Sociologies of the Witnessable and the Hidden Social Order - Essay Example

Sociologies of the Witnessable and the Hidden Social Order Man being a social creature in nature, he has a lot of functions to perform and when he wants to do anything, at first he sets up in his mind a thinking and then express it by performing. Through their performing they make an instance in the society and the other people follow it for doing such. In this context when he hits upon a plan in his mind for doing something that plan is regarded as the hidden social order and the plan is expressed by performing the specified works that is called the witnessable order in society. There is a clear distinction between sociologies of the witnessable and sociologies of the hidden social order in quite similar terms. The hidden social order is thinking for doing something. On the other hand, The witnessable social order is the establishment of the thinking through performing. The witnessable social order sets up an instance in the society, but hidden social order is not be understood by anyone until expressing it. The hidden social order is the theme of research in sociology and the sociologist treat it as the principal of sociology. But the witnessable social order is not any principal, rather than it is the practical concept of society in accordance with the social order. Just as, for Heidegger, science is blind to the ontological difference since it only recognises “that which is present” (always already) so, for Garfinkel, FA takes society as the totality of already-constituted social facts, thereby ignoring their local, in situ processes of coming-to-be. So while there is a strongly popular conception of EM as a purely empirical and descriptive science of “social processes” (a kind of social phenomenology), it may in fact be much more than this, if only because, in Heideggerian terms “coming to presence” must strictly be outside the grasp of any of today’s empirical sciences. Following this line of thought, EMmay turn out to be an alternative to all other social theories; one that offers an understanding (or “thematization”) of both the ontological domain (coming to presence) and perhaps even of the ontological difference as such in the social sphere – an understanding of the difference between “coming to presence” and “that which is merely present” as “social facts.” (McHoul, 1998:15). The witnessable order in society is somehow related with the “Principle of Visibility” that is one of the main principles of social order. The principle of visibility refers to the extent that the behavior of group members can be observed by other members of the group. The higher the observation rate of a group is, the more likely the members of that group are to follow group norms (Stark, 211). A prime example of a society with a high level of observability is Japan. Most offices are close quartered, open office spaces without any partitions. The employees work in full sight and hearing of their supervisors. This high level of visibility encourages workers to stay constantly on task lest they suffer reproaches from their supervisors.Exactly what these studies are, Garfinkel does not elaborate on just here; but the implication is that the term “Rendering Theorem”, “naturally organized ordinary activities”, and “practical action and reasoning” are to mean something like revealing: and, in particular, revealing something – namely the work of achieved coherence – to be both “hidden” and “transparent.” (McHoul, 1998:13). Then, when Garfinkel glosses Rendering Theorem’s interest as taking up what “the FA procedure ignores,” namely “the enacted, unmediated, directly and immediately witnessable details of immortal ordinary society” (Garfinkel, 1996: 8) we can also see an interest in conditions of a sort. As it were, the “witnessable details” are all that could possibly pass for conditions on this account. That is, for naturally organized ordinary activities, whatever claims are made about social being, the grounds of those claims must be the “immediately witnessable details of immortal ordinary society” – or, as Garfinkel (1964) once put it, “the routine grounds of everyday activities.” (McHoul, 1998:16). For example, Garfinkel sometimes dragged out a battered old recording device with headphones. This was an audio feedback delay machine. A person using the device would wear the headphones and speak into a microphone. The device delayed the auditory feedback of one’s own voice, so that as you were speaking, you heard through the headphones what you had just said a moment ago. The disruptive effects on the fluency of speaking were dramatic and sometimes hilarious. Another device he often used consisted of a welder’s mask outfitted with a tank prism purchased through an army surplus supplier. is not a Cartesian point of certainty. Nor is it a nihilistic denial of the possibility of This theory is knowing anything at all. Instead, the emptiness is a logical consequence of a deep, vivid, and self-consistent conception of social order. Despite his disclaimers about theorizing, Garfinkel again and again enunciates a comprehensive vision of how “the ordinary society” organizes itself. It organizes itself through its members’ use of methods of all kinds, and the stress is on all kinds: formal and informal, tacit and explicit, expert and ordinary, efficient and inefficient, rational and non-rational, methods for analyzing other methods, etc. and etc. It is a paradoxical vision, because the society’s methodic operations include all of the practical and intellectual resources that sociology might want to claim for its own. Garfinkel clarifies this perspective by arguing that: “The objective reality of social facts was Durkheim’s descriptive proxy for every topic of logic, meaning, reason, rational action, method, truth, and order in intellectual history, specified in any actual case as congregationally produced and naturally accountable, endogenous order production populational cohort’s concertedly witnessable and recognized, intelligible empirical phenomenon of immortal, ordinary society. Therein the phenomena of order consist of lived, immediate, unmediated congregational practices of production, display, witness, recognition, intelligibility, and accountability of immortal ordinary society’s ordinary phenomena of order, its ordinary things, the most ordinary things in the world.” (Garfinkel, 2002:93) If we wanted to press this comparison further, we would have to show how Heidegger’s project (the general conditions of coming to presence) and EM’s (the immediately witnessable details of coming to presence as grounds)were closer than they appear on this initial account. (McHoul, 1998:16, 17). That is possible by one way. The way is to approach this concept would be to ask how the early Heidegger’s position on the general conditions of being might ultimately be pragmatic in orientation. If the conditions, at least for the form of being that is Dasein, turn out to be pragmatic, then there is a much better possibility of them coinciding with EM’s notion of “witnessable details” as grounds. (McHoul, 1998:17). As Garfinkel puts it: The witnessably recurrent details of ordinary everyday practices constitute their own reality. They are studied in their unmediated details and not as signed enterprises (Garfinkel 1996, p. 8). That is, the practised character of the performance is displayed in the performance and we need not appeal to any hidden inner operations. According to Latour, the sociology of associations should be understood as a radical alternative of how to do sociology. Investigating “the very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (Latour, 2005:7), is for him not simply announcing a subfield among others, but the essence of a new sociology sharply contrasting (therefore challenging it much more than supplementing it) the mainstream, commonsense sociology which he labels ‘the sociology of the social’. This orthodoxy is characterized by its confession to the social as an entity or phenomenon that demarcates and differentiates sociology from the territories of all other disciplines. For hundred years now, Latour claims that: “… a given trait was said to be ‘social’ or ‘pertain to society’ when it could be defined by possessing specific properties, some negative – it must not be ‘purely’ biological, linguistic, economical, natural – and some positive – it must achieve, reinforce, express, maintain, reproduce, or subvert to social order” (Latour, 2005:3). At last, it can be said that though the two concepts are totally different from one another, both of these are much related with each other. The hidden social order is regarded as a concept in society through the establishment of it. So, hidden social order comes from the witnessable order. Both of them are essential concepts of the society. Through the revolution of the hidden social order in society, the society has been devolved. So, man being a social creature in nature must follow the hidden social order in society and should perform in accordance with it. References Garfinkel, H. (1964). Studies of the Routine Grounds of Everyday Activities. Social Problems 11 (3): 225–250. Garfinkel, H. (1996). Ethnomethodology’s Program. Social Psychology Quarterly 55 (1): 5–21. Heidegger, M. (1967). Being and Time. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Latour, Bruno (1992) “One more turn after the social turn…” in The Social Dimensions of Science, ed: E. McMullin; Notre Dame, Indiana, Notre Dame Press, pp. 272-94, 1992. McHoul, Alec. “How can Ethnomethodology be Heideggerian?”, Human Studies 21: 13–26, 1998. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pollner, M. (1991). ‘Left’ of ethnomethodology. American Sociological Review 56: 370–380. Stark, Rodney (2007). Sociology. 10th ed. Read More