first short line of 宇, u by incorporating the following three constituent properties. First, the teacher verbally explains what to draw with the directive “stroke from this side.” However, the proximal demonstrative pronoun “this side” in the directive is not accountable by itself, since what “this” refers to has not yet been elaborated in the local history of this lesson. Second, while delivering the verbal formulation, he moves the brush from the left side to the right side in mid-air (i.e., air stroking), specifying, and thus gesturally demonstrating, the indexical expression “stroke from this side”

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  157 Extract 8.1

SL1: mottekuru (teaBd in the transcript refers to the teacher’s bodily conduct; teaGz, the teacher’s gaze; AS refers to a stroking gesture in mid-air, i.e., air-stroking)

(Figure 8.2a). In addition to the normative stroking order of 宇, u, it is noticeable that “this side” is specified as the line because the apex of this embodied conduct is provided when he says “kara motte kun” (bring from/stroke from) and moves his gaze toward the first short line in the model (Figure 8.2b). Third, he adds another unit “kono ne?” (“this one, right?”) to his turn and points to a specific feature in the already specified line of the model (see Figure 8.2b). Pointing to the line while identifying it with the indexical “kono” (“this one”) characterizes the exact part of the line that should be drawn “from this side” (i.e., the starting point of the first short line). By this composition, he indicates the first line in the stroking order and defines it as a hook-shaped short line rather than a mere straight line (see Figure 8.3). The first pre-drawing instruction in line 2 defines what to draw, while the second one in line 4 specifies how to draw it (i.e., with a stroking trajectory for drawing the hook-shaped short line). First, by adding “fude o” (your brush) to his turn, this direction orients to the stroking movement of the brush. Second, the trajectory of air stroking is modified. That is, the brush movement depicts a gentle upward curve rather than a straight horizontal trajectory (Figure 8.4). The combination of directive and modified stroking movement thus instructs the brushstroke for the first line of 宇, u in the way that the previous pre-drawing instruction (line 2) has characterized.

158  Yusuke Arano

Figure 8.3  Differences between lines (both drawn by the teacher).

Figure 8.4  The trajectory of the brush in air stroking (line 4).

Figure 8.5  The trajectory of the brush in drawing (line 5).

His brush movement in line 5 materializes the trajectory of the brushstroke that the pre-drawing instructions in lines 2 and 4 had indicated (Figure 8.5). In other words, this practical drawing demonstrates the embodied performance of the brushstroke that the just prior instructions indexed: what to draw and how to draw it. Since the teacher’s actual drawing is deployed after the pre-drawing descriptions, the drawing is recognizable as the lived work of calligraphy that realizes and embodies what the prior instruction intended. The teacher’s drawing thus becomes a lived demonstration rather than orienting to simply a reproduction of the printed model. Here, four different phenomenal resources (i.e., verbal formulations, stroking gestures, actual stroking, and the printed model in the journal) are organized as a

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  159

Figure 8.6  The teacher’s instruction.

harmonious production of the instruction (Figure 8.6). The instruction shows the trajectories of the brushstroke as well as how the student should see the drawing techniques implicit in the textually depicted character. Spatially juxtaposing the model and his drawing, the teacher uses the printed model as a resource for the instruction, rather than as a self-sufficient exemplar for me to imitate. Thus, the lines of characters drawn by the teacher and the lines in the printed model do not have equivalent instructional properties – they are each produced to accomplish different instructional work in situ. The teacher’s first short line is produced as his drawing which has been modified in a unique way (Figure 8.6). As mentioned in the introductory section, characters drawn in calligraphy are reproducible, whereas originality and uniqueness can be created by incorporating the calligrapher’s “interpretation” and “intention” of their work (Nakamura 2007). Insofar as the teacher’s instructions in lines 2 and 4 project how and what is to be drawn, the teacher is not specifically oriented toward the reproduction of the printed model. Rather, his actions demonstrate and elaborate an embodied correspondence between the printed character and the work of drawing a unique instance of it, which is to be used as an instructional model in the ongoing interaction. Following instructions After the teacher finishes drawing all the characters in his drawing phase (a part of which is presented as Extract 8.1), we change sitting positions to move to my own drawing phase, in which I draw the instructed character in an attempt to follow the instructions. In contrast to the teacher, novice calligraphers are expected to produce a copy of the completed figure displayed in the teacher’s drawing by accomplishing the tasks that the teacher has instructed in Extract 8.1, i.e., drawing the first line in the hook shape and stroking the upward curve when drawing it. In my drawing phase, enacting the instructed task exhibits what, how, and to what extent

160  Yusuke Arano I understood and could execute the preceding instruction. However, the instruction “attain[s] the status of an agreement for persons only insofar as the stipulated conditions carry along an unspoken but understood et cetera clause” (Garfinkel 1964: 247). Any instruction inescapably fails to formulate all the details of the instructed actions, such that “et cetera” provisions are made relevant both as resources for, and sources of difficulty with, following instructions (Garfinkel 2002; Livingston 2008; Sudnow 1978). They also provide occasions for emergent instructions in the course of a lesson (i.e., ad hoc instructions). Extract 8.2 and the embedded Figures 8.7a-h shows how I follow the instructions provided during the teacher’s drawing phase and focus on how an ad hoc instruction is delivered during my drawing phase. Before the drawing, while the teacher silently watches, I vocalize where I would start drawing and rehearse how to draw a particular stroke (lines 1–3 in Extract 8.2). Then at line 4, I begin to draw it, and I treat the teacher’s out-breath at line 5 as an alert to stop the current stroke, and I lift the brush (Figure 8.7e). The teacher then examines the width of the line and uses it as an occasion for an ad hoc instruction (lines 9 and 10) in which he points out that I should have drawn the line “thicker (futoku)” by using the nuku technique (swishing). From this phase, I use the teacher’s drawing as the model. Prior to the drawing, speaking in a low voice with gaze averted, I work out by myself where to draw (line 1, Figure 8.7a) and then rehearse the instructed enactment on the inkstone and the paper by air drawing (lines 3 and 4, Figure 8.7b). Rather than soliciting a conditionally relevant response, these rehearsals provide an opportunity for the teacher to respond (which Arano 2020 calls “solitary confirmation”).4 The ecology of the lesson allows me to produce rehearsals for where to draw in the instructed way prior to drawing. Within the organization of the lesson, my understanding of the teacher’s instruction is only made public in my drawing. However, unlike in some other practical activities where mistakes can be repaired without a trace, I cannot modify the already drawn characters while drawing because the black ink is not erasable. As of calligraphic practices, where to draw the first line in a piece of paper is crucial in terms of achieving a balance between the characters and within the piece of paper. Therefore, my solitary confirmation orients to this uncorrectability of the drawn character and exhibiting what and how I understand the teacher’s demonstrative instruction when actually drawing. Upon the rehearsal, I treat the teacher’s non-responses as a possible display that my stroking and the position of the first line are unproblematic. Then, I start drawing from line 4. Upon completion of drawing the first short line (line 5), the teacher vocalizes with Nm at line 7. I hear it as a possible approval by moving the brush to the left to project the next line (Figure 8.7f). However, as the teacher soon makes evident, his vocalization implies that he found something noticeable in the first short line.5 For him, the moment when I finish drawing the line is the appropriate sequential slot to problematize the then-finished line. This is because, insofar as the category pair of [teacher]–[student] is relevant in the lesson, my stroking and my drawing are situated as candidates, that provide an opportunity for the teacher to approve, evaluate, and correct them (Arano 2020; see also Macbeth 2004). Accordingly, the teacher’s hissing out-breath, while I am drawing in line 5, is a possible alert to stop

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  161 Extract 8.2  SL1: Kohshite (stuGz represents my gaze)

(Continued)

162  Yusuke Arano Extract 8.2 (Continued)

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  163 the current stroke, and the Nm token in line 7 is a possible preparation to make a correction space relevant. The noticeable feature is then introduced in the following turns as an ad hoc instruction. From lines 9 through 11, the teacher produces an ad hoc instruction, which is also oriented to the ecology of the lesson. Note that it is deployed in the form of a suggestion. By so doing, it performs a corrective suggestion for the recipient to correct the enactment at the next spatial and temporal opportunity, rather than providing the corrected enactment immediately after the suggestion (see Arano 2020 for the description of “distal instruction sequence”). The corrective suggestion locally builds a contrast between the model and my drawing, enabling me to find the correctable feature in my drawing (e.g., Weeks 1985). With his gaze movement and pointing (Goodwin 2007; Nishizaka 2006, 2018), the teacher is inviting me to look at the model and to see a detail that he has not previously treated as relevant: the thickness and the ending of the stroke (lines 9 and 10, Figures 8.7g and 8.7h). Thus, the corrective suggestion provides a perceptual framework with which to see how the model compares with my drawing in a demonstrably correctable way. In this way, the teacher’s drawing is displayed as a visible resource in which the ideal ways of the brush are embodied. In other words, his drawing is structured not only as a model to be followed but also as a lived criterion with which to evaluate my drawing. Orienting toward the unicity of the movement on the paper, the width of each line is also locally determined by the relativity between lines, between characters, and the size of the paper. Thus, the line drawn by me is not appropriate in that respect (i.e., it is too thin and thus upsets the balance of this character and the others). The width of the line was not explicitly discussed in the previous instruction phase. Nevertheless, as a task, it is a property of an action that I should have grasped and adequately followed by seeing and reflecting upon the teacher’s drawing. That is, the corrective suggestion is accomplished by virtue of the teacher’s discovery of an error relative to an “et cetera” provision and is timely in the way it is designed in situ. In this instance, a criterion of adequacy for drawing a line is locally determined for the contingent instructional purpose at hand. The corrective suggestion in line 9–10 focuses on the drawing technique nuku, which can be translated as “to swish, to swipe, or to pull out the brush.” Figure 8.8 depicts a contrast

Figure 8.8 A comparison of techniques (my drawings). (a) The nuku technique, which swishes a stroke at the end of a line. (b) The tome technique, which stops a stroke at the end of a line.

164  Yusuke Arano between techniques typically used in Japanese calligraphy. The (a) line is the nuku technique, which swishes the brush while gradually releasing the strength of the drawing. The (b) line refers to the tome technique that stops the stroke at the end of the line. The nuku technique is qualified by the adverb futoku (thicker), referring to the width of the line (line 9). Not only does this adverb characterize the quality of the technique, but it also characterizes an achievement, a consequence, or an effect of using the nuku technique by adjusting the strength. To adequately realize this achievement, I need to release the strength while maintaining the tempo of the stroke; otherwise, the line becomes uneven. The teacher’s corrective suggestion about the nuku technique indicates that my hook-shaped short line does not adequately project the next line relative to the current and other lines in the artwork. The next line is, however, not yet drawn at this sequential juncture. However, the teacher’s instruction is available because the line I had just drawn itself constitutes a lived, in vivo, basis for the situated instruction on how and where the next line should be drawn. In addition to the stroke order, as a normative resource for performing the ideal ways of the brush, the position where the next line should be drawn on the piece of paper becomes accountable according to the current line’s shape. In Figure 8.9, the teacher’s vertical orientation of the hookshaped short line points to the place for drawing the next line (see also Figure 8.1 for the stroke order). The teacher’s stroke produces an angle at the right apex and from this apex heads to, or projects, the next line. In contrast, my line stops at the end and does not necessarily head for the next line, nor does it project toward the next line. Although my stroke progresses “from left to right” as instructed, it produces a gentle downward curve (Figure 8.7c), and it stops orienting to the right side (Figure 8.7d). My stroking trajectory thus differs from the teacher’s, given that his stroking depicts a

Figure 8.9  A comparison of the calligraphy of the teacher and student.

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  165 gentle upward curve. In other words, the fact that the instructed enactments have failed is embodied in the gentle downward curve.6 As depicted in Figure 8.9, there is a striking difference between the teachers’ horizontal hook-shaped line and my drawing. Again, mine is oriented downward, while the teacher’s flows upward, and the end of my line heads to the right. My hook-shaped line consequently reveals an inadequate way of the brush since where the line heads contradict the stroke order. This is because the line should have been drawn diagonally to the left to project the next vertical line on the left side. Additionally, stroking a gentle downward curve did not allow me to put the appropriate strength into the drawing. The analysis of my drawing phase has demonstrated how my own drawing locally realizes (or fails to realize) the given instructions. Thus, my analysis of the drawing phase identified how ad hoc instructions are produced and taken up when the instructed techniques are embodied in my drawing. Next, I describe how the locally determined instructional tasks are realized in my drawing phase during the lesson held two weeks later. How to adequately draw the hook-shaped short line During my drawing phase in the first lesson, I did not try again to perform the hookshaped stroke following the teacher’s ad hoc instruction because the ink had already stained the surface of the paper. Consequently, we went on to the next character. During the next lesson, which was held two weeks later, I drew the hook-shaped short line, and the teacher seemed satisfied with it. In the following, I first describe a contingent confirmation sequence before the physical drawing (Extract 8.3a), followed by my effort to draw the hook-shaped first line (Extract 8.3b). At line 3 in Extract 8.3a, the claim of difficulty with drawing the hook-shaped line is produced with yone that serves as a possible request for agreement (see Hayano 2013). However, before its completion, the claim elicits the teacher’s agreement at line 4. Note that this possible request for agreement is delivered by pointing to the hook-shaped line in the model drawn by the teacher (Figure 8.10a). My pointing demonstrates that the teacher’s drawing is the criterion for my prospective action in the unfolding lesson. Second, the upshot of the previous ad hoc instruction (i.e., using the nuku technique to depict a thicker vertical line) is a locally determined objective carried over from the previous lesson. The difficulty I verbalized in line 3 also elicits further instruction from the teacher about how to draw the character and a rationale for the particular stroking technique: “Put your brush here and do this so that you can represent powerfulness” (lines 6 and 8 and Figures 8.10b and 8.10c). At line 9, in overlap with the teacher’s continuation of the preceding instruction, I produce an “out-loud” account of my understanding of the previous instructions while drawing on the inkstone, thereby rehearsing how I proposed to enact it (e.g., Arano 2020). Following a brief silence (line 10), I reproduce the account “in the clear,” again demonstrating the stroking movement on the inkstone to show that I heard (and adequately understood) the teacher’s instruction, and the teacher confirms it (lines 11–14; see also, lines 1–4 in Extract 8.2).

166  Yusuke Arano Extract 8.3a SL2

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  167 After the preparation to draw the vertical hook-shaped short line with a gentle upward curve (lines 1–18), I execute the action (lines 19 and 20 and Figures 8.11a and 8.11b in Extract 8.3b). While doing so, I vocalize a running account of what I am doing, as an instance of what Heritage and Stivers (1999) call an “online explanation.” In Excerpt 8.3b, I use the twofold procedure composed of the online account and the physical drawing. The online accounts (lines 20, 23, 25, and 27) set up my brushstroke as an instructed action by using indexical expressions reminiscent of those the teacher would use to instruct and demonstrate the action. In my utterances, the pronoun (i.e., koh, like this) refers to actions that are not yet performed (cf. Goodwin 1996). The subsequent drawing exhibits and embodies the not-yetspecified action. In other words, the online account projects the subsequent stroke, acting as a device for setting up a demonstration of the brushstroke for the teacher. The teacher then ratifies my accountings and/or my stroking movements (lines 21, 24, 26, and 28). This twofold procedure (online accounting + the physical drawing) methodically provides interactional opportunities for confirmation, encouragement, correction, or further instruction from the teacher.

Extract 8.3b  The continuation of 8.3a

(Continued)

168  Yusuke Arano Extract 8.3b (Continued)

(Continued)

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  169 Extract 8.3b (Continued)

170  Yusuke Arano

Figure 8.12  The overall process of my actual stroking presented in Extract 8.3b.

Furthermore, in the course of drawing, I adjust the movement of the brush and the way I put strength into holding the brush (Figure 8.12). First, the angle at which I hold the brush differs from the previous lesson (see Extract 8.2). By making this change, I can move the brush smoothly so that the stroke depicts the gentle upward curve. Second, I bring the brush up a little at the end of the horizontal line, gradually releasing the strength (line 23, Figure 8.12c) and then putting the strength back in while drawing the vertical line (lines 25–27, Figures 8.12d and 8.12e). In this way, I can adjust the strength to make the line thicker (Figure 8.13). Third, the angle of the brush and the strength are also achieved by minutely adjusting the movement and direction of my wrist. In the previous lesson, the minuscule adjustment

Figure 8.13 The comparison of my own work (the “–>” line represents the nuku technique and the “–•” represents the incorrect version thereof; the circled numbers show the stroke order).

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  171 of the strength was not realized because I had depicted the trajectory by using my entire forearm. In contrast, in this lesson, I depict the line by using my wrist so that I can finely adjust the direction of the brush tip. Thereby, the angle of the right apex is drastically modified (Figure 8.13). Fourth, I also use the nuku technique. As a result, the trajectory of the line recognizably embodies the projection to the next line. The repeated practice of saying-and-drawing invites and receives a series of teacher assessments (lines 21, 24, 26, and 28). The teacher’s favorable assessments during and after the completion of my drawing validate the way I draw the first short line. The thickness embodies the instructed account through the previous lessons that consequently becomes an achievement of the appropriate angle of the focal line. The teacher’s ratification of the consequence (the shape of the completed stroke) retrospectively implicates the production of the stroke along with my vocalized understanding of the instructions in the technique. Therefore, the teacher’s series of positive responses coordinated with my drawing (or the stroke movement) both monitors and assesses the achievement of the drawing over the course of its production following instructions. We can now see the achieved correspondence between my work and the model that the teacher drew (Figure 8.14). During the lessons, the teacher reflexively ties the traces of ways of the brush exhibited in the model to an embodied action combining movement, strength, an exact amount of ink, and orientation to balance (Nakamura 2007; Nishizaka 2020). His reasoning and vision are embodied in his instruction and drawing, which required me to continually mold the instructed ways of the brush; consequently, I was expected to maintain an embodied concordance between the instructional material and my drawing activity that integrated an understanding of the instructions with an embodied production of the action

Figure 8.14  The embodied correspondence.

172  Yusuke Arano instructed. This expectation was conveyed and realized in and through a locally accomplished interactional task.7 Importantly, the teacher’s ratification at line 28 displays that he finds equivalence between the drawn lines by the teacher and me. In this sense, as the criterion of correctness or adequacy of instruction in interaction is achieved locally (Liberman 2013; see Sacks 1992: 435ff), the criterion of likeliness to the model is an interactional achievement that relies on the contingencies locally produced by the participants in situ. The participants in the lessons are not oriented toward standards measured by scientifically rigorous definitions, such as protractors, rulers, or compasses. Concluding remarks: Becoming a competent member This chapter has highlighted topically relevant properties in Japanese calligraphy lessons; particularly, the interactional work of instructing and following instructions for mastering ways of the brush in the instance of drawing the adequate first short line in 宇, u. This interactional work included: (i) the teacher’s demonstration of ways of the brush, embodied by his instructions and drawings which were reflexively provided as a model; (ii) the model was made relevant and visibly structured as a locally achieved standard, which acted as a criterion not only to emulate but also to evaluate and articulate through my own drawing activity; and (iii) my drawn lines were modified according to the lived instructions, including the teacher’s demonstration of a model and his ad hoc instructions for reproducing that model. In addition to being an artistic achievement, the instructed characters provide an account of the instructed actions that shape the line and the strokes. Since only a competent member can make a version of the instructed object, a novice calligrapher/learner can only imitate the model. In other words, a practical mastery of the ways of the brush is reserved for the legitimate member, namely, the teacher in the instances described in this chapter. In this chapter, I glossed over this competence as ways of the brush in drawing and seeing the calligraphic lines. For members, ways of the brush are intrinsically embodied as a habitual cenesthesis realized, seen, instructed, and reproduced through calligraphy work and practice. In this regard, the calligraphic body is the lived body within the calligraphic world. The brush is then used as an extension of the drawer’s body, as a sensorially available, operable, and thus instructible prosthesis. In other words, the brush becomes “a bodily auxiliary, an extension of the bodily synthesis” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 176) with which members, like my grandfather in this chapter, perceive the world rather than the object that they perceive. In this sense, the hand and the brush, when drawing, work together as a unit, much like the hands and the keyboard in typewriting (Sudnow 1979) or the hands and piano in playing jazz (Sudnow 1978, 2001). For me as a novice calligrapher, however, the brush was an instrument that I perceived in and as itself. It did not matter that I use a pen to write on a daily basis. The calligraphic line is accomplished through other movements and with different tactile and kinesthetic facilities than writing. The lessons were therefore designed to lead to “a rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema” (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 164) where I acted and perceived with the brush.

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  173 The teacher and I were oriented toward the achievement of an accountable correspondence between my own work and the teacher’s model as a first step into the calligraphic world. To this end, the teacher demonstrated how to see and draw the calligraphic lines throughout the lessons, thereby showing how to make the correspondence between my drawing and the model. As my analysis suggested, this embodied correspondence was neither static nor reducible to any analytical conceptualizations. Rather, its work and achievement took place as locally contingent actions and coordinated productions, which necessarily included “et cetera” provisions. To establish correspondence with (or a legitimate imitation of) the model, I did not only need to master a manual task, but I also needed to show an understanding of how lines are drawn in accordance with the instructions that I was given. To exercise the proper technique, I was expected to understand how the body should kinetically move and to tactically feel the brush touching the paper. A sense that what and how a particular line corresponds to that of a model is accomplished only through the situated practices of instruction, evaluation, and drawing. The teacher provided me with instructions, but I needed to make and display them as my instructions and reflexively materialize the instructions as my own exemplar of the instructed actions. In other words, I needed to treat the teacher’s instructions not as formal demonstrations of the techniques being used, but rather as realizations of the appropriate ways of seeing and reproducing the model. Hence, perception and the realization of the ways of the brush were enabled only by and as the organization of calligraphy practice. This perception and realization of exemplary techniques were thus an embodiment of members’ competence, produced in and through locally organized practical and interactional detail that Garfinkel calls a “topically relevant” property (Garfinkel 2002: 115n). Importantly, this member’s competence is both a situated topic and resource for my study of calligraphy as much as it is for my practice of it. This is not to say, however, that only the actors themselves are privileged to describe their own actions. They are indeed describable and understandable for the analysts as well as for the readers, as the ways of the brush are publicly displayed practices that the participants rely on in the ongoing accountable activities (cf. Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson 1974). At least for the elementary calligraphic practices analyzed in this chapter, I could claim “unique adequacy” (Garfinkel 2002) as a credited producer of them and credible analyst of their production. What else have I also done as an analyst/member in this chapter? I have analyzed the endogenous accomplishments of actions that make normative connections between actions and resources in interactional detail. These endogenous accomplishments are not simply a product of native intuitions; instead, drawing the proper first short line of the 宇 u character in 宇宙洪荒 uchu koh koh involved a struggle to make instructions “intuitive” in the course of drawing. If my descriptions in this chapter have succeeded, they may be read as instructions for drawing, or at least appreciating, the quality of the lines I discussed and drew. As I was instructed in the lessons, readers should be able to see my initial drawing as a poor character. In this sense, I hope to have shown what I learned through the lessons as “styles of vision” (MerleauPonty 2012: 155) which are inhabited, coordinated, and described in the instruction of drawing techniques.

174  Yusuke Arano Acknowledgments I am grateful to Mike Lynch and Oskar Lindwall, the editors of this volume, for their brilliant editorship, their insightful comments on the earlier version of this chapter, and for helping me revise and improve the final draft. I am indebted to Kazuo Nakamura and the members of the Garfinkel and Sacks online reading group for the comments. I also thank anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Finally, my thanks go to my grandfather, Masayoshi Arano. Notes 1 At the final step, the practitioner reproduces the model without looking at a model and instead produces their own interpretation of the characters to express their own spirit. 2 There are three types of scripts in Japanese calligraphy: the stiff (kaisho), semi-cursive (gyosho), and cursive (sosho). Kaisho is the one featured in the extracts I discuss. It is the most basic form of script and is usually the first one introduced to novice calligraphers. 3 The extracts are provided in three tiers. The first tier is the original utterances with the transcription conventions (Hepburn and Bolden 2017). The second tier depicts the word-byword gloss, which allows us to observe the syntactic construction of the original utterances. Finally, the third tier represents the rough translation of the original utterances. Furthermore, conventions developed by Lorenza Mondada (2018) are used to convey bodily conduct below the translated utterances. See Appendix A for the conventions and abbreviations. 4 The solitary confirmation of the position is a recurrent action prior to drawing (line 18 in Extract 8.3, for example). One may also recall “a correspondence problem” (Tuncer, Lindwall, and Brown 2021). That is, I halt the progressivity of my drawing phase prior to the initiation thereof to check what I must do to establish correspondence. 5 Nm in Japanese is generally used as a continuer, acknowledgment, token of approval, etc. The Nm token in this case is used to mark the completion of the previous drawing and to make a transition to the next possible activity, thereby prefacing an instruction or at least making an opportunity for an instruction in the transition space. However, this should be empirically analyzed in detail in another paper. 6 One of the anonymous reviewers suggested the way of describing a concept in use, which reminds me of Peter Winch’s account. Winch (1990) suggests that to be able to report a specific concept (such as voting and using a bookmark), not only an observer but also the actors themselves should have knowledge of the concept. In this segment, insofar as I follow the instruction, my hook-shaped line is seen as the realization of the incorrect technique. Even though it looks like a tome technique, I do not use the tome technique to describe the situation as “using the tome technique is an attribution of the intention.” I am grateful for their valuable comments. 7 However, my drawing does not yet fulfil every standard that the teacher and the model demand. For instance, my second drawing is unbalanced (Figures 8.13 and 8.14). That is, the third line was drawn away from the first short line because the correct technique was not exerted in the position where the first short line locally projects. This is because the second line has not been drawn in the position where the first short line projects. Consequently, the lines after the second line are lowered, as is the drawing of the character 宇, u as a whole.

References Arano, Yusuke. 2020. ‘Doing Reflecting: Embodied Solitary Confirmation of Instructed Enactment’, Discourse Studies 22(3): 261–290. Garfinkel, Harold. 1964. ‘Studies in the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities’, Social Problems 11(3): 225–250.

Ways of the Brush in Japanese Calligraphy Art Lessons  175 Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Edited by Anne Warfield Rawls. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Goodwin, Charles. 1996. ‘Transparent Vision’, in E. Ochs, E. A. Schegloff and S. A. Thompson (eds.) Interaction and Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 370–404. Goodwin, Charles. 2007. ‘Environmentally Coupled Gestures’, in S. D. Duncan, J. Cassell and E. T. Levy (eds.) Gesture and the Dynamic Dimension of Language: Essays in Honor of David McNeill. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 195–212. Hayano, Kaoru. 2013. ‘Territories of Knowledge in Japanese Conversation’. Available through Radboud Repository, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, https:// repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/2066/105826/105826.pdf Hepburn, Alexa and Galina B Bolden. 2017. Transcribing for Social Research. London: SAGE. Heritage, John and Tanya Stivers. 1999. ‘Online Commentary in Acute Medical Visits: A Method of Shaping Patient Expectations’, Social Science and Medicine 49(11): 1501–1517. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London and New York: Routledge. Liberman, Kenneth. 2013. More Studies in Ethnomethodology. Albany: SUNY Press. Lindwall, Oskar, Gustav Lymer and Christian Greiffenhagen. 2015. ‘The Sequential Analysis of Instruction’, in N. Markee (ed.) The Handbook of Classroom Discourse and Interaction. London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 142–157. Livingston, Eric. 2008. Ethnographies of Reason. Farnham: Ashgate. Macbeth, Douglas. 2004. ‘The Relevance of Repair for Classroom Correction’, Language in Society 33(5): 703–36. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Donald A Landes. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Mondada, Lorenza. 2018. ‘Multiple Temporalities of Language and Body in Interaction: Challenges for Transcribing Multimodality’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 51(1): 85–106. Mondada, Lorenza and Kimmo Svinhufvud. 2016. ‘Writing-in-Interaction: Studying Writing as a Multimodal Phenomenon in Social Interaction’, Language and Dialogue 6(1): 1–53. Nakamura, Fuyubi. 2007. ‘Creating or Performing Words? Observations on Contemporary Japanese Calligraphy’, in E. Hallam and T. Ingold (eds.) Creativity and Cultural Improvisation. Oxford: Berg, pp. 79–98. Nishizaka, Aug. 2006. ‘What to Learn: The Embodied Structure of the Environment’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 39(2): 119–154. Nishizaka, Aug. 2018. ‘Aspect-Seeing in the Interactional Organization of Activities’, in D. Favareau (ed.) Co-Operative Engagements in Intertwined Semiosis: Essays in Honor of Charles Goodwin. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, pp. 345–354. Nishizaka, Aug. 2020. ‘Appearance and Action: Sequential Organization of Instructions in Japanese Calligraphy Lessons’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 53(3): 295–323. Sacks, Harvey. 1972. ‘An Initial Investigation of the Usability of Conversational Data for Doing Sociology’, in D. Sudnow (ed.) Studies in Social Interaction. New York, NY: Free Press, pp. 31–74. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, Vol. 1. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation. Language 50(4): 696. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/412243

176  Yusuke Arano Sudnow, David. 1978. Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sudnow, David. 1979. Talk’s Body: A Meditation Between Two Keyboards. New York, NY: Knopf. Sudnow, David. 2001. Ways of the Hand: A Rewritten Account. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tuncer, Sylvaine, Oskar Lindwall and Barry Brown. 2021. ‘Making Time: Pausing to Coordinate Video Instructions and Practical Tasks’, Symbolic Interaction 44(3): 603–631. Weeks, Peter. 1985. ‘Error-Correction Techniques and Sequences in Instructional Settings: Toward a Comparative Framework’, Human Studies 8: 195–233. Winch, Peter. 1990. The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Yen, Yuehping. 2004. Calligraphy and Power in Contemporary Chinese Society. Oxon: RoutledgeCurzon.

Appendix A Conventions for utterance The conventions of the transcription system are listed below (Hepburn & Bolden 2017): = [ ] (0.0) (.) wo::rd ˚word˚ WORD word. word? word, word¿ Wo>word
--≫

The initiations as well as the termination of the relevant conduct The conduct is maintained until the same sign The conduct’s preparation The conduct’s retraction The conduct started before the transcript The annotated conduct is maintained across the lines The conduct is carried on throughout the extract

Abbreviations CP SP L O TP FP QP QT N ITJ

Copula Subject particle Linking particle Object particle Topic particle Final particle Question particle Quotative particle Nominalizer Interjection

Appendix B

Figure B8.1 The teacher’s drawing (left). My first drawing (middle). My second drawing (right).

9

Performative Teaching and Learning On the Instruct-ability of Kin/aesthetic Properties Chiara Bassetti

Introduction “Dance is to a large extent taught by way of imitation […]. Observability is absolutely crucial […] participants are placed in a way that enables a view of the teacher(s)” (Keevallik 2010: 403, 416 passim; see also Douglah 2020). In dance classes as much as in rehearsals, the instructor is both the primary object of visual attention whenever enacting the dance and the primary watcher of the other dancers’ actions to identify moves that are correctable. However, dancers are continuously monitoring other co-participants to know what to do, when, and how – a self-initiated correction is as important as an other-initiated one. A practitioner compares their moving body not only to that of the teacher but also to those of (selected) fellow dancers. Performative learning is grounded on mimicry and differentiation, in a dialectic of bodily and visual understanding (see Wacquant 2003: 118) that works not only simply dyadically (from trainer to trainee) but also collectively. The mirror contributes to the constitution of the dance studio as a “panvisual” environment where each one sees everybody else, as well as themselves, and everyone knows if, when, and who is looking at, or addressing (e.g., instructing), her or another participant. The enhanced visual field the mirror establishes allows for collaborative interaction in a context where, at most times, none of the participants is visually oriented to the other(s). This also means that self-vision co-occurs with alter-vision – an unusual condition in everyday life, yet crucial in training expressive action. This chapter builds on previous ethnomethodological studies on instructed perception (Goodwin 1994; Nishizaka 2014); instructions, instructed action, and understanding in apprenticeship (Arnold 2012; Becvar Weddle & Hollan 2010; Hindmarsh, Reynolds & Dunne 2011; Lindwall & Ekström 2012; Lynch & Jordan 1995; Macbeth 2011) and in other training settings (Arminen, Koskela & Palukka 2014; De Stefani & Gazin 2014; Mondada 2011; Sanchez Svensson, Luff & Heath 2009; Zemel & Koschmann 2014); and embodied directives, instructions, and corrections in everyday life (Cekaite 2010), routine work (Mondada 2014), sports (Evans & Lindwall 2020; Evans & Reynolds 2016; Råman & Haddington 2018) and dancing (Bassetti 2009a; Broth & Keevallik 2014; Keevallik 2010). This literature largely focuses on instrumental activities. However, dancing is not just a matter of jumping, DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-13

Performative Teaching and Learning  179 for instance, from here to there, to avoid a puddle, but of jumping with a given bodily shape, energy, rhythm, and a number of other kinaesthetic properties. Merleau-Ponty refers to the latter as abstract movement (1945) and notes how artistic moving and expressive gestures amplify while continuing ordinary locomotion and grasping gestures (1960: 182). When an aesthetic bodily doing such as dancing – not just skillful action but expressive, performative action meant to be aesthetically appreciated – is concerned, its qualities are more important than its instrumental outcome, and the teleology of action regards engendering a given (kin)aesthetic effect – a percept – in the viewer. This means that whether an end has been accomplished or not cannot be assessed just by looking to the phenomenal world “outside,” but requires the performing self to be part of such a phenomenal world. Consequently, learning to dance is not just about the visibility and observability of one or more instructors, teachers, and fellow dancers, but also – and comparatively – of one’s own performing body. That is the background against which the praxeological validity (Garfinkel 2002; see also Lindwall & Ekström 2012) of instructions is assessed when expressive action is concerned. This study focuses on the instructed production of such an aesthetically appreciable conduct – i.e., on performative teaching and learning – and explores questions of instruct-ability, observability, and intersubjectivity. In what follows, I consider dance classes that involve various levels of advancement and professional companies. In addition to discussing differences, which I mention whenever possible, I focus on common aspects. A relevant issue in instructing performance is that of distinguishing performative action from the surrounding conduct. To pursue that issue, I examine, first, the preparatory work through which participants frame activities and their participation formats. In so doing, I also offer an introductory sketch of the setting. I then consider how and when teachers intervene with instructions such as directives, hints, corrections, and demonstrations for progressively (re)specifying the detailed properties of dance actions. Attention is paid to the different instructables of dance action and the multimodal formats that, based on the circumstances, are variously employed for teaching-to-perform. Explicit instructions can be produced along with, after, or by interrupting the performance and can be aimed at prompting or correcting. In the latter case, a teacher needs to identify an action that is correctable (Weeks 1996) and to decide when the benefits of correction merit disturbing the dancing flow. I also focus on what dancers do for learning-to-perform and particularly how they exploit co-participants’ actions, which are instructed and instructive at the same time. Their conduct is consulted continually to learn what to do when and for confirming whether one is moving correctly. Finally, I look at peer-to-peer instructing, which emerges either unsolicited or by implicit or explicit request. The mirror features prominently in the organization of all activities considered in this chapter. Data and methods This chapter stems from an ethnomethodological ethnography I conducted on the world of Western theatrical dance. Although I encountered many styles, the research primarily focused on modern and contemporary dance. Data include

180  Chiara Bassetti fieldnotes, video recordings (75 hours), in-depth interviews (25), and documentary material. Empirically, the research took place in Italy, but I also spent three months at the Dance Department of a U.S. university. In Italy, for a period of two years, I observed the everyday activities of two dance companies and two schools, and I participated in a variety of events such as festivals, competitions, fairs, master classes, and stage performances all over the country. These allowed me to enter the backstage activities of several national and international companies and academies. Additionally, for the first time in my life, I took part in dance classes and shows (modern, contemporary, and theatre-dance) as a complete member of this social world. Similarly to Sudnow (1978), I went through a learning process myself, engaging in what I call becoming-the-phenomenon-based ethnography (see Bassetti 2021: 25–35). In adhering to the unique adequacy requirement of methods, I adopted an embodied, rather than just embedded, perspective and I maintained a focus on the process of becoming alongside being and belonging. What follows is grounded on the analysis of video recordings and fieldnotes. Fragments are transcribed following Jefferson’s (2004) and Mondada’s (2018) conventions; dancing movements are not annotated in detail, and what is transcribed – ranging from nothing to only verbal to multimodal conduct, of the teacher, the dancing group or individual practitioners – depends on the local analytical aim and readability concerns. Transcripts and fieldnotes are translated from the original Italian and employ pseudonyms. Selected ethnographic fieldnotes leverage my own learning experience to better depict self-monitoring and selfcorrection or serve to illustrate interactional sequences too long to be reported with transcripts. Framing dance action Whatever their level of expertise, dancers need to know which activity is at stake at any moment; that is, (a) which “segment” are they in, e.g., exercising with academic steps, stretching, or choreography, and especially (b) which participation framework is operative: attending to the teacher’s demonstration; enacting together with her, whose action is instructive; or performing under her scrutinizing gaze when co-participants’ actions are the only kinds available. Several resources are employed by participants to locally frame and mutually coordinate their situated activities (see Broth & Mondada 2013). First, by mentioning academic steps (e.g., plié, jeté) and/or conventionally identified parts of the studio (“In the center,” “At the barre,” “From the back”), the teacher provides explicit instructions on what is next. When verbalized between the current and the following segment, names of steps and areas function as markers of upcoming activities, since specific exercises are usually enacted in given areas: “study sequences” of academic steps in the center or at the barre, diagonals “from the back”; conversely, in the center one enacts academic steps and choreography, etcetera. Combined with local knowledge about the general structure of a dance class of a given style (and a given instructor), verbalizing steps/areas is quite enough to provide information pertaining to the issue sub (a) above.

Performative Teaching and Learning  181 Second, proxemics and formations (Kendon 1990) play an important role. The teacher’s positioning in the culturally marked space of the room and her orientation with respect to the mirror tacitly instruct dancers on the activity framework. A choreographer who is about to demonstrate or recap a sequence faces the mirror and takes a central position among dancers in the room. Otherwise, the choreographer stays at the borders and looks at the dancers’ enactment, either directly or in the mirror. This use of the mirror is not discussed but is simply acted upon (see also Douglah 2020: 30). Third, the teacher’s bodily posture is informative. As the choreographer is about to demonstrate, she stands still for a fraction of a second in the starting posture for a given sequence. This move, which I call “isolation” (Bassetti 2009a), distinguishes the instructor’s upcoming action from the surrounding ordinary movements and frames it as dance action. Posture, therefore, not only serves to discriminate between enactment and observation; it also points to an exemplary demonstration, as opposed to a “marked”1 recap or to the choreographer’s co-occurrent non-exemplar bodily conduct, such as gesturing (I return to this in Extract 9.4). Bodily posture tacitly instructs on how to look at the teacher’s upcoming action, and it distinguishes instructive action from instructional conduct. Given the subtlety of isolation, the visibility of the teacher to all dancers is crucial. A fourth implicit marker of the activity at hand consists of playing music. Its absence indicates explicit instructions are about to begin – demonstration, recap, or correction following or interrupting dancers’ enactment. In contrast, when music is playing, dancers are required to perform, with varying degrees and types of accompanying instructions by the teacher. The only exception is when a demonstration of the “dynamic” of dancing (rhythm of moving) is in place. If present, music also instructs dancers on when to start (Extract 9.1); otherwise, the teacher must give verbal directives, such as “Go!” (Extract 9.3). These four resources are sequentially organized in a recurrent format. The instructor first mentions the relevant step/area while dealing with music. Then, often in overlap with continuing talk/music, she takes a given position in the room and assumes a certain bodily posture. An example of such multimodal preparatory sequences is offered in Extract 9.1, where the teacher is about to observe dancers. The instructor directs dancers to exercises at the barre (line 1) but still has to provide information about the sequence at hand. She delays offering such information until she finds the relevant music piece. Accordingly, dancers move toward the front barre (near the mirror) but take the time for “self-grooming” (Broth & Keevallik 2014: 114) (fig. 1, Extract 9.1). It is only when the teacher utters “Plié” and gazes away from the phone (line 3) that they take position along the barre (fig. 2, Extract 9.1). Following this, the instructor starts the recorded music and takes an observational position and posture near the back barre. Instructing dance action Different instructions by the teacher or choreographer require different temporal and sequential organizations, multimodal formats, and recipient designs. Whereas

182  Chiara Bassetti Extract 9.1  Dance class, advanced

Performative Teaching and Learning  183 their purpose – prompting or correcting – makes a difference, the most relevant variable is constituted by the different instructables, hence correctables, of dancing. Instructables

There are three main kinds of instructables, concerning what to perform when – movement and tempo, e.g., “jeté is on five,” “développé starts during the turn” – and how to perform it, that is, (a) the modal properties of movement, i.e., its kinaesthetic details and dynamic, and (b) how to reach them, how to produce with one’s performing body the required visual and (kin)aesthetic effect (where to put strength and energy, what to imagine or think while enacting,2 etc.). Other dimensions, particularly relevant in rehearsing but which I cannot explore in this limited space, concern how to “dance together” (mutual positions, synchrony, etc., see Bassetti 2021: 69–75) and interpretation. The following extract illustrates the main components of how to perform. Extract 9.2  Company rehearsals 1      INS:     Più netto ¥que¥sto giro¥                     Sharper this turn         ins:                       ¥….¥turns- - -¥ 2                  Pensa proprio ¥alle anche (0.3)¥ alla direzione delle anche                     Think really to the hips (0.3) to the direction of the hips                                              ¥turns- - - - - - - -¥ 3                  Non andare con le g¥ambe e ne¥anche col busto                     Do not go with the legs and neither with the chest                                                       ¥Rleg tendu¥ This is where the expressive character of dancing is evident, and the praxeological validity of instructions can be appreciated: one can see in the mirror whether her instructed action (turning by starting the movement from the hips) actually engenders the desired outcome (a “sharp” turn). Whereas what and when to enact is easily instructable along with dancers’ performing, how to enact is only manageable that way to a limited extent, especially when it comes to corrections. Prompting: along-with instructions

Along-with instructions include prompts, which consists of what I call (a) saying the sequence, (b) counting the tempo, (c) mimicking rhythm – all verbal and vocal instructions, i.e., prompt talk (Extract 9.3) – and (d) embodied prompting. Saying the sequence amounts to naming movements as they unfold by uttering their names (e.g., “plié,” lines 2, 3) or other indexicals (e.g., “up,” line 3; “stretch,” line 4) which work as directives. This is mixed with the enunciation of beat numbers – i.e., counting the tempo – and of vocables (Feld et al. 2004), or “‘semantically

184  Chiara Bassetti empty’ vocalizations” (Tolins 2013), which retain no meaning but a rhythmic one, as they mimic and contribute to conveying the dynamic of proper enactment (e.g., “bum bum ta,” line 3; “wha::m,” line 4). Thanks to prosody, prompt talk as a whole serves this purpose.3 Extract 9.3  Dance class, basic 1      INS     Vai! E un do stai cinque sei sette stai Go! And one two stay five six seven stay 2 e un do stai cinque sei sette >e ↑plié< and one two stay five six seven >and ↑plié< 3 e un (.) e su (.) e >bum bum ta< plié and one (.) and up (.) and >bum bum ta< plié 4 e stendi e wha::m and stretch and wha::m Embodied prompting accompanies talk and consists, for instance, in moving one’s hands/arms so as to mimic the prescribed movements of the feet/legs, or in making noise (e.g., by clapping, by hitting one’s hand on one’s thigh) in order to mark the tempo, highlight an accent, initiate a suspension, or emphasize some other element of performing. Whereas the bodily conduct of an observing teacher fully consists in prompting, when she enacts her body behavior can be described as dance action. Enactment, however, is complemented by talk, which works as a descriptor and prescript of the action. Embodied prompting also can be employed. Extract 9.4 provides an example: the teacher is demonstrating a sequence while Extract 9.4  Dance class, intermediate

Performative Teaching and Learning  185 dancers imitate her and follow her instructions (fig.1, Extract 9.4); at a point, she partially abandons dance action in order to use her right arm for emphasizing the hip position characterizing the movement she is enacting (called “inch”). She does so both gesturally and sonically, tapping hand on hip (fig. 2, see arrow, Extract 9.4). Dancers clearly recognize this as “highlighting” (Goodwin 1994): nobody imitates the gesture. The teacher then moves her arm back to the initial posture for the “inch” movement and briefly stays – i.e., isolates – prior to repeating the movement and proceeding with the dance action (line 2). Making this feature of the movement conspicuous amounts not only to make it visually available via enactment but also to heighten the observability of such kinesthetic property while remaining bodily engaged in dance action. The highlighted property thus becomes performatively salient: visible and noticeable to be produced (see the difference between dancers’ postures, of hips and legs in particular, in fig. 1 vis-à-vis fig. 2 in Extract 9.4). Correcting: (re)specifying kin/aesthetic properties

Corrections can be produced along with, after, or by interrupting dancers’ performance. Along-with corrections are verbal (and gestural) actions produced in the interstices of prompt talk, as an intra-text, and mainly concern what and when to enact (Extract 9.5, line 2). Extract 9.5  Dance class, intermediate 1    INS  e fouetté du tre plié (.) e sei               and fouetté two three plié (.) and six 2            >sei Sa↑ra: il cambio di ginocchia è sei<               >six Sa↑ra: the change of knees is six< 3             sette e un du tre ↑su plié e giro                seven and on two three ↑up plié and turn Also corrections on how to move can be offered along with dancers’ enactment, provided that the modal properties at stake are easily conveyable to them. This happens, for instance, with the stable characteristics of academic steps,4 such as the openness of the knee in a retiré in Extract 9.6. The issue is one of recipient design (Sacks 1992, Vol. 2: 438) and concerns the degree to which the properties of a given kinaesthetic configuration are (expected to be) known to participants. When the configuration is conventional and institutionalized, its properties get described and prescribed repeatedly during dance classes (and in textbooks, video-tutorials, etc.) so that, provided the recipient has a minimal level of experience, verbal instructions are most often enough. “Open more” is perfectly understandable for intermediate level dancers practicing a retiré sequence.5 The teacher mixes directives with individual corrections (“open the knee Fede!,” line 7; lines 11 and 12) and collective ones (see talk within >…< in lines 2 and 3). Conversely, the modal characteristics of less codified or simply less known movement configurations need to be conveyed rather than glossed or brought to the

186  Chiara Bassetti Extract 9.6  Dance class, intermediate   1      INS     Vai! (0.3) Sette otto (.) destra dietro apri                      Go! (0.3) Seven eight (.) right behind open   2                 apri il ginocchio >di più sotto il sede:re<                      open the knee >more below the bu:tt<   3                 e passa la punta avanti >guardate che sia apertissimo<                      and move the tip ahead >see[ensure]that it’s very opened<                      [transcription continues]   7                Ancora! E su (.) coupé retiré apri il ginocchio Fede!                     Again! And up (.) coupé retiré open the knee Fede!   8                Apri apri (.) e passa in avanti: e sfiora::                     Open open (.) and moves ahea:d and lightly touches::   9                fino al coupé (.) >rimane apertissimo< e dita-collo                     until the coupé (.) >stays super opened< and fingers-instep 10                un e due (.) e sali apri sostieni sotto:                     on and two (.) and raise open sustain below: 11                >Cinzia sostieni avanti< Apri di più Sara:!                     >Cinzia sustain in front< Open more Sara:! 12               Apri di più Franci! Poi passo e                    Open more Franci! Then step and attention of dancers. This entails an activity framework and a multimodal format which can only with difficulty occur with the practitioners’ performance. Frequently, “how” correctables call for interrupting the performance or postponing the correction as they require demonstration6 – embodied instructions – and/or the manipulation of the dancer’s body, i.e., haptic, body-to-body instructions.7 There is another reason why instructions of this kind come after dancers’ enactment. As each movement configuration holds manifold properties – “abstract” moving is a syncretic, multilayered form of action – these properties are specified progressively, based on the correctables the teacher identifies in the dancers’ performance. Extract 9.7, continuing from Extract 9.1, offers an example: the teacher is observing dancers enacting, when she interrupts them and the music (line 8) to specify the properties of movement. Accordingly, dancers interrupt their performance (line 9) and direct attention to the choreographer (looking at her either directly or in the mirror) as soon as she takes a demonstration position, posture, and gaze direction (line 10, fig. 4 of Extract 9.7). Following this, the teacher brings about the correction: verbally, via demonstration, and with accompanying gestures (e.g., line 17, fig. 5, see circle). This also includes an instance of what I call dichotomous differential demonstration, an instructional format that is ubiquitous in the dance studio (Bassetti 2009a) and sport settings (Evans & Reynolds 2016). It consists in “bodily quoting” (Keevallik 2010) the incorrect version of the movement as previously enacted by dancers (line 18) and in contrasting that with the exemplar demonstration of the correct version (line 19). By comparison, dancers more easily recognize the minute details of rhythmical movement – another way to do highlighting. Indeed, in the considered example, although some dancers

Performative Teaching and Learning  187 (D3, D4, and D5) started to practice the movement along with the teacher’s demonstration (lines 17–19), other dancers will only attempt to adjust their enactment at the end of the differential demonstration. When is it the case that a correctable leads to an interruption rather than postponement? First, when the improper performance gets repeated by one or more dancers. This mostly concerns how-corrections, and its importance increases with the increasing level of advancement. Whereas repeated proper enactment is the way through which a dancer embodies a given movement (and globally, a way of moving), which can then be performed “automatically,”8 repeated incorrect execution bears the risk of solidifying it: making the error automatic or habitual. Second, interruptions are frequent when the mistake jeopardizes the exercise itself. This has Extract 9.7  Dance class, advanced

(Continued)

188  Chiara Bassetti Extract 9.7 (Continued)

mostly to do with study sequences and may regard what to perform when, or how to enact it. In the former case, the issue is quite simple: if I do not recall the sequence of required actions, I cannot practice such actions. On the other hand, when a property is deemed constitutive of a movement, by not applying the property I do not practice that movement. When such circumstances emerge as widespread among dancers, the teacher may interrupt them to recap the sequence or, as in Extract 9.7, to (re)specify a property. In short, interrupting emerges when correctable actions jeopardize embodiment directly, or as the expected offspring of practicing. On all other occasions, depending on the multimodal format the correctable requires, corrections are made along-with, in the midst of prompting, or ex-post. Co-participants’ instructive actions Fellow dancers’ conduct, visually available in the mirror, is also instructive, to see what to do when, and to comparatively assess one’s performance, possibly leading to self-correction.

Performative Teaching and Learning  189 Copying

Dancers’ actions instruct co-participants on what to do in the first instance, and/or when to do it, thereby helping each to build their own actions. For example, if one participant fails to hear a directive, or is unsure about “where” (at which point of a choreography) to start, they may consult the others’ positioning and posture. More often, dancers’ conduct is used to learn about “nexts” in enacting: what to perform next and when exactly to do that. In Extract 9.8, a group of dancers is practicing a piece of choreography the teacher has introduced that day; they enact on music while she observes (fig. 1). Knowing a turn was the next movement to be performed but being unsure about when to produce it, a dancer (D1) turns her head – a movement not prescribed by the choreography – to look at co-participants in the mirror (fig. 2); she freezes for a fraction of second (fig. 3) and starts turning when she notices the other dancers doing so, thereby producing the movement in slight delay (notice the difference between D1 and the dancer aside her in fig. 4). In Extract 9.9, a dancer (D2) is unsure about what to enact and “copies” coparticipants by looking at them in the mirror. When the sequence requires to turn one’s back to the mirror, D2 changes her head and gaze orientation to be able to keep seeing other dancers. She does so by turning her head to the right at the beginning of the turning movement (fig. 1) and then by looking left after having turned herself (figs. 2 and 3). Extract 9.8  Dance class, intermediate

190  Chiara Bassetti Extract 9.9  Company class

Performative Teaching and Learning  191 Also, notice how D2 gets back in synchrony by speeding up the movement which brings the arms from a V to a II position (fig. 2). Conversely, another dancer (D1), because he is early with the turn (fig. 1), stays still a little longer with his arms in the II position (fig. 2) before enacting the plié (leg movement) in synch with the others (fig. 3). This is an example of self-initiated correction. Self-monitoring and self-initiated correction

Self-monitoring and self-initiated correction are fundamental tools in performative learning, which is characterized by reflection-in-action (Schön 1983; see also Bassetti 2009b, who talks of reflexivity-in-action). This is evidenced by several aspects. First, individual corrections can work as collectively. [The teacher] asks us to practice independently and moves around providing individual corrections. These clearly work collectively as well. This is visible from the participants’ bodies, mine included, that modify their posture and performance almost in unison any time she offers instructions to one of us. (Fieldnote 9.1: Dance class, basic) Any instruction – verbal or not, thanks to the mirror – has the potential to heighten dancers’ attention toward a particular element of enactment, making that element performatively salient. Participants are brought to check themselves in that respect, to see if they are making the same “mistake” or can improve their performance. Second, based on self-monitoring and comparison, dancers themselves notice correctables in their enactment and ask for instructions. Federica asks the teacher for further instructions about a movement of the arms. The teacher demonstrates it while describing its properties: arms are “soft”, including hands and fingers, yet the movement is ample, far reaching and … palms must be visible! To me, this is an epiphany. I finally understand why I did not like my arms in the mirror, why they were not producing the same visual effect as those of the teacher. The “secret” is in the visible palms, hence the position of the wrists. (Fieldnote 9.2: Dance class, basic) Once again, individual instructions also guide the action of other dancers. Notice, moreover, how the way to generate the viewer’s impression sits at the core of participants’ attention and effort with their embodied performance. To paraphrase Liberman (2013: 48), the cogency of the instruction is grounded in the contingencies of performing.9 Third, fellow dancers’ instructed actions, easily available in the mirror, are themselves instructive and may tacitly influence performance even when the teacher is

192  Chiara Bassetti not enacting those actions. It is not only a matter of what they are performing when, it is also – comparatively – a question of the extent to which they move properly. In fact, to maximize the instructive potential of co-dancers’ actions, participants may rearrange their line-up with respect to the mirror (front or back row) based on situated competence. The choreographer asks if we did our homework (she refers to a sequence she introduced in the previous session). Embarrassed silence fills the room. When I nod, Fiona [a dancer and the choreographer’s assistant], who was absent last time, asks me to switch with her and “go in front.” (Fieldnote 9.3: Dance class, intermediate-advanced) Even beyond such rearrangements, dancers can select a situated model from among the surrounding moving bodies. Although proximity plays a role, favoring centrally positioned or “nearby” dancers, practitioners can choose, at any given moment, the best-performing body with which to mimic and to (try to) match their own movements. Although within each class group there are participants who get recurrently selected as models, as they are considered better dancers, situated modeling constantly perturbs such hierarchies. Embodied experiences with choreographic roles also can be relevant, particularly in professional settings. Peer-to-peer instructing The enhanced visual field of the dance studio allows co-participants to offer explicit instructions to one another, thereby supporting a collaborative component. These instructions can be solicited by a dancer – self-initiating correction – or the choreographer, or can be made available in the absence of any request. Unsolicited instructions usually emerge out of noticing another dancer struggling with a movement configuration or sequence, for which evidently – from a member’s point of view – she currently lacks understanding of what to do and/or how to achieve the required effect. This is visible in the dancing itself but may be made salient by the behavior of the struggling dancer, who may use the interstices between collective performances to repeatedly attempt a given configuration. A struggling dancer may also accompany her interstitial practicing with a peculiar kind of complaining. This is usually expressed non-verbally (e.g., grumbling) – although verbal complaining sometimes contributes – often apparently self-directed. Similar to self-talk and response cries (Goffman 1978), it is a display whose purpose is to defend one’s face (I’m aware I’m not performing well),10 thereby managing embarrassment, but which also works as an implicit plea addressed to everyone present and no one in particular. It is an open call – a “floor cue” (Goffman 1978: 804) – for somebody to perform and to communicate how to reach such a result. The one who can better determine who that might be is the dancer who volunteers to do it. That is why there is no pre-selected recipient. When this kind of floor cue is present, we can talk of implicitly solicited instructions.

Performative Teaching and Learning  193 In Extract 9.10, while the teacher is dealing with music, a dancer (D1, partially visible in the images) practices a piece of the choreography; this attracts the attention of other dancers, particularly D2 and D4 (quadrant 1) and later D5 and D3 (quadrants 2 and 3, respectively). Yet, only D2 and D4 explicitly instruct D1. As soon as she notices D1 who then stops moving, D2 suggests to her the Extract 9.10  Dance class, intermediate

194  Chiara Bassetti next movement in the sequence by embodied and verbal means (quadrant 2). The movement is then enacted also by D5 (quadrants 3 and 4), who, however, proceeds to perform the sequence on her own, with its original dynamic. D4, instead, just marks the movement (see the difference between her and D2 or D5 in quadrant 3) and, as D1 does the same, starts enacting the next movement with slower dynamic (quadrant 4, see arrow). A peer-to-peer instructing sequence has started, as recognized also by D2, who abandons her posture and observes for a while (quadrant 4), then starts practicing on her own (quadrants 5 onward). D4 goes on instructing with a demonstration and minimal verbal action. She systematically waits for D1’s execution of a given movement before producing the next one (e.g., quadrants 6, 7, and 9). As they proceed, the two dancers become more and more synchronized, yet D4’s enactment always anticipates D1’s execution. D4 never stops looking at D1 through the mirror (notice, e.g., the “weird” head orientation in exiting the turn that closes the sequence, quadrant 10). D4’s instructional conduct is also visible from her gesturing, which does not belong to the choreography (quadrants 5 and 6), just like the teacher’s gesture in Extract 9.4. Peer-to-peer instructing is present from the intermediate level onward and significantly increases during rehearsals. Expertise, self-confidence, and members’ interest in the overall quality of the performative artwork play a role. Formal and informal hierarchies, particularly within professional companies, also have an impact (mostly through some participants’ refraining from coaching when they think it could be taken as offensive). Though subject to other contingencies, what brings a dancer to self-select for providing instructions is their capability to properly perform and their grasp on how to do so. Notice that this is not always the case for the choreographer, who, having created and demonstrated a sequence, perhaps months earlier, does not rehearse it as much as dancers do, and while aiming for a particular aesthetic effect may not know precisely how the dancers can practically reach it: Emma makes a mistake in her pas de deux with Ann. […] They repeat several times, with many instructions by the choreographer and some interventions also by Vivian, who does the same pas de deux in Emma’s role but with Sara. Vivian’s contribution ends up being crucial for solving Emma’s problem with that movement. (Fieldnote 9.4: Company rehearsals) In short, many dancers may notice that a co-participant is struggling, and many may have good reasons for helping, but not all of them provide instructions. As evidenced in Extract 9.10, a second determining factor alongside situated competence is proximity: as dancers aim to bring about this interaction without disrupting the flow of the collective activity, they do so within its interstices; therefore, the more the two (or three) are close to each other, the easier it is. Similarly, when peer-to-peer coaching is explicitly solicited by a dancer, and she thus has to select a recipient, the latter’s proximity is quite relevant, granting the

Performative Teaching and Learning  195 opportunity to bring about interaction interstitially. However, choreographic role distribution, if present, guides the selection as an index of embodied experience: Ann keeps having a problem in enacting the lift with Emma. I see her grimacing in pain. […] Ann addresses Vivian, who enacts the same role as Ann but lifts Emily: “I keep burning my instep doing the lift, do you?”. Vivian shakes her head, catches Emily’s gaze and starts performing the lift with her while verbally illustrating to Ann what she is doing with her body. (Fieldnote 9.5: Company rehearsals) Choreographic parts guide selection also when the choreographer is the one requesting a dancer to coach another. These role-related solicitations are less likely to be regarded by members as establishing a general hierarchy among dancers but are instead oriented to solving the practical matter of how to reach the desired aesthetic effect. Discussion and conclusion In the augmented interactional space of the dance studio, almost anything can work as an instruction, and participants constantly exploit the co-present bodies as instructive resources (Table 9.1). Practitioners’ actions are not just explicitly instructed by the teacher, and at times by fellow dancers, but also by the developing gestalt contexture in which these actions occur, which includes co-participants’ instructed conduct. Visibility and observability are pivotal for performative learning. Instructions and instructive actions are evident, first, in the multimodal preparatory work of the teacher or choreographer, whose visible action is fundamental, alongside talk, to guide participants (Extract 9.1). The use of space (positioning), Table 9.1  Instructions and instructive actions in the dance studio

Instructor – dancer/s

Dancer/s – dancer

Instructions

Instructive actions

• Directives: what to do (and to dance) • Prompts: what, when (and how) to dance • Correction: what, when, and how to dance • Demonstration: (what, when, and) how to dance • Body-to-body: how to dance • Peer-to-peer coaching: what, when, and how to dance

• Proxemics (positioning): which activity framework • Bodily posture: how to look at what is next • Music manipulation: which activity framework; when to start • Enacting together with dancers: what, when, and how to dance • Proxemics and other non-dance action: what to do • Copying: what and when to dance • Comparing: how to dance

196  Chiara Bassetti artifacts (music), and body (posture) tacitly instructs and organizes the participation framework at hand and “isolates” instructive dance performance from the surrounding instructional conduct. In discussing “embodied preparatory sequences” to instrumental action in instructional interaction, Arnold (2012: 282–283) focuses on gesturing. In describing the preparatory work before the demonstration in a crochet class, Lindwall and Ekström (2012: 31) mention talk and positioning. Bodily posture is likely to characterize pre-sequences to actions that, like dancing, require full body engagement and are meant for aesthetic appreciation. Clearly, the visual availability of the teacher’s action and demonstration is also crucial, particularly for exemplifying how the dancers’ actions should appear. However, visible exemplary action is not enough to instruct performance. The qualia (cf. Peirce 1931a, 1931b) building up to the required aesthetic effect are to be made conspicuous, highlighted as constitutive of a given movement (Extracts 9.2, 9.4, 9.7, Fieldnote 9.2). From this perspective, the mirror not only enhances the visibility of the teacher, whose positioning and conduct when demonstrating or enacting moves maximizes precisely this potential, but it also makes the dancers visible to the instructor, allowing her to spot correctables in their actions – even when she too is enacting – and thereby orienting her in the progressive specification of movement properties. Kin/aesthetic details emerge as salient out of the contingencies of the evolving context and are then objectivated through corrections. These detailed instructive actions are produced with multimodal formats and temporal organizations which are differently designed depending on the different degrees of instruct-ability that different instructables – what, when, or how to perform – present to differently experienced practitioners. Whereas what to perform when is verbally manageable along with dancers’ enactment (Extract 9.5), this is only sometimes the case with how-corrections (Extract 9.6). More often, such instruction requires demonstration, even at the expert level and concerning both choreography (Extract 9.2) and elementary sequences (Extract 9.7). The different degree of instruct-ability that the “how” dimension holds also reflects how coparticipants exploit the situated production of one another’s visible actions. When copying, dancers are interested in what and/or when to perform, and the observability of co-dancers suffices, whatever the level of expertise (Extracts 9.8 and 9.9). When how to perform is at stake, comparison in action – hence co-visibility and co-observability – is crucial. When expressive activities are practiced, members must learn how to produce a visible impression for their audiences. The novice archeologist featuring in Goodwin’s discussion of professional vision (1994) has to learn to take a measure in the correct spot, yet the graciousness or sharpness of the measuring gesture is irrelevant. She does not need to attend to the aesthetic figure of her own embodied action; instead, the primary figure is the phenomenal world of the soil horizon in the archeological dig; she does not need reflexivity-in-action (Bassetti 2009b).11 In performative learning, on the contrary, self-monitoring is fundamental, and the co-observability, hence comparability, of instructive and instructed actions is paramount. The mirror allows dancers to collectively attend to the teacher’s visible conduct alongside the instructed and possibly instructive action by co-practitioners. It also

Performative Teaching and Learning  197 enables comparison during one’s own enactment. This way, the dancers notice how their performance falls short of the desired aesthetic outcome, thereby opening them to sources of improvement. It is not only the instructor who spots correctables, but also the dancers, who can self-correct (Fieldnote 9.1) and ask for further instructions (Fieldnote 9.2). Indeed, dancers continuously produce instructed actions which are available as objects of aesthetic evaluation to all participants, including themselves, and which may be instructive for fellow practitioners. Dancers are constantly monitored, monitoring and self-monitoring, all at once. The mirror works as a technology of intersubjectivity, allowing the simultaneous presence of self and other in its visual space. This is what enables performative learning, or to put it differently, the instruct-ability of kin/aesthetic action. Moreover, the spatial and performative organization of the dance studio fosters collaboration by establishing an interactional context where the focus of attention can easily switch – and continuously does switch – from centralized to distributed and from self- to alter-vision. Peer-to-peer instructing emerges out of noticing another participant struggling with a movement or a sequence (Extract 9.10), or out of grasping a floor cue in her visible conduct. As in everyday interaction (Kendrick & Drew 2016), the recruitment of assistance can be based on “trouble alerts” or “embodied displays of trouble,” alongside explicit requests or reports of difficulties (Fieldnote 9.5). Overall, the instructed production of kin/aesthetic performance works systematically: anyone may provide instructions, although the teacher occupies a special place; anyone’s action may be instructive, as long as observable; anyone may notice correctables, and self-initiated correction via comparison is always an available mechanism. Instructed actions are more than responses to explicit instructions, and they configure as progressive adjustments of participants’ actions that respond to emerging saliencies in the developing phenomenal field – which includes the acting self. Notes 1 To “mark” is to enact without fully dancing, to perform movement in a synecdochic manner, deprived of some of its properties. While saving energy, marking is used to recall and “serves a variety of communicative functions for the group and a variety of cognitive functions for the individual” (Saura and Kirsh 2010, 18). 2 On the relevance and role of the imaginative dimension in dance training, see Bassetti (2009b). Becvar Weddle and Hollan (2010: 140) discuss the use of “embodied conceptual metaphor” in dental hygiene training. 3 On the rhythmical talk employed to teach rhythmical moving, see Bassetti and Bottazzi (2015: 463–65). 4 Despite emerging out of classical ballet, academic steps are practiced and mentioned in other styles too. 5 Lindwall and Ekström (2012: 28) observe: “For someone who already knows how to crochet, the directive ‘make ten chain stitches’ might not be that much different from ‘can you pass the salt’.” 6 Dancers may sketch movements by imitating the demonstrating teacher, yet their attention in such situations is mainly devoted to observation rather than enactment.

198  Chiara Bassetti 7 Bateson and Mead (1942: 84–87) and Tarr (2008: 495) report on this practice in teaching, respectively, Balinese dance and Alexander Technique. Becvar Weddle and Hollan (2010: 128–34) talk of “molding”. In Western theatrical dance, this is a sort of “ultima ratio” for having the dancer understanding what is asked from him/her. 8 This is how members define actions that have been embodied and do no more require proactive attention to be executed. 9 Liberman’s (2004, 2015) work on Tibetan monks’ public philosophical debating – which, not by chance, he describes as “logic made to dance” (2015) – is more generally relevant to the study of the learn-ability and instruct-ability of performative action, including concerted formal reasoning. Liberman compellingly shows how the quickly alternated enunciations by the debaters are both instructing the co-participant’s contribution, thereby setting a rhythm, and instructed by such established rhythm. 10 Considering self-talk by children, Goffman notices: “An adult attempting to learn to skate might be equally self-talkative” (1978: 798). 11 This is not to say that aesthetics has no place in scientific practices. However, even beyond the fact that, compared to other occupations, scientists are only limitedly allowed – socially – to explicitly care about and discuss aesthetic issues, the latter concern the world they study and the forms in which they represent it (e.g., Lynch and Edgerton 1988); it does not concern, on the contrary, the aesthetic dimension of the scientist’s body or bodily action.

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10 Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work in Yoga and Taiji Practice Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell

Introduction Taiji and yoga can be easily connected, e.g., by the conjunction “and.” This ease of course belies that taiji (fully written out as taijiquan and also transcribed as tai chi chuan), as a self-proclaimed internal martial art, and yoga, often viewed as a meditative and spiritual practice, differ in many respects. Such differences can be found both between and within the various traditions of each practice: starting from the actual exercises, one will be expected to do up to the ultimate aims of the practice at hand. Nevertheless, expert practitioners themselves often overlook some of the differences, for example, when observing that “[i]n both the yoga and Taoist [i.e., taijirelated] traditions, awakening the inner senses is a central feature of the spiritual path” (Frantzis 2007: 320). In contrast, in this chapter, our conjoint view of taiji and yoga is not concerned with seeking commonalities of “internal affairs”; instead, we start from an investigation of commonalities in practice: the social practices through which taiji and yoga are taught and learned by practitioners. These include how experiences can be shared and evaluated on their correctness. As such, yoga and taiji produce social objects, world- and self-relations, skills, and meanings in interaction, which are recognizable to their practitioners and are viewed here as observable social practices. It is in this sense that we will investigate in both cases how the instruction of complex body movements and postures go hand in hand with specific ways of attending to those practices, as practices of one’s own and/or as observable performances. There are various types of work for which “doing taiji” or “doing yoga” are glossed by terms such as “concentration,” “visualization,” “breathing,” “mindfulness,” “moving from the center,” “letting go,” “following the practice,” etc. Furthermore, yoga and taiji work with and furnish even more ephemeral phenomena such as “internal movements,” “states of consciousness,” and “subtle energies” which, according to the theories of the field, become fathomable and bodily tangible by engaging in the methodic ways of the practice. It is these phenomena that we are summarizing with the gloss of “internal affairs” – in modern yoga described as the “spiritual dimension,” in taiji as “internal energy” or “internal movement.” Their ephemeral character notwithstanding, or perhaps exactly due to it, these internal dimensions of practice are seen by practitioners as crucial aspects, as bedrock principles, that ultimately characterize what doing yoga or taiji is all about. DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-14

202  Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell Such fields of activity confront not only novices with various practical challenges but also teachers and established practitioners when trying to explicate and instruct (tacit) embodied skills or transcendental experiences. In an ethnography of a Zen monastery, Preston (1988) describes the embodied sensitivities of “spiritual energy,” taught as competencies that are socially recognized but easily overlooked by scientific observers who are not acquainted with the relevant practices and experiences. Ken Liberman (1999: 55), in his seminal study of Tibetan Buddhism, even goes a step further stating that “the very topic of meditation can turn social scientists green in the face, to the point that there is a professional pressure to ignore it as a phenomenon.” This chapter will tackle the practical, observational, and (theoretical) descriptive problems glossed by “internal affairs” by considering video recordings of teacher-pupil interactions, partner exercises, and autoethnographic observations. Not only do we consider how yoga and taiji are taught and learned, e.g., how the “correct” posture for lying down or standing still is made accountable, and for whom. We also wish to go further and tap into how recognizable “ways of moving” and concomitantly instantiated shared realities relate to – or are even found to be wanting in – practitioners’ “inner experiences” as ongoing embodied work and social accomplishments. Our observations begin with practical challenges of instructing and embodied ways of enacting instructions, before elaborating on our own problems taking first steps into the “internal world.” We then proceed to more complex interactional sequences which shed light on how ephemeral phenomena can be practically embodied and socially accomplished. Finally, we revisit Garfinkel’s vernacular distinction between instructions and instructed action, insofar as it is instructive for, as well as explicated by, the cases at hand. Instructions and instructed actions Embodied skills and specific sensibilities present a practical conundrum that is especially acute when it comes to taiji and yoga lessons. The pertinent issue is then: How can they be conveyed and instructed? In what way, to what extent, and for whom are these “internal affairs” socially recognizable in order for participants to be able to identify, recognize, and feel that they are in fact doing what, for all intents and purposes, they are supposed to be doing and experiencing? In this sense, the embodied competencies and skills of yoga and taiji practice can be considered to be specifically “missing,” problematic, and hard to grasp for lay and professional sociological reasoning alike. Before we turn to this (also from practitioners self-professed) specific difficulty, it seems prudent to revisit Garfinkel’s (2002: 197–218) usage of the vernacular distinction between “instructions” and “instructed actions” to point toward and exhibit similar easily “missed” phenomena of embodied work in everyday activities. The “gap” between instructions and the lived work of following instructions may seem familiar enough, but Garfinkel’s argument about it is easy to misunderstand. The starting point of his argument is the intractably problematic nature of instructions. Just as is the case for rules, instructions are necessarily incapable of

Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work  203 conveying completely and definitively how they are to be applied and continued. The problem involves the infinite regress of rules for following rules, as well as the inability to anticipate specific varying circumstances arising in particular instances. Everyday instructions exhibit this problematic nature, for example, when participants are unacquainted with the practices in which they are engaging. Simply put, the recipe for baking a cake does not go into detail on how to separate the eggs or how to use an oven, especially not with the particular ingredients, implements, and facilities one happens to have at hand. At first glance, it appears that the work of following instructions, such as baking a cake, remedies the gap between instructions and actions; when no particular problems arise, the instructions seem to have been adequate. However, a point that Garfinkel makes, but which is easily misunderstood, is that describing practical activities as a matter of following instructions or rules is flawed when those accounts are taken as identical with their accomplishment. Describing social actions as rulefollowing does not account for – and in fact “invisibilizes” – the skillful and artful ways through which participants orient to and engage in the social organization and coordination of practical activities. Putting his finger on the “irremediable” and “unavoidable” character of such a “gap,” Garfinkel does not seek a theoretical remedy conjoining instruction and action; instead, he describes activities in a seemingly circular manner as finding in the “course of instructed action, […] what one could have been doing that instructions will describe” (Garfinkel 1992: 5). Ultimately, the instruction circle is squared by nothing less than praxeological validity – eating the cake, and its accomplishment as an accountable (observablerecognizable-describable) chocolate and not carrot cake. The point is to describe in detail how instructions and instructed action are empirically resolved in embodied social interaction and, thus, become praxeologically discoverable recognize-able, and report-able, thus appearing as a remedy each next time for the gap that could only be found via its practical solution in situ. It is in this sense that praxeological descriptions are part of what they describe and can be misread at a worksite as instructions for “the work of following which exhibit[s] the phenomenon that the text describes” (Garfinkel 2002: 126). This praxeological and empirical investigation is complicated by the issue that the embodied phenomenal details and properties involved in achieving coherence and cohesion in everyday tasks and activities are very easily missed. They are, as Garfinkel argues, ordinarily uninteresting (seen-but-unnoticed), taken for granted, and seemingly unproblematic. Therefore, Garfinkel utilizes breaches and perspicuous settings – such as passing while undergoing gender transition or tutorials such as wearing inverting lenses – as estrangement devices to create “trouble,” to make observable and inspectable just how dependent ordinary activities are on the transparent availability of everyday situated and oriented bodies. This then exhibits how “the bodies of practices” (Garfinkel 2002: 210), in their complex lived work of social coordination, are “chained to the hopeless embodiment of the parties to that setting” (ibid., 207). Due to its salience for the cases of taiji and yoga, the argument concerning embodiment specifically warrants brief consideration here. It can be described

204  Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell as being twofold: on the one hand, Garfinkel stresses the relevance of embodied work, involving transparent familiarities, sensibilities, and competencies, constituting everyday ways of orienting, recognizing, and coordinating actions that are easily missed in their relevance for achieving social phenomena, for instance, the phenomena he calls “looking’s work” (ibid., 210). On the other hand, what is often glossed in terms of “being-in-the-world” or “embodiment” also has to be considered in and of itself as an ongoing social achievement, situated in the social world of mutual coordination, cooperation, and social interaction. Moreover, this respecification of embodiment also becomes apparent in Garfinkel’s own use of “instructions” to guide his students to “misread” phenomenologists such as Gurwitsch or Merleau-Ponty: “Take Gurwitsch’s findings and then administer them, meaning, they’re the first segment of an instructed action, then go follow them” (Garfinkel 1992: 14). When considering the “phenomenal field,” Garfinkel asks, on the one hand, how the coherence of the phenomenal field and its properties and details – i.e., the sensual fields opened up in and through embodied, oriented actions – are produced and accomplished. On the other hand, he addresses the witnessable, describable, and instructable (re-)production of that field in everyday practices and, finally, considers how both sides are intertwined (Garfinkel 2021 [1993]; cf. Eisenmann & Lynch 2021). Also, in this regard, it is not only about an identifiable “gap” between Gurwitsch’s theoretical descriptions and the lived work but also about a social respecification of phenomenological “first person” investigations into a “third person phenomenology” (Anderson & Sharrock 2018: 4) of the vicissitudes and practicalities of the lived social world. “Use those details that he [Gurwitsch] offers, and go searching to find the cases he’s talking about” (Garfinkel 1992: 14). Taking this instruction as our mission statement, we now turn to our cases to empirically investigate what we have been talking about. Introducing “internal affairs” Instead of engaging with theoretical troubles concerning the notion of “following instructions,” this and the next two sections of this chapter build upon Garfinkel’s treatment of “instructed actions” with an aim to empirically respecify the practical and embodied troubles faced by practitioners of yoga and taiji. As Sharrock and Button (1999: 94) observe regarding the issue of extending rules: “The illusion of a particular problem in making the transition from the instructions given to their further application is compounded by a rather restrictive portrayal of the teaching situation.” In line with this observation, we aim to observe situated lessons in detail, ultimately challenging “confusions” or “illusions” – such as the belief, conjecture, theory, etc. that there are definite and finite rules, concepts, or instructions, on the one hand, and mental or internal operations of following them, on the other. Starting with such an alternative description, however, harbors the risk of moving too quickly and missing the empirical phenomenon “on the shop floor” (or yoga mat). In contrast, we will linger on the concrete dealings with practical intertwinement of embodiment and “internal affairs,” for which yoga and taiji offer perspicuous

Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work 205 settings, in order to investigate just how distinctions of “internal” and “external” are used, employed, seen as problematic, let go, or recognizably accomplished. The troubles at hand start and hinge upon the practitioners’ view of yoga and taiji as practices precisely aiming at something “internal,” “spiritual,” or “more” vis-à-vis other movement systems, martial arts or sports, as a yoga teacher elaborates while reflecting upon his teaching practice: Yoga practice, for me, is an inward orientation, even if the yoga teacher first wants the attention to be with the yoga teacher. It should actually quickly be taught that you can still orient towards what is happening, but that through the instructions you can go back into your inward orientation. […] Yoga ceases to be a sport at that moment when your attention goes inward. […] So, when I reflect on what I’m doing, it’s exactly this: How do I give the student the ability to engage in yoga […]. My experience is that as soon as you get a student to breathe, that is the beginning of the spiritual practice. For this yoga teacher, the conjecture that instructions cannot specify their application is a fundamental issue insofar as already listening to and, thus, following and orienting toward “external instructions,” does not account for the practice of “inward orientation.” More precisely, in his description, one needs to disengage from the instructions to a certain extent and instead use them as a vehicle to engage in the practice in order to be able to “discover” what the practice is. The problem and its solution expressed here do not pertain to a strict adherence to specific instructions, but rather they relate to how the competence and enskillment of attending to and getting involved in these practices can be taught and learned. The putative “gap” is conceived as being solved in the practice, in its use, and is described as successively reaching resolution once “practitioners start to breathe.” But assuming and hoping that participants were already breathing beforehand, this seems to be a rather nonspecific description. This issue is also invoked by the teacher, who instead stresses the dependence on a certain degree of pedagogic vagueness: Yoga practice was once meant to be a practice of discovery and I don’t want to impose too much on people, but I want to give them the chance to discover things for themselves […] Why? Because the manifestation of the spiritual dimension is different for everyone. […] That’s why the more precise the instructions of yoga teachers are, the more likely it is that they are completely wrong. While the solution is supposedly to be found out in practice, at the same time, the teacher does assume a “gap” between instructions and diverging subjective, internal, and individual experiences that are taken for granted. It is because of such a gap – viewed as non-resolvable through more detailed descriptions, but through “individually discoverable” experiences – that instructions are described more vaguely (that is, more flexibly, openly). This view on “subjectivity” may easily be interpreted as a source of the previously mentioned “confusion,” or also, considering the “vagueness” involved, be seen as practices of “mystifying” and

206  Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell “exoticizing” a supposed “authenticity” of “spirituality.” The problem is that such interpretations easily miss the work that discovering “internal affairs” entails, not only as idiosyncratic or subjective but also as socially recognizable and accountable phenomena, as we will elaborate further. “Let’s start working with non-physical energy”

For such investigation, it is prudent not to settle for accounts expert practitioners give about (yoga or taiji) practices, but to observe how they are actually dealt with in (social) practice. The same teacher, who stated in the interview that he does not wish to “imply too much,” opens his yoga lesson – a couple of hours prior to the interview – with a lengthy elaboration on “non-physical-energy.” His course, called “Back and Joint Yoga,” takes place in the early afternoon at a yoga festival in Berlin, Germany. Sitting on his heels, next to an assistant on a meadow, in front of around a hundred participants, he concludes his introduction and explains while leading with his stretched right index finger and rotating his arm in large circles: “All right, the nonphysical energy, which hasn’t taken any form, does need space.” Both his hands with wide stretched fingers come together on the side of his forehead indicating “space.” He then continues: So, that it can flow freely, because if instead it bumps into tight resistances, whether these are physical resistances or mental resistances, doesn’t matter, then it gets stuck, yes? (laughs) And then it flows in there, into this resistance (Figure 10.1a), and then, also, where it’s stuck will become more clearly visible. If there is space (Figure 10.1b), as soon as we unfold, then it can flow more freely and energy becomes more easily changeable, transformable. It will be easier for you to choose in what state you want to be in, mentally, emotionally, energetically, bodily. You don’t have to do

Figure 10.1  (a, b) Instructions, Yoga Festival Berlin, 2012.

Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work  207 much more when for example say ‘I need to move from a, b, c, d, e, f, g, to z.’ But, ah, (flicks with his fingers) that’s how fast it goes. Let’s start working with it directly, shoulder girdle, is a good possibility to free a lot of energy, yes. At the end of these explanations, the concerted physical practice begins with a stretch of the right arm. Beforehand, however, the teacher introduces rather demanding concepts such as “formless non-physical energy,” thereby indicating the assumed case-specific relationship between bodily practices and states of consciousness. He starts with a parallelism of “physical” and “mental resistances” and further differentiates physical, emotional, mental, and energetical forms. These differentiating adjectives are spoken quickly, rapidly listed one after the other, and in this form conveying more of an emphasis on holism and complexity. An important point this episode illustrates is how everyday metaphors – such as using consecutive letters of the alphabet for a series of events – and embodied gestures and postures are employed for translating and mediating seemingly “invisible” phenomena that become specified in the instructions as embodied and experienceable phenomena. The flow of “non-physical energy” is represented and bodily performed with wide circling arm movements. The “inner space” that this energy “needs” is represented by wide outstretched palms forming a visible sphere. Blockages or resistances are enacted via a huddled and contracted posture (Figure 10.1a), whereas the goal of “free flow” and “space” is represented by a posture of widely opened, outstretched arms (Figure 10.1b). Reaching for corresponding experiences is signified as arriving at “z” as a kind of “ahaeffect,” with a snip of the fingers, while the transmutability of energy is itself an equivocal metaphor, applicable both to the “physical” and the “spiritual world.” It is the body of the yoga teacher that functions – one may argue exaggeratedly for demonstrative purposes – as the medium and metaphor for translating “nonphysical energy” into everyday connectable and physical-material embodied correlates such as spatial dimensions of “tightness” and “width.” These are also topicalized by the teacher as becoming “more clearly visible,” e.g., when energy gets “stuck.” Here, the laughter of the teacher may also be seen as partially indicating the – literal – semantic stretch of such metaphors, bridging diverse phenomena such as “formless non-physical energy” concretely and physically “getting stuck.” Sitting on his heels, his upper body – especially the teacher’s arms and hands – stays in continuous motion in an abundance of gestural accompaniments of his speech. This is also pivotal in producing a typical yoga setting, a focused interaction situation, in which the deliberations and the body of the teacher build the center of attention. The gestural and metaphorical performance accompanying specific vocabularies can be seen as evoking and embodying a kind of horizon of experiences and meanings that prefigures and co-constructs the possible interpretations for participants’ own experience as they follow the teacher’s practice: a practice in which one is not only doing gymnastics but also supposed to be working with “non-physical energy.”

208  Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell With the announcement of such a “possibility” of releasing “a lot of energy,” the physical practice begins. The teacher introduces this by raising his right arm, nodding several times, while also verbally prompting the participants to join in on the exercise. The stretch is verbally instructed and physically demonstrated. The yoga teacher also marks specific parts of his body, e.g., sweeping with his left hand from top to bottom on his left side, thus indicating where the “length” is to be located. Furthermore, some “corrections” take place. On the one hand, verbally, such as when the teacher instructs, “to use the whole palm of your hand,” after having seen that some participants only grasped the arm with a few fingers; on the other hand, with intercorporeal corrections, i.e., through haptic touch, in this case performed by an assistant who adjusts the angle of the arm physically. These corrections will be investigated more closely in the next chapter, as they are salient for the social accomplishment of yoga and taiji practice. In sum, the execution of the posture is instructed by demonstration, verbal instruction, and possible correction. The exercise is specified in some detail, both anatomically, according to length and space in the chest area, the whole thoracic spine, and the shoulder joint, and in terms of the type of movement, which should be soft and light while at the same time exerting force. But also, other co-participants, lay and professional in varying ways, mirror the current exercise for each other. This is not only of relevance for the back rows, e.g., when the view of the teacher is limited or details are not visible at a distance, but also provides diverging and corrective comparisons, e.g., for comparing one’s own physical capabilities not only with “advanced” postures and movements of the yoga teacher. After stretching the left arm and right arm for about 45 seconds each, the teacher harkens back to his preface by stating: That’s the idea, that when the external movement stops, that is when it gets really interesting (laughs). That we let the forces continue to work there, where actually nothing more happens externally. So that internally a change can come about, for me, that we look that more space arises. In this case, above all, more space in the shoulder joint, more space in the shoulder joint, more space in the shoulder joint, more space in the shoulder joint. This conclusion of the sequence is marking out room for the experience of such a “space” on the basis of one’s own physical exercise. The shoulder joint is the place where the introductory remarks of the yoga teacher are supposed to materialize and become perceptible. How such a space in the shoulder joint and upper chest actually is to be experienced remains (to some extent) an open question also for the teacher and participants. The relevant competence of getting involved in the yoga practice requires refinement and differentiation of sensing and experiencing, which is introduced by the exercise but takes place in time, not only in the course of this lesson but also developed over years of continued practice. For this, we will now shift gears and cases to depict engagement in practice auto-ethnographically, describing how the differentiation of internal and external became interactionally and biographically of relevance for one of the authors in taiji.

Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work  209 Moving from the center? Passing problems during movement reassignment

Although the linkage of movement and “internal affairs” is similarly seen as pivotal in taiji practice, in the case of the taiji-practicing author of this chapter, a certain amount of ignorance, obstinance, or resistance to this linkage was initially at work. As an ex-professional ballet dancer trained in a rigorous daily regimen of balletic movement since the age of 11, a certain amount of proprioceptive credit seemed to be available to me when starting taiji lessons in 2006. The common hurdle of being able to pick up sequences of movement – known as “choreography” in dance, as “forms” in taiji – simply was not present, allowing me to race unproblematically through a few different forms, not having to bother with this strange “internal movement business.” However, some “internality” nevertheless crept in at this initial stage, in the form of a “discovery” of tension especially in my shoulders during so-called standing exercises. Such exercises basically entail what they “say on the tin,” i.e., standing still. While first attempting them, I initially took the teacher’s instruction to “relax” in this not particularly relaxing position as a cue to execute what I felt to be the corresponding actions: as a classically trained dancer, this meant ensuring that my shoulders were “back” and “down,” that my back was “straight,” and that my neck was not “strained.” Over time in both the sense of months of practice and literally, the standing time ranging from 10 to 30 minutes, it seemed, however, that a new form of “tension” was announcing itself to me, e.g., finding “room” in my shoulders to relax more only after several minutes of standing still, as recorded in my notes from the time. By 2008, however, my proprioceptive credit was completely exhausted and I had to face the fact that taiji practice in this balletically informed manner would no longer be “sensible.” Indeed, some palpable frustration with my progress was creeping in. Whereas in ballet practice comparing how one’s movements looked vis-à-vis others was a good indicator of how one is doing – executed, e.g., by quick glances at others easily facilitated by omnipresent studio mirrors – in these taiji lessons the aesthetic of one’s movements seemed to not be the leading currency. Whereas other practitioners – from the perspective of my strictly schooled balletic gaze – seemed to be muddling through movements, barely keeping arms and legs coordinated at times, I felt and got the feedback from teachers that what I was doing looked pretty good. Nevertheless, when I went up against fellow practitioners in partner exercises, who were from the perspective of my “kinesthetic elitism” proprioceptively challenged, any aesthetic finesse of my movements seemed to be for naught; indeed, I even seemed to be pretty close to the bottom rung of my class, if not the entire school, only able to beat complete neophytes. A pivotal moment in this conversion process from ballet to taiji occurred in an individual lesson with my school’s main teacher, Michael, in July 2008. After voicing some of my issues at the beginning of the lesson, I was asked to perform the main form I had now been studying for two years. According to the school’s curriculum, after learning the basic choreography of this form, I was only now being introduced to how each of its movements was to be “connected to the center” of one’s body. After performing a chunk of the form, Michael asked me to perform a single unit of movement

210  Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell

Figure 10.2 (a–d) An attempt at “Left Brush Knee Twist Step.” From left to right: (a) starting position, (b) weight shift, (c) twist with arms and (d) end position.

from it, a so-called “posture” itself containing a small number of movements often divided into different phases. The nomenclature of the posture in question, “Left Brush Knee Twist Step,” is a bit on the nose – without the metaphoric flair of, e.g., “Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain” (Fu 2006) – pretty much describing that the posture entails a brushing movement of one arm over one leg; during this brushing movement, a step is taken with the same leg as the brushing arm and the weight is shifted from the back to the front leg. This shift coincides with a twist of the waist (see Figure 10.2a–d). This offered a “perspicuous posture” since the twist provided a test of whether I was “truly moving from my center,” i.e., whether the movements of my arms and the shift of weight from the right to the left leg originated from the twist of my waist, or to be more specific, an area around three fingers below my navel; “the center” or the Chinese term for it, the dāntián (丹田). Moving in such a way would be in accordance with taiji movement principles – literally and metaphorically – central to the explicit aim of allowing the ephemerous, but ever-present energy or qì (氣) to “flow” in movement. In contrast, disjointed movement exemplified by the arms perceptively moving before anything else to initiate the twist would be considered a clear violation of this principle and an indication of one’s qì flow needing some more or less critical work on its plumbing. The apparent normative definitiveness and clarity of what the work of “moving from the center” entails as sketched out here, told from a perspective benefitting from many more sequences of instruction and instructed action, belies how, back in 2008 with Michael, performing this posture felt anything but clear, leaving me to wonder: “Is this really moving from the center or am I just turning my waist?” Upon completing the posture, these doubts suddenly seemed to become pressing, when Michael, who had been watching from the side of the room, carefully and steadily began to note in his sonorous voice that the “apparent visual correctness of the movement from the center notwithstanding” he did not believe that everything was “moving together.” With that, I felt nothing less than exposed as the “external pretender” I had perhaps secretly known myself to be, attempting to pass as a taiji practitioner by simply moving my waist deliberately in eye-service to my teacher audience. As a pedagogic remedy, Michael then offered the imagery of pushing against a wall while performing this posture, which, however, felt more like a quick fix

Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work  211 ad hoc, rather than an effective didactic means of conveying what moving from the center “really is.” I perfunctorily “pushed against a wall” during the twist step and the lesson eventually moved on. According to my notes and recollection, this teacher-pupil interaction left an indelible mark, illustrating to me that there was nothing clear about the work that is moving from the center and, ultimately, moving according to the principles of the “internal martial art” of taiji. Furthermore, with regard to my personal passing problems, transitioning from ballet to taiji, there was only fuel for the fire to be found in the taiji literature. First, it seemed to accurately predict my attitude to movement practice, observing that a transitioner “will be vexed at the lack of tangible indices of progress, which are easily recognizable in the external” (Smith 2003[1974]: 23). Second, and even more specifically, it seemed that such a moment of exposure was, from a taiji teacher’s point of view, almost inevitable with one teacher noting on his website why he always observed students doing forms to estimate their skill: And the reason for this is that anyone who is good at picking up movement and postures is able to copy anyone else to a certain degree and get the physical movement correct most of the time. A good ballet dancer for instance can look quite good at the main Taiji […] forms … well sort of. However, to the trained eye, it is only a representation of physical movement with nothing real happening at all. (Montaigue 2006) Overall, although my interaction with Michael may have been personally disappointing, given his criticism that I did not fully achieve “moving from the center,” with regard to the accomplishment of “internal affairs,” it can be seen as highly productive for the way it made tangible the (lack of) embodied work of “Left Brush Knee Twist Step.” Such interactions with teachers, movements, and taiji literature furnished me with the “embodied certainty” that it was work and not just a con job constructed around the vagueness to which “internal” can refer. The other side of the didactic coin here is that it illustrates how “internal” work can be made “externally” accountable by experts for practitioners, lay, and professional alike. Lastly, merging both sides of the coin, this episode shows how embodied work is made accountable and identifiable within the student-teacher interaction. Within this interaction, the more or less irredeemable vagueness of “internal” may be exactly why the term functions so well in the first place, offering a platform for soul-searching, critical instructions, and ensuing passing problems. The social and internal organization of haptic correction Teaching bodily corrections to teachers

Embodied instructions and intercorporeal corrections are keys for guiding participants into desired positions and movements, avoiding “incorrect” postures, and – as shown in the previous section – facilitating new experiences and sensitivities

212  Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell that are deemed necessary for the “correct” practice of yoga and taiji. This section offers a closer investigation of the social dimensions involved in the practical embodied achievements of such corrections. Yoga teacher training provides an empirical setting in which bodily corrections are not only used but also taught and thus explicated in more detail for yoga teacher candidates. In the following sequence, two experienced yoga teachers demonstrate corrections and bodily assistance for the yoga posture matsyasana (“the fish”), which then are practiced by the teacher candidates in groups of two. Teacher 1 (standing): then you have it very often (.) that the people (.) go into the hollow back ne (.) there we could now say again, mhh (.) so verbally correct and say uh (-) (Figure 10.3a) of the coccyx below roll in and you could also again give such an impulse with the hands ne, (Figure 10.3b) that you tilt the iliac crests in this direction ne? (.) that’s what it’s all about (2) The standing yoga teacher 1 begins with a verbal description, which, as shown in Figure 10.3a, is accompanied by a semicircular movement of his hand of 180 degrees to the right (see arrow) indicating the direction of the tilt of the iliac crest. He then (Figure 10.3b) positions himself above the person to be corrected in order to give an “impulse” with his hands in the same direction. “What this is all about” is quickly explained and briskly demonstrated by the two yoga instructors on the raised platform. However, participants face several problems when following the demonstration. First, directional indications are troublesome in this bodily orientation, since indexical formulations such as up and down, or front and back, usually refer to a standing “everyday” body posture. This is thwarted here by a twisted inversion in which one’s head is upside down and looking away from one’s body. Second, in the back bend a large part of one’s weight rests on the buttocks and arms, severely limiting one’s possibilities for manipulating the hip position. Third, the correction

Figure 10.3  (a, b) Fish and correction, yoga teacher training, 2013.

Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work  213 is a minimal rotation of the pelvis, which – despite the overly accentuated demonstration of the yoga teachers on stage – is (nearly) impossible to be recognized by untrained observers, even if captured in still images. Further, it is even more difficult to physically perform the tilt oneself, which will become evident in the partner exercise that follows. The correction not only requires a kind of “professional vision” (Goodwin 1994) – as an ability to recognize incorrect posture and follow instructions (Schindler 2011) – but also depends on one’s own bodily understanding of the quality of the movement, here the position of the hip and the accentuation of the backward bend in the chest area. The correction implicates the whole embodied orientation, the logic of movement, and refined sensitivities of specific embodied ways of being-in-the-world that lose their transparency, become problematized, and need to be reassembled in the work of becoming a yoga practitioner. The social practices involved, the forms of concerted activities of enskillment, so to speak, become apparent in the following partner exercise. Here, the yoga teacher apprentices are to practice the correction alternately and are asked to give each other feedback about “how the corrections feel.” The following images illustrate the embodied work of such feedback possibilities of instructed actions. The standing practitioner in Figure 10.4a has major difficulties, searching in vain for “handles” on the other’s body for possibilities of gentle and soft manipulation in line with the desired correction. After some time, the practitioner lying down comes out of the position, takes both of her hands, and leads them to her iliac crests (Figure 10.4b). She then lifts her pelvis from the ground to simplify the possibilities of correction. During a second attempt at correction, the standing practitioner interrupts the activity, comes to a fuller standing position, and tilts her own pelvis back and forth while following her own body movement with the touch of her own hands (Figure 10.4c). In this case, “learning” can be seen as an observable activity in social situations (Wiesemann 2000). These situations are not only about learning to correct others

Figure 10.4  (a–c) Partner exercise, yoga teacher training, 2013.

214  Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell but also about an engagement with the body of the other that allows for a mirroring with the medium of one’s own posture and movement capabilities, as well as for the discernment and recognition of “principles” and “logics” of movement. These practices of recognition and correction hinge upon a comprehension of one’s own body, the prerequisite enskillment which also takes place in the same activities. In a study of an experienced midwife teaching a trainee to feel a pregnant woman’s baby with her hands, Nishizaka (2007: 210) describes the intercorporeal organization of such activities, involving the “multilayered character of touching a touching hand.” A similar phenomenon of intercorporeal (Merleau-Ponty 1964) organization of interactional activity is at work here, in which relevant body parts and their movements become accountable through the reciprocal orientation of the two bodies and hands in the situation (Meyer et al. 2017). It also provides the social and intercorporeal basis of one’s own bodily perception that is highlighted in this case by the standing practitioner’s own search for an embodied understanding of the position and correction, while following the recognizability of her own movement with her own hands. Thus, confronting and engaging in the ingrained resistances of one’s own body becomes the object of intensive and continuous examination and modification. In the field, the correct bodily enactment of the fish is often viewed as a prerequisite for the “opening of the heart” and, thus, for experiencing the flow of energy in the “anahata-chakra” (heart center). However, for the unattuned body, the fish is a very unusual position, and for many beginners not only difficult but even uncomfortable. Lack of understanding, as exhibited in the partner exercise, and experiences such as discomfort are often translated into field-specific communicative interpretations, such as an “energy blockage” in the “heart-chakra,” which are supposed to be resolved by continued practice. In line with the practitioners, it may be argued that such interpretation prompts the “search,” but, turning the tables from a sociological perspective, it is exactly such embodied troubles and their recognizable embodiment in social interaction that become keys to the accomplishment of such “new ways” of experience and interpretation, as we shall see in more detail in the case of doing silk reeling in taiji (cf. Eisenmann 2022 for a more detailed discussion in the context of yoga). Silk reeling as a perspicuous exercise

The previous correction of the “Fish” illustrates the (lack of) enskillment of a practitioner who as a pedagogic neophyte is at first uncertain of how or even where to make contact with another’s body, even needing to refer back to her own hips to ascertain how a “yoga body” could work. In contrast, the following correction sequence from taiji depicts the work of a corrective professional. In this chapter’s previous visitation of taiji, the practitioner and perhaps even the teacher were left with a feeling of uncertainty not unlike that experienced by the prospective yoga teacher described above. Indeed, leaving aside the biographical idiosyncrasies of an ex-classical dancer attempting to pass as a taiji practitioner, this uncertainty is not merely an individual problem, but oftentimes is diagnosed by practitioners as

Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work  215 typical of taiji lesson practice, a common joke being that Chinese tradition holders would often placate their curious Western pupils with the “tendentious” (Garfinkel 2002: 197) answer that things would “become clear later.” This kind of difference in clarity of instruction even appears in the field as a differentiating factor between different types or styles of taiji, schools, teachers, etc. It is at this juncture where the taiji exercise from the Chen style called silk reeling comes into play because it seems to have been designed to bridge the practical gap by both attempting to make the style more attractive for practitioners and making the basics more clear for beginners.1 As Chen Xiaowang, the current tradition holder and inventor of silk reeling, recounts in person or in the documentary by Jon Braeley (2008), after the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, during which taiji practice was forbidden, the “basic skill” and primary mode of practice was simply a long form, i.e., a main sequence of movements which takes around half an hour to complete. As Grandmaster Chen tells it, while working in local government in the 1980s, an official asked Chen why his style of taiji had no “basic skills,” pointing to the issue that the form was too difficult. Thus, silk reeling was born, which Chen Xiaowang notes in a jab against the competition is “even more simple than Yang style taijiquan.” Simplicity of design notwithstanding, the silk-reeling2 exercises are claimed to be nothing less than “the essence of Taijiquan. All movements, exercises, applications, and techniques have their rationale here” (Silberstorff 2009: 122). Indeed, among serious practitioners, they often speak of the “depth” of taiji especially encapsulated by these essential exercises, and the Grandmaster himself is quoted as describing them as “[v]ery easy to learn, one morning. To go deep, one lifetime not enough” (Kinthissa 2009: 118). How these depths, which can be plumbed in silk reeling, are made accountable in lessons is illustrated by the following sequence. The scene was filmed on one of the final days of an intensive week-long seminar and does not even get into the “simple” movements of the exercise, but instead is a correction lasting several minutes of just the starting position (Figure 10.5a). The idea behind filming it was to attempt to record the type of correction which occurred in almost every lesson of this teaching tradition, be it during silk reeling, the form, or meditative standing exercises, and which for us practitioners seemed to be a clear differentiator vis-àvis the aforementioned “tendentious pedagogics” of “it will become clear later.” After setting up two camera angles, my teacher Frank told me to do a cycle of the exercise on my own. Upon completion, I was then told to “go again,” giving rise to my concerns about my right thigh already starting to ache and slightly shake, seemingly not completely rejuvenated from the lunch break. Watching the video a few weeks later with Frank in a café in Hamburg, it became clear that he used this solo section of the correction to appraise my performance, (re-)evaluating it in the café saying, “I do see two or three things that aren’t that great, but overall it’s okay.” Back in the lesson situation after two cycles, Frank, evaluatively primed, commanded, “Stop!,” upon which I automatically froze in the starting position (Figure 10.5a), awaiting his arrival. After slowly walking toward me, Frank then raised his

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Figure 10.5 (a–d) First correction phase. (a) Starting position, (b) hands placed, (c) first adjustment, and (d) “co-relaxing.”

arms purposefully like a surgeon before the first incision and then placed his left hand on my right hand and his other hand on my left shoulder (Figure 10.5b). Here, he then began to adjust the position of my hand, and, using his purchase on my shoulder to adjust the angle of my upper body, he “steered” me with the interplay of his hands (Figure 10.5c). Apparently feeling that I had been guided to a better place, Frank then, even visibly, relaxed his own body, as if transferring his bodily organization into mine (Figure 10.5d). This moment of “co-relaxing,” although only barely visible above by comparing Frank’s shoulders in Figure 10.5c with their position in Figure 10.5d, immediately leapt out at Frank during the café viewing, exclaiming: “Do you see how I am doing the movement as well?” For my teacher, this was indicative of his commitment to the “whole program,” of correcting “the unity of body and mind.” He added that it is not purely “a mental thing,” and also not only “a matter of the body”; “otherwise,” i.e., without considering both body and mind, “it is only a matter of demonstrating and copying and then no deep learning takes place.” In the moment of

Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work  217 being corrected, I myself was less aware of Frank’s “co-relaxing” efforts and more focused on the leaden piece of concrete my thigh was masquerading as, leading me to bite my lip with nerves that I might not make it until the end of the exercise. Nevertheless, it warrants mention that the video, or the still photos in the figure, cannot convey the feeling of surgical precision and lack of heavy-handedness in Frank’s correction, his all-seeing, all-feeling hands seeming to always find exactly the right spot to move me in “the right direction” with very little effort and no strain, only resistance from my unattuned body. In the correction sequence, Frank lightly tapped both my shoulder and hand (Figure 10.6a), both seeming to signal that the first phase of the correction was over, and also “setting” me in my correct(ed) position one last time, as one would press a model put together with still drying glue. Then, he broke contact with me, walking behind me to initiate the part of this day’s correction that felt most important and memorable to me. Standing behind me, my teacher literally got into the heart of, or more accurately: the hips of the matter, leaning over me slightly and grabbing my hips (Figure 10.6b). Perhaps because I was not immediately responsive – the leaden leg issue was not getting any better – he then also whispered, “Come up!,” whereupon he clearly moved my hips upward (Figure 10.6c). In the moment, I was perturbed by this correction, as I was very deliberately trying to follow the instruction of “sinking into my leg,” and this correction seemed counterintuitive in the way it was moving me in the opposite direction. Viewing the video, my teacher first offered a specific, practical explanation: “Look, when I lift you up, then I can really push you onto your leg, you know?” This signified how, by attempting to sink into my leg, I had committed the error of just bending my knees, rather than actually “getting into my right leg.” In the café, Frank summarized my mistake more generally observing that I had fallen into a common pitfall of focusing on external “absolutes.” Instead, learners such as myself should aim to bring “their hips backwards, that is, doing the opposite of what they’re trying to do […] relaxing the hip joint so that they can then internally get to where they need to go.” As Frank reminded me, this was nothing less than a defining issue of taiji practice, ultimately noting: “We are doing an internal martial art and not an external one. That’s why it doesn’t work on the basis of externalities.”

Figure 10.6 (a–c) Second correction phase. (a) “Setting the position”, (b) hip grab, and (c) “come up!.”

218  Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell

Figure 10.7  (a, b) Weight change. (a) Grip change and (b) slight shift onto the right leg.

After correcting my “externally” motivated – too deep – stance, I was then ready to be put back onto my right leg. Frank changed his hand position, one hand on my hip, the other on my ribs, whispering to me to “transfer” my weight (Figure 10.7a,b). Likely, the change of grip and verbalization were necessary because I was yet again unresponsive to previous, more subtle haptic signals to transfer my weight. Here then followed the pièce de résistance of the correction sequence: Frank shifted his hands, placing them both over my hips (Figure 10.8a). Probably receiving some resistance from me, he then whispered quietly: “Open your hip!” Upon uttering this instruction, his hands then performed a delicate and difficult to reconstruct twist with his fingers and a subsequent pushing-down motion (Figure 10.8b). Thus, this corrective movement took the new “structure” Frank had built in this starting position and allowed the weight of my body to flow into my leg to such a degree that it felt as if I were standing on Jupiter, subsequently, respecifying for me what the instruction of “sinking into my leg” could mean and the weight it could entail (Figure 10.8c).

Figure 10.8 (a–c) Hip openings. (a) Hands on hips, (b) “open hip” instruction, and (c) a new sense of “sinking.”

Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work  219 Only after this preliminary work in the starting position was Frank ready to run through the actual exercise to allow me to get an impression of what doing silk reeling could mean, informed by this embodied correction. This respecified stance felt more correct, but also highly tenuous, meaning it would prove difficult to not slip out of this new way of reeling silk and, thus, doing taiji (cf. Mitchell 2023). Conclusions in taiji and yoga lesson practice As the conclusion of the taiji correction sequence indicates, taking seriously the work of learning what “doing taiji” is can present practitioners with an arduous path upon which the end can often seem unclear. Luckily, taiji and yoga lessons provide ample time for such a search, both with regard to their duration and their iteration, e.g., from week to week. Here, lesson practice has somewhat of an advantage over us in that we must now conclude our journey through lesson practice regarding “internal affairs” and will not be able to meet in a week’s time to correct and respecify what we mean each next first time. However, already with this textual iteration we have attempted to demonstrate just how and for what these lessons present perspicuous cases. Yoga and taiji lessons visibilize and especially tangibilize the enormous amount of embodied work involved in the production of practical activities, social affairs, and everyday life. Pivotally, the work here revolves around a distinct conception of “the internal,” a category whose production seems anything but economical, but upon which the practices viewed here “essentially” rest. To recapitulate, our starting point was not the commonality of, but rather in, practices regarding these “internal affairs.” Via enacted verbalizations, e.g., setting the scene for a festival or autobiographical self-narration, and haptic corrections between prospective teachers, experts, and neophytes, we were able to illustrate the diverse resources employed in the work of their production: vis-à-vis “everyday resources” they take up all kinds of vernacular categories, such as “mind” vs. “body,” “superficial” vs. “deep,” “stuck” vs. “free,” bodily orientations such as “up” vs. “down,” “left” vs. “right,” anatomical knowledge such as “hips,” “chest,” “shoulder,” and embodied metaphors such as “pushing against a wall.” These resources are required for the comprehensibility and followability of the ensuing redefinition and respecification of “internal affairs” in practice, making accountable in “communities of co-movers […] what good movements should be like” (Sudnow 1979: 4). Seen in this light, the distinction between “internal” and “external” loses some of its mysterious aura as it necessarily becomes just another, albeit essential, part of the social equipment employed in the co-production of specific embodied ways of moving-in-the-world, and, thus, being-in-the-world in interaction. Nevertheless, it is in the development of these specific embodied ways of (co-)moving that the “specifically missing” element alluded to at the beginning of this chapter can be found. Viewing “internal affairs” in and as a social accomplishment reveals how practitioners are required to investigate their embodied ways of being-in-the-world in detail and with an unbalanced scrutiny that in the “everyday life” of “the absent body” (Leder 1990) remains unproblematically transparent and taken for granted in practice, although

220  Clemens Eisenmann and Robert Mitchell from the perspective of these cases in an obscure way. Akin to Garfinkel’s tutorials with inverting lenses, this “internal work” shifts focus to everyday embodiment and practice, breaching them and bringing into focus the everyday work of orientating in the world. Unlike the inverting lenses, however, the cases studied here aim not only to temporarily disrupt the world by turning it upside down; rather, they establish socially recognizable ways of “inverted” moving and their corresponding senses and sensibilities via social interaction. This is no simple undertaking in the taiji and yoga lessons described above. It requires verbal, haptic, and intercorporeal corrections, especially on the part of the field’s experts. The ultimate aim is to lead to the continuous (self-) examination of one’s own ways of moving and being-in-the-world, making observable the embodied work of what “doing yoga” or “doing taiji” is, thus, socially coconstituting bodily experiences as “internal affairs.” Notes 1 Taiji is generally practiced according to so-called styles often named after the families that founded them. The previous passage in this chapter described a posture from Yang style taiji, the most commonly practiced style worldwide, although other styles such as Chen taiji lay claim to being the most original form of taijiquan. 2 With regard to the exercise’s nomenclature, there are two competing explanations: one, that the exercise metaphorically latches onto the careful (human) work of pulling silk from a cocoon (Silberstorff 2009: 122) and, two, that reference is actually being made to the silk producer itself, i.e., “the writhings of the silkworm as it creates silk from within itself” (Kinthissa 2009: 116). Correspondingly, one finds two slightly different Chinese denotations of the exercise: cánsīgōng (蠶絲功, gōng, i.e., the work of the silkworm) and chánsīgōng (纏絲功, i.e., the work of winding silk).

References Anderson, Bob and Wes Sharrock. 2018. Action at a Distance: Studies in the Practicalities of Executive Management. Abington: Routledge. Braeley, Jon (Dir.). 2008. Masters of Heaven and Earth. The Secrets of Tai Chi Chuan. Empty Mind Films. Eisenmann, Clemens. 2022. (Spirituality as Social Practice.) Spiritualität als soziale Praxis – Zur Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit im Yoga. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter Oldenbourg. Eisenmann, Clemens and Michael Lynch. 2021. ‘Introduction to Harold Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodological “Misreading” of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field’, Human Studies 44(1): 1–17. Frantzis, Bruce Kumar. 2007. The Power of Internal Martial Arts and Chi. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Fu, Zhongwen. 2006. Mastering Yang Style Taijiquan. Translated by Louis Swaim. Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books. Garfinkel, Harold. 1992. Transcript of Garfinkel seminar, SOC 271, ‘Tutorial Problems’, 20 April 1992. Garfinkel Archive Newburyport, MA. Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Edited by Anne W. Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Garfinkel, Harold. 2021[1993]. ‘Ethnomethodological Misreading of Aron Gurwitsch on the Phenomenal Field’, Human Studies 44(1): 19–42.

Spirituality and Internal Movement as Embodied Work 221 Goodwin, Charles. 1994. ‘Professional Vision’, American Anthropologist 96(3): 606–633. Kinthissa 2009. Turning Silk. A Diary of Chen Taiji Practice, the Quan of Change. Oxford: Lunival. Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Liberman, Kenneth. 1999. ‘From Walkabout to Meditation: Craft and Ethics in Field Inquiry’, Qualitative Inquiry 5(1): 47–63. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: Meyer, Christian, Jürgen Streeck and Scott Jordan. 2017. Intercorporeality. Emerging Sociality in Interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, Robert. 2023. Ballet and Taiji in Practice: A Comparative Autoethnography of Movement Systems. Bielefeld: Transcript. Montaigue, Erle 2006. ‘Internal Movement, Looking Within’, edited by taijiworld.com. [Online; posted 20-November-2006; last accessed 29-June-2023]. http://www.taijiworld. com/internal-movement.html Nishizaka, Aug. 2007. ‘Hand Touching Hand: Referential Practice at a Japanese Midwife House’, Human Studies 30: 199–217. Preston, David. 1988. The Social Organization of Zen Practice: Constructing Transcultural Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schindler, Larissa. 2011. (Fighting Skills.) Kampffertigkeit. Eine Soziologie praktischen Wissens. Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius. Sharrock, Wes and Graham Button. 1999. ‘Do the Right Thing! Rule Finitism, Rule Scepticism and Rule Following’, Human Studies 22: 193–210. Silberstorff, Jan. 2009. Chen: Living Taijiquan in the Classical Style. London: Singing Dragon. Smith, Robert W. 2003 [1974]. Hsing-I: Chinese Mind-Body Boxing. Berkeley, CA: Blue Snake Books. Sudnow, David. 1979. Talk’s Body: A Meditation between Two Keyboards. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wiesemann, Jutta. 2000. (Learning as an Everyday Practice.) Lernen als Alltagspraxis. Lernformen von Kindern an einer Freien Schule. Bad Heilbrunn: Julius Klinkhardt.

Part IV

Improvisations and Subversions

11 Bricolage in Astronautics Talk-in-Interaction in the Construction of Apollo 13’s DIY CO2 Scrubber Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock

Introduction The Apollo 13 mission, and its attendant perils, is the stuff of spaceflight legend, providing perhaps the most famous example of ingenuity and problem solving across NASA’s mission control and astronaut teams. One peril dealt with during that mission was the rapidly increasing volume of toxic gases filling the astronauts’ lunar module (LEM) (the command and service module being unavailable due to a prior explosion in an oxygen tank and a need to conserve power), as the three crewmembers consumed oxygen and produced carbon dioxide (CO2) at rates unsustainable by the LEM’s CO2 scrubbing system. To support the astronauts, mission control rapidly designed an alternative means of affixing the square lithium hydroxide canisters (which absorb CO2 from the ship’s atmosphere) of the command and service module to the circular ventilation socket of the LEM using only the materials that the astronauts had on-board. Instructions then had to be read up from the ground by the Capsule Communicator (CapCom) for building this bricolage system, using only talk in the absence of other communication formats. This chapter analyses transcripts covering this moment of improvised instructed action, far outside of NASA’s typically tightly scripted procedural methods, to elicit an understanding of just how descriptions can be made to work under extreme circumstances and pointing toward the potential for ethnomethodological analysis to generate valuable insight for space agencies on the work of doing astronautics. Famously, Apollo 13 is NASA’s “successful failure” (Smith 2017); a missionaborting emergency threatening the lives of three astronauts was averted, providing NASA with much knowledge of unanticipated (though vital) aspects of spaceflight systems and missions. This is relevant to the present volume, as NASA were and are instructors of action par excellence, attributing their everyday operations and engineering and scientific achievements almost entirely to their innovating in what might normally be understood as an unremarkable (non-)technology; the checklist (Hersch 2009). The ubiquity of checklists to prescribe the practices of astronauts contextualizes the events captured in the transcripts we analyze, which demonstrate Garfinkel’s (2002) notion of instructed action – a pairing of instructions and the work to enact them – that formulates a “core topic for ethnomethodology” (Suchman 2007: 22). As such, an ethnomethodological focus on how instructions DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-16

226  Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock feature in the resolution of one aspect of the Apollo 13 emergency – the rapid construction of a system for removing poisonous carbon dioxide from the atmosphere of the ship – yields insight on how instructions are made, and made to work, ad hoc. Furthermore, this provides a markedly different account of the practical work of astronautics than space agencies normally pursue; one which is likely to be increasingly valuable to the organization of spaceflight missions of the present and in the future. NASA, Apollo, and Apollo 13 The Apollo 13 incident itself must be contextualized in relation to NASA’s Apollo program more generally. Apollo is a much-celebrated part of NASA’s history, due to the rapid progression of spaceflight technologies from sub-orbital and low-Earthorbital missions to leaving Earth’s orbit entirely, landing on the Moon, and safely returning. On the basis of this program of work, the first lunar landing (Apollo 11) was achieved in 1969. Though this is universally accepted as the high watermark of the Apollo program, there were six further missions planned beyond Apollo 11, largely organized around revisiting the Moon for scientific data collection and engineering research. However, only five of these post-Apollo-11 missions successfully reached their destination, with Apollo 13 – launched April 11, 1970 and crewed by Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise – having to abort mid-flight and return to Earth due to the explosion of an oxygen tank in the command and service module (CSM). Despite not landing on the Moon, Apollo 13 remains a significant historical moment owing to the dramatic circumstances around the oxygen tank explosion, and the incredible collaborative effort between the ground and astronaut teams to maintain the life support and flight systems of the ship and bring the crew back to Earth alive. Though the organization of astronauts’ activities on Apollo missions is characterized by preordained, omnipresent, and tightly prescribed handbooks to guide astronauts through any eventuality (Hersch 2009), the rapidity and seriousness of Apollo 13’s emergencies required a significant shift in NASA’s approach to generate and deliver new instructions to a crew who themselves were increasingly tired, ill, stressed, and suffering the deleterious effects of sleep and oxygen deprivation/ carbon dioxide toxicity. It is in this sense that Apollo 13 was a “successful failure” (Smith 2017), affording NASA much insight into the practical realities of writing, reading, and enacting handbook instructions. It is in the spirit of ethnomethodology’s “breaching experiments” (Garfinkel 1984), which point to the (sometimes instructed) organization of social life by examining moments where organization is disarrayed, that we are interested in Apollo 13. A rough timeline of events is: en route to the Moon (56 hours into the mission) a routine stirring of the ship’s second oxygen tank ignited some damaged Teflon wiring insulation, rapidly heating and pressurizing the highly flammable contents of the tank causing it to explode. The explosion also damaged the remaining oxygen tank and parts of the interior of the CSM (the main body of the ship, dubbed Odyssey) and sheared away other external protective materials (Williams 2016).

Bricolage in Astronautics  227 As oxygen was both used to supply the astronauts with breathable air and as a chemical component of their electrical batteries, this immediately created two lifethreatening problems: sustaining a liveable atmosphere long enough for the crew to return to Earth and maintaining enough electrical power for core systems to allow the crew to loop around the Moon, reorient the ship toward Earth, and follow a survivable re-entry trajectory. The three crewmembers were able to retreat to the lunar module (LEM, dubbed Aquarius) – designed to support two crewmembers for two days – to endure a four-day emergency return to Earth. A number of problems plagued the return journey, including restoring and rationing electrical power, withstanding the cold and wet interior atmosphere, and provisioning potable water. However, our focus is on just one mission emergency; the rapid design and implementation of a system for scrubbing poisonous carbon dioxide (CO2), breathed out by the crew as they normally respirated, from the ship’s atmosphere. Though the CSM and LEM each had lithium hydroxide canisters capable of filtering the air in this way that would in principle be sufficient for the duration of the mission, the unavailability of the CSM, coupled with the non-interchangeability of the LEM and CSM canisters, presented difficulties. As the LEM and CSM were designed by two different engineering firms, the CO2 scrubbing systems for each module were not tested for compatibility with one another – hence, though there were ample square-shaped lithium hydroxide canisters in the CSM, these could not straightforwardly be affixed to the circular ventilation sockets of the LEM. Consequently, finding a way to repurpose whatever equipment the astronauts had to hand to build and install a bricolage CO2 scrubbing system became essential – our interest here is in how that system, hurriedly designed and tested on the ground, finds its way up to the astronaut crew via a voice-only discussion over the radio with CapCom Joe Kerwin.1 The interactional work aboard the ship and between the crew and ground teams is captured by NASA as a procedural matter – for Apollo missions, NASA’s mission control was in more-or-less constant contact with astronaut crews and taperecorded all audio communications between the crew and the mission control through an Air-to-Ground channel. The talk captured is manifest through the particular communications setup aboard Apollo 13, whereby a crewmember would receive and transmit radio signals from ground through a headset and microphone connected to one of the communications devices placed in the different areas of the ship. Each crewmember did not necessarily wear a headset continually for various reasons – mobility through different areas of the ship, concentrating on other tasks, etc. – though in order to maintain a constant connection with ground at least one crewmember would do so. The recordings that capture these communications were also transcribed shortly after they were received, for NASA’s own data collection as well as for public relations purposes. As such, there are complete public records that detail the talk between astronauts and ground teams for Apollo missions and we relied on these transcripts for the present analysis.2 The analysis brings an ethnomethodological focus to these transcripts, drawing on the various ways in which the organization of the ad hoc activity (in the sense that there is no pre-existing training, handbook, or procedure to guide the ground

228  Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock or astronaut crews in building the bricolage CO2 scrubbing system) is manifest and displayed concurrent with its undertaking (Garfinkel 1984, 2002). The analysis is of an episode involving the delivery of instructions from ground to crew for building the rapidly prototyped bricolage device and the crew’s efforts to assemble it with the verbal guidance of the CapCom. The design and delivery of the instructions as a significant part of the action, rather than prior to and causal of it, make an ethnomethodological conception of instructed action especially apposite for describing the episode. The analyzed events took place approximately 90 hours into the mission over an approximately 70 minutes stretch on April 15, 1970.3 The Air-to-Ground transcript gives timestamps for utterances in days, hours, minutes, and seconds elapsed in the mission (e.g., the opening timestamp is 03 17 58 23; approximately a minute and a half before 6 p.m. on the third mission day) and features speakers CC (CapCom Joe Kerwin), CDR (Commander Jim Lovell), CMP (Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert), and LMP (Lunar Module Pilot Fred Haise). Constructing the device4 Ground rules, gathering equipment

The excerpt begins with CC, as Houston, contacting Aquarius’ crew (with CDR answering), checking signal quality in preparation for delivering the instructions for building the bricolage CO2 scrubber device (03 17 58 23). CDR appears on the open line again at 03 18 06 38 with the talk between himself and CMP that can be overheard by CC pertaining to arranging for CMP to get a headset and receive the instructions. CDR then addresses CC directly (03 18 07 46) to say Jack (the CMP) is grabbing his helmet/headset, providing a verbal update on what is happening aboard Aquarius whilst giving CMP time to prepare. At this point, CDR also proposes a method for CC to deliver the instructions from ground to ship – giving his own headset to CMP for the purposes of being able to listen directly to the instructions and copy them to paper as the first step. CC advances a counter-proposal on the basis of the pre-formulated character of the instructions he has to hand (which reflects their specific design by the ground team, the format of the instructions having been considered as the bricolage device was under development): The way I thought it might be best to do it would be to have you gather the equipment and let us talk you through your procedure while you do it. Now, maybe you could give Jack [CMP] the headset and – and – get the equipment together, and we’ll talk you through the procedure. I think it’ll be a little easier to do that way than if you tried to copy it all down – and then go do it. (03 18 08 43) CDR agrees and proceeds by requesting from CC the list of equipment required for the device; “I’ll just get it [the list] and give it to him and I can just sit here where I am” (03 18 09 11). CC agrees. Throughout this period, CDR remains the

Bricolage in Astronautics  229 sole speaker for the crew, advocating forms of instruction delivery that the crew would find most efficient. This also keeps a line of communication open between crew and ground, assuring CC that any talk will be heard by at least one crewmember. However, as CC is the only party with oversight on the instructions to be delivered at this point, some refinement of the suggested form is needed, and CC does this by reiterating the different memberships of the crew and ground teams (“we” and “you”). In this way, the mode of delivery for the instructions is established through the sharing of specialized knowledge (e.g., the role of the CO2 scrubber) and an emerging mutual situational awareness that is mindful of the particular communications context at hand (i.e., that it is impractical for a crewmember to use the headset whilst hunting for items across the volume of the ship). The mode of talk now established, CC lists the relevant equipment to CDR: Okay. I think the equipment you’ll need will be two command module lithium hydroxide canisters, a roll of the gray tape, the two LCGs, because we’re going to use the bags from the LCGs5, and one – one LM [Lunar Module] cue card – one of those cardboard cue cards which you will cut off about an inch and a half out from the ring. Now, I think that’s all we’ll need. Over. (03 18 09 17) CDR reads the list back to CC to open up opportunities for corrections and check for accuracy (03 18 10 28) – a piece of interactional design common throughout the episode as we shall see – and CC confirms, also adding extra information on the relevance of the LM cue card. (“If you’ll just cut the cue card, which is a handy piece of stiff paper the right size, about an inch and a half from the rings. Just cut off the ring holes, in other words, and you’ll have a card about 11 inches long and probably 6 inches wide, something like that.”) CDR can then be overheard relaying the information to CMP, who gathers the items over the next ten or so minutes. The provision of additional context for the LCGs and the LM cue card suggests a recognition on the CC’s part that the activity is one of constructing a “potter’s object” (Garfinkel, Lynch & Livingston 1981: 137) – an item whose nature is at the time unknown (to the crew), but which is gradually developed and revealed as the object is created. Moreover, the suggestion is that the crew will understand that the use of components such as the cue card is odd and requires contextualizing, e.g., compared to the lithium hydroxide canisters whose role in the device is obvious, and the tape which is multipurpose. Rather than leaving it for the crew to have the purposes of the odd items revealed only on completion of the device, CC explicitly alerts them that the bags from the LCGs are required and that the stiffness and size of the LM cue card are relevant properties. Just how these items may fit together remains to be established, though the crew are now briefed in enough detail to begin. Once CDR announces the equipment is gathered, he asks CC for guidance on how to deliver the instructions: “We have gathered the materials, and I can put Jack [CMP] on the headset and he can copy the instructions … do you see any need for – or should I copy it to give them to him, or do you think they’re too detailed?” (03 18 21 37).

230  Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock CC suggests CMP should take the headset to hear the instructions directly and outlines how he envisages the instructions will be best delivered, what specific task these particular instructions are designed to achieve overall, and detailing the first task to be performed: Okay. I’m ready to start into the procedure. When you answer me back, speak up – speak up into the microphone, because our downlink is pretty noisy. The first thing we want you to do, and we’ll do this on one canister, and then let you go ahead and repeat it on the second. So take one of the LCGs and cut off the outer bag. By cutting along one of the heat seals; do it carefully and close to the heat seal, because we may have to use the outer bag if we damage the inner bag. So go ahead and do that, and then we’ll do the next step. (03 18 22 50) CMP repeats an abridged version of the first instruction back to CC to open the opportunity for a correction if one were needed (though one isn’t) (03 18 23 37). The above quote from CC does much work to establish the form of the instructed action to follow. The instruction provides technical information on how to manage a noisy downlink, along with a description of the task at hand for constructing one canister first, as a test, before the second is attempted. He uses a limited palette of indexicals in these voice-only communications, allowing for adding additional detail as the task unfolds – for instance, CC specifies that cutting of the outer LCG bag close to the heat seal should be done carefully in order to protect its integrity in case it is required later. CC also provisions time for CMP to perform the immediate task. Although the cutting requires tools (a pair of scissors) that are not explicitly named on the list of device parts, CC presumes their availability, focusing on less commonplace tools and pieces of equipment featured in the task. Orienting to the familiar-strange

After approximately one minute, CMP announces completion of the cutting task: “Hey, Houston, Odyssey – or Aquarius. We’ve done that” (03 18 24 50), signifying an opportunity to proceed with the next instruction. CC requests CMP perform the same bag-cutting method on the inner bag of the LCG, and CMP copies the instruction back to CC as a check and display of understanding and then announces completion of the task component. At 03 18 26 22, CC’s next instruction is a matter of tidying up the workspace: “Okay, Jack. Now you can put the LCG itself; that is, take it out of the inner bag, put it in the outer bag, and stow it some place; we recommend U-1, but you can stow it wherever it’s convenient” (03 18 26 22). At this point, CMP copies the instruction not (only) to CC but rather to another (unidentified) crewmember aboard Aquarius, whilst himself remaining in the seat and on the line. That it does not matter for the present task where the LCG is to be stowed reflects a specific concern in zero gravity operation: if things are not tidied away, they may get lost and cause trouble later.6 Since it is the LCG bags that are relevant (rather than the garments themselves), it is also apposite for a different

Bricolage in Astronautics  231 crewmember to do this work as it is only indirectly connected to building the device; a task that CC has stated requires a single crewmember’s sustained attention. The following instruction from CC facilitates a mutual orientation to the lithium hydroxide canister itself: Okay. Now pick up one of the lithium hydroxide canisters, and let me describe which end is which. It’s approximately square on one – one of the vented flat ends, has the strap, and that’s the end we call the top, the end opposite we call the bottom. Is that clear? Over. (03 18 26 50) The elaborated description of what might, in other circumstances, be trivial details is here required to attune CMP to seeing properties of an object which might normally go unnoticed. The description has to render the object recognizable in the same way by both parties for subsequent instructions to do their work (cf. Smith 1978). With no visuals possible, verbal checkpoints (“Is that clear? Over.”) are provisioned prior to continuing the activity. CMP confirms his understanding with CC, which suffices as grounds to move to the next instruction. The ongoing accumulative achievement of a shared orientation

At this point, CC outlines the next step; taking two lengths of tape, each “about 3 feet long, or a good arm’s length” (03 18 27 37), to create two belts around the side of the canister with the sticky side facing outward so it can be used to adhere the device later. CC adds context, noting that the tape needs to be fixed to the device “as tight as possible. It’ll probably take both of you [CMP and CDR] to get it nice and snug” (03 18 27 37). CMP and CDR perform the instruction and announce its completion to CC (03 18 33 25). The step that follows involves CC extending the work to be done with the sticky tape: The next step now is to anchor that tape, and the way we want you to do that is to cut about a 2-foot length off the roll and then tear it lengthwise so that you have two strips about 2 feet long and about half an inch wide. And you’ll wrap those around the canister at right angles, more or less, to the tape that you’ve got so that it goes across the top and across the bottom; and when it goes across the top and the bottom, put it so that it’s outboard of the center hole and try to get it over one of the ridges between the screens, so that it won’t block the flow. Is that clear? Over. (03 18 33 30) Rather than read back this lengthier instruction to CC, CMP acknowledges receipt and indicates his understanding (“Yes, Joe. Very good.” (03 18 34 15)), proceeding to commentate his activities whilst doing them (“OK. I’ve got a cut length right here and we’ll tear it lengthwise … and I’m going to go around right here at this ridge all the way around at right angles and anchor it…” (03 18 34 22)).

232  Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock This gives CC opportunities to interject with corrections should the verbal accounting signify an incorrectly-followed instruction. CMP also requests a clarification as to the orientation of the sticky tape: sticky side up or down (03 18 34 46)? CC responds: “Oh, that’s [sticky side down] correct. I forgot to say that. That’s right” (03 18 35 05), allowing CMP to continue the task and announce its completion at 03 18 37 28. The next step is delivered by CC: The next step is to get the EVA cue card and use it to form an arch over the top of the canister; just tuck one short end under one ridge on the top the other one against the ridge on the other side so that it forms a rounded arch over the top of the canister. You see, Jack, what we’re going to do is slip the bag over this whole assembly and the cue card will serve to keep the bag from being sucked down against the screen. Over. (03 18 37 32) CMP then responds, “Okay. I got the idea” with CC adding extra detail, and CMP repeating the instructions back to CC, performing the operation with sidetalk to another crewmember (presumably CDR) and CMP then reporting back on the success of the operation in the now-familiar format. A similar unit of activity unfolds around the next step, which CC outlines as follows: The next step is to stop up the bypass hole, which is the hole in the center of the bottom of the canister; we want to stop that up because we don’t want to bypass the flow; and I forgot to tell you to get something to stick in that hole. We recommend that you either use a wetwipe, or cut off a piece of sock and stuff it in there, or you could probably even crumble up some tape and use that. Over. (03 18 43 41) From here, CMP acknowledges the instruction, talks with another crewmember (again presumably CDR) about cutting a section of his towel as a plug, and reports back to CC when the job is complete. The instructions leave open the particular objects (wetwipe, sock, crumbled-up tape) for stopping up the hole and thus attune to what is to be done with them. The delivery of all of these task components – the taping of the lithium hydroxide canister, the affixing of the cue card, and the plugging of the bypass hole – relies upon the astronauts’ capacity to make sense of the instructions in terms of what they are designed to achieve in the immediate situation. The availability of a shared orientation to make this possible has already been provisioned in such a way that where CC mentions properties of an object (e.g., “ridges”), it is assumed that the astronauts and ground team can see the same things. The checking-back of instructions also provides opportunities for correction and amendment should any be required (e.g., if the crew’s talk indicates a misunderstanding on the practicalities and purposes of the task at hand).

Bricolage in Astronautics 233 A point of no return

Next, CC announces the next step as one of containing the emerging device within the LCG bag prepared earlier. Notably, CC’s description gives the bag “ears” – “slip it [the bag] over the top of the canister, when you do that, orient it so that the ears of the bag, that is, the corners should stick out on the closed end – are oriented along the open ends of the arch, because we’re going to snip one of those corners to stick the hose in” (03 18 47 21). CMP copies back the instruction to CC, inviting CC to check CMP’s understanding: CMP: Okay, Joe. Slip the bag over the canister so that the arch is at the bottom of the bag and that the ears are along oriented along, let’s see – I guess it would be – would be at the sides of the arch. CC: Depends on what you mean by sides – over the – the open ends of the arch. CMP: Right, the open ends of the arch. Here, the orientation of the bag is vital, as one “ear” is to be cut for a hose to be fed through and tucked underneath the open face of the rainbow-arch of the cue card; if the bag were positioned with the ears facing the sides of the device/cue card, the hose-opening would end up in the wrong place. CMP’s ambiguous term “sides” therefore has to be checked by CC before continuing, and the importance of the bag orientation is amplified by the next instruction (03 18 49 20); to seal the bag in place with a further strip of tape. This taping operation denotes a point at which it is difficult to return from should any mistakes be made – something that the instructions are seemingly designed to mitigate, by prefacing the orientation of the bag explicitly beforehand. The next task is to remove the excess bag material that CC expects will be present (assuming/knowing that the object matches what is envisioned by the procedures at this point): Now there’s probably a couple of inches of excess bag sticking our [out] around the bottom of the canister. To prevent this from sucking in against the bottom screen, we’d like you to trim it off with the scissors, and when you’ve done that, we’d like you to cut two more strips of tape about 12 inches long or so, cut the – tear them lengthwise to get four pieces 12 inches long and one-half inch wide, and then use those four strips to secure the bag by passing the strips from the sides of the canister outside the bag around the bottom of the canister and back up the other side, and when you do this, just as you did on the top, make them go outward of the hole and in between the screens. (03 18 52 47) CMP compartmentalizes these instructions, first raising a question of how much excess to trim (03 18 53 42), then copying back the instructions on tearing the tape as well as clarifying the placement of the tape with CC (03 18 54 58). At 03 18 58 03,

234  Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock CC announces the completion of the device and moves on to the preparation of hoses for carrying scrubbed air away from the device7 – cutting the cloth sheath that encases each hose and separating out the two (red and blue) hoses contained therein. The conversational move – decomposing a single “hose” into the two “hoses” that comprise its construction – mirrors the instruction itself, re-assigning the former from “hose” to “sheath” and the latter as the “hoses” to be worked with: I don’t know whether this has been done already, but if it hasn’t, what you have to do is cut the outer Beta-cloth sheath down the full length of the – of the hoses and then also cut the rubber ties that secure the two [red and blue] hoses together and the hoses should come apart and the COMM cable should – should come off. (03 18 58 03) CMP begins this at 03 18 59 04, noting “That’s in work” to flag to CC to await a future announcement of task completion. Such an announcement is made at 03 19 00 52, and CC proceeds to instruct on the cutting of a diagonal hole in the LCG bag near the cardboard arch, into which the hose can be fed with the inlet in a down position, and then the hose and bag taped together “nice and snug.” CMP copies and can be overheard by CC invoking the assistance of other members of the crew to retrieve equipment (LMP) and affix the hose (CDR). The operation takes approximately 10 minutes, with CMP announcing completing at 03 19 10 26: “Okay. Our do-it-yourself lithium hydroxide canister change is complete. Joe, the only thing different is that our arch on this piece of cardboard is not big enough to position the red hose with the inlet down, and the inlet – The inlet to – to the red hose is lying on its side, but I think it’ll still work.” CC concurs – both parties now have a working device in their hands, despite the instructions evidently not having been followed in their fullest detail. CC interjects with a final step that he had previously omitted, but “which you [the crew] can do now quite conveniently” – taping the hole into which they stuffed a section of the towel so that it doesn’t fall out. To little fanfare, a completed device is implemented

As of CMP announcing that this has been done (03 19 12 28), the first of the two devices is complete, and casting forward to future related issues – configuring the hoses to circulate air properly, and scheduling the work of building the second device – becomes a relevant activity to pursue. Here, CC notes that the configuration of the hoses should be parked until the canister has had time to begin working (“which will probably be another 45 minutes or an hour” (03 19 12 30)), and in the meantime the crew should set up the second command module canister. CC also then flags the next distinct task to CMP beyond dealing with the lithium hydroxide bricolage: For your information, when you’ve got that done [built the second device] and if you’ve had your breakfast and so on, the next thing I’ve got for you

Bricolage in Astronautics  235 is a switch-configuration list for the command module, which will represent the – the powerdown, square-1 starting configuration for all our – our preentry checks. CMP checks with CC as to whether or not the first device should be working now. Since it is mounted on the hose, CC concurs that it should (though the configuring of the hose later will improve the flow through it), and CMP can then be overheard beginning to construct the second device off-radio. Discussion Though the relevance of the episode at hand as a case of instructed action has been covered throughout as part of our ethnomethodological description of the transcribed talk, there are several features worth headlining: how the logic and purpose of a task features in its communication and execution; how boundaries on the beginnings and endings of specific tasks render those tasks discrete-butinterdependent on one another; the management of the pacing of specific tasks and the interactional design and building-in of checks on understanding and performance at relevant moments; and the use of verbal descriptions as heuristics for task completion (e.g., ensuring a shared notion of where the “sides” of the device are through describing the visual properties of objects). Overall, what is apparent throughout is the sense in which instructions must be made to work, by people who are uniquely and adequately equipped to do so. As Suchman (2007: 80) notes, “The indexicality of instructions means that an instruction’s significance with respect to action does not inhere in the instruction but must be found by the instruction follower with reference to the situation of its use.” In this way, even despite NASA’s careful prescription and data/information gathering,8 it would never be possible to deliver a generalized set of instructions to the crew and have the crew straightforwardly apply them to their situational context – instructions “do not prescribe a determinate in-advance matching of situation and action” (Sharrock & Button 2003: 262), and the crew and ground teams met this occasion together. Ad hocing (Garfinkel 1984), then, is an integral feature of the instructed action on display; while much could be anticipated, there was equally much that could not and, moreover, did not need to be specified until occasioned: for example, the specific material for plugging the bypass hole, or the placement of the hoses to circulate freshly scrubbed air throughout the ship. This notion of ad hocing is not only relevant to a hastily designed bricolage system, but also because ad hocing is a feature of all instructed action: To treat instructions as though ad hoc features in their use were a nuisance, or to treat their presence as grounds for complaining about the incompleteness of instructions, is very much like complaining that if the walls of a building were only gotten out of the way, one could see better what was keeping the roof up. (Garfinkel 1984: 22)

236  Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock There is no better display of the need to account for the ad hoc aspects than the fact of the delivery of a set of instructions taking 90 minutes of CMP’s and CC’s focused collaboration – as the outcome is so high stakes and the ad hocing so integral, time and schedule-space is allotted accordingly. Ethnomethodology in space

At this point, it is useful to elaborate how a focus on instructed action is relevant in domains outside of ethnomethodology. The segmentation and marking of tasks, as outlined above, points toward the role and purpose of instructed action in the ways that practical spaceflight work is organized, without the need for an exclusively checklist-oriented focus (where checklists are taken as fully descriptive of the practical work required to implement them). Exploring how an instructed action approach might be factored into a domain where it currently is overlooked (e.g., the accounting of astronautics work and its organization) is, therefore, one way of drawing out the analytic value of our project. With this in mind, we have throughout sought only to treat our material descriptively, to make the features of instructed action therein intelligible with respect to the practices used to deal with a problem. We expect to develop this discussion in a future deeper investigation of the same materials to give a more generic depiction of the in situ segmentation of formulating and executing a task. For present purposes, however, the instructed action focus can conceivably contribute to how we understand the work of human spaceflight itself as carried out by space agencies (NASA, ESA, JAXA, etc.) currently seeking to deliver a program of long-duration and ever-longer-distance missions, where increased degrees of autonomy and self-sufficiency among astronaut crews become harder requirements.9 Even currently, International Space Station (ISS) research is exploring 3D-printing for future missions where damaged or missing items cannot easily be supplied from Earth, and “out-of-Earth manufacturing” (European Space Agency 2021, §11; also see Gaskill 2020) will become a necessity. Moreover, such technologies better utilize the expertise of astronaut crews, where technical and procedural information held by ground teams no longer reflects the situational context of environments as the crew know them: Typically the actual design work for out-of-Earth manufacturing would be done on the ground – but it is important that those on the ground have an accurate picture of conditions in space … Alexander [Gerst, ESA/ISS astronaut] gave the example of his Russian colleagues trying to apply plastic coverings to renew the internal wall surfaces of the service module, but finding that some of the shapes that had been produced did not match the reality after two decades in orbit, and had to be modified to fit. (European Space Agency 2021, §13–14) While it may remain possible for ground teams to develop prescriptive instructions and procedures prior to missions, the efficacy of those prescriptions is likely

Bricolage in Astronautics  237 to continue to diverge from the practice of astronautics as missions become longer and involve longer distances. As we have seen, when circumstances dictate a need, astronauts and ground teams are capable of working outside of the tightly prescribed checklists that normally characterize their practice – issues that NASA has sought to support in its long-standing social/human sciences research program.10 However, of this program, it can be argued (cf. Brooker (forthcoming) and Brooker, Moignan and Rodriguez 2021) that their approach (a) applies a scientific method to defining, explaining, and predicting human life and work, which is enabled by (b) a structural focus that construes human life and work as a set of intersecting variables (population size, calorific/energy requirements, time spent on a task, etc.) that can in principle be measured and standardized for comparison and experimentation. Our analyses and those of Brooker (forthcoming) and Brooker et al. (2021) suggest that space agencies are as yet lacking a means of recording and accounting for the lived work of doing astronautics and would do well to begin with developing qualitative (ethnomethodological) accounts of doing astronautics as part of their research agenda. It is concerning, then, that NASA and other space agencies appear to remain committed to the belief that a greater number of finer detail procedures (which seek to “fill in for” the indexicality/context-specificity of human life and work in space) can solve the problems that will be raised by long-duration and long-distance missions (cf. DeChurch et al. 2019; Jordan, Allcorn & Williams 2019). Though Mulhearn et al. (2016: 467) note that “NASA has begun to shift leadership operations away from a top-down command-and-control model,” the continuation of a scientistic variable analytic focus in their human research program does not sufficiently depart from the (social) scientism of their past. What we have seen above indicates there is much vital work that would remain invisible in this mode of accounting. As Schoonhoven (1986: 274) notes, “When tasks are nonroutine … as they generally are in space missions – centralized, rule-based structures are inefficient and often ineffective, as fixed rules are applied inappropriately to changed circumstances. Instead, discretion must be high at the level at which the unprogrammed decisions are required.” However, Schoonhoven’s (1986) suggestion for moving away from thinking only in terms of tightly prescribed checklists provides a generalized corrective to a problem of too much generalization, as if the point is that centralized rule-based structures are inefficient and ineffective as a whole (cf. Schmidt 1997 as proof of the necessity for our cautionary remarks). Our materials show routine engineering work addressing a small (albeit life-threatening) problem of the kind that arises from the need to endlessly apply systematic procedures in circumstances that cannot easily be conceptually or technically regularized, where the perpetual standard for practical conduct applies: good enough is good enough! Conclusion Ethnomethodology originally interfaced with Computer-Supported Cooperative Work because computational technologies had developed to where they could be networked as a basis for cooperative work, not least because different “applications” could be

238  Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock developed for different activities, organizations, and occupations. This instilled an increasing awareness that more would need to be learned about the work being done in order to shift the problem successfully addressed by Human-Computer Interaction: “how do you use a computer?” to “how do you use a computer to do something (e.g. automate business processes, share information)?” As a result of its interest in examining collaborative work, ethnomethodology became welcome in research labs and technology disciplines where it is now counted as part of a broadly identified “ethnographic” approach to the workplace. Ethnomethodology’s input offered more ready familiarity with the organized character of workplaces to those charged with designing technologies to support the work that goes on therein. It is on this basis that we advocate ethnomethodology and instructed action in the domain of human spaceflight. This chapter has highlighted various features of instructed action that can be read from NASA’s Apollo 13 transcripts – as noted, NASA’s (and other space agencies’) approach to social science typically does not capture the fine detail of just what work has to be done to enact instructions; an area that will be increasingly important as routine missions become longer and span greater distances from Earth. The above demonstrates that ethnomethodology, and a specific focus on instructed action, may be positioned as a useful alternative frame for investigating life and work in space. Rather than decry existing studies, our approach – recovering a moment of instructed action in space in close reference to the talk and work it comprised as depicted in NASA transcripts – points to just how and why these problems are hard (cf. Suchman 2007). Nonetheless, the ready availability of historical transcripts and other documents, such as astronaut diaries, film and photo of astronaut activities in space, and scientific/technical reports, makes fertile ground for ethnomethodology to contribute to accounts of how moments such as those outlined above were achievable. As Brooker et al. (2021) suggest and as, Garfinkel et al. (1981) pioneer, this can usefully begin by bringing the tools of social science to extant transcription corpora. The hope for this chapter is to provide a robust model of research that displays the value of an ethnomethodological approach to instructed action as a means of re-telling the successes of the past as much as helping narrate missions yet to come. Notes 1 The CapCom is a role integral to NASA’s crewed missions: a trained astronaut (Kerwin later flew on NASA’s Skylab II mission) who speaks on behalf of mission control, but who also holds contextual knowledge of the work of doing astronautics. 2 Digitized versions of relevant audio files are also available publicly. However, the audio processing required to render these excerpts legible has been prohibitive. As such, we focus only on NASA’s own transcriptions, though unapologetically because they are quite valuable. 3 The relevant transcript excerpts are available at the following address, or by request from the principal author: https://github.com/phillipbrooker/Apollo13_Bricolage. 4 An account of the episode replete with images is provided by Dür and Jones (2012). 5 We suspect this refers to liquid-cooled garments; the “underwear” astronauts would don beneath their pressurized spacesuits to help regulate their temperature during extravehicular activities (EVAs, or spacewalks) and other such tasks. On Apollo 13 at this point,

Bricolage in Astronautics  239

6

7 8

9 10

these would still be stored in sealed plastic bags and available for use here, as the crew were no longer expecting to carry out any EVAs (and this would also suffice as a reason for specifically selecting the also-redundant EVA cue cards to be used elsewhere in the system too). Though this is a concern in standard gravity environments too, the difficulties of finding lost items aloft are multiplied by virtue of their being losable across a full three-dimensional space; a common astronaut complaint is that you cannot expect to locate a lost object by simply looking on the ground around where it has been dropped (cf. Hitt et al. 2008). This is done so as to circulate the clean air through the ship as widely as possible and prevent scrubbed air from immediately cycling back through the scrubbing system before it has been breathed by the crew. One example of this is NASA’s omniscience with regard to knowledge of all items stored aboard the ship, such that an assemblage of identical backup materials could be used to design and test a workable device on Earth before developing the procedures to replicate it in space. For example, continued operations aboard the International Space Station, Lunar Gateway as a space station orbiting the Moon, settlements on the Moon, and ultimately settlements on Mars. Though covering a diverse range of topics/disciplines, this list serves as a concise touchpoint for NASA-referenced studies claiming to apply social scientific thinking to human spaceflight: Bluth, 1981, 1983; Connors, Harrison and Akins, 1985; Ehricke, 2017 [1957]; Harris, 1996, 2009; Harrison, 2001; Mauldin, 1992; O’Neill, 1974, 1976.

References Bluth, B. J. 1981. ‘Sociological Aspects of Permanent Manned Occupancy of Space’, AIAA Student Journal 19: 11–15. Bluth, B. J. 1983. Sociology and Space Development. Available at: https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/ seh/sociology.htm (Accessed: 27/01/2021). Brooker, Phillip. Forthcoming. Living and Working in Space: An Ethnomethodological Study of Skylab. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brooker, Phillip, Effie Le Moignan and Paola Castaño Rodriguez. 2021. ‘Living and Working in Space: Expanding the Human Factors Framework, The Sociological Review Blog. Available at: https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/living-and-working-in-spaceexpanding-the-human-factors-framework/ (Accessed: 22/04/2021). Connors, Mary M., Albert A. Harrison and Faren R. Akins. 1985. Living Aloft: Human Requirements for Extended Spaceflight. Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Scientific and Technical Information Branch. DeChurch, Leslie A., Ashley A. Niler, Jessica R. Mesmer-Magnus and Noshir S. Contractor. 2019. ‘Task Management in Space Multiteam Systems’, 2019 NASA Human Research Program Investigators’ Workshop Annual Conference, Galveston, Texas, USA, January 22–25: 1. Dür, Hermann and Eric Jones. 2012. ‘Building an Apollo 13 LiOH Canister Adapter’, Apollo Lunar Surface Journal, September 30, 2012. Available at: https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/ a13/a13_LIOH_Adapter.html (Accessed: 22/04/2021). Ehricke, Krafft A. 2017 [1957]. ‘The Anthropology of Astronautics’, Executive Intelligence Review 44(12): 3–7. European Space Agency. 2021. ‘An Astronaut’s Guide to Out-of-Earth Manufacturing’, European Space Agency, March 8, 2021. Available at: https://www.esa.int/Enabling_ Support/Space_Engineering_Technology/An_astronaut_s_guide_to_out-of-Earth_manufacturing (Accessed: 18/03/2021).

240  Phillip Brooker and Wes Sharrock Garfinkel, Harold. 1984. Studies in Ethnomethodology, 2nd edition. London: Polity. Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. Edited by Anne Warfield Rawls. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Garfinkel, Harold, Michael Lynch and Eric Livingston. 1981. ‘The Work of a Discovering Science Construed with Materials from the Optically Discovered Pulsar’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11(2): 131–158. Gaskill, Melissa. 2020. ‘How Space Station Research Is Helping NASA’s Plans to Explore the Moon and Beyond’, NASA, March 18, 2020. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/ mission_pages/station/research/news/space-station-research-helping-nasa-plans-toexplore-moon-and-beyond-mars (Accessed: 24/04/2020). Harris, Philip R. 1996. Living and Working in Space: Human Behavior, Culture and Organisation, 2nd edition. Chichester: Wiley. Harris, Philip R. 2009. Space Enterprise: Living and Working Offworld in the 21st Century. Chichester, UK: Springer. Harrison, Albert A. 2001. Spacefaring: The Human Dimension. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Hersch, Matthew H. 2009. ‘Checklist: The Secret Life of Apollo’s ‘Fourth Crewmember’, The Sociological Review 57(1): 6–24. Hitt, David, Owen Garriott and Joseph Kerwin. 2008. Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story. London: The University of Nebraska Press. Jordan, Gary, Aaron Allcorn and Tom Williams. 2019. ‘The Human Element’, Houston We Have a Podcast [Transcript], December 27, 2019. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/ johnson/HWHAP/the-human-element (Accessed: 24/03/2020). Mauldin, John H. 1992. Prospects for Interstellar Travel. San Diego, California: American Astronautical Society. Mulhearn, Tyler J., Tristan McIntosh, Carter Gibson, Michael D. Mumford, Francis J. Yammarino, Shane Connelly, Eric Anthony Day and Brandon Vessey. 2016. ‘Leadership for Long-Duration Space Missions: A Shift Toward a Collective Approach’, Acta Astronautica 129: 466–476. O’Neill, Gerard Kitchen. 1974. ‘The Colonization of Space’, Physics Today 27(9): 32–40. O’Neill, Gerard Kitchen. 1976. The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space. New York: Bantam Books. Schmidt, Kjeld. 1997. ‘Of Maps and Scripts: The Status of Formal Constructs in Cooperative Work’, Group’97, Proceedings of the ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, November 16–19: 138–147. Schoonhoven, Claudia Bird. 1986. ‘Sociotechnical Considerations for the Development of the Space Station: Autonomy and the Human Element in Space’, The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 22(3): 271–286. Sharrock, Wes and Graham Button. 2003. ‘Plans and Situated Actions Ten Years On’, Journal of the Learning Sciences 12(2): 259–264. Smith, Dorothy. 1978. ‘“K Is Mentally Ill”: The Anatomy of a Factual Account’, Sociology 12(1): 23–53. Smith, Yvette (ed). 2017. ‘A Successful Failure’, NASA, August 7, 2017. Available at: https:// www.nasa.gov/image-feature/a-successful-failure (Accessed: 18/03/2021). Suchman, Lucy. 2007. Human-Machine Configurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, David. R. 2016. ‘The Apollo 13 Accident’, NASA, December 12, 2016. Available at: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/ap13acc.html (Accessed: 22/04/2021).

Bricolage in Astronautics  241 Abbreviations CC/CapCom CDR CMP CO2 COMM CSM ESA EVA ISS JAXA LCG LEM/LM LMP NASA

Capsule Communicator Commander Command Module Pilot Carbon Dioxide Communications Command and Service Module European Space Agency Extravehicular Activity International Space Station Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency Liquid-Cooled Garment Lunar Excursion Module Lunar Module Pilot National Aeronautics and Space Administration

12 When Someone Walks Apart Instructed Action and Its Fragilities Eric Laurier

Introduction I’m up against by getting it done before the company comes, what does completeness, followability, sequence, correct sequence, local historicity (and the rest) come to look like. (Garfinkel 2002: 202) Now it’s a curious feature of the adequacy of local collections of people – and that means whoever just happens to be together on some occasion – that even when one is doing things like talking about something else, an initial issue is: What is it that’s being done about the current collection of people? (Sacks 1992, Winter 1971: 296) At the family home, Harold Garfinkel is on the living room floor assembling a chair. He has pulled out the instruction sheet, then tipped out the contents of the box, and, from the side, the voice of his wife warns him that he should complete the chair before their guests arrive. This scene, wryly established by Garfinkel, not so far from a husband’s misadventure plot in a sitcom, is instructive in its own way – that you should not try to assemble flatpack furniture when you are expecting guests. For me, it captures a particular scene of inquiry into instructions. The ethnomethodologist is inquiring alone, re-specifying a theoretical problem that besets the social sciences, from a practical problem, such as assembling furniture, doing origami, or wayfinding with a map. It’s a scene of apartness; Garfinkel’s wife is not there to inspect the diagrams and parts. Even though the guests establish the no time-out character of instruction-following by their impending arrival, they are absent. My ambition in this chapter is to bring us to a different scene of instructed action and actions with instructions, where each and several are acting for, with, and apart from others. A scene where instructed actions do not stand apart from those actions as instructive for the understanding and standing of each to the other. It is common in ethnomethodological studies of instructed actions to examine the local crew, staff, or gang, their worksite, and their technical expertise in giving and following instructions. An utterly familiar publicly organized, private DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-17

When Someone Walks Apart  243 institution is the couple, and Garfinkel was following furniture instructions as part of a couple. Be it officially married, or married in marriages of duration, cohabitation, children, parents, and so on, the couple is an arrangement of intimacies. Couples accomplish, and fail to accomplish, everyday activities which produce, constitute, and transform them as couples. The everyday thing I will inquire into in this chapter is having a day out together. One of the other things that couples expectably do is spend time with other couples, and days out are one of the occasions for couples to be company for, and with, one another. Couples are intimates within each couple and, between each couple, there are friendships in the particular ways that couples are friends with other couples. Their friendships are complicated on occasion by the reluctances and enthusiasms of one and/or both parts of the couple to be with that other couple and vice versa. They are complicated by the uneven intimacies between the couples, where one or two from each couple are close friends, and one or two are not. As I begin to sketch out these aspects of couples and their relationships, even though it is only four persons, two couples, the unit (the couple), and its relationships, when they are brought together in events, it makes for a potentially unstable imbroglio of desires. Each couple is a unit yet also has two pair parts (to recycle a term from the organization of talk), and each part is drawn upon in making sense of who does what to whom as a couple, or as part of a couple, or inside a couple, and what that does to the others as a couple or a part of a couple. Sacks (1992, Winter 1971: 291–317) analyzes couples’ talk among other group situations, such as friends, generations of families, therapy groups, and more. One of his interests is in the two-way street between the group in the organization of the turn and the turn in the organization of the group. Sacks has a further interest in the fragilities of talk in situations where there are multiple recipients and multiple relationships: … an interesting aspect of how that fragility doesn’t get burst is that they’re able to find people who will have a same circumstance to present and who, in accepting the one, set up a way of getting a second also passed. So that it seems that “we both suffer the same troubles,” “we both understand our circumstances.” (Sacks 1992, Winter 171: 312–313) Building on that fragility, Sacks examines what happens, in particular, when one part of a couple is apart from the group and they are talked about by others, as either the other part of their couple or their friend. Stanley Cavell, in his reflections on the comedies of remarriage, understands the value of friends and intimates through the slightly arcane term “helpmeet”: “someone to whom one can say, or from whom one can derive, words that express oneself, words in which to become intelligible” (Cavell 2005a: 50). What we learned from Garfinkel’s breaching of intimacies was that friends and intimates treat the breacher as up to something and up to something that likely threatens their mutual standing. As Cavell continues “you had better have some standing with me from which you confront my life, from which my life matters to you, and matters to me that it matters to you” (2005a: 50).

244  Eric Laurier Before we inquire into the difference that couples make for instructed actions, I will briefly re-establish how instructed action re-specifies the concept of instructions and their relationship to action. They are part of the push from ethnomethodology to get away from trying to understand “the phenomenal field details of phenomena of order” (Garfinkel 2002: 185) through descriptions, toward trying to understand phenomena through treating them as instructions. In taking instructions a step further, Garfinkel pursued orders found in trying to instruct others and in trying to follow instructions. He came upon other criteria than those for description, criteria that are distinct because their cogency, reasonableness, logic, and so on are praxeological. To ground the difference between instructions versus instructed actions, one of Garfinkel’s cases (which fits well for us here) is the difference between reading a map from the comfort of the sofa and reading a map in the midst of walking through the boggy swamp that the map is a map of. The map has a “different and lively sense” (Garfinkel 2002: 200) when we are following it as instructions to find our way through the boggy swamp compared to the familiar, docile sense it has when we read a map on the sofa. The power of this shift is to open up our studies to the massively available, usually overlooked, and distinctly messy, if not perplexing, worlds of following maps as the local work of orienteers running (Pehkonen, Smith & Smith 2022), ship’s crew avoiding reefs (Hutchins 1995), armies on the move, tourists finding somewhere for lunch (Brown & Laurier 2005), etc. Instructed action is a domain of order that is missed and missing from social scientific, scientific, cognitive, and many other studies of the formal properties of instructions (Sormani 2010). There is a tension between instructed action locating a subset of practices that do involve more or less explicit instructions and ethnomethodology’s alternate approach to revealing the quiddities of action. One of the problems with instructed actions is, then, that the imprint of instruction-following and instruction-giving falls across how we understand what people are doing. Even as it opens up orders missed by the social sciences’ conventional descriptions of actions, it locks us into the pairing of instructions and actions in the way that situated-action also does (not that Garfinkel created that term as a compound noun). Although Garfinkel’s studies of instructed actions might lead us to think that they are restricted to domains of action that involve giving or following instructions, both Macbeth (2014) and Bjelić (2019) develop a wider sense of instructed action, freeing it both from Garfinkel’s focus on textual instructions and from settings where forms of instruction are given or followed. By the germane example of one acquaintance greeting another, “we hear how a first greeting instructs, and does so in its production, without time out, to be heard as, for example, ‘I haven’t forgotten my grievance’, or ‘Where have you been?’, etc.” (Macbeth 2014: 304). Although he mentions greetings, Macbeth is primarily reflecting on workplaces and expertise where “the exchange is leveraged not from what recipients don’t know, but from what they do. Instructed action is premised upon, relies upon, our competence to produce, find, and make use of it. Both parties are engaged in its achievement” (ibid.). Even as he is responding to studies of workplaces and expertise, Macbeth is gently lifting inquiries into instructed action one remove away from Garfinkel’s emphasis on learning. Macbeth has brought us into the domain

When Someone Walks Apart 245 of grievances and greetings indexing the standing of one person with the other. Instructed actions become instructive as to what more a greeting might be doing to the other, between just these parties, in terms of their recent and recollectable history of intimacies and estrangements, quarrels and reconciliations, recognitions and evasions (McHugh et al. 1974). Macbeth’s first greeting is exemplary as an instructed action that “presume[s] the competence of the other to find in their production a cogent, apt greeting in return” (2014: 304). In doing so an exchange is accomplished, and we do think of greetings as being things that we exchange, and their hearability as warnings, reminders, civility, interest in buying, etc. is found in the other as enemy, friend, stranger, neighbor, street-seller, etc. There are, of course, as Macbeth is hinting, many other things that friends do, other than exchange greetings; things that rely upon their competence to produce, find, and make use of them. Sacks’s studies of couples, friends, and other groups of persons follow this same strand on what each one is hearable as doing to each other when they are, and are not, direct recipients of the action. Sacks’s concerns with couples delve into the quiddities of compliments and insults, ranging beyond the sequential organization of talk (Carlin 2020; Smith et al. 2020). He shows that when parties in a group produce compliments and also insults, there is another kind of fragility to their actions because the first party, in complimenting or insulting a second party, can so easily do something to a third party. The giving, receiving, and being party to compliments and insults, rather than instructions, are favorite objects for Sacks to examine in the quiddities of their use, because of the obvious manner in which they leave in question, for those present, what each party does to the standing of not just the direct recipient, but also to those other recipients as members of couples, families, therapy groups, and more (see also Bergmann 1993, on gossip). Turning to couples, on a day out, following a digital map and audio guide. It would seem that, in consulting a digital map and audio guide, there is, as the instructed action underlines, something to learn. Yet, whether there is a thing to learn on a day out with friends and (their) partners is easily a bone of contention. And the contention around learning from a guide or an app remains connected to the standing among those involved. The contention, or absence of it, is also part of coming to know couples, friends, and others, more or less intimately, where that knowing is not collapsible into epistemic matters. Members’ rights to know and evaluate the actions of other persons is bound up with whether they are related as acquaintances, intimates, distant aunts, or close friends and, then, further to how that relationship compares to further persons that they are speaking with (Raymond and Heritage 2006). In short, members are analyzing who they are talking to, about whom, and their relation to the person they are talking about compared to the others. Couples not walking together One of the things the “day out” as an event for a family allows is for the family to show, check on, question, and transform how things are with one another (Laurier et al. 2021; Tolmie and Crabtree 2013). In the event that I will examine, a pair of

246  Eric Laurier older couples are on a day out, walking in the hills, initially on a vehicle track, then on moorland. They are following the directions provided by a map and guide app, using them to find and learn about the barely discernible remains of a Roman fort. At different points during the walk, the two couples walk apart, then close together again. One half of one couple (Sean) walks off and continues to walk alone ahead of the group, and he does it several times, each time as its own singular accomplishment. In its recurrence, each has its own instructed action for the other(s) departed from and walked apart from. By their recurrence, they become a thing that is seeable in a different way from Sean’s departure happening just once, not least in finding it as someone doing this again for a next time, just as the repeated absence of a greeting becomes a thing distinct from it happening once. Doing walking apart is not the same as doing a walk-out from the set of a TV show (Llewellyn & Butler 2011), nor a unilateral departure from a car in the midst of an argument (Dersley & Wootton 2002). Each of those actions shows the potential drama of departing from a conversation on foot. Nor does Sean’s walking apart have the unremarkable character that departing does in group transitions from places and topics described by Broth and Mondada (2013). As we shall see, Sean does, nevertheless, accomplish his departures in the orderly and accountable fashion, that Broth and Mondada describe, as the topic closes each time and, by stepping onward, he attempts to close an activity. From my own studies of walking in the countryside with friends and family, and from the video collection assembled as part of studying following a map app, walking far ahead or apart in the countryside is not an unusual arrangement of the walking group (see Laurier et al. 2021). It’s one of the freedoms and pleasures of walking with others in the open countryside rather than on pavements in the city. As a routine thing, walking groups bunch-up, disperse, or walk in single file; these mobile formations are themselves reflexively tied to, and made sense in terms of, relations to the openings and closings of conversational topics and shared terrains such as fields, moors, forests, riversides, cliff paths, etc. (Keisanen, Rauniomaa & Siitonen 2017). The walk provides an occasion, and it is known in common as a convivial one (like dinner parties, dances etc.), where couples can meet other couples and where the couples can, through its practices, split and rejoin to talk with one another. Splitting and rejoining is part of the walk’s value as a resource for the conviviality of couples on a day out: who talks to whom can be easily switched, and to be convivial, it ought to be switched. Otherwise, should the couples keep to themselves, as two walking pairs, it diminishes the very conviviality of the occasion (see Raffel 2007 on the dinner party). As I’ve noted, there is more to this walk because the day out is around following the map and audio guide to find and visit an obscure Roman fort. There are two digital tablets, with GPS, that have the visitor app on them. Each couple has one tablet. Consulting the app is another practice that, in itself, is accomplished together, as a convivial thing, or to provide reasons, such as reconnaissance, for walking apart, which, themselves, emerge from and show the expectation of walking together as a group. In the varied arrangements of a walk, as a day out for friends, one member of the group may turn out to be the guide; one who is, thereby, in particular ways,

When Someone Walks Apart  247 responsible for organizing the interest and enjoyment of the walk for the others. For this walk, the app is the guide, and there is no host. No members of the research team are present, and one member of each couple is wearing a bodycam. Relatedly, the route does not belong to one or another of the walkers as it would if one couple were showing the other around their moorland. Yet, as we shall see, finding a route and taking a route does allow for acquiring and/or sharing ownership of that route, or the assessment (e.g., via a compliment) of it (Laurier & Lorimer 2012). The day out, as an organizational device, brings them together, as a party, under the auspices of spending time with one another, doing being friends, and yet frees them from the division of responsibilities that go with, for example, being hosts and guests at dinner parties. Walking apart 1

When we join the walk in its course, the two couples are on the vehicle track and are apart. One couple, Peter and Jenny, are ahead, and Sean and Tina are behind. Both couples have stopped to listen to the guide app. Tina holds one tablet and Jenny has the other. I am interested in this first event on the walk not just because Sean will walk away from Tina but also because what happens here will be explained later in the walk. At a transition-relevant point, Sean starts walking. The guide app has provided an audible instruction, delivered as a suggestion, “walk a little further along the track until we get to stop five” (on transition relevance, see Broth & Mondada 2013). Sean glances back at Tina and that glance is available to, but not produced to be exchangeable with, Tina (Figure 12.1, panel 2). It is a glance that would find her to be moving off not far behind him. Yet Sean does not slow his pace to help Tina catch up. As his walking continues, the gap widens. Sean is adequately following

Figure 12.1  Part 1 – Sean walking apart from or ahead of Tina.

248  Eric Laurier the guide’s instructions, yet his following, in its details, can then also be found to be doing something to Tina. There is a witnessable thing, which is witnessable in its orderliness, yet it provides for witnessing as more than merely orderly. Of course, Tina is not the only party to witness Sean walking ahead of them. He walks past Peter and Jenny and without pausing or saying a word. Tina says a few words when she passes Peter and Jenny. Sean’s walking ahead in silence is brought to a close when Jenny begins to talk to him. The talk could also serve to mark a transition to another activity which he will need to stop for (De Stefani & Mondada 2014). For whatever reason – and he may not even hear Tina’s pursuit of a transition – Sean continues to walk until Tina shifts to an explicit directive. Then he stops (Figure 12.1, panel 5). What might or might not be there to be heard in that “please” that succeeds the explicit directive and softens it, is a sense of how Tina and Sean are with one another. In the recording, I hear a hint, perhaps not of despair, but possibly disheartenment. Yet I am not intimate with this couple, so I am uncertain what Sean’s hearing is of Tina’s directive. Without further account from an intimate or becoming their friends, what their intimacy as a couple precludes is what I am entitled to say that an intimate could hear in Tina’s directive. An event like this is not only for Sean and Tina to find out, and check on, how they are as a couple, they are splitting apart and rejoining in the presence of others (Mandelbaum 2003). Moreover, those others as friends have the occasion to consider what was done to them by Sean walking past and then ahead of them. In the next part of the walk, Tina will return to what happened here to deal with Sean having potentially done something to the friends left apart for a next time, and this will be particularly fragile because it is seeable and hearable by them, as about Sean’s relationship to Tina, and to them. Walking off

After walking along two different tracks up a small hill, the group has gathered together to consult the guide app, this time by trying to establish where they are on, and via, the map interface. Sean will depart again and we will examine how he accomplishes departing and walking ahead of the group. It is neither unintelligible nor unaccountable, yet just what he is doing and what it might show about his desire to be with the group poses that problem for the group. Sean, on the basis of a consultation of the map with the other members, takes on the task of looking at the landscape to search for paths marked on the map (Laurier & Brown 2008). On, “so we want to walk” (Figure 12.2, panel 1), he pursues it as a transition away from consulting the map to commencing walking, even though Tina, Jenny, and Peter are not finished with the map. Taking a few steps in the direction of their destination, Sean provides a suggestion, “we’ll go down the hill then” (Figure 12.2, panel 3) which could serve to commence the walking. At this point, the others do not follow in his footsteps. Having failed to move the others from their discussion around the map, Sean continues inspecting the landscape. As a moorland without obvious landmarks, it requires scrutiny to discern potential features relevant to wayfinding. He times

When Someone Walks Apart  249

Figure 12.2  Part 2 – Sean departing and walking ahead.

his next pursuit of departure to Jenny’s transition relevant, “Shall we follow the sheep’s track” (Figure 12.2, panels 4 and 5), so that he is involved in not only setting off with them but also leading them. In their details, his actions are instructed by the map, they are instructed actions for the others to take, while the movements onward also show his desire to progress. The other three, by their very gathering as a three, produce a unit that is no longer divide-able in, and by, couples. Sean is departing from the three rather than Tina as his other part of their couple. By using his location within the group as nearest their next destination, he generates the “reasonableness” of his departure as leading off the group rather than leaving them behind. In that spatial categorizing of the walking group as a group, rather than as two couples, it is Jenny who next adjusts her location, in its details, not only to be beside Sean but also to form a second in a file following him (Smith 2021). While Sean briefly succeeds in initiating the resumption of the walk as a collective, the other walkers are not finished with their earlier topic after all. Peter extends the topic of diagnosing their map-following troubles, and they come to a halt (Broth & Mondada 2019). Sean’s walking onward becomes a clear departure from the group. It need not have been; absent is a glance back to check on whether he is being followed, or a pause to let them catch up. Sean’s departure without a glance is (or could become) an instructed action, on the condition that the others find, in the absence of a specific directive or other account, just what kind of departure it is. Sean’s recommencement of walking is adequate for practical purposes, and is found to be adequate by the group, for a few steps onward. One of the adequacies of walking as friends, as couples that are friends, turns upon the checking and mutual monitoring. Sean’s walking away is an emerging problem for the rest of the party when they see him continue to walk ahead. In its details, in the absence of him checking on whether he has left them behind, his walking further and further apart could then be understood by them as doing something to them. The sense

250  Eric Laurier of the action as instructive action, as in the midst of following these instructions, opens up considering what they can competently make of it. It could be judging them to be too slow in progressing the walk, or to be inadequate navigators, and it could be showing a wish not to be with them. It is, at least, ambiguous. It could even be accidental and excusable, yet we have already seen a pattern in Sean regularly walking ahead and apart, and so it is susceptible to what Edwards (1995) calls a “script formulation.” At this stage, no one has provided a script formulation. One part of that absence of dealing with his apartness being that the group has differentiated entitlements to the judgment as to what is being done to them by Sean walking apart. Avoiding injury – Who can make Sean’s walking apart intelligible

We have in the short series of events which I have presented so far, Sean walking ahead twice. In the second occurrence, the rest of the group members, one couple and one of half of Sean’s couple, remain gathered over the map to make sense of why they had previously taken two different routes. Although they could have followed Sean in a collective recommencement, they remain to examine the apartness of the previous part of their walk. Apartness and divided navigation are being treated by them as significant enough to require a halt and an account. There is, in this accounting of apartness, an occasion for sensitivity to the walk as sociable and requiring being together. They build the account in the instructed action of following the app and the GPS of different devices. The digital map was illegible in its cluttered audio guide markers and GPS was out of sync. In Figure 12.3, panel 2, Jenny, for one couple, explains having a separate route: “that’s why we came up where we did.” Tina, for the other couple, identifies the problems of “lots of dots all in one space” which leads to difficulties and problems with which Peter affiliates in

Figure 12.3  Part 3a: How Sean’s “move on” should be understood (Tina’s camera angle).

When Someone Walks Apart  251 adding “likewise” (Figure 12.3, panel 4). Meantime, Peter is the last to stop walking after Sean. In his walking, Peter had reformatted their spatial arrangement to potentially produce Sean and Peter as the front pair. Now though, he turns around to create a loose and stationary grouping. The three have stopped together, yet in an arrangement that retains an orientation to the departing Sean. The scene in Figure 12.3 is Garfinkel’s scene of the lived work of following instructions on and via a map in the midst of the walk. There is in it their finding of the shared problem “in doing the next one” which gets a “yes yes” from Jenny (Figure 12.3, panel 4). In finding the commonality, they are resolving their divergence of routes, not in disagreement with one another, or with anything else, but holding the map app and GPS themselves as accountable for their taking different routes. Meantime their settling of the previous apartness in their agreements is making Sean’s apartness on this occasion all the more apparent. As Sacks noted, “how it is that for the different collections of people walking into a room, the inspectable features of that room are a function of who happens to be with you” (1992, Winter 1971: 298). Accordingly, the accountable features of Sean’s having walked ahead again are inspectable features of the landscapes for Tina, as a function Jenny and Robert being with her, and for Jenny and Robert for being with Tina. When Tina, as one half of her couple, produces her story of the clustered dots, it also finds in its production a sense of the standing of these couples with one another. As Jenny (Figure 12.3, panels 1 and 2) provided her explanation of taking their own route, so it is that Tina now provides an explanation for the route that she and Sean walked. Each in their explanation wards off the inference that they were up to something else. The inference, which is there to be found in the relation of either couple toward the other, is that in walking apart from them, there was a lack of desire to walk in a sociable way with the other couple. It is Tina who provides the script formulation of their apartness (Figure 12.3, panel 5): “and Sean wanted to move on because he’s a walker.” The script formulation of his apartness is hearable as emerging from the navigational troubles that they had just been discussing. It is also hearable, in light of Sean’s once again having walked ahead, as a spatial display of their splintered walking group in Sean’s singularized distance. Tina could build up their apartness as Sean’s fault, using his absence to make a complaint about him “always walking off,” “being too impatient,” etc. We, and they, were witnesses to her having to be explicit previously as a confrontation with his inattentiveness to her voice and their shared task. Sean’s walking apart, again, becomes something which could be taken as, not so much instructive for their wayfinding, as destructive of their day out. When Tina formulates Sean’s apartness, then and now, as “he’s a walker,” she makes of it, something improper, though in a particular way. “He’s a walker” draws on her entitlement, as his intimate, because it accounts for his apartness by the alternate version of their activity together, the walking and navigating version rather than the socializing version of their trip. Alongside her entitlement to be the one that accounts for Sean, Tina is dealing with what Jennifer and Peter could make of Sean’s apartness. Available to Jenny and Peter, in understanding Sean’s walking as instructed action, is their couple status. As Sacks (1992: 277) noted, “applying, say, relationships that

252  Eric Laurier one has to the recipient, to find what’s been done to you.” Sean walked apart from his intimate earlier and she treated that in terms of his desire to walk and they have the same formulation available now. In response to “and Sean wanted to move on because he’s a walker,” Peter laughs as a competent hearing that finds a quick affiliation. The laugh nevertheless finds the double meaning in Tina’s “because he’s a walker” because the walk on the day out is more than a walk (Cuff 1994). Available to the three who are still together and accounting for their apartness is that Sean as a walker is oblivious to the occasion – that they are on a day out. Peter’s laugh shows the appreciation of how using the script formulation deals with what Sean has just done to them again, now, and his obliviousness. Let us return though, in Peter’s laugh as hearing and seeing, not just to what more there was of Tina’s instructed action but also as part of the other couple analyzing the scene from Jenny’s perspective (see part 3a [Figure 12.3]). In her instructed action’s embodied details, Tina steps slightly to the side and raises her gaze direction, as if just adjusting her glasses. One aspect of Peter’s accomplishment in finding Tina’s wit in her comment about Sean’s current absence is that it brings off their togetherness. Because he has one of the cameras on his chest, I can reproduce the earlier graphic transcript from his chest-cam which provides us with a proxy of his perspective. He (and we) can see how Tina looks up as she goes on to talking about Sean; her look then topicalizing Sean’s current remote position from the group; a look that Peter can see that Jenny is likely to have missed, with Jenny’s continued attention to the map (Figure 12.4, panels 1 to 3). Peter has available, as half of his couple hearing Tina, that his other half will not notice it and so he ought to provide the laughter. (For you, the reader, my circling of Sean in Figure 2.3, panel 5, instructs a seeing of a certain comic identification of the remote figure almost disappeared in the camcorder’s visual field, the camcorder’s lens perspective adding to that distant effect.) We are, then, starting to instruct ourselves in how to understand a day out and walking together and apart, as sense-making devices for its members as couples, and, through them, each couple’s attentiveness to their standing and how that maintains and transforms their relationships. In examining groups of couples and friends together, Sacks directs us to the alertness and careful monitoring of who is present when something is said and what can be done in an absence of one half of

Figure 12.4  Part 3b – Peter’s camera angle on Tina and Jenny.

When Someone Walks Apart  253 a couple (1992, Spring 1970: 278). Sean’s absence, because it is accountable here, leaves him vulnerable and yet we see how delicately Tina deals with his absence and that her care deals with the fragility around complaining or complimenting him to the other couple and what they can make of her relationship with him. “Because he’s a walker” is hearable as categorizing him intentionally in neither compliment nor complaint. Instead, it is building the explanation as an acceptance of him for what he is and as an instruction for making sense of his walking apart then, now, and in the next parts of the day out. Complimenting a part of one couple by members of the other couple

A few hundred meters later, Tina has fallen into last place and Sean waits for her to stand beside him. All the walkers gather together for another next time. Peter and Jenny closely examine the digital guide. With no delay, Sean moves off on a different route to walk apart, now, for a third time. Tina walks to join Peter and Jenny. After a brief discussion, they commence walking as a threesome, Tina lagging slightly behind Peter and Jenny. This is perceptibly, instructably, another occasion to understand Sean’s walking apart (he’s circled in Figure 12.5, panel 2). On this next occasion to account for Sean, it is Jenny providing an announcement, from checking the map app, that Sean is on the right route (Figure 12.5, panels 1 and 2). The word “actually,” at the end of Jenny’s informing, marks the reversal of their perception: from, presumably, seeing his walking as merely his own desire to move on (“because he’s a walker”) to finding it as following the route correctly. It is navigation-relevant news which Peter marks with his “oh” (panel 3). When Peter joins Jenny in examining the map, they collaboratively report on their error: they had “drifted off” and they’re “believing it” (“it” is the GPS dot showing

Figure 12.5 Part 4 – What complimenting Sean does (Tina’s camera angle, apart from panel 2 which is Peter’s).

254  Eric Laurier an erroneous location). Built on their investigation of the map, she then compliments Sean for his “spot on” navigation, and Peter agrees. While the way the other couple bring together Sean’s position on the landscape with the digital map is itself interesting, my focus remains on how that knowledge is to be sensitively handled in terms of the couples’ standing toward one another, which is constituted in and through the walking. The compliment is shaped to whom is present to hear and what they can hear it as: Peter as a partner of Jenny and Tina as a partner of the absent Sean. It was only a few hundred meters earlier that Tina, as the intimate, and the one who had already been walked apart from, provided an explanation of what was being done to them by his walking, that was hearable, and was heard as, more than categorizing him as “a walker.” In the presence of Tina as one who is analyzably more intimate, Jenny begins instead with her entitlement as a map reader to inform them that Sean is witnessably on the right track. Jenny’s “he’s absolutely spot on” is in a distinct register from Tina’s formulation of Sean’s tendencies; it is elaborated and celebratory. It attends to his instructed actions as following the map app’s instructions and not doing being anti-social. Compared to his earlier response to “because he’s a walker,” Peter’s “yes” is without the laughter that marks Jenny as ironic, or that there is a double-edge to this compliment to be found. In complimenting him and confirming, Jenny and Peter show how they stand as a couple in relation to Sean’s walking apart. They are saying it with Tina there to hear the compliment, because, of course, Sean is visibly present but, in his apartness, out of hearing range. Tina can find not just what the compliment does, in terms of how the other couple feel about what Sean has been doing to them, but also what their compliment does for her. As Sacks writes: “there is some kind of formality to the way in which relationships are used to find ‘what’s been done to me’ for secondary non-recipient parties” (1992, Spring 1970: 278), where what has been done to Tina as Sean’s partner is made sense of, retrospectively, in relation to their “discovery” of what he has been doing all along. In the face of its recurrence, Tina need not feel embarrassed by Sean’s walking apart: what is hearable for Tina is that their compliments now relieve any worry that may have been heard in Tina’s earlier explanation. Each time after Sean’s walking apart raises itself as a problem of its instructiveness for the partner and friends, the group carefully finds a way to return to their walk together. His recurrent departures do not become a crisis like the divorces and remarriages examined by Cavell (2005a) yet it remains a confrontation that raises a confusion for his wife and for the other couple of what, on this day out, his walking apart reveals about their desire or aversion to walk together as friends. The other parties could understand his walking apart as variously excusable, understandable, and grieve-able. Finding his walking apart to be any of those, the parties could be forgiven, or apologized to, by Sean if they have misunderstood what he is up to. Over the sequential course of the three occasions, each, as a member of a couple, deal with that confrontation. By its close, walking apart is something to be celebrated by finding it as an instructed action that is succeeding in following the instructions, where they are failing to do so. Dealing with him as an actor, acting within the limits of instructed action is, in that sense, a resolution to the problem of

When Someone Walks Apart 255 couples and friends in their confrontations, excusings, and forgivings that maintain or erode their friendships each and every time they are together (and apart). Confronting instruction-action Several times over, for the other walkers, Sean challenges their walking together with his departures from their work of consulting the map and app; he walks apart on in his own route. His walking apart has threatened the walking together as an occasion for talking together as the constitutional sociability of couples on a day out. It is not that he isn’t following the instructions provided by the map and the audio guide; his partner and friends use that following of the instructions to find a good reason for his departures and his distinct route. The app’s instructions and GPS are usefully inadequate for the others, via their maintaining their relationships to him, for avoiding pursuing what else he might be found to be doing. We have examined Tina’s account as, itself, instructing the other couple on how to see Sean’s walking ahead and that Tina, as Sean’s intimate, has the right to provide the script that excuses his departures: “Because he is a walker.” Her account provides recipients with neither known nor unknown “information”; it is not an epistemic matter, though, at times, recognizing where he is walking is. It is that Tina, in making what is available to be heard as more than an explanation, which Peter hears that way, discloses something which recognizes and perhaps builds the intimacy between her and the other couple. In these asides are the makings of intimacies. Hearable in the other couple’s celebration of Sean’s wayfinding is the sustaining of their good standing toward him, which is a sustaining of their standing with her. For the couple, for each half for the other, they are there to figure out the minor injuries that could be seen to be done by the instructed actions of their intimate, injuries to themselves and to others. As helpmeets, they are there to confront one another around the person whose actions might present trouble, awkwardness, or tactlessness; to make their actions more than intelligible (Cavell 2005a). It is not just the other intimate in the couple, as a helpmeet, that finds, in his apartness, Sean to be Sean, the other couple does too. Sean’s very absence from the conversations is the arrangement that allows them to avoid the confrontations of providing acceptable justifications for his walking apart and walking on his own route, rather than on a collectively agreed route (Sacks 1992). Yet we can also consider what more Sean does in his walking ahead, not so much in instructing as in confronting them for not having followed his instructed action, and instead staying with their map discussion and continuing to follow the map. They could then find themselves to be dawdling, sticking to their incorrect route and failing to find the way ahead in the map. By reflecting on what went wrong previously, Jenny’s “discovery” before complimenting Sean recasts his wandering off as just that kind of confrontation with their wayfinding. Instructed actions, while providing an alternate to conventional descriptions of action in their radical sufficiency, in their unique adequacy, in that very moment of being detailed and being all that is needed to be intelligible, draw us into a restricted realm of action. We stay in the room upstairs with Garfinkel, with the door

256  Eric Laurier closed on the couples’ occasion, even while feeling the pressure to follow those instructions before the guests arrive. Instructed actions risk circumscribing actions with organizational things, with projects, with what we can learn, and with contingencies of worksites. Macbeth drew upon Garfinkel to show us that the response “I do” to a wedding vow is hearable as more than Austin’s performance of the action of marrying. In drawing upon both Sacks’s (1992) and Cavell’s (2005b) consideration of the fragility of actions done between and within couples and friendships, we find the insufficiencies of instructed action. It is perfectly in keeping with EMCA conceptions of action that the recognition of what is being done about their companions by each instructed action is adequately unintelligible to its producers. This is not to argue that the person is a dupe or a cultural dope – a shadow puppet for a sociologist’s theory or a contextual, ideological, or cognitive explanation. Instead, an instructed action involving intimates and their intimacy, their friends and their friendships, and other relationships, takes their lived and living personal relationships as essential to making their actions intelligible and as more than matters of epistemics and more than their intelligibility; as actions through which intimates have access to what Raffel (2013) calls their “innermost” and what we might call soul or character. This sense of intimacies and friendships acknowledges that each person involved will need help from friends in finding what they are in what they are doing, not just to those others present (Sacks 1992) but also to themselves, because, by what they do to those who know them (again, not in an epistemic register), they reveal desires and confusions over desires and aversions in as much as they reveal reasons (Cavell 2005b). It was not as though Garfinkel ever guaranteed how instructed actions would be taken, could be taken, or ought to be taken, but that he was simply less concerned with worlds built upon understandings. Worlds where others would be figuring actions out as instructive in terms of what was done to them as sometimes justifying that standing, sometimes relying on that standing, sometimes sustaining it, and sometimes eroding it. References Bergmann, Jörg R. 1993. Discreet Indiscretions. New York: Walter de Gruyter. Bjelić, Dušan. 2019. ‘“Hearability” Versus “Hearership”: Comparing Garfinkel’s and Schegloff’s Accounts of the Summoning Phone’, Human Studies 42: 695–716. Broth, Mathias and Lorenza Mondada. 2013. ‘Walking Away: The Embodied Achievement of Activity Closings in Mobile Interaction’, Journal of Pragmatics 47(1): 41–58. Broth, Mathias and Lorenza Mondada. 2019. ‘Delaying Moving Away: Place, Mobility, and the Multimodal Organization of Activities’, Journal of Pragmatics 148: 44–70. Brown, Barry and Eric Laurier. 2005. ‘Maps and Journeys: An Ethno-Methodological investigation’, Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 40: 17–33. Carlin, Andrew. 2020. ‘Sacks’s Plenum: The Inscription of Social Orders’, in R. J. Smith, R. Fitzgerald and W. Housley (eds.) On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations. London: Routledge, pp. 32–46. Cavell, Stanley. 2005a. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. London: Harvard University Press.

When Someone Walks Apart  257 Cavell, Stanley. 2005b. ‘Passionate and Performative Utterance: Morals of Encounter’, in S. Cavell and R.B. Goodman (eds.) Contending with Stanley Cavell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 177–199 Cuff, E C. 1994. Problems of Versions in Everyday Situations. Washington DC: International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis & University Press of America. De Stefani, Elwys and Lorenza Mondada. 2014. ‘Reorganizing Mobile Formations: When “Guided” Participants Initiate Reorientations in Guided Tours’, Space and Culture 17(2): 157–175. doi:10.1177/1206331213508504. Dersley, Ian and Anthony J Wootton. 2002. ‘In the Heat of the Sequence: Interactional Features Preceding Walkouts from Argumentative Talk’, Language in Society 30: 611–638. Edwards, Derek. 1995. ‘Two to Tango: Script Formulations, Dispositions, and Rhetorical Symmetry in Relationship Troubles Talk’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 28: 319–350. Garfinkel, Harold. 2002. Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Hutchins, Edwin. 1995. Cognition in the Wild. London: MIT Press. Keisanen, Tiina, Mirka Rauniomaa and Pauliina Siitonen. 2017. ‘Transitions as Sites of Socialization in Family Interaction Outdoors’, Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 14: 24–37. doi:10.1016/j.lcsi.2017.05.001. Laurier, Eric and Barry Brown. 2008. ‘Rotating Maps and Readers: Praxiological Aspects of Alignment and Orientation’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33(2): 201–216. Laurier, Eric, Ria Dunkley, Thomas Aneurin Smith and Stuart Reeves. 2021. Crossing with Care: Bogs, Streams and Assistive Mobilities as Family Praxis in the Countryside’, Gesprächsforschung - Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion. http://www. gespraechsforschung-online.de/fileadmin/dateien/heft2021/si-laurier.pdf Laurier, Eric and Hayden Lorimer. 2012. ‘Other Ways: Landscapes of Commuting’, Landscape Research 37(2): 207–24. Llewellyn, Nick and Carly W Butler. 2011. ‘Walking Out on Air’, Research on Language and Social Interaction 44(1): 44–64. Macbeth, Douglas. 2014. ‘Studies of Work, Instructed Action, and the Promise of Granularity: A Commentary’, Discourse Studies 16(2): 295–308. Mandelbaum, Jenny S. 2003. ‘Interactive Methods for Constructing Relationships Studies in Language and Social Interaction’, in J. Mandelbaum, P. J. Glenn, and C. D. LeBaron (eds.) Studies in Language and Social Interaction. London: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 207–220. McHugh, Peter, Stanley Raffel, Daniel Foss and Alan Blum. 1974. On the Beginning of Social Inquiry. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pehkonen, Samu, Thomas A. Smith and Robin J Smith. 2022. ‘Maps, Mobility, and Perspective: Remarks on Map Use in Producing an Orienteering Course’, Mobilities 17(1): 152–178. Raffel, Stanley. 2007. ‘Self-reflective Rule-following’, Culture and Organization 13(4): 327–335. Raffel, Stanley. 2013. ‘The Everyday Life of the Self: Reworking Early Goffman’, Journal of Classical Sociology 13(1): 163–178. Raymond, Geoffrey and John Heritage. 2006. ‘The Epistemics of Social Relations: Owning Grandchildren’, Language in Society 35(5): 677–705. Sacks, Harvey. 1992. Lectures on Conversation, Vol 2. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell.

258  Eric Laurier Smith, Robin James. 2021. ‘Categorisation Practices, Instructed Actions, and Teamwork as Occasioned Phenomena: Structuring the “Carry Off” in Mountain Rescue Work’, Gesphrächsforschung-Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen. http://www.gespraechsforschungonline.de/fileadmin/dateien/heft2021/si-smith.pdf Smith, Robin James, Richard Fitzgerald and William Housley. 2020. ‘On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations’, in R. J. Smith, R. Fitzgerald and W. Housley (eds.), On Sacks: Methodology, Materials, and Inspirations. London: Routledge, pp. 1–11. Sormani, Philippe. 2010. ‘L’ordinaire dans l’’ésotérique’: l’action instruite comme phénomène instructif’, in B. Olszewska, M. Barthélémy and S. Laugier (eds.) Les données de l’enquête. Paris: PUF, pp. 167–195. Tolmie, Peter and Andy Crabtree. 2013. ‘A Day Out in the Country’, in M. Rouncefield and P. Tolmie (eds.) Ethnomethodology at Play. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 159–191.

13 Protocol Subversion Staging and Stalking “Machine Intelligence” at School Philippe Sormani and Luna Wolter

Introduction This chapter offers an ethnomethodological respecification of a (if not the) received notion of “machine intelligence,” a notion that can be traced back to Turing’s circular a priori from the 1930s – that is “Machines can be said to think precisely because thinkers compute” (Shanker 1995: 80). Today, Turing’s circular notion finds its textbook expression in ostensibly declarative sentences, such as “complex behavior arises from simple algorithms” (Ben-Ari & Mondada 2018: 39) and/ or “very simple electrical circuits” (Ertel 2011: 1), the lingering analogy between “mental states” and “machine-state configurations” (Shanker 1995: 59), as well as the cybernetic “notion of feedback [as being] essential for intelligent behavior” (Riedo 2015: 10). As an ethnomethodological respecification, the present chapter, in turn, articulates two steps.1 First, the chapter examines how this multifaceted notion of “machine intelligence,” and in its vein the idea of a robot endowed with cognitive abilities, happens to be introduced, probed, and challenged in the course of a usability experiment with a particular robot at school – a small two-wheeled “mobile robot” (mobot) with multiple sensors, an embedded computer, differential drive, and LED lighting (see Figure 13.1). Second, this chapter explicates the heuristic interest of the described experiment, and especially of “protocol subversion” as engaged in by a lively group of pupils in situ, for the recently revived discussion around “artificial intelligence” (AI). More often than not, the latter discussion takes the form of a continued controversy, pitching inductive and deductive forms of AI against each other (e.g., Lake et al. 2017), if not warning “against humanity’s surrender to computers” (Collins 2018). Less often are inquiries into the circular a priori of “machine intelligence” subtending the continued controversy. The short quote from Shanker above alludes to that circular a priori. The remainder of this introduction briefly elaborates on the two key steps of the presently envisaged respecification.2 Step 1: The setting examined is a “usability experiment” with mobot ed (our pseudonym) as just mentioned and further presented below. The experiment was conducted by a team of social psychologists on behalf of robotics engineers to test the pedagogical interest(s) of ed as their newly designed educational technology (for a recent study on the pandemic-induced boom of such technology, see Teräs DOI: 10.4324/9781003279235-18

260  Philippe Sormani and Luna Wolter

Figure 13.1 Lateral desktop view of “Thymio” (nicknamed ed in this chapter), two-wheeled educational mobot. (image credit: Mobsya Media Kit, https://media.mobsya.org/ )

et al. 2020). For the purpose of the experiment, pupils were asked by an instructor to engage in two successive tasks: first, to [observe what this mobot does on its own] and, second, to [describe the observed mobot behavior algorithmically]. The practical accomplishment of each task was filmed and supervised by a team of assistants, in addition to the principal instructor, whilst pupils were being asked to note down their observations with increased precision on customized forms. The square brackets above mark the two tasks’ pending description. How did the instructor introduce those tasks so that the mobot usability experiment could take place in the classroom? How did two pupils undermine its introductory framing and continued monitoring in terms of “machine intelligence,” playfully subverting the experimental protocol? Drawing on a video analysis in answer to these questions, the bulk of this chapter pauses on the pupils’ challenge of the very terms in which the requested tasks were successively introduced to them – in short, their “protocol subversion.”3 Step 2: What’s the point? To this short question, the chapter offers a longer answer. On the one hand, the examined episode (which ironically, as we shall see, shaped up as a virtuoso incapacitation of robot behavior) reminded us of a conceptual disagreement that, by and large, has been edited out of the “official” history of AI in the vein of Turing’s reductionist agenda (see again Shanker 1995), namely, Wittgenstein’s question regarding incipient AI’s assumed intelligibility: “Is it possible for a machine to think?” […] [T]he trouble which is expressed in this question is not really that we don’t yet know a machine which could do the job. […] The trouble is rather that the sentence, “A machine thinks (perceives, wishes)” seems somehow nonsensical. It is as though we had asked “Has the number 3 a color?” (Wittgenstein 1960: 47) On the other hand, we found pupils’ playful subversion of “machine intelligence” not only to suggest alternative frames of conceptual and critical, if not pedagogical,

Protocol Subversion  261 interest but also to cast into relief the local administration of such frames as “inverted glosses.” Wieder and Pratt (1990) introduced this term to discuss an ethnographer’s professional zeal to conflate natives’ utterances with local expressions of her theoretical argument from the outset. In our materials, the principal instructor, as the professional on the scene, implied “machine intelligence” as a theoretical gloss to begin with. He manifestly did so by both requiring and expecting pupils’ conduct to exhibit the gloss’ logical properties (e.g., its circular a priori in the classroom). “Protocol subversion,” as we shall see, is of particular interest in this respect: it both exhibits and exploits the “contextual contingency” (Bjelić 2019: 709) of his definitional fiat, while challenging central AI assumptions and pedagogical retrofit in the process. To conclude, we will reflect on our respecification of Turing’s circular a priori and Wittgenstein’s conceptual critique. Therefore, we shall revisit the chapter’s findings on “conceptual change” ad hoc – as a contingently “inverted gloss” across classroom interaction, if not computer science history – in the light of Garfinkel’s notion of “instructed action” as an achieved phenomenon. “Machine intelligence” a priori: From arguable incoherence to demonstrator device The later Wittgenstein (e.g., 1956, Part 5: §2) took issue with the “synthetic psychology” that underpinned Turing’s seminal notion of simulated “machine intelligence” (1936, 1950). Turing’s psychology, in Shanker’s (1995) succinct terms, constituted a “remarkable synthesis: not only did [he] succeed in merging recursive function theory [key to later computer science] and cognitive psychology, but within psychology itself, he brought together two distinct – and even hostile – schools of thought [behaviorism and mentalism] under the banner of post-computational mechanism” (p. 53). Simply put, Turing developed an affirmative answer to his philosophical question “Can machines think?” (1950) by assuming that the psychological question “Do thinkers compute?” had already been answered affirmatively, if mechanistically (Turing 1936), hence the prefix “post-”. His “mechanist and psychological theses are internally related: [computing] machines can be said to think precisely because thinkers [mechanically] compute” (Shanker 1995: 80). This circular a priori of “machine intelligence,” which has an intricate genealogy of its own, was taken issue with by Wittgenstein on three counts at least:

• First, intentional conduct (such as “thinking,” “calculating” or, say, “reading”)

is different from mechanical operation: the former involves normative terms (e.g., “rules,” “norms,” “maxims,” if not “reasons”), and the latter relies on causal procedure, pre- or post-computational (Shanker 1998: 54–55). • Second, and by implication, the claimed emergence of intentional conduct from mechanical operation is a “category-mistake” (Ryle 1949). Because they are of different kinds, there can be no “learning continuum” from simple mechanisms to everyday activities, as if “higher forms of learning [were] built up out of simpler components” (Shanker 1995: 65). A plant, when (re)turning to a light

262  Philippe Sormani and Luna Wolter source, does not “learn” in the same sense as a child, for example. Again, a conceptual difference between causal regularities and normative terms is involved. • Third, a formalist understanding of mathematics informs both the (postcomputational) mechanist reduction and claimed emergence of intentional conduct, a common understanding which misses both its everyday use (“in mufti,” Wittgenstein 1956, Part 5: §2) and normative character (i.e., in terms of “rules” or “subrules,” not causal or recursive mechanisms per se). Taken together, Wittgenstein’s objections (further explained in Shanker 1998) highlight the arguable incoherence of “machine intelligence” as construed by Turing (1936, 1950). However, Turing, in what has become a famous passage, simply proclaimed a “conceptual change” yet to come: “[…] I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted” (Turing 1950: 442). At the time of writing, an ambivalent picture is thus to be drawn. Undoubtedly, Turing’s proclamation has found its recurring expression in the early 21st century advertisement and alluring design of computing devices, big or small, be it in terms of their “smart,” “autonomous,” or otherwise “intelligent” features (in addition to teaching resources in engineering and computer science, such as those quoted in the introduction). Moreover, countless robots have been designed and put to work in its vein – across science, fiction, and automation – ranging from fixed industrial to mobile service robots (e.g., Ben-Ari & Mondada 2018, Ch. 1). Ed, the small two-wheeled mobot of present interest (see Figure 13.1), falls within the latter category, as it has been designed to render a distinctive “educational service” from primary school onward (more of which below). Upon closer inspection, however, neither computer architecture nor robot design, let alone their “operational stipulations” (Coulter 1995: 169), have displaced vernacular usage of existing words and ordinary distinctions altogether, nor can or should they. If only for a sales argument, it seems impossible not to rely upon vernacular usage: computers, robots, and related technologies are customized into countless domains and therefore traded to prospective clients and multiple users in their everyday terms. Yet this “semantic compensation,” especially in the form of the vernacularly upgraded sales pitch, comes with a cost. Indeed, the opportunistic mix of technological sophistication and ordinary terms may at best accommodate, and at worst accentuate, conceptual confusion (as Wittgenstein’s threefold critique of Turing’s “machine intelligence” already indicates). A closer look at mobot ed, and its twofold “educational service” in particular, offers us a circumstantial glimpse at how such accommodation and/or accentuation looks like – that is, in terms of its design and user manual, respectively. First, ed’s minimalist design as an LED-equipped “white box” constitutes a teaching device of robot operation itself, namely, its operation in terms of a “sensor[computer]-actuator loop” (Riedo 2015: 10). Indeed, ed through its LED lighting demonstrates the interlinked operation of its “sensors” (when reacting to a detected

Protocol Subversion  263 object), “computer” (running a given program), and “actuators” (turning its two wheels in the same or opposite direction as a result). Depending on the algorithm it has been programmed with, ed exhibits different “reactive behaviors” in different LED colors: when (following an object) it lights up in green; when (avoiding obstacles) it lights up in yellow, etc. Second, the preassembled design of ed facilitates more advanced pupils’ practical engagement with robot programming to define or change any of its algorithmically controlled, colorfully displayed “behaviors,” in contrast to educational robots having to be assembled first (e.g., Google Vision Kit systems). Depending on the pedagogical scenario, the relative emphasis on material exploration or formal programming allows teachers to bring different aspects of “reactive behavior” (Ben-Ari & Mondada 2018, Ch. 6) and/or “computational thinking” (Wing 2006) into focus. Drawing upon the robot’s design features and programming language, the user manual explains how to switch ed “on and off” and then how to change its “behaviors”: Use of buttons: Press 3 sec. on the center button […] to turn the robot on and off. The other buttons […] allow changing the robot’s color. Each color corresponds to a different behavior ([see] menu). [The center] button […] is used to start a behavior and to come back to the menu. Behaviors: 1 Friendly ([green LED]) follows object/hand 2 Explorer ([yellow LED]) avoids obstacles 3 Fearful ([red LED]) runs away from object or hand, shock detection [etc.] (source: “Thymio” user manual, p. 2, Mobsya open source project, CC BY-SA 3.0). In other words, the manual sets the stage for using mobot ed as a device to demonstrate “machine intelligence,” despite, or precisely because of, its circular a priori and arguable incoherence (as traced above, through the Wittgenstein-Turing dissensus). In particular, the manual conveys a robot version of “synthetic psychology,” assuming a commonsensical yet questionable correspondence between LED-displayed robot operation (lighting up in “green” or “yellow”) and intentional conduct (expressing “friendly” or “explorer” behavior, for example). In turn, and from the manual presenting the mobot as being both textually and visually programmable (p. 3), readers may infer that the intentional quality of its “reactive behavior” (e.g., ed is “fearful,” therefore it [runs away]) emerges from “simple algorithms” (Ben-Ari & Mondada 2018: 39). Finally, this formalistic implication of algorithmic emergence finds its visual expression in ed’s color-coded display of its own robot operation (see the ‘behavioural menu’ [1, 2, 3, etc.] on p. 2 of the quoted user manual, a small paper booklet that facilitates mobot use). In the context of the user manual, then, there might be an operationally intelligible, if conceptually incoherent, answer to Wittgenstein’s rhetorical question: “Has the number 3 a color?” (Wittgenstein 1960: 47). For more detailed instructions, see WikiThymioOrg (2023).

264  Philippe Sormani and Luna Wolter However, for Valentino Braitenberg, an important source of design inspiration for mobot ed, an animal analogy would suffice to pitch the indicated conceptual conundrum as pedagogical virtue: Interest arises […] when we look at these machines or vehicles as if they are animals in a natural environment. We will be tempted, then, to use psychological language in describing their behavior. And yet we know very well that there is nothing in these vehicles that we have not put in ourselves. This will be an interesting educational game. (Braitenberg 1984: 2) Indeed, mobot ed seems to have been designed, used, and (re-)tested accordingly.4 “Protocol subversion” in situ: An ethnomethodological respecification In the school context of the usability experiment, mobot ed appeared as a demonstrator device of particular interest, if only insofar as its said “cognitive state” and shown “mechanical operation” might not only dovetail with each other (as in Turing’s frame) but also rule out their coherent articulation (per Wittgenstein’s argument as well as Braitenberg’s acknowledgment). So we have been led to ask: What happens to this demonstrator device, and its arguable incoherence in particular, when experimentally tested at school? Our ethnomethodological answer, in turn, will (re-)specify how the principal instructor formulated the experimental protocol, while implying “machine intelligence” a priori, and how the observed group of pupils eventually subverted both. To probe mobot ed’s pedagogical interest, the experiment brought together the initially mentioned team of social psychologists with a double empirical and evaluative goal.5 Formulating the protocol: Instructing tasks, implying “machine intelligence”

“A [wo]man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to a strict discipline, is in effect a universal [computing] machine.” (Turing 1969 [1948]: 9) How did the principal instructor introduce the tasks of the mobot usability experiment so that this particular experiment could take place in the classroom? For the experiment to “take place in the classroom” meant that it would generate (video) data recoverable from the pupils’ classroom activities, while allowing the instructor and his team to subsequently assess the mobot’s pedagogic interest in terms of their formal model (a trifold “utility, usability, acceptability” model). In anticipation of this evaluative purpose, the instructor would be [formulating the protocol] of the envisaged experiment – that is, explicating the social manner, temporal order, and spatial arrangement in which pupils were expected to engage, if only for their activities to be recordable. Prior to the experiment, ten tables had been separated and

Protocol Subversion 265 arranged into three rows, each table affording a group of two pupils with a mobot, pen, and paper, as well as further paraphernalia to be experimented with (with the exception of the iPad-camera placed on each table for recording purposes).6 Let us take a closer look at the instructor’s protocol formulation in class (Extract 13.1), prior to turning to his subsequent introduction of tasks, and the way in which that introduction elaborates both on mobot ed’s implied “machine intelligence” and pupils’ analogously expected discipline (see Extracts 13.2 and 13.3). Here is how the instructor spelled out the experimental protocol to pupils. Extract 13.1  Protocol formulation

(Session 1A: iPad shot TA4_1 and Cam2_1 shot) INS Instructor/PPs Pupil(s)

To get the experiment underway, the instructor spells out its protocol by drawing upon the prearranged classroom in two ways. Their connection, in particular, makes manifest his practical concern to have the experiment not simply “work” (Ting & Fitzgerald 2020), but to “work” accountably. Not only does the classroom setting allow him to position himself as the “instructor” (similar to a substitute teacher) in front of the “pupils” (as his temporary class) while setting out the protocol he formulates in expectably understandable terms (“so, this morning, … we will do two activities together,” line 01); and not only do the pupils manifest their understanding as expected, by silently listening (04, 07, etc.), while the instructor leaves little time (03– 05, 06–08) or minimizes their interjections (09–11), as he spells out the “experiment” (in terms of the two announced activities) and its “protocol” (i.e., their expectedly accomplished manner, order, and arrangement; 01–17). Moreover, the classroom’s particular prearrangement, including its multiple cameras, allows the instructor to define the playing field as to be filmed (“you must stay in the angle formed by … the area inside … the red tapes,” 14–17), while checking for the pupils’ confirmation that they understand the protocol and its requirements (20). Hence, by confirming that they understand, both individually (18–19) and jointly (21), pupils agree to have their upcoming activities filmed and performed-to-be-filmed in the designated area.7

266  Philippe Sormani and Luna Wolter Against this background, the instructor then spells out the pupils’ “first activity” (22) as their imminent task, whilst asking them to “listen carefully” to its verbal instruction: Extract 13.2  Introducing Task 1

(Session 1A: iPad shot TA4_2 and Cam2_2 shot) INS Instructor/PPs Pupils

The formulated task appears to be instructed in two ways. Retrospectively, the instructor draws upon the previously formulated protocol to spell out the task as a “first activity” (of the announced two) and to specify its playing field (i.e., by introducing and showing the “robot,” 25–28, as well as indicating “pens and… paper,” 30–33). Prospectively, the formulated task allows him to instruct pupils, by both telling and demonstrating to them (e.g., 27–28) what they are expected to do – that is, to engage with and possibly manipulate mobot ed in the designated area (25), while writing down their observations (30–35). In so doing, the instructor not only implies the mobot’s “machine intelligence,” an implication which is developed by its nominal identification (“a robot, the robot ed,” 25) and agency attribution (“what ed is doing,” 35). Moreover, he also treats the pupils as “intelligent machines,” in the sense of being docile recipients to his instruction to observe and record mobot “behavior” with pen and paper, without being told for what purpose (echoing the “strict discipline” of Turing’s “universal [computing] machine” quoted above). Note in this respect the hesitantly stated yet confirmed continuum between mobot agency and pupil experimentation – that is, between “what ed is doing” (35) and “what you did” (37), followed by a micro-pause (“.”) and confirmative repetition (ibid.).8 Again, the instructor asks pupils to confirm their understanding (“ok?,” line 39) and, after a follow-up question for clarification (not transcribed), pupils are allowed to start engaging with and observing mobot ed. To begin with, pupils seem somewhat at odds on how to proceed. They have been instructed, if by implicit contrast (35, 37), to [observe what this mobot does on its own]. Yet ed has also been introduced to them as a “dependent machine,” dependent on their possible intervention (e.g., their “robot grasp,” 27), rather than exhibiting agency per se

Protocol Subversion  267 and/or lending itself to detached observation. To this first ambivalence, a second one is added: pupils are expected to play accountably (with ed in the filmed desktop area) and to produce intelligible accounts (of its “robot behavior”). Yet they are not told right away how or why to do so, individually or collaboratively, in intentional or mechanical terms. Consequently, pupils start to talk to each other, watch what others are doing at neighboring tables, and set out playing with ed to figure out how to proceed. The classroom floor turns rapidly into an “unruly plenum” (Lynch & Macbeth 1998: 281), mixing pupil talk, mobot sounds, and motor noise – bling bling, jii. jii., “ha, ha, ha” – in various recognizable, partly repetitive, partly competitive patterns. In turn, the instructor is led to make repeated calls to classroom order, in addition to giving occasional hints, as he and his assistants are “making rounds” (Greiffenhagen 2012).9 Eventually, the instructor introduces the “second activity” fixed by the experimental protocol: Extract 13.3  Introducing Task 2

(Session 1A: Cam2_3 shot) INS Instructor/PPs Pupils

The instructor’s introduction of the second task does not lift his ambivalent formulation of the first. On the contrary, he accentuates this ambivalence. At this point of the experiment, pupils have had ample opportunity not only to accountably (i.e., observably-and-reportably) play with ed but also to discover if not describe its “reactive behavior,” rather than its autonomous agency. Yet the second task is formulated as if ed’s agency depends on its differently displayed “cognitive states” (e.g., what it is observably “doing” when in the “green mode,” 621), rather than pupils’ interaction with it (or some combination of both, intentional and/or mechanical). Again, pupils are being asked to observe, yet without being given a rationale. To the contrary, they are being asked not only to commit themselves to a “strict[er] discipline” à la Turing (“now… tell me precisely,” 617) but also to leverage that discipline to explain why ed, rather than the class, behaves as it does (“what you think it does … what you deduce,” 622–623). In short, they are asked to [describe the observed mobot behavior algorithmically] in a double sense – that is, by both (re)describing mobot behavior in its systematic reactivity and committing themselves to it (by filling out the new form “precisely,” color by color, etc.); hence, arguably, the conspicuous yawning by one pupil and the reluctant activity uptake by others (627).

268  Philippe Sormani and Luna Wolter Again, the assigned task appears to be doubly instructed. Retrospectively, it draws upon the initial protocol and prior task, while taking into account their progressive achievement. In so doing, the formulation of the second task retrofits the initially attributed agency (“what ed is doing,” 35) to its reduced mechanical substrate (i.e., via ed’s finite color display, 618–621). This implies that the former agency somehow emerges from the latter substrate (e.g., via a “feedback control system,” Ben-Ari & Mondada 2018: 97) and requires that both the mechanical reduction and the implied emergence be traced to their formal origin (viz., ed’s visually expressed, formally specifiable algorithm(s)) as a topical task and pedagogical requirement. Prospectively, the second task thus sets up the critical conditions for its twofold subversion: not only is this task rooted in the hitherto unquestioned protocol of the experimental design for pupil compliance, but it also progressively roots the notion of “machine intelligence,” as implied by this protocol, in its circular a priori, if not arguable incoherence. Indeed, the second task’s formulation articulates Turing’s seminal assumptions, whilst accentuating the grounds for their (proto-) Wittgensteinian challenge in the classroom. Retesting the mobot: Diverting instruction, mocking “machine intelligence”

“Block it, block it!”

(Carlo to André)

How did two pupils, Carlo and André, challenge the mobot usability experiment? The epigraph to this section offers a sneak preview of their playful protocol subversion. Instead of allowing themselves to be tested, as the pedagogical usability experiment intended, Carlo and André used its protocol for another purpose: namely, to engage in [retesting the mobot]. For this interstitial experiment, the two pupils assumed the “experimenter position” themselves, instead of complying as experimental subjects with the position and task(s) they had been assigned. Instead of assuming ed’s “machine intelligence,” they swiftly tested it with a task of their own, before mockingly “punishing” its apparent failure of execution. Eventually, they would incapacitate ed as a demonstrator device of “machine intelligence,” as implied by the instructor, thereby neutralizing both its color display and contrastive utility for visual coding. Taken together, these summary “achievements” characterize the two pupils’ protocol subversion and its critical consequences. In the previous section, we described how ed’s “machine intelligence” hinged upon the instructor’s formulation of the experimental protocol, as the latter conveyed the former’s basic assumptions, one by one. How did Carlo and André’s deconstruction take shape, in turn? This is the leading question for the present section.10 To begin with, consider Extract 13.4. In the extract, André can be seen to be positioning mobot ed in front of the wall that he has just built with wood blocks (#1). In so doing, André both draws upon and deconstructs the instructor’s protocollary formulation of the usability experiment – that is, the instructor’s way of explicating the experimental protocol by articulating its successive tasks, whilst intimating robot ed’s “machine

Protocol Subversion  269 Extract 13.4  Wall destruction

(Session 1A: Cam3 clip7_1 and Ipad shot TA4_1) AND André/CAR Carlo

intelligence” and requiring pupils’ analogous discipline. André draws upon the instructor’s formulation as he positions the mobot within the playing field demarcated by strips of red tape, as initially required for the entire experiment to be filmed (lines 92–94, #1). Yet he also deconstructs the instructor’s formulation by setting up a competitive experiment, both in terms of its alternative framing and anticipated results.11 The alternative framing of this new experiment, staged as a crash test (95–97), subverts the initial protocol in two ways: first, it is now André and Carlo, and not the instructor, who take up the “experimenter position” by tasking and testing the mobot as their experimental subject; second, they do not accept the instructor’s attribution of “machine intelligence” to ed, let alone the requirement of algorithmic discipline that he required from pupils; instead, they suspend the discipline required from them in order to test the very “machine intelligence” attributed to the mobot. In positioning ed in front of the wood block wall and announcing its next task, André sets up a “mini-Turing test” (Greiffenhagen, personal remark), while disregarding ed’s visually indexed intelligence (the “cognitive state” displayed in bright yellow, #1). By forgoing the requested algorithmic description in terms of the “color code,” presented in a form provided for the purpose yet left lying unused on the desk (#1 and #2), what results can André’s test be seen to anticipate? Retrospectively, André’s repeated instruction at “wall destruction” (92–97, #1) comes as the last one in a series of prior attempts, each of which failed despite the range of methods used, including hand waving and verbal instruction (by André), as well as remote control (by Carlo). Prospectively, then, André’s formulation of ed’s task is of particular interest: “beware, it will destroy” (95). Not only does his formulation set up ed for a task that it is most likely to fail, yet again and in front of the camera, but also it preemptively identifies ed as the culprit, should it indeed fail as expected (which, given the prior failures, is most likely). Its repeated inability, then, may be taken to demonstrate ed’s lack of “machine intelligence” (rather than André’s double failure at his own interstitial task and/or the instructor’s pending one). Indeed, and after André’s repeated failure at commanding mobot ed (98–101), Carlo puts the

270  Philippe Sormani and Luna Wolter blame on ed first, by mocking its behavioral incapacity in cognitive terms (“yes, but he didn’t understand everything, that one” (i.e., that mobot in play), 103–106), before attempting to regain mobot control (108–109). In sum, the new experiment has disabled ed’s “machine intelligence” as a starting assumption and reanimated local competition over mobot control. In the process, ed is turned into a “useless toy,” rather than being assumed as an “autonomous agent” (for a similar contrast, see Alač 2016).

Extract 13.5  Encircling

(Session 1A: Cam3 clip7_2 and iPad shot TA4_2) AND André/CAR Carlo

Consider Extract 13.5 for how mobot testing continues. Again, the collaborative pursuit of mobot testing by André and Carlo both trades upon and deconstructs the “official experiment.” Their playful collaboration trades upon the instructor’s instrumental use of teaching routine, addressing them as “regular pupils,” yet only for the sake of an “unusual experiment” (see Extract 13.1). In seizing the experimenter position, André and Carlo take up this “means-end” scheme too, not as docile pupils or experimental subjects but as mobot testers, if not would-be scientists, who set up and pursue their own experiment. Accordingly, they devise their own commands (e.g., “beware it will destroy,” Extract 13.4, line 95; “block it, block it,” Extract 13.5, line 148) to set up ed’s purported responses (e.g., his repeated [backing off] and [turning left], lines 98, 101, 152–153, 156), and they provide their own ironic assessments (“… he didn’t understand everything, that one,” “eh he he,” 100, 104–106, 158). Yet the borrowed “means-end” scheme also allows them to accentuate their protocol subversion, both insofar as the interstitially tested mobot and the pending usability experiment are concerned. By exposing ed as a “bad pupil” (i.e., failing in front of the camera), André and Carlo divert attention from their expected performance as “good computers,” as required in the instructor’s usability experiment. Neither André nor Carlo indeed sets out with matching colors, filling out the form, articulating the involved algorithms, and acting accordingly, as expected.

Protocol Subversion  271 Once framed by a “means-end” scheme, ed can arguably only fall short of manifesting “machine intelligence,” simply because its mobot display has been designed otherwise, according to two other “cognitive” and/or “behavioral” schemes (see first section). This, at least, seems to be the way that André and Carlo instrumentalize ed and, in the process, successively undermine both schemes, before jokingly deconstructing their dubious synthesis under the rubric of “synthetic psychology.” André first attempts to use ed as a tool for “wall destruction,” while formulating that instrumental use in “cognitive” terms – that is, by verbally instructing “switched on” ed and thereby assuming, if playfully, that it must be endowed with some cognitive ability to understand (see Extract 13.4, 92–97, #1). Second, its manifest and repeated failure at “wall destruction” leads André not to change the instrumental scheme but to use it for another purpose, namely, to frame ed’s “behavior” as a means for another end (i.e., its own “enclosure,” inside a ring wall of wood blocks; see Extract 13.5, #3). Yet André’s instrumentalization of ed’s “behavior” also fails (ed escapes, 156– 159, #4), despite, and at times because of, Carlo’s verbal and manual assistance to “block it” by placing wood blocks in its consequently changing direction (154–160, #3, #4). Taken together, these successive failures not only make ed appear as a seemingly useless toy but also challenge the “machine intelligence” whose emergence it is supposed to demonstrate. If ed neither works via “(active) cognition” nor “(reactive) behavior,” how is the former supposed to emerge from the latter? Playing fast and loose with the “learning continuum” (see again first section) appears as a fair summary of our two pupils’ operational testing of mobot ed. Fast: André and Carlo go along with the instructor’s “pupil/machine” analogy, whilst bringing it to bear on the mobot, rather than on themselves; that is, they continue playing with ed, the wood blocks, and remote control, instead of starting to fill out the form. Loose: they reevaluate the analogy’s terms, degrade the mobot “pupil” in front of the camera (e.g., as a “mindless insect”), and thereby challenge the premise of a shared continuum and, by implication, their own upgrading as computing “machines” (dedicated “color coders”). Yet Turing’s definition of “machine intelligence,” in addition to its stipulation of a “learning continuum,” required a reduction of intentional conduct to mechanical operation and relied upon algorithmic formalism to have the former intelligence emerge through the latter operation. So did the instructor’s framing of the usability experiment. Would André and Carlo subvert those reductionist and formalist assumptions too? Their playful pursuit of mobot testing and ed’s eventual trapping suggest so (see Extract 13.6). “Voilà, leave it like that” (278, #8) – How did André and Carlo arrive at “trapping” mobot ed, incapacitating its intended display of “machine intelligence” in situ? The trapping documented above comes to a close with Carlo positioning a red wood block as a “last brick” in André’s ring wall (274–284, #7, #8). Prior to this trapping and closing episode (Extract 13.6), Carlo had been “stalking” ed subsequently to its escape (Extract 13.5, 156–159, #4). Carlo’s stalking had him continuously parading the red wood block in front of ed which, as a result, started turning on its own axis, whilst increasing its motor noise (“jiii. jiii. jiii”) and triggering André’s mocking laughter (“he, he, he.”). “But what does it do there!?”

272  Philippe Sormani and Luna Wolter Extract 13.6  Trapping

(Session 1A: Cam3 clip7_3 and Ipad shot TA4_3) AND André/CAR Carlo

the filming assistant reproachingly asked. While continuing his stalking, parading the red wood block in front of ed, Carlo cheekily answered “I don’t know, me.” In turn, André’s final punchline – “[ed] plays the idiot, he’s at school!” – accentuated the disjunction by casting ed’s circular motion in terms of the assistant’s agency assumption, despite Carlo’s continued intervention and wood block parading (“>tac, tac, tacso< °so° ? , . [so [this [((does)) |so |((does)) bling. jiii.

Pause timed in seconds Micro-pause No discernible interval between adjacent utterances or activities Described activity, typically non-verbal Emphasized stretch of talk Faster stretch of talk Quieter stretch of talk Rising intonation, as in a question “Continuing” intonation Falling intonation, as at the end of a sentence Overlapping utterances and/or activities Utterance and activity overlapping, one sign per participant Mobot (motor) noise

Afterword Instructed Action as Wayfinding Douglas Macbeth

Introduction “Afterwords” often work as a first review, an appraisal of the volume and the papers that assemble it. To settle that account, the studies collected here are mature and diverse by authors deeply engaged in their settings through the lens of ethnomethodology (EM). They constitute a collection of studies of “instructed action” (hereafter IA), but not in the familiar sense of collections as we know them through sequential analysis, where we find “same things again,” evidently. Here, we find many different, even exotic, settings for studies of a “same thing.” They organize a diverse address to what may be one of Garfinkel’s most penetrating formulations of the routine grounds of everyday life. In addition, much of the collection can also and productively be read through Garfinkel’s “studies of work” (Garfinkel 1986). It might even be more easily read that way, which is to say that a reading is an instructed action too. At the same time, the diversity of the collection can hold our attention in ways that obscure the continuities to be seen across them. The distance from calligraphy to surfing to introductory endodontics and walking on the moors (the list is longer still) stretches the premise of sameness. The studies can also be challenging for how these settings aren’t only, or centrally, matters of talk; they are also enactments with bodies and other things attached. The editors’ fine Introduction is writing on behalf of the conceptual attachments of IA throughout EM’s corpus studies. It is a curriculum in its own right. This Afterword is more modest; it aims to reflect on the collected studies and use them to separate studies of IA from professional and vernacular readings of instruction. Following remarks on the collection, the discussion turns to consider how we can hear EM’s alternate understanding of ‘instructed action’ in a world that seemingly knows ‘instruction’ well enough, already. A diversity of forms The volume collects remarkably diverse tasks, settings, and occasions, and we gain across them a sense of the indefinite range of the routine grounds of everyday life and IA’s play within it. At the same time, within each study setting we find, in my judgment, multiple tasks and occasions for which IA is at play. Bassetti’s treatment of dance instruction (Chapter 9) across cohorts (from beginners to professionals) is

280  Douglas Macbeth compendious. As one who cannot dance, it was overwhelming, really. (The panoptic play of the studio mirrors was, for me, too thick to get hold of, but see Sudnow 1972 on glances produced in public places for just one pair of eyes to find.) I could make the best sense of the “beginner” exhibits, but the larger point is that each of her chapter’s sections is shot-through with the play of IA, and we could say the same of each of the other chapters. Laurier’s “walkers” (Chapter 12) immediately come to mind. For interesting reasons, the centerpiece of his treatment of two couples off on a “day out” on the moors in search of an archeological ruin is how the fellow in one party more than once walks well ahead of both his companion and the other party. For them (and for Laurier), it opens a sense of disruption in the comity of the outing. At an opportune moment his partner, speaking as the one who knows him best, offers to the others that “He’s just a walker” as an instructed gloss that might set aside any sense of disaffection within or between the parties. In my reading, it is a welcome venture into “relationships” in our accountings of practical action. We are, for one another, not only strangers standing in line. It is also noted that each couple has a GPS device for locating the historical site of interest. The parties clearly are not the first to go looking for it, and we immediately see another play of IA (one that Brown & Laurier 2005, 2012 have examined elsewhere) in how their “archaeological app” is producing instructions-to-be-followed. For better or worse, an error in the system is surmised from their wayfinding difficulties. The app has led both parties astray, and this is no less a matter of IA wherein we begin interrogating our instructions for their alignment with the territories they promise, and those we see. And no less interesting is how the lone walker, the one who walks ahead and leaves behind his companions, seems to have also left behind the GPS device for his partner to keep. And as the others discover their suspect instructions, they also conclude that he – the lone walker – has indeed been finding the correct path, apparently without the benefit of the device. I do not know how, but want to conjecture that he may have been reading the moors, finding instruction in the landscape and perhaps also in the residual records of those who walked it before him as evidence of their readings. By whichever account, the lone walker has been leveraging his wayfinding as an instructed matter too. To take interest there is in no way a critique of the chapter’s central examples of IA. Not remotely. They are all revealing. It is rather to remind us of the ubiquity of IA, and that our exemplars – which we select, develop, and exhibit for publication – do not mean that IA (or “reflexivity,” for that matter) is some kind of rare-earth element of the social world. It is not remotely rare. The exemplars of “instructed action” we find in these studies are plucked from fields that are dense with them and rely upon them, though only a few may be brought into view as the authors look for instructive exhibits across fields of other expressions. This is not a critique of where an analysis drills down its interests. It is rather to context them in the welter of analytic possibilities beneath our feet. Though relentlessly occasioned, IA is hardly occasional. With this view in mind, consider the density of IA’s work in the endovascular surgical procedure so clearly developed by Ivarsson and Falkenberg in Chapter 3. The achievement of the “cursor workaround,” a fine example of bricolage, must

Afterword  281 have been laminated onto a practical history of inquiry and alternate IAs for seeing and showing fields of tissue so as to achieve a firmly settled terrain for each next pending surgery. Their study begins with a critique of the “product version of instruction” and how the insight that “competence renders instructions intelligible is perhaps ethnomethodology’s most important message to pedagogy” (p. 58) and also to our reading of IA. They then turn to wood working and a workaround of Pythagoras for achieving 90-degree joinery. I know something about that (90-degree joinery is still my ambition), and there are endless articles, tapes and tutorials on how to design joinery for wood that moves with the seasons. But when they take up their central exhibit, the cursor workaround in the endovascular procedure, we discover it is leveraged from local histories of instructed actions among colleagues developing procedures we will not find in clinical textbooks. It is the local work of old hands and newcomers, and we see their instructed achievements in the life-saving reliability of their maps for securing an irreversible procedure. Along the way, we also find instructive discussions of the EM literature that frame the conceptualizations Ivarsson and Falkenberg bring to their study. So too for Lindwall and Lymer’s discussions of multiple instructional settings and tasks (Chapter 2). Their collection of craftwork, YouTube tutorials, and an introductory lecture tour of an endodontic procedure for third-year students is instructive in its diversity. (If you read the last one closely, you will find a reason to worry about your tongue.) Their YouTube materials are directly about “following instructions,” a deceptively simple phrase with endless enactments, especially embodied ones. The video tutorials show students working through multiple presentations to see, recover, and “tame” the recorded detail* so as to render a visibility that can be re-enacted. (The asterisk on detail* is Garfinkel’s asterisk [see Garfinkel 2002: 146n].) In my view, Lindwall and Lymer’s central contribution is to tie instruction to the description of action – a diverse topic in the sociological canon. Their discussion renders a great deal of instruction sociological, essentially.1 And, as they also observe in matters of description and the instruction of novices, “it is hard to imagine how this proceeds absent what the novice does know” (p. 37), a topic that is central to this Afterword. I am remarking on each chapter because each deserves consideration in its own right. Kreplak’s treatment of the IA of artistic installations (Chapter 7) not only examines the work of following installation instructions, it opens with the contingent work of producing them, and how, joined to the contingent work of following them, art installations can, given the right circumstances, become matters of artistic expression and history. Her account can shake our taken-for-granted assurances that what we are seeing at MoMA is just and exactly what the artist would have us see. And while the artistic project may be committed to seeing differently, Kreplak is showing us materially instructed contingencies standing just out of view of whatever we see. Brooker and Sharrock (Chapter 11) take us through the high drama of Apollo 13. The hopes in the space capsule and on the ground turn on assembling a sequence

282  Douglas Macbeth of instructed actions, not that anyone was speaking of it that way at the time; they were too preoccupied with doing it. While trying to figure out how to “rig” a CO2 absorption system from whatever was at hand in a disabled module in 1970, the NASA ground crew had no need for the expression, as they produced one of its most accessible and memorable exercises. Thankfully, it did not take long to figure it out (nothing like fixing the location of a branching artery). It can also leave us to wonder about the play of IA in any actual case of NASA’s highly disciplined checklist procedures for taming other contingencies that could be just around the corner and out of view. Among other things, Button reminds us in Chapter 6 that the life of a skipper on the high seas has taken quite a civil turn. His discussions of the maxims and familiar expressions that he finds in practice sailings with novices draw on Sacks’ (1989) remarks on proverbs, and how they are not about eternal verities or boundless wisdom. Rather, to hear them instructively, you need to reckon why you are hearing them now, as in what relevance a swinging boom might have for the expression, “I wouldn’t sit there if I was you.” Though not exactly proverbial, it is certainly cryptic, and that the novice who hears it has no idea of the possibilities that lie ahead reminds us that maxims and instructed actions presume the wherewithal for hearing them. The “wherewithal” underwrites what could be instructive about them. Mondada and Tekin (Chapter 4) gave me some relief from settings and exemplars about which I know absolutely nothing, in their account of the pedestrian (literally) character of the instructed assembly of queues. Garfinkel spoke of queues as emblematic of ordinary immortal society (see Garfinkel & Livingston 2003). Queues evidence the objective reality of formal structure as an enforceable normative order, radically qualified by EM’s amendment: order, structure, and recurrence possess praxiological foundations leveraged among strangers knowing what “anyone knows.” (We have all seen this more than once: someone walks up the line we are standing in and slips into it. A shoulder-length away, someone else says loudly enough for all who might have noticed to hear, “What took you so long?” Structure, rules, IA, moral order, and membership-in-good-standing are themselves queued up.) The other study settings for which I have no clue include Arano (Chapter 8), Eisenmann and Mitchell (Chapter 10), and Liberman (Chapter 5). Each writes an annotation to Garfinkel’s “unique adequacy requirement” (2002). Briefly, when the analyst is not competent to the practical affairs she would describe, readers will find a tourist’s account. These chapters are not tourist accounts. On the other hand, given the dense embodiment of these studies, and the depth of familiarity that Eisenmann, Mitchell, and Liberman exhibit, it is not clear how instructive they can be in the matters they display for readers like me. There is of course conceptual instruction too, and it is generous. Eisenmann and Mitchell respecify the “outside and inside” of yoga and taiji. Their discipline as analysts and practitioners is clear and palpable. These are perspicuous settings for studies and conceptualizations of embodiment, and they are not only writing about insides and outsides, but they do so by taking their own in hand. Eisenmann and Mitchell, and Liberman bring multiple literatures and their disciplined life-studies to bear

Afterword  283 on their study settings. Liberman gives us instructions for seeing the orderliness of breaking waves and those who share them, complete with “rules,” queues, and the presumptive competence to measure both the wave and the other. I am left to think there were times and places where surfing was all about the wave. Now, it is a densely social wave, competitive and zero-sum, and both perspicuous and a bit freaky for that reason. Arano stands at some distance from these studies, in that his unique adequacy is that of a novice (and grandson). He opens our thinking onto the IA available to novices and what they know well. At the same time, the pedagogy of Arano’s calligraphy seems deeply layered across cultural, technical, and familial laminations, and a sequential rendering may not be entirely revealing. When the grandfather replies to a redundant question with “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I am not sure how to hear it. The play of instruction’s three-turn sequence (cf. Macbeth 2000; McHoul 1978; Mehan 1979) may not capture the intimacy of these materials. And perhaps more than any other contribution to the collection, Arano’s materials are exemplary of instruction that is relentlessly, and gracefully, oriented to correctness. There seems to be little space that is not available to it. Sormani and Wolter (Chapter 13) document yet another encounter between the confidences of a well-financed educational project designed to exhibit, in this case, robotic artificial intelligence, from within a plenum of ordinary kids (see their bibliography for other projects that encountered a pleasant indifference). Most kids do not have the conceptual “table manners” the researchers are taking for granted. They are not practiced at this kind of “wait and see.” But the project also became an occasion for examining the instructed actions the students produce in pursuing their own interrogations. Though they may know little about collaborating in exhibiting AI, the students evidently do know something about frustrating a chicken (now the robot) and taunting it for its haplessness. The project seemed unprepared for the students’ lifeworld as they went about figuring out what they could do with the robot while producing stories for their friends, not the visitors. In this light, it is not clear that the kids were “subverting” the protocol so much as that it was simply opaque and uninteresting and also an opening onto alternate curiosities (see Garfinkel et al. 1982 on “kids’ culture”).2 Their stance seems more of a productive indifference, and in Sormani and Wolter’s treatment of the encounter, a professional conceptual incoherence comes into view for us. Wayfinding Instructed action is leveraged from the insight of indexicality, or the essential incompleteness of expressions, including instructions and descriptions (see Garfinkel 2002: 198, passim). We know it well. It is alive throughout the chapters in this volume and our literatures. Still, I want to point to occasions where this incompleteness, and the gaps, contingency, and uncertainty it can yield, may be less pressing, not because we find “complete” instructions (though sometimes nothing more need be said), but rather because we are competent to find our way with such things.

284  Douglas Macbeth To speak of this competence to IA as “wayfinding” is of course tendentious, as is the formulation of IA itself. Our chapters are showing us competent domains I have not seen before. We see parties engaged in joint tasks, e.g., instructing taiji with a senior student, installing artworks or visualizing a reliable surgical field among colleagues, etc. Notwithstanding these special settings and disciplines (alongside the ordinary settings described by Laurier, Mondada and Tekin, and Sormani and Wolter), they are of a piece with the parties’ practical, familiar tasks. Most of our chapters exhibit IA in the company of others who are presumed competent to see and hear them and take them up. (Note how Garfinkel’s solitary assembly of the chair is to them an outlier.) If you are a dancer, studio work is of your everyday life, and IA in these settings seems tied to the work of finding and evidencing the sense of where we are in our joint enterprises so as to see what may lie just ahead. Whether in the studio or on our way to the moon, familiarity underwrites the instructed actions we routinely produce and find, and across the collection there seems to be little time out from the exercise. This may be a novel use for “wayfinding” with respect to its more familiar treatments, as in finding our way through unfamiliar territories in the company of technical or vernacular maps (see Garfinkel 2002: 199; Psathas 1986). But wayfinding has a substantial, seen-but-unnoticed place in our everyday lives as well, as we shape the course of our affairs in concert with others. This is the sense of the subtitle phrase for this Afterword. Sequential orders of every kind are achieved by the local analyses of those who are party to them. This volume is a collection of sequential orders, and they are not only conversational orders. To achieve them is to engage in assembling an observable-reportable path from what we are doing now to what lies ahead. IA is among the midwives of the achievement, and wayfinding is a way of speaking of its work. The suggestion, however, also takes the discussion of IA in a slightly different direction. Wayfinding need not presume that we are lost. Two expressions IA is a play on an endlessly variegated world of social action having to do with the pair: instructions, broadly conceived, and what we do with them. This volume is a display of its diversities that hopefully will defeat all efforts to cage them, and through the collection we can begin to take stock of the range of Garfinkel’s formulation. Across these widely diverse occasions and expressions of the pair, similar work is going on. And what work it is, is taken up in the editors’ expansive Introduction to the conceptual terrain of IA. It should be read closely, and central to the clearings it offers is advice on how to take interest in all this talk of instruction in a world thirsty for (and willing to pay handsomely for) new and more effective forms. But it is not for them that EM takes interest in the pair. The troubles that arise during efforts to follow instructions are less interesting as technical problems to be overcome, and more interesting as sources of

Afterword  285 insight into the organizational, technological, and interactional resources and expertise of the participants in the local production of social actions. (Lynch and Lindwall, p. 1 in “Introduction” of this volume) For EM, social action is always near to hand. The Introduction also presents a second pair structure, in the difference (and there is not always a difference) between instructed action and instructive action. It notes how instructed actions have no need for a “division of labor between instructor and instructed” (p. 9), and how a queue, itself an assemblage of instructed actions (as Mondada and Tekin describe), is also instructive for anyone seeking to join it. “In such cases, instructed actions also are instructive actions, the performance of which ‘explicates’ what to do next …” (p. 9). The Introduction also speaks of the “pervasiveness of instructed action” and asks whether “all social actions are instructive in some sense?” The question “invites pursuit of how coherent and concerted actions are organized if not through the instructive reproduction of social order” (p. 11). The sociology is vivid. At the same time, the phrase “instructed action,” relieved of Garfinkel’s asterisk and his clear aim that his interests are not in “any old thing about instructions and following instruction” (2002: 197), can be vexatious in the ways that natural language borrowings tend to be. They can beckon familiar certainties about instruction, teaching and learning, their familiar settings, and those who staff them. They are readily heard in social science and everyday life and have been enshrined in 100 years of educational research. We find them whenever we hear of those who know and those who do not (holding aside the epistemic literature, whose interests in “those who do and do not” lie elsewhere, in agonistic “territories of knowledge” [Heritage 2012, passim]). As words on the page, the two phrases can invite straightforward readings. Instructive action can be read as action that instructs, just as instructed action can be read as action that has been instructed. Both readings are unremarkable in the life of classrooms, in professional education and its literatures, and in instruction following of many kinds.3 Yet clearly EM finds a distinctive sociological interest in IA, and it seems to entail looking backwards and forwards (as Garfinkel does recursively from his diagram to the pieces on the floor and back again; our collection is rife with the exercise). As the editors emphasize, “…instructed actions are not limited to actions for which there are specific, coherently identifiable formal instructions” (p. 11). My aim in the second half of these remarks is to spare IA those more familiar readings. On correctness and competence In Garfinkel’s assembly of his chair (to which this volume adds to the corpus of commentaries), he takes up a slip of sketch diagrams – a stand-in for the irreparable incompleteness of seemingly every instruction – and proceeds with the chair’s puzzle parts on the floor to, as a way of speaking, discover what the instructions do not say (and what can be seen across the field only if we are seeing it right). I want to bring two points to the discussion.

286  Douglas Macbeth First, there was nothing deficient about Garfinkel’s curriculum for the task. It is not that there is something he should have studied or known beforehand to assemble the chair. I expect he had assembled many things from many slips of paper before, as we all have. They are written as puzzle-maps that promise outcomes. Yet the docile map relies on our interrogations to come to life, and the chair is exemplary of his distinctive interests in how instructions, for all their infirmities and ellipses, are made to work. (His curiosity about how they work trumped the pending arrival of his guests.) Second, although all formal instruction (and a good deal of “informal” instruction) premises it, it can be difficult to find in his account some way to say that whatever he was doing with the instructions and the puzzle parts is either correct or incorrect, beyond whether or not he ever gets to sit in the chair. Unlike instructions for credentialing programs (as when learning to tie our laces or do a root canal), if the chair is assembled, however and whenever he does so, including, say, by modifying parts or driving screws, the kinds of things craft-persons do all the time, then it’s assembled and ready for use. This is to say that we may routinely find “instructed actions” that are distinctively relieved of normative orders of correction or correctness. We hear and/or see them, take their measure, and proceed (as in many of our volume’s exhibits and the exhibit below). Garfinkel’s investigation of the chair’s assembly was not oriented to “correctness”; he was looking instead for the instructed coherence of an ensemble, as we see in several of our chapters, especially those that take us through mature practice. However, the unmarked reading of “instruction” and its variants can have just those attachments that make correction relevant. Learning to do something “right” is the familiar frame of instruction in common parlance. Classroom lessons and setting the dinner table are shot-through with pending corrections. But overwhelmingly “instructed action” shows a different enactment, an instruction produced for those who are competent to see, hear, and find their way with it (as were the Apollo crew, and Eisenmann and Mitchell). Such occasions proceed by what any cohort competent to, say, art installation, would make of them. IA in our collection seems overwhelming premised on the competence to find it. I also want to note the range of IA beyond the studies collected here. The editors remind us of its play in the routine grounds of everyday life as constitutive of “the most familiar activities in our lives,” activities that elude formal efforts to “capture and contain” them (p. 3), “in research laboratories, technological workplaces, and countless scenes of practical communicative actions” (p. 6). The flow of traffic of every kind is emblematic, as when a pedestrian seeking to cross the street instructively comports herself to be found as someone seeking to cross (and then reckons IA in turn, from fenders, windshields, and vehicular pace as to whether she has been found or not; [see Liberman 2014; Sudnow 1972]). Goffman’s formulation of a “with” (1971: 19) – that parties walking in pace with each other are seen as companions – is also exemplary. They are producing their stride as an instructed field of action to be found by anyone approaching them.4 So too for preference organization in ordinary conversation (Pomerantz 1984), wherein a prefacing question – “Are you doing anything this weekend?” – can be heard for the question

Afterword  287 it prefaces, and that question, whether welcomed or not, can be “instructed” by the temporal parameters of the recipient’s next turn production (e.g., after a pause, “I’m doing my mother’s laundry”). These organizations strike me as among the indefinite range of instructed actions produced to be seen and found within actions underway, without timeout or need or thought of “correction.”5 In this way, perhaps the most pervasive evidence of IA aligns with the “next turn proof procedure” in conversation’s organization, a “procedure” for securing the recurrent achievements of common understanding (Moerman and Sacks 1988 [1971]; Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974). However, the alignment for IA has nothing to do with “proofs” for overhearing analysts, but rather, entirely, with the local achievements of common understanding that permit the parties to “go on.” Every next turn reveals its speaker’s analysis of what was said and done in the prior and is mightily instructive in that way, but in a fashion having nothing to do with correct replies, though indeed misunderstandings can be revealed and then repaired. But only if everyday life is the play of an endless lesson quiz can misunderstandings be treated as “incorrect replies.” It may be, instead, that the recurrent achievements of common understanding are also, in the temporal parameters of each turn’s construction, the work of instructed actions. And as we routinely see in turn constructions and across our collected studies, understanding is the play of competence. In this light, instructed actions achieve understandings not in the confidence of what the other does not know, but what she does. Competence underwrites IA and our studies articulate, in their particulars, what it is a competence to.6 Overwhelmingly, IA implicates the competence to hear and/or see the affairs it speaks of without time out. How else could it play? To press the account a bit further, a shopworn example from my classroom materials follows. I want to frame the discussion through the organization of “repair” in natural conversation (Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977) and the conceptual distance between correction and repair. “Correction” implicates a normative order. Every correction does. But studies of conversation show perfectly correct speaking that is repaired, and oddly produced speaking that is not. Repair is not then in the service of the normative orders that underwrite correction: … The term ‘correction’ is commonly understood to refer to the replacement of an ‘error’ or ‘mistake’ by what is ‘correct’. The phenomena we are addressing, however, are neither contingent upon error, nor limited to replacement. … Accordingly, we will refer to ‘repair’ rather than ‘correction’ in order to capture the more general domain of occurrences. … [I]t appears that nothing is, in principle, excludable from the class ‘repairable’. (Schegloff et al. 1977: 363) Similarly, IA routinely isn’t an exercise in correction (though it surely steers normative orders, as when a first story or glance instructs the character of its next). And similarly, it is difficult to imagine its boundaries. IA is also about achieving common understanding, which does indeed underwrite normative orders, but not as

288  Douglas Macbeth a correcting engine. There is not time in the world to rely on correction to organize and proceed with our everyday lives. An exhibit The brief sequence below shows the ongoing production of a classroom lesson as it relies upon the competence to hear the instructed action of a question’s production. The exhibit is a 3rd grade science demonstration on heat energy, where food coloring is dropped into jars of hot water, tap water, and ice water, and the students are asked to say what they see (see Lynch & Macbeth 1998; Macbeth 1996, 2014). Across their exchanges, the teacher’s recurrent question is: “What happened here?” This sequence shows her exchange with Lauren about the jar of hot water. mn:1 …

→ → → →

85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

T: Kay. Now. (3.0) Whut can you tell me (1.0) happened here. (1.0) ((hands go up)) What happened here. Huh? What happened here. (0.7) Lauren. L: The coloring spreadded all over the water. (1.0) T: How > fast? (0.7) L: Like- real fast. T: Real fast. = I wonder why (). L: Cuz it wuz- (.) hotter. T: Cuz it’s hhhot. Okay. What happened here, in tha tap water. (1.0) tap water. (1.0) Huh? (2.0) ((hands go up)) Alright, Elizabeth…

Asked “what happened?” in the jar of hot water in line 88, Lauren replies that it “spreadded all over...” The next question in line 91 becomes, after a pause, “How > fast?” The question thus calls for a metric of “fastness,” and while one might figure the students could answer in terms of the other jars – as in “faster or slower than that one” – the teacher is asking about just this jar. And in that way, absent a local comparative field, “how fast?” becomes a very different question. What would a relevant metric be, e.g., “faster than the tortoise, or slower the hare?” Perhaps anticipating the question’s task (see the pause of line 90), the teacher produces it as an instructed action for answering. The “>” notation in line 91 notes the pace of her turn: her question “How > fast?” is said quickly, and Lauren finds her reply in the question’s pace (note the pause following the question): “Like– real fast.” In asking it as she does, the teacher is relying on Lauren to hear in the question’s production an instructed exhibit for continuing on with their lesson colloquy, and Lauren hears it. Their exchange is thus not oriented to what Lauren does not know or cannot hear, but what she does and can. And this competence to the production grammars of questions, offers, hints, and withholdings, among many other things, and not only conversational things, underwrites the wayfinding work of every classroom lesson (along with childhood socialization, domestic life, and the

Afterword  289 competent work found in our collection). The teacher’s question relies on a reckoning of what Lauren is competent to hear, as a resource for pursuing a lesson on matters that she (Lauren) may not know. In this way, “instructed actions,” once we look for them, may be routinely implicated in underwriting the conventional sense of “direct instruction.”7 Note further how in Lauren’s exhibit and elsewhere in the collection we find instructed actions that suffer no problems of clarity, completeness, or followability. IA can be as fleeting and adequate as “How > fast?” It underwrites common understandings of endless sorts and wayfinding more broadly.8 Conclusion Instructed action is writing an “alternate” to and respecification of deeply familiar vernacular and professional accounts of instructing and following instructions (see Garfinkel 2002: 192 on “asymmetric alternate technologies of social analysis”). It does so as it opens the box onto what we do with them in their varieties and occasions, and how we both produce and proceed with them notwithstanding however they may be unfinished. As in the play of indexical expressions in natural language, “completeness” cannot be the measure of adequacy, and we do indeed find its adequacies throughout the collection (except, perhaps, in Sormani and Wolter’s classroom AI project). Should we go looking for shortcomings, we will have to find them elsewhere (as they do). IA’s alternate expressions and interests are a conceptual project and not an easy one. The difficulties include how it may be very hard to escape the gravitational pull of familiar reckonings about students, teachers, novices and old hands, their tasks, relations, and appointments. By EM’s lights, “instructed actions” have a pervasive play in social action, unimagined by the instructional and social science literature; one need not find correction in order to find it, and the presumption that we do reveals another astonishing “gap” in the literature (Garfinkel 1996: 16). The gap ignores a vast terrain of wayfindings that has less to do with anxieties about being lost than the praxiologies of continuing on. To be sure, there are corrections to be found in our study collection. But correction is not the half of it, and certainly not the first half, and when we uncouple instructed action from correction and see its tie to competence, the range and weight of Garfinkel’s formulation begins to come into view. At the same time, there is still the matter of his chair. His treatment is both exemplary of IA and distinctive. Laurier’s Introduction alerts us to a passage wherein Garfinkel collects his tasks and assesses his circumstances, and they are daunting. Factual adequacy, completeness, ambiguity of expression, followability, effective procedure, unique correspondence of representation and object – these topics, and all the topics that I encounter in addition to these, are available to me under the condition that the topicality poses the practical problem in vivo in which I am going to have to take and deal with not only “Are the instructions complete?” but given the material organizational things I’m up against by getting it done before the company comes, what does completeness,

290  Douglas Macbeth followability, sequence, correct sequence, local historicity (and the rest) come to look like. And that’s an Ethnomethodological question. (Garfinkel 2002: 202, original emphasis) The chair is the first exhibit of IA taken up in Garfinkel (2002) and there are others (see also Livingston 2008). Occasioned by an ordinary practical task we all know well, he found a densely perspicuous setting. The correctness of the instructions was not his question. His topic was the coherences of the phenomenal-field properties of the various parts and diagrams and the wayfindings they afford in vivo. As the assembly of the chair became intertwined with his inquiry, there were, no doubt, puzzles, “time outs” and uncertainties (as when we receive an Amazon package wrapped in plastic mystery). The chair was not a seamless inquiry, and our collected studies also find those contingencies (as when installing an art installation, deciding that our GPS devices or fellow surfers are unreliable, reproducing a videotaped enactment, or renewing the uncertain end of a queue). Wayfinding is perhaps the brightest continuity across our collection. Garfinkel’s chair introduces his sighting of a world of instructed action. Our collection of studies is extending this work, reading through its priors while taking up domains of IA and social-action that the rest of us have not consulted or imagined. Ethnomethodology thrives on the study of settings we have not considered before. They are its prods. For future students and studies of instructed action, this volume offers a first and very fine collection, instructively prodding us with its exhibits of diverse coherences to see countless domains of the routine grounds of everyday life as an unrelieved fabric of instructed actions. Notes 1 They offer the example of Garfinkel’s exercise in which students are given a transcript of a father telling his wife of his shopping outing with their young son (who put a penny in the parking meter) (Garfinkel 1967: 29). The task for the students is to say-in-somany-words what the parents were talking about and thus to “write instructions for recognizing what the parties were actually and certainly saying.” Those instructions were descriptions (and “the very way of accomplishing the task multiplied its features” [1967: 26]). We see it throughout the present volume, and there can be no complaint here. Instructing routinely describes an action, and the assured incompleteness of instructions may issue from the “etc. clause” of any such description. On the other hand, an instruction is more than a gaggle of words. There are practiced grammars of natural language and account construction, with bodies attached, that send followable instructions forward as of their constituent descriptions, and the competence of recipients to receive them. These collected studies regularly take up that competence. 2 Note also their critical edge: of the robot’s haplessness André remarks, “[he] plays the idiot, he’s in school” (p. 21). 3 It is relevant to note that my degree is in education and my academic appointment was to a college of education. I doubt that any domain of science – social, natural, clinical, or technical – is relieved of natural language borrowings and their “bewitchments” (Wittgenstein, 1958, Part 1, para. 109). But education is awash with them; ‘teaching & learning’ are its royal couple.

Afterword  291 4 As in how a first greeting instructs its next, the “with” instructs the traffic of which it is a part (we go around them, not between them). These are things we see evidently, and the evidence of the instructed action is the flow of traffic that preserves it, without remark. I sometimes would ask students whether they had ever found themselves walking synchronously with a stranger. It was readily acknowledged, along with a sense of creepiness that led them to ‘break it off’ once it came into view. The break is an IA as well, for others to find. 5 They evidence and rely upon grammars of practical action. In his “Notes on methodology” (edited by Jefferson), Sacks speaks of conversation’s order as “… another grammar. And grammar, of course, is the model of routinely observable closely ordered activities” (1984: 25). Commonly, instructed action is such an activity. 6 See also Garfinkel on the “autochthonous order properties … of the congregational work of producing social facts … and ordinary things. … By one and all they are observable and demanded, even while they are seen but unnoticed. They inhabit the enterprises of the streets as well as the privacy of bedroom talk. They are available in service lines, entering a freeway traffic stream, street crossings by pedestrian crowds, walking together” (Garfinkel 2002: 190, original emphasis). IA is of this congregational work, and these orderly productions routinely evidence the competence that underwrites it (as when navigating a four-way traffic stop; see Liberman 2014; Livingston 2008). 7 In Lauren’s exhibit and elsewhere in our materials, we can see an alignment between “instructed action” and more familiar readings of “instruction,” wherein IA is the gearworks, knitting together the understandings that send instruction forward. In the chapters by Arano, and Eisenmann and Mitchell, “direct instruction” tends to emerge where IA fails to find its purchase. And when the surfer in Liberman (p. 170) turns on his board and stoutly blocks an interloper from the wave, we can figure it is a second to a first but unseen instructed action, a blunt correction for one who had not found the end of a lineup that was in plain view for anyone competent to see. 8 In a variation on this theme of IA in the service of instruction, the narrator of the live endodontic procedure for first term students in Lindwall and Lymer’s chapter seems closely oriented to moments in the procedure where students can find evident things, such as “blasting water” or “twirling” watch stems. The narrator’s tour of the procedure is opportunistic, looking for places to pull from the procedure what anyone can see as a way to introduce them to what they cannot. The lesson exhibits a first-led wayfinding through unmarked terrain, and the narrator is marking it.

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292  Douglas Macbeth Garfinkel, Harold and Eric Livingston. 2003. ‘Phenomenal Field Properties of Order in Formatted Queues and Their Neglected Standing in the Current Situation of Inquiry’, Visual Studies 18(1): 21–28. Goffman, Erving. 1971. Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Harper & Row. Heritage, John. 2012. ‘Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge’, Research on Language & Social Interaction 45(1): 1–29. Liberman, Kenneth. 2014. More Studies in Ethnomethodology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Livingston, Eric. 2008. Ethnographies of Reason. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Lynch, Michael and Douglas Macbeth. 1998. ‘Demonstrating Physics Lessons’, in J. Greeno and S. Goldman (eds.) Thinking Practices in Mathematics and Science Learning. Marwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 269–297. Macbeth, Douglas. 1996. ‘The Discovery of Situated Worlds: Analytic Commitments, or Moral Orders?’, Human Studies 19: 267–287. Macbeth, Douglas. 2000. ‘Classrooms as installations’, in S. Hester & J. Hughes (eds.) The Local Education Order. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 21–72. Macbeth, Douglas. 2014. ‘Studies of Work, Instructed Action, and the Promise of Granularity: A Commentary’, Discourse Studies 16(2): 295–308. McHoul, Alec. 1978. ‘The Organization of Turns at Formal Talk in the Classroom’, Language and Society 7: 183–213. Mehan, Hugh. 1979. Learning Lessons. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Moerman, Michael and Harvey Sacks. 1988 [1971]. ‘On “Understanding” in the Analysis of Natural Conversation’, in M. Moerman (ed.) Talking Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 180–186. Pomerantz, Anita. 1984. ‘Agreeing and Disagreeing with Assessments: Some Features of Preferred/Dispreferred Turn Shapes’, in J. M. Atkinson and J. C. Heritage (eds.) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–101. Psathas, George. 1986. ‘Some Sequential Structures in Direction-Giving’, Human Studies 9(2/3): 231–246. Sacks, Harvey. 1984. ‘Notes on Methodology’, in J. M. Atkinson and J. C. Heritage (eds.) Structures of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–27. Sacks, Harvey. 1989. ‘Lecture 13: On Proverbs’, Human Studies 12(3/4): 365–375. Sacks, Harvey, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. 1974. ‘A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking in Conversation’, Language 50(4): 696–735. Schegloff, Emanuel, Gail Jefferson and Harvey Sacks. 1977. ‘The Preference for SelfCorrection in the Organization of Repair in Conversation’, Language 53: 361–382. Sudnow, David. 1972. ‘Temporal Parameters of Interpersonal Observation’, in D. Sudnow (ed.) Studies in Social Interaction. New York: Free Press, pp. 259–279. Wieder, D. Lawrence and Steven L. Pratt. 1990. ‘On the Occasioned and Situated Character of Members’ Questions and Answers: Reflections on the Question, “Is He or She a Real Indian?”’, in D. Carbaugh (ed.) Cultural Communication and Intercultural Contact. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 65–75. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to endnotes. accountability 75, 77, 84, 84–97; of instructions 149, 203, 211, 250–1 accountable/account-able 2, 40, 118, 121–9, 149, 153–4, 156, 164, 202–3, 206, 214–15, 246, 251, 265, 267 accounts 38, 125, 171; analytic 43–4, 52n3; descriptive 25–6, 69; formal 6, 35n18, 38, 41, 58; incompleteness of 38, 41, 44; online 167; reflexivity of 51n1 achievement: of embodied technique 171, 204; of intersubjective understanding 69, 232, 287; of order 23 action: embodied 7, 43, 46, 59, 108–9, 171–2, 196–7, 252; practical 2–3, 51n1, 102, 236, 263, 280–1; social 11, 70, 101, 203, 244, 284–5; see also methods action categorization 40–5, 49, 95, 126; situated 9, 244; see also embodied action adequacy: of instructions 26, 172; of sociological descriptions 49–50, 51n1, 131, 132n11; see also unique adequacy ad hoc: conceptual change 272–3; considerations 26; instructions 160, 163, 165, 210–12, 226–28, 234, 236; practices 118 ambiguity 10, 38, 50, 76, 87–97, 103, 105, 110; see also indeterminacy analysis: formal/professional 27, 37, 122; by participants in activities 10, 37, 44, 48–49, 227, 287; video 47–48, 96, 180 Anderson, Bob 68–70, 132n11, 204 Apollo 13 mission 225–7

art 135, 147; ethnomethodological approach to 136, 147; exhibitions/ installations 136, 281; lessons 154; martial 217; works of 136, 139–40, 150n2 assessment 45, 59–60, 171, 247 audience 45–7, 210 auto-ethnography 154, 180, 208 Beals, Ralph 30–1, 35n15 beginners: see novices Bjelic, Dusan 47, 244, 261 body/bodies see action, embodied breaching exercises/experiments 4, 220, 226, 243 Brown, Barry 8, 15, 48, 280 categories/categorization see action categorization; membership categories Cavell, Stanley 243, 254 classifications 49 coaching 8, 194–5 cognitive states, attributions of 264, 267, 269–71 cognitivism 5, 261 coherence: achieved 4, 58, 102; gestalt 44, 68–71, 108, 204 Collin, Finn 22 commonsense descriptions and perspectives 49, 101, 125, 129–30, 273 competence/competency 58, 111, 138, 154, 172 complaints: about instructions 103; about violations 112–13, 251 completeness of instructions 3, 6–7, 26, 30, 102, 148, 242, 289

294 Index computer: cursor as visual guide 61, 70; science 261, 273 conceptual issues 145, 260–2, 272–4, 282–3 contingencies 4, 10, 30, 48–9, 105, 113, 127, 194–6, 256, 281–2, 290 conversation analysis 9, 44, 47; proof procedure in 287 coordination 47–8, 62, 64, 100–1, 115, 146, 171, 173, 180, 203–4 corporeal action see action, embodied correction/corrections 87, 163, 179, 187–91, 208, 286–7; haptic 211–19; intercorporeal 211, 214, 220; and repair 287 correspondence: embodied 173; between instructions and conduct 48, 263; between model and drawing 154, 171; between representation and object 27, 289; between saying and doing 50 Coulter, Jeff 1, 262 culture 123; kids’ 273, 283; material 60; studies 32 dance 140, 178–79; enactment of instructions in 188–92; ethnography of 179–80; peer-to-peer instruction in 192–5; as social action 180–1; studio instruction in 181–88, 280; and Taiji 209–11, 214–15 demonstration 39, 45–9, 156, 167, 172, 180–81, 186–87, 194–96, 208, 212–13, 274, 288 describability 173, 203, 204 description/descriptions 6, 10, 24–7, 37–51, 58, 63, 68–9, 102, 145, 146, 158, 163, 173, 203–5, 212, 225, 230–1, 233, 235, 244, 250, 269, 281, 290n1 detail/details: coherence of 114; constitutive 41–3, 73, 95; discernment of 63–8, 163; of drawing 154; embodied 203, 219, 252; emergence of 196; granularity of 40–1, 47, 52n3, 229, 237; of images 45; of implementing instructions 25; of instructions 142–4, 147, 230–31, 249; local 109; in phenomenal field 59, 68–71, 204, 244; recovering 281; relevance of 173; schemes of 32–3; temporal 75; visualization of 65

directions 3, 7–9, 115, 118, 142–3, 151n12, 246 discovery, discoveries, discovering 30–1, 136–40, 205, 206, 209, 254 display, displays 75, 111; defensive 192; GPS 8; instructive 46, 175, 235–36; of knowledge 119; of order 84, 96, 163; of orientation 81–2; of robot operation 263, 268; spatial 251; subverting 271–72; of understanding 127, 230 Dreyfus, Hubert 24, 275n2; and Patricia Allen Dreyfus 33, 34n4 Duchamp, Marcel 140–44, 151n14 embodied action see action, embodied et cetera provision 3, 103, 160, 163, 173 ethnography 29, 52n3, 179–80, 202 ethnomethodological: alternate 27, 244, 251, 255, 283, 289; indifference 1 ethnomethodology 1–3, 6, 27, 33, 38, 47–9, 58, 73, 102, 118, 136, 147, 154, 178–80, 225, 227–28, 235, 242–43, 264, 279, 289–90; and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 237–38 exercise/exercises 3–5, 11–12, 22–4, 26, 28, 33n1, 38, 180–81, 208–19, 290n1; see also breaching exercises/experiments explanation/explanations 167, 271, 273–74; practical 217 Figal, Günter 103 followability 3, 25, 45–9, 58, 219, 289–90 following instructions: see instructions, following formal: analysis 27–30; instructions 2–3, 6, 11, 34n9, 35n19, 244, 285–86; models 264; rules 100, 103, 113, 172; structures 282 formulation/formulations 9, 29, 46–7, 57, 126, 129, 156, 212, 250–52, 265, 268–69 Frake, Charles 29, 34n12 games 42–3, 100 Garfinkel, Harold xix, 1, 100–3, 229, 238, 279, 281; account of assembling a chair 5–7, 58, 136, 139, 242–3, 286, 289–90; archive 21; Ethnomethodology’s Program 2, 21, 68; exercises and experiments

Index  295 11–12, 40–1, 48, 58–9, 220, 243; instructed actions 2–3, 5, 50–1, 58, 105, 114, 148, 160, 202–4, 225, 244, 274, 284–5, 289; on descriptions as instructions 38, 244; “On formal structures of practical actions” (with Sacks) 29, 41; on perspicuous settings 3–4, 22, 26; on queues 74–6, 87, 95–7, 282; on science 106; on “shop floor problem” 10; Studies in Ethnomethodology 51n1 gestalt: coherence 43–4, 68–70, 108–9; contexture 195; temporal and visible 79, 93, 96–7 gesture: corrective 186; embodied 207; expressive 179; and gaze 44, 177; imitation of 185; pointing 46, 84, 89; stroking 157–59 gloss/glosses: anthropologist’s 30; instructed 280; inverted 261, 271, 273; Sacks’s 4, 24, 28–30; theoretical 261; verbal 153, 201–02 Goffman, Erving 82, 192, 198n10 Goodwin, Charles 10, 41, 49–50, 178, 185, 196, 213 granularity 39–41, 45, 51 Greiffenhagen, Christian 267, 269, 272, 273, 287 guidance 8, 10, 58, 60, 62–3, 228–9 guidelines 2, 6, 16, 103 Gurwitsch, Aron 4, 68–9, 108, 204 human-computer interaction 61, 70, 237–8, 273 Husserl, Edmund 60 “immortal” social order 16, 96–7, 282 improvisation 5–6, 11, 68, 225 incompleteness of instructions 7, 38, 41, 44, 103, 143, 146–7, 235, 284–5 indeterminacy 76, 86, 89, 103 indexical: artwork 153; expressions 156–7, 167, 183, 230; formulations 212; ground 44; instructions 235; talk 43 indexicality 10, 235, 283 instructed actions: ethnomethodological studies of 50–1, 68, 118, 136, 154, 178, 225, 235, 244; praxeological validity of 23, 27–29, 33n2, 179, 183, 203 instructed perception 178–9

instruction/instructions 1, 38; classroom 265, 287–89; following 49, 58, 119, 135, 144, 160, 165, 172, 202–4, 251, 281, 289; formal 5–6; from ground control to spacecraft 228–34; incompleteness of 7, 103, 143, 146–7, 235, 283, 285 instructive actions 2, 9, 70–1, 74, 145, 179, 181, 188, 195–6, 245, 256, 285 interaction: embodied aspects of 44; instructional 51, 148, 155, 160, 195–7, 202, 211, 227, 229, 267; with mirror in dance studio 180; rules of 102, 104, 113–15; see also human-computer interaction interactional practices 76, 93, 154, 172–173 interpretation 7, 11, 24, 49, 84–6, 93, 96–7, 101, 145–6, 148–9, 153, 159, 207, 216 inverting lenses exercise 4, 23, 33n1, 203, 220; see also exercises; Garfinkel, Harold irony 6, 31, 57, 143, 272 Jefferson, Gail 43, 275n8 knowledge 62, 109; anatomical 64, 219; common 40, 120–1, 127; local 180; natural 118–20; scientific 273; specialized 229; tacit 9–10; territories of 225 Koschmann, Timothy 136, 147–8, 150n3 language: natural/ordinary 50, 274, 285, 289; programming 263; specialized 125, 146 Latour, Bruno 2 learning 50, 245, 261; continuum 271; by doing 118, 125; embodied 105, 213; imitative 154; performative 178–79, 196; self-initiated 180, 191–2; teaching and 29, 179, 285 Lebenswelt pair 27, 33, 35n10, 148 lived work: of following instructions 57–8, 202, 251; of practice 158, 237; of producing social order 34n7, 35n19, 95, 202–4 Livingston, Eric 9, 60, 75–6, 82, 83, 87, 93, 115, 282 maps 26, 125, 244, 284; see also directions; occasion maps manuals 141 maxims 102, 118–32; see also rules Medawar, Peter 6

296 Index

observability 178–9, 195–6; of coherence 102, 109; conversation analytic 47; of “internal affairs” 202, 204; of learning 213; of robot actions 260, 266–7 observable: instructively 31, 43, 49–50, 73–5, 95, 114, 201; intersubjectively 102; making 61, 65, 84, 109, 149, 185, 220; publicly 41, 73, 97; reportable (accountable) 118, 203, 267, 284 observation 24; ethnographic 75–6 occasion maps 7 order see social order organization, endogenous 24, 48 organizational objects 4–5, 24, 68, 70, 74, 103, 247, 256, 289 orientation/orientations: to audience 45, to co-participants 75, 93; embodied 194, 212–13; of gaze 189; interactional 214; of instructions 49; inward 205; to mirror 181; to moral accountability 95; mutual 231–3; to regulations 81, 96; sociological 50; spatial 63, 165; tutorial 47

performance 148–9, 179, 185–6, 191, 196–7 perspicuous phenomena/settings 3–4, 28, 36, 51, 136, 203, 244 phenomenal field/fields, 68–70, 204 phenomenology, 59, 68–9, 204 plan/plans 43, 146, 148 play 130, 267; conceptual 69; field of 67, 265–6, 269; of instructed actions 284–5; with instructions 136, 260; subversive 260–61, 268, 271, 274; see also games playing: with brush 172; music 172, 181 Pollner, Melvin 9, 101, 114 practical action see action practical problems 89, 91, 97, 115, 117, 194, 202, 236, 242, 265, 289 practical purposes 144, 232, 249 practical reasoning 154, 273 practice/practices 103, 105, 172–3, 187–88, 213, 246; artistic 136, 145, 147, 149, 158, 160, 201–204; conceptual 146; embodied 211–13, 219–20; good 125; improvised 118; laboratory 148; methodic 96; routine 112; sequential 181; situated 173; spiritual 205–8 practicing 185, 188–9, 192 praxeologizing descriptive accounts 23, 25–6 procedure/procedures 26, 34n13, 167, 228–30, 281; in artificial intelligence 261; instructional 39–43, 46–50, 60–1, 156–7; surgical 61–7 production: of activities 219; of artworks 144, 159, 171; of order 6–7, 73–4, 76; of classroom lesson 288; collective 146, 196; of shared understanding 69 professional vision 49–50, 196, 213; see also Goodwin, Charles proverbs see maxims; Sacks, Harvey Psathas, George 7, 284

pedagogy 58, 210, 273, 281, 283; Garfinkel’s 4; infrastructure of 117; methods of 121; robot’s role in 264, 268; role of rules in 104; subversion of 261–3; tendentious 215; vagueness of 205

queues 9, 73–7, 95–7, 282, 284; finding places in 81–5; order and disorder of 85–95; recognizability of order in 77–81; rights to place in 107; in surfing 107, 111, 283 queuing 75, 91, 97; rules for 111

membership categories 78, 95–6, 155, 160 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 12, 24, 30, 33, 34n4, 68–9, 102, 172–3, 179, 214 methods: formal 9; ordinary, everyday 44; pedagogical 121, 154; practical 57, 60, 167; technical 65–7 misreading phenomenologists 30–3, 68 missing what, the 155, 202, 244 monitor/monitoring 62, 65, 75, 81, 89, 91, 178, 198, 249, 252, 260; self- 180, 191–2 multi-modal: conduct 179–81; formats 179, 186, 188; transcripts 43–4 natural accountability 75 newcomer see novice Nishizaka, Aug 154, 214 novice/novices 9, 38, 45, 51, 104–7, 121, 154–5, 159, 172, 196, 202, 214–5, 279–83, 289

Index  297 recipes 58–9, 203 recognizability 51n1, 52n3, 153, 202–6, 213–14; and descriptions 38–41, 231, 290n1; in queuing 73–9, 82, 87–9, 95–7 reflexivity 10, 51n1, 58, 95–6, 196 repair: conversational 287; endovascular 61–2; machines 52n6; situational 273–4 representation/representations 27, 289; of action 148; of physical movement 211; visual 76 respecification 4, 147, 204, 218–9, 259, 275n1; see also praxeologizing descriptive accounts re-specifying see respecification rules and rule-following 10–12, 100–15, 123– 4, 202–4, 237, 262; see also maxims Ryle, Gilbert 52n3 Sacks, Harvey 74, 112, 154–5, 185, 242–3, 245, 251–3, 254; “On formal Structures of practical actions” (with Garfinkel) 29, 41; on proverbs 122–3, 130, 282; on turn-transition 9; “Sociological description” 49–51; Sacks’ gloss 4, 24, 28–30, 32, 34n11 Schegloff, Emanuel 38–9, 41, 47, 287 Schwartz, Howard, 74, 101 science 1, 6, 9, 118–22, 127, 148, 237–38, 275n7; as practical action 25–6, 30; education 58, 272–3, 288 sequences 59–60, 68, 196, 209 sequential organization 9, 69–70, 245 shop floor 10, 59 Shanker, Stuart 259–62 Sharrock, Wes 68–70, 132n11, 204 skills 14, 26, 120, 138, 202, 215; see also competence social action see action social order 2, 11, 73–4, 95, 285; see also “immortal” social order

standardization 6, 67, 153, 237 Suchman, Lucy 9, 225, 235 Sudnow, David 74, 154 technology: educational 259; of intersubjectivity 216 temporal: course of journey 8; flow of interaction 70; Gestalt 93; morality 74; order 254 temporality 69, 73–5, 96–97, 156, 196; conversational 284; of perspectives 97 theorizing 22–3 third person phenomenology 59, 204 time see temporality training: amateurs 118, 123–5; expressive actions 179; teachers 212–13 transcription 44–5, 47–9, 238 trouble 2–7, 12, 23, 87, 93, 204–5; see also breaching exercises Tuncer, Sylvaine 8, 48 Turing, Alan 261–4, 267 Turing test 269 turn-taking 9, 109, 112 tutorial: problems 22, 48; videos 8, 37, 45–51, 52n6, 52n7, 281 unique adequacy 131, 132n11, 173, 180, 255, 282–3, 289 visibility 66, 77–8, 195–7 walking 93, 244–56 Watson, Rod 13, 101, 103 wayfinding 23, 242, 248–9, 251, 255, 280, 283–4, 290 Wieder, D. Lawrence 34n9, 261 Winch, Peter 21, 174n6 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 102–3, 260–4, 273, 290n3 Zemel, Alan 136, 147–8, 150n3 Zimmerman, Donald 101, 114