Everyday Practices and Practical Formalization: The Jurisdiction of Indifferent Everydayness
Everyday Practices and Practical Formalization: The Jurisdiction of Indifferent Everydayness
«Everyday Practices and Practical Formalization: The Jurisdiction of Indifferent Everydayness»
by Kolyo Koev
Source:
Critique and Humanism Journal (сп. Критика и хуманизмы), issue: 35 / 2010, pages: 203-227, on www.cceol.com.
EVERYDAY PRACTICES AND PRACTICAL FORMALIZATION: THE JURISDICTION OF INDIFFERENT EVERYDAYNESS
This article deals with a thematic circle which Heidegger discusses extensively in his works from the 1920s, and especially in Being and Time, but nevertheless leaves somewhat unclear and indeterminate. 'Everyday life' and 'everydayness' have different, often contradictory, connotations in the architecture of Being and Time; but then, maybe that is precisely why they are a non-negligible constituent of the philosophical intrigue of the book as well as a path leading to the heart of Heidegger's early thought. Here, however, I am interested less in the role of the category of everydayness in understanding Heidegger's opus magnum than in a dimension of everydayness that is merely hinted at in it – a dimension I will review under the heading of 'indifferent everydayness' – and in the possibilities it opens up for a radical rethinking of the idea of everyday life in contemporary sociology, and maybe also for redefining the very character of sociological work. In view of this perspective, in reconstructing the idea of 'indifferent everydayness' I will constantly link Heidegger's point of view to the way ethnomethodology treats everyday life in its factual encounters with the complex of 'indifferent everydayness'. As is well known, Harold Garfinkel, especially in his later studies, carefully avoids binding ethnomethodological work to any analytically worked out construct. From this perspective, a juxtaposition with Heidegger's 'indifferent everydayness', which is unquestionably such a construct, makes it possible to subject Garfinkel's ethnomethodology to a 'misreading' such as that applied by the latter itself to the so-called formal analysis.
Of course, the question arises as to what is the point of intersection of the thus outlined circle of problems and the theme of the legality and (ii) legitimacy of power that is relevant to the subject of this issue of Critique & Humanism. Such a point of intersection can be found only if both everyday life and power
are viewed not through overcodified forms but as live practices. Such a view of power is proposed, for example, by Dimitar Vatsov in his book Opiti varhu vlastta i istinata (Essays on Power and Truth), where the focus is not on the institutionalized forms of power, and not even on micro-power objectifications, but on power as ‘an immediate evaluative force’ which, precisely as such, unavoidably produces sociality (cf. Vatsov, 2009). From this perspective, the level of competing performative acts in immediate encounters (mutual contestation, ignoring, recognition) is crucial for understanding the secondarily sedimented crystallizations of sociality (power), and not vice versa. The analysis of course can also take the opposite approach, starting from the institutionalized forms of power, but it would be sociologically relevant only if it constantly takes into account the dependence of the different objectifications upon ‘the live interplay of actual performatives’.
As for everyday life, its differentia specifica is usually assumed to be regularity. Regularity as a predicate of everyday life becomes visible primarily in a situation where its functioning – in late modern society – is free of transcendent meanings, and where regularity demonstrates a self-referentiality that is underpinned by different (technological, legal, political, and economic) structures of ‘formal rationality’ (for details, see Koev, 2003, Chapter III). In such a large-scale perspective, however, the anonymized structures in question fatally conceal the elementary codifications of regularity that are produced in the very unfolding of everyday practices (power practices are such as well) and, in this sense, belong to the practices themselves but are realized directly by the participants. The view of regularity as being produced, stabilized, and reproduced in the interaction of concrete practices also throws a different light on the question of everydayness which, far from standing out in its petrified forms, demonstrates a complex interplay of ‘externalizations’ of what is codified in the process of interaction, but also of an unproblematic re-appropriation of what has been externalized. All this takes place at one and the same level which, however, is not the level of institutional overcodification that is the usual point of departure of most of the explicitly formulated or implicit sociological conceptions of everyday life. I shall try to show that both Heidegger and the ethnomethodologists are sensitive, albeit in a different way and in a different style, to such a dynamic conception of everyday life. On the other hand, such a conception contains a serious resource for interpreting power-legitimation as an element of the immediate interactive practices of exercising power.
On the Term ‘Indifferent Everydayness’
In saying that in Heidegger the idea of indifferent everydayness has not crystallized in a clearly defined thesis I do not mean that it cannot be reconstructed on the basis of solid arguments proposed by the author of Being and Time himself. Furthermore, I would say that in Being and Time – unlike, for instance, in his 1915 habilitation dissertation, The Doctrine of Categories and
Meaning in Duns Scotus – Heidegger demonstrates sensitivity to facticity not in its immediate concreteness but as facticity concretized from a definite initial indifference of Dasein’s existing. The idea of everydayness as an indifferent totality is suggested in a methodological imperative formulated at the beginning of the book, above all through the shibboleth ‘proximally and for the most part’:
At the outset of our analysis it is particularly important that Dasein should not be interpreted with the differentiated character (Differenz) of some definite way of existing, but that it should be uncovered (aufgedeckt) in the undifferentiated character which it has proximally and for the most part. This undifferentiated character of Dasein’s everydayness is not nothing, but a positive phenomenal characteristic of this entity. (Heidegger, 1962, p.69)
In my further analysis I will be guided by this imperative, focusing on Being and Time as well as on some lecture-courses delivered by Heidegger before or immediately after he wrote his seminal work.
Everydayness in the mode of initial access to the question of the meaning of Being is to be found even at the very beginning of Being and Time as a pre-conceptual understanding of the ‘is’, within which we always conduct our activities when faced with the question of ‘What is Being?’. We start from such a ‘vague average understanding of Being’ as from a ‘fact’ (Heidegger, 1962, p.25). In Being and Time the attainment of access to the meaning of Being is elaborated as a basic principle of the analytic of Dasein. It is in that principle that the notorious ‘ontological difference’ is actually rooted. According to this principle, that which is ‘ontically closest’ must be the object of constant ontological attention, or in other words, ontological interpretation must start from and carry within itself an ontic way of being interpreted. From this perspective, according to Heidegger (ibid., p.37) we must take advantage of the ontico-ontological priority of (everyday) Dasein, which is ‘ontically “closest” to itself and ontologically farthest; but pre-ontologically it is surely not a stranger.’
This pre-ontological closeness is expressed precisely by everydayness in its indifference. Let us take a closer look at the two components of the phrase ‘everyday indifference’. In using the word ‘everydayness’ Heidegger tries to retain linguistically the immediacy of intentional life and, at the same time, its practical formedness. Whereas we experience the environment ‘in’ which we are (or, rather, ‘which’ we are), we do not experience it for the most part as clearly distinguishable ‘objects’ posited by egos (self-posited, in their turn, as ‘subjects’) but, as we have already seen, as a ‘vague average understanding of Being’. Insofar as there is any ‘I’ here at all, it is to be understood exclusively and only in the sense of referring to a ‘particular phenomenal context of Being’ within which it may reveal itself as its ‘objective’ opposite. For its part,
the ‘not-I’ (the objective opposite) is not simply an entity which lacks ‘I-hood’ but ‘a definite kind of Being which the “I” itself possesses, such as having lost’ (Heidegger, 1962, p.152). At the same time, every-dayness alludes to a regularity of comportments, to sedimented forms ordering the infinite multiplicity of being in the worldhood of living that likewise cannot be reduced to theorized formulations. Yet it is precisely this second aspect, everydayness as regularity, that tends to crystallize in things present-at-hand. But it does not necessarily freeze in them.
When speaking of everyday regularity and of crystallization in things present-at-hand, one must note the ‘disturbance tendency’ (Störungstendenz) in the normal functioning of things ready-to-hand, a tendency Rainer Schubert finds in Heidegger. More specifically, this is a situation in between total absence of disturbance and factual disturbance of the functioning of what is ready-to-hand. A given equipment may function without being disturbed while at the same time being constantly susceptible to a ‘disturbance tendency’.
What we have in the disturbance tendency is not an alternation in time of unproblematic functioning in which the ready-to-hand withdraws [into invisibility] and is thus ready-to-hand proper, and factual disturbance in which the purely present-at-hand announces itself in the ready-to-hand, but an internal interconnection, preceding every factual disturbance, between unproblematic functioning and the possibility that it may be disturbed. (Schubert, 1995, p.42)
Here the emphasis is on the possibility of disturbance, and not on its single or multiple occurrence. From this perspective, there can exist readiness-to-hand without actual presence-at-hand, but there cannot be readiness-to-hand without potential presence-at-hand. That is because a disturbance tendency is inherent in every equipment and every use of equipment (ibid., p.43). This conclusion is important, on the one hand, in view of the frequently leveled criticism against Heidegger that he privileges the ready-to-hand over the present-at-hand. On the other hand, however, it is especially important in view of what I will analyze below, in the context of comparison between Heidegger and Garfinkel, under the heading of ‘practical formalizations’. In their general form, practical formalizations are everyday means of initial counteraction against possible disturbances of ordinary everyday functioning. They are, strictly speaking, things present-at-hand that result from everyday interactions themselves but that are seen as unavoidable elements of the reproduction of everyday life (as constituents of everyday regularity) by the participants in the latter. In a previous study, in the context of the problem of rationality in Weber, I had in mind similar forms, defining them as unintended, non-negotiated, liminal upshots of everyday actions within the context of which they are subsequently habitualized, acquiring their specific ‘naturalness’. From this perspective, they cannot be viewed as some
externally imposed norm that is to be followed but constitute an autonomized (and eventually institutional) expression of embodied patterns of action (see Koev, 2003, p.170).
Heidegger recognizes the need of both aspects of everydayness noted above. Maybe that is precisely why he explains at the end of Being and Time how everydayness should not be conceived of in the context of fundamental ontology and what he is actually emphasizing in this term, differentiating 'everydayness' (Alltäglichkeit) from 'everyday life' (Alltag). 'Everyday life' (Alltag), 'every day' (alle Tage) seems to refer to 'the sum of those "days" which have been allotted to Dasein in its "lifetime". What is at work here is calendrical regularity. The term 'everydayness' (Alltäglichkeit), on the other hand, primarily insists on a definite 'how' of the being of Dasein (see Heidegger, 1962, p.422). In other words, the emphasis is not on a concrete everyday life and its content or on everyday life as an externally kept chronology of days, but on the everydayness of Dasein as 'a way to be' (Weise zu sein). Or according to the expressive, if somewhat awkward, formulation in History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena,
We are reporting no particular everyday life but we are seeking the everydayness of everyday life, the fact in its ficticity, not the everyday of the temporally particular Dasein but to be the everydayness for its particular while as Dasein is what matters to us. (Heidegger, 1985, p.155)
No doubt the term 'everydayness' is the leading one, and its correct interpretation is also a ground for the non-objectifying perspective on 'everyday life'.
'Indifference' in this case does not mean neutrality and unconcern, as it often does in Being and Time. The thus presented totality is a tensed structure, modo potentiali; it is in a state maintained just before its manifestation in different empirical actualizations: it is, as it were, 'on the point of departure' (auf dem Sprung), as Heidegger (2001a, p.27) puts it metaphorically elsewhere. Hence, this is not some sort of primordial state which we have attained through regression. Indifferent everydayness is a priori in character, but it is not an 'aprioristic construction'. In Being and Time Heidegger (1962, p.117) speaks in this sense of 'a perfect tense a priori which characterizes the kind of Being belonging to Dasein itself'. That is to say, factual a priori (re)cognition between habitual dispositions and things ready-to-hand in the 'pre-ontological' understanding of Dasein, which in this sense – as an indifferent totality – are 'prior' and predetermine the self-understoodness and constant incompleteness of every present concrete preoccupation/comportmental relation in care. This is the meaning of the "a priori" letting-something-be-involved' (das "apriorische" Bewendenlassen): it is the condition for the possibility of successful 'discovery' = 'encounter' (Begegnen) of anything ready-to-hand, and not its
yet-to-be (re)production-adjustment ('bringing into its Being' – cf. Heidegger, 1962, p.117). Or, if we elaborate in Heidegger's style: letting-something-be-as-it-is-in-its-equipmental-totality as an entity, not as an isolated entity but as an entity whose equipmental aspect is intentionally involved with other entities that are equipartmentally interrelated with it in the same way.
Thus, the analysis of indifferent everydayness points us to two interconnected manifestations of everydayness which, however, ought to be clearly differentiated. On the one hand, we can speak of constant everyday structuring which is an indicator of ontical living in the world and in the course of which Dasein deals with 'things ready-to-hand' (Zuhandenheiten), and encounters 'things present-at-hand' (Vorhandenheit) in a state of actual existence, overcomes it, and returns to its normal everyday being. On the other hand, we can discern a complex of potentialities of everydayness (manifested in the above-mentioned a priori) – a dynamic totality that is not distinct as a discernible figure, and that permeates the so-called fore-structures: something like a pre-given but unarticulated regularity of everyday structuring, which in Heidegger becomes possible through 'pro-jjection' (Entwurf) towards the world or towards a totality of significances (cf. Heidegger, 1962, pp.191-192). It is no coincidence that in the conclusion of The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics projection is defined as the occurrence of actual distinction between beings and Being, 'the originally irruptive "between"', whose structural moment is signified by the totality of the 'as' in the projection itself (Heidegger, 1995, p.365).
World and Everydayness: The Constitutive Role of Privation
In describing 'world', Heidegger applies his well-known strategy which presupposes first pointing out what a given term is not (as a closed, isolated category) in order to then highlight its specific characteristics (in their live relationship with other entities). The world is not presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit); it is not an object that can be pointed out in its unquestionable being. Neither is it something ready-to-hand (Zuhandene), as is the totality of worldly equipment (Zeug). Nor is it, of course, a container accommodating different value-laden worldly objects, or a totality of natural things. Worldly objects and natural things cannot be understood without it. In a sense, it is indeed 'in', permeating (manifesting the being of) all these things. The sense in question, however, cannot be derived by viewing the world through the lens of scientific knowledge – this lens itself must be made sense of through it. Rejecting different possibilities in an effort to find an adequate ontological description of the world, Heidegger places the emphasis on the worldhood of the world (Weltlichkeit der Welt), which must be revealed progressively in the course of the analysis in Being and Time. The worldhood of the world, in turn, refers us to Dasein. Thus, what we ultimately have is a specific ontico-ontological pair: in its 'existentiell signification' the world is that 'wherein' Dasein exists / worldhood as an 'ontologico-existential concept' designates 'the a priori
character of worldhood in general’ (see Heidegger, 1962, p.93). These are the meanings of world formulated as No. 3 and Time (ibid.). The two elements of the pair are of course mutually requisite but, as we already know, the point of entry to an ontological understanding is through the ‘pre-ontological existentiell’, while the ‘ontologico-existential concept’ can be derived from structures revealed through everyday being-in-the-world. That is the reason why Heidegger discusses in great detail how the world is ‘in’ for Dasein, and how the non-spatial meaning of ‘in which’ is actually transformed into the ‘with-which’ of concernful preoccupation (besorgender Umgang). In other words, the environing world (Umwelt), the world as a nexus of references (Verweisungszusammenhang), the world as a ‘totality of involvements’ (Bewandtnisganzheit), is a focus of intensive interest to Heidegger in its capacity as a significant point of access to the worldhood of the world. It is so significant that according to some interpreters of Being and Time, Division One of Part One of the book, which is centred around the analysis of the relation between Dasein and world through everydayness, must be regarded as self-sufficient and practically irreducible to Division Two, or even as conflicting with the latter. Either way, however, irrespective of to what extent, when, and how ‘worldhood’ can be elucidated, it remains an a priori condition for the functioning of ‘world’. Every encounter from the world, to which – as regards Dasein – corresponds ‘letting something be’, is tacitly premised on the worldhood of the world (see Heidegger, 1962, p.119). Prior knowledge of the significance of worldhood ensures understanding the world ‘towards which Dasein as an entity always comports itself’ (ibid., p.118). That is also why the non-functioning of ‘what is ready-to-hand’ does not simply mean its standing out as something ‘present-at-hand’, but the lighting up of ‘the context of equipment’ (Zeugzusammenhang), of a ‘totality’ with which ‘the world announces itself’ (ibid., p.105).
Such an account of the idea of ‘world’ in Being and Time obviously requires a more careful inquiry into the connection between ‘world’ and everyday life, even if just because what we have described as ‘indifferent everydayness’, and more specifically, the relation between everydayness as a complex of potentialities and everyday structuring, seems to be a figure that is analogous to the relation between ‘world’ and ‘worldhood’. In both cases there is an a priori moment (everydayness/worldhood) which, in turn, permeates the relevant world/one or other everyday structuring. In addition, the description of the environing world (Umwelt) as a world of direct action actually unfolds the structures of everyday ‘being-in-the-world’ (In-der-Welt-sein). This is the imperative of the main methodological proceeding as assigned in Being and Time: ‘We must make a study of everyday Being-in-the-world; with the phenomenal support which this gives us, something like the world must come into view’ (p.94); ‘The Being of those entities which we encounter as closest to us can be exhibited phenomenologically if we take as our clue our everyday Being-in-the-world, which we call our “dealings” in the world and with entities within-the-world’
(p.95). It must also be noted that Heidegger is not sufficiently consistent in explicitly differentiating between ‘everyday life’ and ‘being-in-the-world’ and that is why, as already noted above, the two occasionally overlap. At the same time, the idea of ‘indifferent everydayness’ which I am trying to derive from Being and Time cannot be argued without a clear differentiation between ‘everyday life’ and ‘being-in-the-world’. This interim recapitulation is an attempt in that direction, which may occasionally deviate from Heidegger but nonetheless preserves the spirit of his thought.
Above all, Heidegger conceives everydayness as privileged access to the human situation, and hence, to the world and to the meaning of Being, for to him everydayness represents the inseparable existence of Dasein and world, existence before any knowledge of existence, before any externally assigned discursive meaning of existence, before any semantic and logical figures expressing such meaning, and – in a certain dimension – before any sociality. From this perspective, everydayness in Being and Time is, as I already mentioned above, a method through which fundamental structures of life (Grundkategorien des Lebens, as Heidegger calls them in Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle) are revealed. The worldhood of the world is one of them. The differentiation between everydayness and worldhood is obvious in this respect. The everydayness of the world, however, is also a fundamental structure proper, insofar as the world is ‘always already’ given as the common world: it is not the case that there are first individual subjects with their own worlds, which are then constituted in an intersubjective world. This is Heidegger’s well-known reaction against the egalological perspective; in this sense, in its capacity as ‘public’ (and therefore everyday), the above-mentioned ‘common world’ governs every interpretation of the world and of Dasein (see Heidegger, 1985, p.246). The ‘proper’ interpretation of the world ought to be derived from the common world. This problem, of course, brings us to the big theme of the ‘loss’ in the common world, of modification into ‘inauthenticity’ – a motif I will discuss further on in this article.
I believe one important line of differentiation between everydayness and worldhood ought to be drawn by viewing the everydayness of the world as a mode of being of Dasein amidst the worldly significances. However everydayness may be interpreted, concernful practical dealings with what is ready-to-hand are an irrevocable aspect of factual being-in-the-world: Heidegger by no means seeks to overcome everyday structures by striving to attain an independent from them realm of pure conception from which to fully interpret these structures as well. The very distinction between the structural totality ‘care’ (Sorge) and ‘concern’ (Besorgen) reflects the difference between the categorical structure ‘care’ and its everyday enactment. ‘Concern resides within it [within this entity] but does not recognize it as such. Concern, however, knows its environing world [Umwelt] perfectly well’ (Heidegger, 2004a, p.23). In Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity, the world is ‘something being encountered as
what we are concerned about’ which, being closest to us, ‘gives to the world of everydayness the character of an environing world, a world round-about’ (Heidegger, 1999, p.66). For its part, the environing world, precisely because it is the environment of our most immediate everyday dealings, is defined by Heidegger as the world of life, whose dimensions are the withworld (Mitwelt) and the selfworld (Selbstwelt); that is, the environing world is defined as the fundamental one among the three worlds (Heidegger, 1993, p.33).
In fact, ‘the world’ is always in a state of everydayness with its ‘whileness’ or temporal particularity (Jeweiligkeit). That is precisely what I mean by saying that everydayness is a mode of being of the world (and, hence, of Dasein). Even idle standing around in the street does not turn a person simply into an object among other objects, such as houses, rows of houses, and so on; here Dasein is always already ‘being-on-the-way’ (Unterwegssein) (Heidegger, 1999, p.67). Here, one must keep in mind the fact that the everydayness of the world is predetermined by care as categorially given: the categorial, however, must not be conceived as external vis-à-vis the world and its experience. The categorial is lived in, it becomes a reality through its experience (its immediate apprehension is ‘invested in the most everyday of perceptions’, says Heidegger, 1985, p.48), but at the same time it precedes every concrete experience; it does not come down to a concrete experience and functions as an unthematic given.
Thus, the structural totality ‘care’ permeates the being of Dasein and can be described only through its everyday concernful being-in-the-world. The categorial is appropriated in ‘existential concernfullness’, that is to say, in the course of the self-understanding of life, as Heidegger (2001a, pp.65-68) notes in an early lecture-course, describing the predecessor of Dasein, ‘factual life’, as the mobile figure in the structure ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt). ‘Categories can be understood only insofar as factical life itself is compelled to interpretation’ (ibid., p.66). Life as ‘factical life’ is structured by care, which reflects its in-principle privation (‘to live is to care about one’s“daily bread”’: this must be understood not literally, but in its broadest and ‘formally-indicative’ sense). “‘Privation” (privatio, carentia) is both the relational and the intrinsic basic mode and sense of the Being of life’ (ibid., p.68). This passage sums up Heidegger’s well-known pragmatological revision of Husserl’s idea of intentionality which turns from a cognitive category into a category of factical life, delineating its relational sense, content sense, enactment sense (Bezugssinn, Gehaltssinn, Vollzugssinn) – three inseparably connected practical aspects of the life of intentionality.
The relational sense of life is embodied in ‘caring’ (Sorgen), which is always enacted (Vollzugssinn) in a world that, in its turn, is the content-wise fundament (Grundkategorie des gehaltssinnlichen) ‘upon which’ factical life rests (halten). That is to say that life is in itself world-related (weltbezogen), the world is its boundary and, for its part, the world requires life in order to be a realm of significances. From this perspective, ‘life’ and ‘world’ are not just interdependent (world of life, life-world: Lebenswelt) but also interchangeable, as indicated by
everyday expressions such as ‘to go out into life’, ‘out into the world’, ‘to live totally in one’s world’, ‘totally in one’s life’ (ibid., p.65).
The connection between the categorical structure ('care') and its everyday enactment ('concernful dealing') is manifested in Dasein's dependence on the world. Being-in-the-world is everyday for it always is, so to speak, being-in-privation. This motif is concretized even further in Being and Time. It is said there that in such privative expressions as 'unobtrusiveness', 'inconspicuousness', the practical invisibility of what is ready-to-hand, is a 'positive' phenomenon (Heidegger, 1962, p.106). But in addition to this – let us call it 'weak' – privation, Heidegger also has in mind privation in its 'strong' sense as a positive phenomenon. In its concernful dealings with worldly things, Dasein constantly encounters the circumstance that they are 'too hard', 'too soft', 'too moist', and so on, for they are always experienced in terms of 'a greater or lesser utility' (auf ein Mehr oder Weniger an Nutzbarkeit) (Heidegger, 2004a, pp.31-32). This means that they are never neutral presences-at-hand and that – from an everyday perspective – even their smoothly functioning 'readiness-to-hand' is a sign of overpowered resistances, that is to say, they are in conformity with the already mentioned 'disturbance tendency' (see the discussion of Störungsstendenz above). (As it has already become clear, 'presence-at-hand' should be understood in the same perspective: not necessarily as an isolated opposite but as a significant context of readiness-to-hand.)
In Being and Time Heidegger examines the proposition 'The hammer is too heavy' in its dual sense – first as a 'concernful' assertion (the hammer 'is not light' and it takes force to handle it), and then as an objective scientific statement defining something present-at-hand (the hammer as a corporeal thing subject to the law of gravity). In the second case, says Heidegger (1962, p.412), '[t]o talk circumspectively of “too heavy” or “too light” no longer has any “meaning”'. But what everyday dealings will essentially detect in 'The hammer is too heavy' is privation, and not a scientific description, therefore the practical reaction would be, for example, to pass on a lighter hammer or to utter a just as concernful assertion: 'There isn’t a lighter one.' An 'ethnomethodological crisis' would arise if, for example, the answer is 'I know its physical properties.' Heidegger also has something similar in mind when he speaks in his Logic (1925/1926) of the absurdities of traditional logic which takes as an example of 'determination' the proposition 'The roses are blooming'. For no one who utters the phrase 'The roses are blooming' means to say that those things that are the roses have the property of blooming, Heidegger (1976, p.158) notes. If we continue the above line of reasoning in terms of privation, in 'The roses are blooming' we will hear, for example, 'The neighbours’ roses are blooming but ours are not', and certainly not a determination of a genus and species.
‘Being-in-privation’ in relation to what, however? Could we speak of some model fullness in relation to which privation is to be measured? This question is not unreasonable, especially considering the widely discussed by ethnomethod-
ologists today relation between ‘indexicality’ and ‘objectivity’, and Garfinkel’s insistence that living in indexicalities is entirely self-sufficient and does not need the remedying function of any ‘objective expressions’. As living in indexicalities or the so-called haecceitas in Heidegger and Garfinkel are discussed in an article of mine on the formal indication principle (Koev, 2008), I will not deal with this question here. As regards the question of the ‘commensuration’ of everyday privation, I will only note that Heidegger leaves it somewhat indeterminate. On the one hand, he rejects the possibility of using theoretical ‘fullness’ as a scale of everyday living in facticities; furthermore, as it has already become clear, from his point of view scientific construction is derived from practical action in the world and is a formation of a different order than the latter. On the other hand, anticipation of death, ‘being-towards-ownmost-possibility’, makes it possible to grasp the whole of Dasein, which is related to the ‘resoluteness’ to attain this whole. In a sense, it seems that the whole in question provides the scale by which everyday privation is co-measured. Hence the function of the figure ‘authentic/inauthentic’ (Eigentlichkeit/Uneigentlichkeit) or, in the translation I prefer, ‘appropriate/inappropriate’. Identifying this figure seems to require a gaze that is external to the existing of Dasein, such as is precluded in Being and Time by definition. Of course, Dasein’s being-a-whole is not a static structure, and in the existing of Dasein, even in a situation of hopelessness, even when it has ‘settled its account’, in the words of Heidegger, there is always ‘something still outstanding’, or in other words ‘there is constantly something still to be settled’ (see Heidegger, 1962, pp.279-280). Which is to say that even at this moment the leading idea is that of privation. In all cases, however, Heidegger’s conception of this question remains vague, which suggests that it is time to take a closer look at the big and not unambiguous theme of ‘authenticity/inauthenticity’ or ‘appropriateness/inappropriateness’.
Everyday Understanding: Between ‘Appropriate’ and ‘Inappropriate’
In saying that indifferent everydayness is before any differentiation of ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ existing, I have in mind what is at the core of everydayness, its temporality. I will venture to make a brief commentary. The word ‘everydayness’ itself, as already noted above, expresses a definite regularity of human existence, at that, of co-existence which, at the same time, is possible through practical dealings with what is ready-to-hand and present-at-hand. ‘Every day’, however, also alludes to dis-parting, to a possibility to turn to ‘past days’, to plan the forthcoming – and all this from the unquestionable position of the present. In other words, the thus understood ‘everydayness’ refers to a rationalized time (time as ‘present-at-hand’, Heidegger would say), in the context of which everyday regularity acquires clearly traceable and easily measurable outlines. But this is an abstracted everydayness – even when it is not a scientific construct but an element of everyday comportment itself – freed from its ‘most appropriate’ fabric: everyday experiences themselves.
By proposing that these experiences are the true fabric of everydayness, I mean above all two things. First, that they immediately express (are) the ec-stasis (to put it in Heidegger’s words) of this everydayness or the fact that human being-in-the-world is time. There could hardly be a better concretization of the otherwise hopelessly abstract-sounding expression ‘human being-in-the-world is time’ than the proposition that this being is everyday. If, of course, we conceive the everydayness in question as ec-stasis. That is to say, if we do not view separately the different temporal phases of acting in the world or interpret them as a unity of formerly autonomous elements: ‘past’, ‘present’, and ‘future’. When I ‘do’ something, ‘deal with’ something, ‘refer to’ something, ‘intend to’ do something, I always already am alongside the thing itself (from the side of the world). This, however, is by no means simply ‘dwelling-alongside’: it means that I am ahead-of-myself and that I ‘do’, ‘deal with’, ‘refer to’, ‘intend’, from the perspective of a ‘future’ that is no doubt already ‘present’, insofar as it is simultaneously burdened with a ‘past’ in which, meanwhile, the present is absorbed. Furthermore, every ‘autonomization’, for example of the future or of the past, may be interpreted as a ‘deviation of Dasein’ from itself – for it cannot be understood in its ‘temporal wholeness’ – and, hence, as an unfolding of Uneigentlichkeit (cf. Thomä, 1990, p.279). An ecstatic temporal horizon: past, present, and future can only be discerned in the context of its unity. Of course, here the key ‘ecstasis’ is the future, regardless of whether we are speaking of temporality that is ‘appropriate’ (anticipation in the utmost potentiality-for-Being of Dasein) or ‘inappropriate’ (falling in the world, Dasein as ‘lived by the world’). But in the first case there is, as it were, release of the temporality that is Dasein, and in the second assignment of time from public everydayness, due to which everyday Dasein is constantly short of time. Regarding this extensively discussed in different contexts Heideggerian differentiation, I will note that not even the most appropriate temporality of Dasein is possible as independent from everyday ec-stasis or as parallel with the latter – the point of departure is everyday dealing in a world (the dependence on ‘the many things the day brings’), which, too, is always from the perspective of the future: thus, ‘concern must assign everything its own time’, that is to say, it must reveal its ‘kairological’ character (cf. Heidegger, 2004a, pp.69, 81). Or, according to a pithy Heideggerian formulation: ‘And only because of momentum (Schwung) is there throw, facticity, thrownness; and only because of oscillation (Schwingung) is there projection’ (Heidegger, 1984, p.208).
The fact of ec-stasis means, however, that just as there is no present inserted between the past and the future, there is no ‘I core’, no identical ‘I’ (stasis) that emerges from itself in order to be ‘alongside’, and then returns back ‘into itself’. Here ‘self’ originally means ‘potentiality-for-being’ or ‘ability-to-be’ (Seinkönnen) what Heidegger calls a ‘thrown possibility’ (geworfene Möglichkeit), that is to say, notwithstanding all ‘historic’ limitations of being-in-the-world. Furthermore, the ‘basic form’ of the toward-oneself (Zu-sich-selbst) is
being-ahead-of-oneself (Stch-selbst-vorweg) or, in other words, being-ahead-of-oneself makes possible being-with-oneself (Heidegger, 1984, p.206). It is no coincidence that the basic characteristic of Dasein is that it is ‘outstanding for (Aus-sein auf) that which is not yet, but can be’ (Heidegger, 2004a, p.46). From this perspective, ‘projection’, too, does not presuppose a ‘thematic’ apprehension of possibilities, and therefore the primary meaning of the word is that of ‘pro-jection’ (Entwurf). This is the primordial state of indifferent everydayness which, in this sense, is before the differentiation between ‘appropriate’ and ‘in-appropriate’ existing.
Secondly, the very differentiation within the realm of everydayness, understood qua regularity, between ‘yesterday’, ‘today’, and ‘tomorrow’, the identification of temporal markers, the recollection of unquestionably ‘objective’ dates is possible only from the perspective of the dimension of indifferent everydayness outlined in the previous paragraph. Or, as Heidegger would say, every ‘recollection’ presupposes the fundamental phenomenon of ‘forgetting’ (Vergessen) in a state of initial devotion to what he is ready-to-hand in the world, while the ‘past’ (Vergangenheit) presupposes ‘having-been-ness’ (Gewesenheit) (cf. Heidegger, 1988, p.290). Actually, from this important points of reference for rethinking the traditional understanding of historicity and of the treatment of history could be drawn.
In this context it is worth saying a few words about the logic of practical existing, which highlights the need to regard the everyday understanding as true in itself. It is worth doing so even if just because of the fact that years later, this motif would become very popular, turning into the basic platform of one of the most radical sociological currents: ethnomethodology. In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger devotes special attention to what he terms ‘the indifference of the copula’. ‘Is’, which functions as a copula in an assertion, may look from an external point of view (formally logically) ambiguous and therefore indifferent. But this is by no means a shortcoming in everyday communication, for the utterer of the relevant assertion has, in her very existing, indicatively differentiated in an initial (practico-technical) understanding the mode of being of ‘is’. In everyday communication, discourse is not preceded by instrumental operations of division into/synthesis of verbal sequences, but constitutes ‘sharing’ (Mitteilung): ‘To say that one Dasein communicates by its utterances with another means that by articulating something in display it shares with the second Dasein the same understanding comportment toward the being about which the assertion is being made’ (Heidegger, 1988, p.210). ‘In the understanding of beings that occurs before assertion, what is always already latently understood is’ the ‘whatness’ (Wassein) of the relevant entity and ‘a specific mode of its being’. That is precisely why it would be hopeless to try to understand the character of the ‘is’ by way of the separate statement: in that case it becomes impossible to understand the ‘specific indifference’ of the copula ‘positively by way of its origin and in its necessity and possibility’
(ibid., p.212).
In a similar vein, forty years after Heidegger, in Studies in Ethnomethodology Harold Garfinkel points out (and demonstrates experimentally) the impossibility to distinguish ‘what the parties talked about’ in an everyday conversation from ‘how the parties had been speaking’ (see Garfinkel, 1967, pp.24-31). ‘What was said’ cannot be regarded as a ‘sign’ of ‘what was talked about’. The very modalities of speaking – metaphorically, ironically, didactically, and so on – are methods for practical production of meaning. This point of view predetermines Garfinkel’s conception of the reflexivity of everyday practices, where the realization of social interaction is identical to the processes of its practical ‘accountability’. The pre-understood ‘whatness’ in interaction is usually lost in post-factum interpretation, which requires a reflexivity foreign to endogenous work. Hence also the problem of the ‘missing what’ in the interpretations of the so-called formal analysis.
If we turn to Being and Time, Heidegger’s correlate of the ethnomethodologically interpreted ‘everyday reflexivity’ would probably be the idea of Dasein’s ‘ex-pressing itself’, which is based on the principle that Dasein is not ‘encapsulated as something “internal” over against something outside’, but that it is every time already alongside what is ready-to-hand in the world (and, hence, alongside the worldly ‘others’). From this perspective, '[w]hat is expressed (das Ausgesprochene) is precisely this Being-outside – that is to say, the way in which one currently has a state-of-mind (mood)’. What is important, however, is that ‘what is said-in-the-talk’ (das Beresedet) is always “talked-to” (angeredet) in a definite regard and within certain limits. In other words, what is talked about is revealed in indicative talk. Furthermore, Heidegger (1962, p.205) notes, ‘Being-in and its state-of-mind are made known in discourse and indicated in language by intonation, modulation, the tempo of talk, “the way of speaking”.’ These are the above-mentioned modalities of speaking that can be understood only by way of ‘productive’ endogenous logic.
This idea is even more distinct in History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, a lecture-course that precedes Being and Time, where Heidegger (1985, p.48) says that all our comportments and lived experiences are already ‘expressed’; ‘even if they are not uttered in words, they are nonetheless expressed in a definite articulation by an understanding that I have of them as I simply live in them without regarding them thematically’. This motif is developed further by the proposition that our comportments are ‘pervaded through and through by assertions’, and that ‘they are always performed in some form of expressness’. Even our simplest perceptions, says Heidegger (ibid., p.56), are ‘already expressed’ and ‘interpreted in a certain way’, therefore ‘we do not say what we see, but rather the reverse, we see what one says about the matter’. ‘What one says about the matter’ is a structure of preconception or, more precisely, a structure of ‘self-understanding of life’ (to use an expression of Heidegger’s from the early 1920s) which, however, cannot be reduced to differentiated verbal
propositions but is a dimension of indifferent everydayness (everydayness as a complex of potentialities) which presupposes practical differentiation in the course of everyday interaction itself (everyday structuring). From this one can also draw conclusions about ‘phenomenological hermeneutics’ which are similar in vein to the conclusions drawn by ethnomethodology from the discovery of everyday reflexivity. The non-negligible pre-interpretation of factual life.
Yet even so, the category of ‘indifferent everydayness’ remains vague and unclear. Especially considering that in Heidegger it is not the subject of special discussion and is therefore often used inconsistently. Still, the most enigmatic aspect of this idea is related generally to the function of everydayness in Heidegger’s thought. As I have already mentioned several times, the account of everydayness in Being and Time is quite contradictory. Summing up some of the aspects of everydayness reviewed so far, I will say that, on the one hand, it is an irrevocable way of being-in-the-world, of immediate factual life characterized by its own practical logic which cannot be deciphered from an ‘outside’ point of view. This fact allows Heidegger to use it as a methodological tool for identifying existential structures, as a possibility for beginning ‘from below’, for developing a ‘most radical phenomenology’ (cf. Heidegger, 2001a, p.146). The Heidegger of 1919 is unambiguous in his intention to explore to the full ‘the most trivial trivialities’ until they become ‘absolutely problematic’ (Heidegger, 1993, p.36). This is the first ambiguity in Heidegger’s account of everydayness: way of being-in-the-world/methodological tool. On the other hand, everydayness expresses the ‘fallenness’ of Dasein in the world, a modification of ‘throwness’, which allows Dasein to be ‘benumbed’
One of the most difficult problems, Heidegger (2000, p.76) notes in his lecture-course Towards the Definition of Philosophy, is that of ‘transgressing the limits from environmental experience towards initial objectification’. The transgression of those limits in everyday life is invisible and usually does not keep the scientific consciousness on the alert. This problem, however, is significant for it reveals the paradoxical character of everyday language. This language is, on the one hand, a resource of everyday experience itself and is therefore contextually fused with it: experience is simultaneously already also an expression of the experience. That is because those immersed in the experience are ‘talked-to’ (angesprochen, which also means ‘provoked’) by the significances and understand them, and not for the most part the medium in which they are expressed. On the other hand, qua articulation, everyday language ac-
tivates or implies meanings that strive to overcome the indeterminacy of the situation, that is to say, it invisibly and constantly performs practical formalizations which are naturally required by the ‘competent’ participants in order to determine the uncertain contexts of experience. In this capacity, everyday language tends to contextually ‘fix’ what is meant but does not do it if the everyday interaction is successful. Every ‘initial objectification’ will be precisely fixation, an indication of concentration on interaction or on one of its aspects in a problematic situation, but not necessarily on language itself. We can speak of a kind of everyday reflection that modifies interaction without terminating it. The last part of this article is devoted precisely to practical formalizations, again in the context of the Heidegger-Garfinkel dialogue.
Formalization and Generalization: Practical Formalizations
In his methodological introduction to The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger takes as his point of departure Husserl’s differentiation in §13 of Ideas between generalization and formalization, using the so-called formalization to introduce his seminal idea of formal indication (Heidegger, 2004b, pp.38-45; cf. Kisiel, 1995, pp.164-170; see also Koev, 2008). Although generalization and formalization, as two variants of universalization, are theoretical and therefore ‘ordering’ procedures, formalization – unlike generalization – is not bound to a certain material domain and, hence, to any order of stages of ‘generalities’ (genus and species). This makes it possible to shift the focus from the material content – from the ‘what’ of an object – to the purely attitudinal relation, to the ‘how’ of the object as a ‘counter-stance’ or the ‘to-which’ (Gegenstand) of the theoretical attitudinal relation. The German word for ‘object’ itself, Gegenstand, translates literally as ‘counter-stance’. Such implications are also to be found in the old Slavonic word for ‘object’, pred-met: I denote that which is before me. The objectivity of the object reveals its givenness primarily as a ‘counterstance’ or ‘to-which’, and only then as material content (cf. Heidegger, 2004b, p.42). Formalization is motivated by the ‘how’ for it follows from the ‘attitudinal sense’ (Sinn des Einstellungsbezugs) itself.
What Heidegger calls ‘formal indication’ is based precisely on the freedom of the formal from matter. However unlike formalization as a theoretical procedure, formal indication does not ‘order’ – directly or indirectly – facticities but holds their relational meaning, so to speak, ‘in abeyance’ (in der Schwebe), referring every time to their own enactment sense and relational sense without predetermining it (Heidegger, 2004b, pp.43-44). In any case, however, the problem of formal indication, as Heidegger (ibid., p.38) notes, belongs to the ‘theory’ of the phenomenological method insofar as it is an element of the ‘phenomenon of differentiating’. Heidegger’s formal indication is a method and, as such, has a dual critical/‘differentiating’ function: against the theorizing and objectifying thought, and against the detached from itself and thus reifying everyday consciousness.
This can be elucidated by using an example from Heidegger’s 1923 lecture-course Ontology – The Hermeneutics of Facticity. There Heidegger (1999, pp.67-69) contrasts the ‘inaccurate’ description (the table as a thing in space, as so and so coloured, formed in such and such a way, etc.) with the ‘authentic’ one:
Nothing at all of what was mentioned in the first description given above is found in going about dealings in which we concretely tarry for a while … What is there in the room there at home is the table (not ‘a’ table among many other tables in other rooms and houses) at which one sits in order to write, have a meal, sew, play. Everyone sees this right away, e.g. during a visit: it is a writing table, a dining table, a sewing table – such is the primary way in which it is to be encountered in itself. This characteristic of ‘in order to do something’ is not merely imposed on the table … Its standing-there in the room means: Playing this role in such and such characteristic use. … That is the table – as such is it there in the temporality of everydayness …
As is clearly visible from this example, the ‘accurate’ description (from the perspective of everydayness) in fact always means the table as individual essence (haecceity): the table ‘here’ (for writing, for eating, for sewing). But it is also clear that this description is formally indicative precisely because it can start ‘speaking’ only from the context of the room.
The contentwise ‘display’ (the said ‘inaccurate’ theorizing description but also the relevant de-contextualizing everyday ‘determination’), on the other hand, implies a direct grasp of the meant object as present-at-hand and isolated, which is at variance with the idea of formal indication.
Heidegger, however, seems to suggest something even more important. The ‘accurate’ description in fact actuates an everyday temporality that cannot be described from the outside and in the course of which the table represents itself in the totality of its involvements. The table ‘is’ simultaneously the different light in the room now and before (‘now it looks better in this light’), the scratches I left on it as a child (it ‘is’ my childhood), it ‘is’ the side at which my wife sits during our long conversations at night, it ‘is’ the table-from-that-afternoon my friend and I took a fateful decision.16 The table demonstrates different intentional images that are differentiated from an indifferent everydayness in which multiple heterogeneous moments are involved: occurrences, times, persons, moods. But these images reveal themselves to the participants as seamless monoliths in which the heterogeneous elements fuse into one: haecceitas. In this sense, the individualization ‘this-here-now’ (haecceity) is not an entity free from foreign elements, but precisely an object (Gegenstand) regarding which the only thing one can say (from the outside) is that it is a ‘counter-stance’. From within it cannot be fixed because it is significant not in itself but in its relation to some
occurrence; because its differentiation has no limits and is grasped adequately only in the course of the unfolding everyday temporality.
This brings us to a point where we must again call on ethnomethodology. In fact, as I already mentioned, Harold Garfinkel merely encounters the dimension of indifferent everydayness without discussing it explicitly. He is interested above all in the everyday methods by which a local order (and, in this sense, sociality) is maintained and reproduced rather than in the vortex of its production. However, in Garfinkel’s late works there is an extremely interesting motif which seems to bring to the foreground the point of intersection between everydayness in its indifference and the persistence of everyday regularity. It is also important with a view to the primordial legitimation of power practices mentioned at the beginning of this article. In a long footnote in Ethnomethodology’s Program, a connection is made between ‘immortal ordinary society’ and ‘just thisness’ (Garfinkel’s reading of haecceitas). Immortal, Garfinkel explains (2002, p.92, footnote 1), ‘is a metaphor for the great recurrencies of ordinary society’ which, however, are ‘staffed, provided for, produced, observed, and observable, locally and naturally accountable in and as of an “assemblage of haecceities”’. Here we cannot speak of a linearity of the process, by virtue of which a particular group of people produces in its interactions some local order that gradually becomes independent from its creators and acquires a more or less supra-local (macro-) character, prescribing the principles of behaviour of every person who has fallen under its sway. The very phrase ‘assemblage of haecceities’ implies the accidental character of the grouping which cannot turn into a self-identical permanent structure but, at the same time, it is not a mess. In other words, the order Garfinkel has in mind is not merely local but has an ‘autochthonous’ character: nothing can be ascribed to it from without. It is recognizable precisely thanks to its endogenous characteristics; if those characteristics disappear, so does the order itself (see ibid., p.245ff). But whenever such an ‘assemblage’ appears, it will be identifiable. As regards its production, one must say that it can never be created ab initio, nor does it refer to a persisting social group. Hence its connection to what I described in the Heideggerian context as indifferent everydayness.
The resulting configuration is quite unusual for traditional sociology, which does not have an optic for observing or a language for describing both the autochthonous peculiarities of social facts and the agents grouped around them. Such a configuration is, for instance, the queue or traffic flow in a big city. In both cases we speak of recurrencies which, however, are not predetermined; they are autochthonous characteristics of the particular grouping. Both the queue and the traffic flow are easily recognizable formations but they are always different as ‘assemblages of haecceities’:
In and as of the just thisness (the haecceities) of driving’s details, just this staff are doing again just what in concert with vulgar competence they can
do, for each another next first time; and it is this of what they are doing,
that makes up the details of just that traffic flow. (Garfinkel, 2002, p.92,
footnote 1)
The unusually sounding phrase ‘for each another next first time’ directs attention precisely to the intersection of regularities and concrete faciticities, but what looks like a regularity from without is every time a concrete facticity from within. To designate the dynamic of the situation, Garfinkel introduces another unusual term: ‘congregational work’. As the editor of Ethnomethodology’s Program notes, ‘Congregational refers not only to the idea that these social facts are made collaboratively by a group, but that the populational cohort has its character as a cohort or congregation by virtue of being engaged in doing just this thing’ (ibid., p.245, footnote 1). Congregational work is always an ad hoc activity for ensuring order, in which the congregation is formed as a grouping for doing just this activity in order to produce a given concrete facticity. From this perspective, it is the facticity that constitutes the congregation as a recognizable cohort, and not vice versa. We stand in line even though there are no pre-formulated rules for ordering the queue. We ask ‘Who’s last?’ or ‘Where does the line start from?’ and take ‘our due’ place, telling the guy who is trying to jump the line that he can’t ‘break the rules’. The queue does not have a structure but it is organized in a way that constitutes us as competent participants in doing an always concrete job. The situation is similar with the participants in traffic, whose interactions only appear to be guided by the Traffic Code but are in fact always a concrete (just-this-here-now) physical and publicly recognizable-confirmable work in participating in traffic. At the same time, traffic makes drivers available as ‘typical’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (cf. Garfinkel, 1996, p.5, footnote 1). Once the ‘congregational work’ is done the cohort breaks up, but ‘each another next first time’ we identify it as just this formation, and not simply as a messy crowd and, of course, not as a ‘group’ with pre-given persistent characteristics. And ‘after they exit the freeway others will come after them to do again the same familiar things that they – just they – just these of us as drivings doins are in concert doing’ (Garfinkel, 2002, p.92, footnote 1). It is also in this sense that we must understand ‘immortal’ in Garfinkel’s emblematic ‘immortal ordinary society’: the members know that the ‘organizational things’ they are in the midst of ‘preceded them and will be there after they leave it’ (ibid.).
If we return to the main topic of this article, we can say that in the thus presented analysis, the subject-free organization, the regularity or recurrence of ‘immortal ordinary society’, becomes sociologically (ethnomethodologically) useful only if it is understood in the sense of indifferent everydayness. That is to say, not as an externally identifiable anonymous structure that requires clearly specified actions and prescribes limits of their performance, but as a recognizable ‘assemblage’ which, however, is differentiated always in an every time different ‘this-now-here’. That is precisely why one of the basic ethnometh-
odological ‘policies’, that of ‘unique adequacy’, should not be understood as requiring adequacy of the scientific method to the object of study: it actually requires thick inscription into members’ methods of producing order, even if this means mastering the relevant ‘vulgar competencies’, in order to meet the requirement that ‘methods be uniquely suited to the phenomena whose production they describe’ (Garfinkel, 2002, p.69). That is also why Garfinkel says something at first sight paradoxical about the ‘immortal ordinary society’: that it cannot be imagined, it is only discoverable in any actual case (see Garfinkel, 1996, p.8). ‘Immortal ordinary society’ is not a metaphor for a global (societal) formation that prescribes trajectories of action at the local (everyday) level, but signifies the incessant concrete – and, in this sense, always local and everyday/ordinary – work for producing and maintaining sociality. But if that is so, then there is no leeway space out of the time of congregational practices, where the sociologist could freely do his work to describe the latter (ibid., p.11). Which is to say that the methods for local production of order are the only possibility to gain an insight into the essence of congregational work.
These methods can be said to be ‘members’ methods insofar as they do not belong to the members themselves as identifiable individuals. At the same time, however, they are not preliminarily elaborated tools accompanied by instructions for their use that can be learnt. They are the true fabric of interaction for they are publicly visible through the mutual recognition of members’ competence, and do not crystallize of necessity as something separate from the process of interaction. But whenever this happens, what we have is ‘formalization’ work.
At a first approximation, this work can be grasped within the most general framework of the already introduced differentiation between generalization and formalization, insofar as it carries the specific property of formalization: unconnectedness to a concrete material region. At that, in the entirely literal sense of non-engagement with the indexical content of an action formulated through formalization. If we use another Husserlian differentiation, which is of significant importance to Garfinkel too, formalization tends to be work for remedying ‘essentially occasional expressions’ at the expense of ‘objective expressions’ whose ‘poor relatives’ they actually are (Garfinkel and Sacks, 1986, pp.177-179). Yet even so, this is not a theorizing procedure in the strict sense of ‘theorizing’, but a kind of practical formalization. Garfinkel and Sacks speak of ‘doing formulating’, stressing that this activity of ‘notational display’ is properly practical (and, hence, unavoidably ‘occasioned’) work which, moreover, has no ‘independent jurisdiction’ over the everyday practices formulated through it (cf. Lynch, 1993, p.187). This requires special attention. Practical formalization is part of the development of everyday conversation (and, more generally, of everyday interaction), but it does not give it an otherwise absent rationality. As we know from the very first pages of Studies in Ethnomethodology, everyday practices themselves are identical to the methods through which members make them ‘visibly-rational’; that is to say, there is no need for separate methods for revealing their mean-
ing. What, then, are practical formalizations or the so-called formulations?
In their paper ‘On Formal Structures of Practical Actions’, Garfinkel and Sacks (1986, p.163) say that for participants the commonsense knowledge they produce ‘is somehow exhibited’ as ‘observable-reportable phenomena’ in ‘the particulars of speaking’. But then they immediately note ethnomethodology’s interest in how the very fact that these phenomena are exhibited is ‘made exhibitable in further description, remark, questions, and in other ways for the telling’. This – we may call it secondary – exhibiting is done precisely through practical formalizations. The cited paper examines more specifically one type of such formalizations (formulations), the so-called ‘glossing practices’. And if exhibiting proper is done as ‘assemblages of practices’, glossing practices, in a very important sense, simply cannot be a continuation of the former. That is because assemblage presupposes ‘just-thisness’ which, in turn, reveals its meaning in the unfolding of its own everyday temporality as differentiation from everyday indifference. Every glossing is equivalent to a regressive summary which, at that, rearranges the meaning insofar as it, in itself, is a different everyday temporality. That is precisely what Garfinkel and Sacks (ibid., p.164) mean by their enigmatic proposition that ‘speakers in the situated particulars of speech mean differently than they can say in just so many words, i.e. as “glossing practices”’.
At the same time, glosses have a very important function as ‘shifters’ in everyday sequences. If ambiguities in interaction are not clarified prospectively/retrospectively in the course of interaction itself,
As noted at the beginning, most of the concepts of everyday life in contemporary literature are hopelessly frustrated by their obsession with overcodified institutionalized forms or, at best, with the results of everyday practices that have completed their work. In this article I tried to demonstrate that this is not the only and certainly not the most promising perspective on everyday life. My alternative understanding, whose foundations I tried to outline through the Heidegger-Garfinkel dialogue, takes as its point of departure the idea of
indifferent everydayness. The perspective of indifferent everydayness makes it possible to view everyday practices in the temporality of their own occurrence and, at the same time, as occurring with invariable regularity – which, however, by no means predetermines externally their concrete occurrence. The process of ‘routinization’ (Veralläglichung) (in the sense in which Weber, for example, interprets this term) – as tending towards firm codifications – is superimposed on this level and conceals it, blocking access to the dynamic relation between everyday practices and everyday formalizations. It is crucially important for understanding routinization itself, but cannot be understood without the latter. That is how I can very briefly sum up the arguments expounded in this article, which, however – being a summary – is nothing more than a gloss over a living text. Which undoubtedly means not just more than but probably also something quite different from what is explicitly formulated.
NOTES
1 On the principle of ‘misreading’ in Garfinkel, see Koev, 2009.
2 I will again refer the reader to Dimitar Vatsov’s already cited book where he demonstrates, in a very interesting analysis of Weberian charismatic domination, how charisma may be viewed as intrinsic to every ‘actual power’ (that is, it is present entirely in ‘this world’) and, as such, is interpreted also as ‘an elementary form of codification of power in social interactions’ (Vatsov, 2009, pp.61-69). We can speak of a sort of everyday being of charisma that is different from the Weberian routinization of charisma; what is important here is that the legitimation of power takes place at the level of its very affirmation, and not as a process that is external to everyday practices. On the other hand, as Vatsov also shows, the routinization of charisma ought to be conceived of as ‘progressive codification of domination which at some point can detach itself from its immediate origin and turn into a formal model of social regulation’ (ibid., p.66). The focus of my interest in this article is on, so to speak, everydayness before routinization, that is to say, before the moment of ‘detachment’.
3 On ontic and ontological phenomena as ‘phenomenal adjacency pairs’, see Sabeva, 2006. By this formulation Sabeva implies Harvey Sacks’s well-known idea of adjacency pairs, and points to another line of comparison between Heidegger and one of the offshoots of ethnomethodology, conversation analysis.
4 Heidegger speaks of ‘formal indication’ (formale Anzeige). On the principle of ‘formal indication’, see Koev, 2008.
5 If we use a definition proposed by Alfred Schütz referring, however, to anticipations in the commonsense thinking of daily life (Schütz, 1964, p.287).
6 See, e.g., Dreyfus, 1991, pp.vii-viii. Dreyfus (ibid., pp.34-38) speaks of two hermeneutics characteristic of each one of the two divisions of the book: ‘a hermeneutics of everydayness’ and ‘a hermeneutics of suspicion’ (in the words of Paul Ricoueur) respectively, focusing exclusively on the former. For his part, Jean-Luc Nancy (2000, pp.1-101) proposes rereading Heidegger’s project in ‘Being and Time’ through the lens of inauthenticity/everydayness, or more specifically, interpreting ‘the question of Being’ (Seinsfrage) from the point of view of the ‘question of being-with’ (Mitsseinfrage) (see also Critchley, 1998).
7 In fact, the effort to overcome the division between ‘I’ and ‘world’ requires a practical revision of intentionality (see Thomä, 1990, p.129).
8 Cf. ‘Our life is the world we live in … And our life manifests itself as life [ist nur als Leben] only insofar as it lives in some world’ (Heidegger, 1993, p.34). In the same work ‘life is viewed through the interconnection between ‘self-sufficiency’ and ‘insufficiency’ (privation) that is always characteristic of life (see ibid., pp.30-33).
9 ‘If we negate something in the sense that we do not simply deny it, but rather affirm it in the sense that something is lacking, such negation is called a privation’: this is how Heidegger (2001b, p.46) defines
privation in his Zollikon Seminars. I call the privation referred to in the cited passage from Being and Time 'weak' because although it involves negation, it does not imply any 'lack'. From this perspective, Heidegger's formulation of privation in his Zollikon Seminars is probably not sufficiently exhaustive. On privation as a possibility in Heidegger and on the approaches towards a 'sociology of affectiveness', see Sabeva, 2010. For a connection between privation and performativity, see also Deyanov, 2008.
For the category 'determination', see Gasche, 1993, who discusses the origin of the word 'determination' (Be-stimmung) from 'mood' (Stimmung), and therefore from preoccupative assertions. No doubt there is an analogous connection between 'grasp' (Griff) and concept (Be-griff).
The motif of Husserl's 'time-consciousness' (Zeitbewuftsetin) is the common denominator (all differences notwithstanding) in Heidegger's understanding of the temporality of Dasein, Schütz's idea of the project of action, and Merleau-Ponty's conception of the temporality of being-in-the-world. In all three cases, however, of key importance is the idea of temporality as incessant everyday modification. See Husserl, 1982; Schütz, 1974, pp.74-83; Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp.410-433). For a Schützian 'operation' on Heidegger's 'structure of understanding' in formulating the term 'project for action', see Sabeva, 2010, pp.101-101.
Or, in the words of David Farrell Krell (1992, p.71) Dasein as 'something utterly passive, an object of the transitive verb leben'.
See Merleau-Ponty's (1962, p.485) good example of 'recollection' and 'memory' invoked by dating the production of English cloth to the period before the Second World War.
The German benommen means 'benumbed', 'blinded', 'dazzled', 'dazed'. At the same time, the verb benehmen, of which benommen is the past participle, translates as 'behave', while the noun Bennehmen means 'behaviour', 'manners'. Thus, etymological connection itself between Benhemen and Benohmenheit is along the line of 'comport oneself', 'behave in a particular way' in the world – to be 'benumbed' ('dazzled') by the world. See the important comments on Benohmenheit in Krell (1992, p.10).
Thereby in generalization, unlike formalization, the direction of universalization is also predetermined: the most general determination refers to the less general and thus all the way to the very last one in the series of subsumptions.
For similar examples, see Heidegger, 1999, p.70.
Curiously enough Deleuze and Guattari use the same term (though not exactly in the same sense) in A Thousand Plateaus, where they speak of an assemblage of the haecceity type, referring to Duns Scotus's haecceitas. However quiet in the vein of Garfinkel this assemblage, which 'carries or brings out the event', refers to persons only in the sense that, in the words of Maurice Blanchot cited here by Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p.265), 'something happens to them that they can only get a grip on again by letting go of their ability to say I'.
Even by using what Garfinkel calls 'ad hoc' – the use of 'ad hoc' considerations such as 'et cetera', 'unless', and 'factum valet' (for details, see Garfinkel, 1967, pp.20-21, 73-74).
For example, as Rose's gloss. The eminent anthropologist, Professor Edward Rose, wants to draw his colleague, who has met him at the airport, into an everyday conversation, so after watching scenes from the city, which he has never seen before, out of the window of the car while they are driving home, he makes a remark that can be followed up: 'It certainly has changed.' This prompts his host to start telling him about the construction work done in the last ten years, and so on. Garfinkel and Sacks (1986, pp.187-188) describe Rose's gloss as a 'practice that makes deliberate use of the property that definiteness of circumstantial particulars consists of their consequences'. In other words, in this particular case (for the person who is uttering it) the gloss is not a context-transcendent explication but an invitation to contextualize. By using the matter-free formulation 'It certainly has changed', Rose 'finds in the reply, and with the use of the reply, what he, Rose, was talking about in the first place.' After the shift, it is no longer a problem for him to keep up the conversation with specific remarks such as 'You don't say. What did it cost?' etc.
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