Doing Modernity: Studies in Critical Interactionism

Ethnomethodology as a "Nomad Science," Revisited Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. A note on this piece: I wrote the original version of this post in December 2011, not long after my first serious encounter with Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Fifteen years and a great deal of fieldwork later, I want to reopen it—not because the original intuition was wrong, but because I now have the conceptual and empirical tools to say something more precise than I could say then. I have long been drawn to the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and especially to A Thousand Plateaus , one of the more radical works of social philosophy I have encountered. In "Treatise on Nomadology," Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between what they call royal or State science and nomad or itinerant science. Royal science seeks stable forms, reproducible relationships, and knowledge capable of being formalized and transported. Nomad science stays closer to materials, pr...

This is an abstract from a paper I gave at the Pacific Sociological Association in the late 1990s.  I got the paper still but have never sought to publish it. The contemporary workplace is a site of an ongoing guerrilla warfare in which workers clandestinely take control of time, space, their own bodies and voices to creatively resist managerial control of the labor process. I learned about this underground battlefield of class struggle and practiced it every day in my role of clerical worker for a large aerospace firm in Southern California in the early 1990s. I learned that capitalist domination is not complete not total, for within the cracks and crevices of the dominating structures of contemporary corporations, workers continually commandeer the worklplace for their own ends. This story is about some of the everyday occupational struggles I encountered in this workplace and one set of tactices employed by a rebel gang of clerical workers,that I call the Sn...

On Interactionism: The Microsociology of Meaning and Social Practice Interactionism, as a major strand of sociological thought, centers on the study of how people produce and interpret meaning in everyday social interactions. Rooted in American pragmatism and phenomenological traditions, it has blossomed into a rich field of inquiry encompassing symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, institutional ethnography, and conversation analysis. These approaches share a focus on the micro-level processes through which individuals construct social realities, and together they form the foundation of contemporary social psychology and qualitative inquiry. Roots in American Pragmatism The philosophical foundations of interactionism lie in American pragmatism, particularly the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. Pragmatism emphasized process, contingency, and the emergent nature of reality. Knowledge was not seen as a static reflection of a pre-giv...

It was a strange time to begin taking notes, he thought. The Gilded Age—his own private version of it, at least—had come to an end. The fancy parties, extravagant outings, celebratory galas, and easy confidence that tomorrow might offer still more of the same had receded into memory. History, apparently, had changed the lighting. A Great Depression had descended upon us. Not necessarily the one with breadlines, bank failures, and photographs by Dorothea Lange, though at moments the resemblance seemed uncomfortably close. This depression had its own forms of dispossession and uncertainty, its own frightened calculations about rent, food, work, and what might disappear next. Gloom and despair did not announce themselves every morning with trumpets. More often, they settled into the background, a low and persistent hum beneath the mundane activities of everyday life. People still bought coffee. Buses still arrived. Dogs still inspected lampposts. Couples argued over lunch. Someone somewhe...

Reflexive Praxis and Being an Ally July 18th, 2008 by waynemellinger Throughout “Doing Modernity”, I have advocated a Critical Interactionist  approach to  understanding everyday life  that focuses on how people create and recreate the social world through their historically-specific practices in concrete instances of life. I have particularly been concerned with locating the practices through which “societies structured in dominance” (Stuart Hall) are made, re-made and consciously changed.  For example, I have outlined some practices involved in “ doing inequality ” and “ how ideologies work “. In this entry I want to consider how we can consciously change the world through  reflexive praxis , a mode of acting on the world filled with keen awareness of our ability to alter reality.  This will be contrasted with our unreflexive behavior –our habitual modes of “going along” with the status quo.  I will relate these two modes of acting...

To live in the city is to do modernity . That is, through our everyday performances—our gestures, our glances, our strategic silences—we participate in the ongoing production of the modern social world. One of the most subtle yet powerful of these performances is what sociologist Erving Goffman called "civil inattention": the micro-ritual through which we acknowledge the presence of others while simultaneously maintaining distance. Through this ritual, we demonstrate that we recognize the other person's presence, are not seeking a sustained interaction, and have no hostile intention.  These seemingly minor exchanges—fleeting eye contact, averted gazes, momentary adjustments in bodily orientation—are the mundane building blocks of urban life. As Harold Garfinkel (1967) emphasized, social order is not pre-given; it is an accomplishment , enacted in and through everyday interactions. In this sense, civil inattention is not simply a behavioral norm but a key practice thr...

UNDERSTANDING EVERYDAY LIFE: A CRITICAL INTERACTIONIST APPROACH TO SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OUR SUBJECT MATTER – SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY Social Psychology is a very broad topic concerned with many aspects of human behavior. I see it as representing some of the greatest wisdom about the human species as distilled through the ages. It is one of the social sciences, along with anthropology, political science, economics, sociology, psychology, human geography, ethnic studies, women’s studies, criminology, etc. All of these disciplines seek to understand the complexity of the human condition. While solid lines of demarcation may have at one time separated these academic disciplines, that is no longer the case. We live in an age of blurred genres and interdisciplinarity. Social Psychology is centrally concerned with interpersonal relationships and processes. It examines the reciprocal relationship between individual selves and society—how does society influence the individual ...