Doing Modernity The Practical Accomplishment of Life Under Conditions Not of One's Making by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

 Doing Modernity

The Practical Accomplishment of Life Under Conditions Not of One's Making

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Abstract

This essay advances doing modernity as an analytic frame for understanding late modern life as an ongoing practical accomplishment rather than a structural condition or historical epoch. Drawing on ethnomethodology and phenomenological sociology, the analysis foregrounds the embodied, accountable, and morally saturated work through which recognizable personhood—competence, responsibility, choice, normalcy—is produced inside powerful systems that individuals neither design nor control. Through extended autoethnographic reflection and engagement with Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schonberg's Righteous Dopefiend, the essay distinguishes between precarious inclusion and abandonment as positional variations within the same modern order. Abandonment, it is argued, does not constitute an externality to modernity but reveals its structure in limit cases where the demand for self-management persists despite the withdrawal of institutional support. The essay proposes a synthesis of ethnomethodology and phenomenology that treats lived experience and interactional practice as analytically inseparable, and situates autoethnographic attentiveness as a disciplined methodological resource rather than a confessional genre.

I. Introduction: Modernity as Accomplishment

Modernity is typically treated as a condition people inhabit: a historical period, an institutional arrangement, or a structural configuration characterized by rationalization, bureaucratization, and systemic complexity. In this essay, I propose a different analytic starting point. Modernity is not primarily something people are in. It is something they do.

Following ethnomethodology's central insight—that social order is locally produced through members' methods—I use doing modernity to name the ongoing, embodied, accountable work through which people manage everyday life inside systems they did not design, do not control, and cannot exit (Garfinkel 1967; Heritage 1984). This is not a theory about modernity in the abstract. It is an analytic focus on the actual practices through which modern social reality is accomplished, sustained, and repaired in ordinary scenes.

I came to this formulation through a convergence of intellectual training and lived experience that cannot be cleanly separated. My graduate education at UC Santa Barbara in the 1990s immersed me in the ethnomethodological tradition—the careful attention to how social order is accomplished in the details of interaction, the refusal of structural explanations that float above actual conduct, the insistence that competence is always situated and observable. Under the mentorship of Don Zimmerman, Thomas P. Wilson and Harvey Molotch, I learned to see society not as a container people move through but as something continuously produced through accountable practices.

What I did not anticipate was how thoroughly I would come to know these dynamics from the inside—not as analyst but as subject. In the years following my doctoral work, circumstances I will only partially narrate here brought me into sustained contact with the institutions and street-level realities that form the empirical ground of this essay. I have sat in the waiting rooms I describe. I have navigated the clinics. I have known what it is to produce documents for caseworkers and to fail at that production. I have experienced what Bourgois and Schonberg render ethnographically as a condition of my own existence. This is not confession; it is methodological positioning. The phenomenology I develop here draws on observational and analytic skills honed through academic training, but it is also informed by a kind of participant observation that was never chosen as a research design.

Doing modernity refers to the practical production of recognizable personhood—competence, responsibility, normalcy, and choice—under conditions where performance is demanded but control is denied. This work is continuous rather than episodic, embodied rather than purely cognitive, accountable rather than private, technologically mediated rather than face-to-face alone, differentially distributed across social locations, and relentlessly individualized in its attribution of success and failure. Anthony Giddens famously described modernity as a 'juggernaut,' a powerful but only partially steerable force that moves forward with enormous momentum (Giddens 1990). What interests me here is the lived interior of that juggernaut: how it is navigated, endured, and reproduced in the details of everyday conduct.

II. Modernity, Practice, and Lived Order: Theoretical Orientations

Classical sociological theories of modernity—Weber's rationalization, Durkheim's differentiation, Marx's alienation—tend to operate at the level of large-scale structures and historical transformations. Weber's vision of the iron cage, in which rational-legal authority progressively displaces traditional and charismatic forms, captures something essential about modern institutional life: its administered quality, its procedural indifference, its reduction of persons to cases. Marx's account of alienation—from the products of labor, from the labor process itself, from species-being, and from other people—names a felt condition that persists across transformations in the mode of production. More recent work in social theory has emphasized risk (Beck 1992), reflexivity (Giddens 1991), and governance through responsibilization (Rose 1999). While analytically powerful, these approaches often leave unspecified how modernity is done in concrete moments.

John Zerzan's concept of the 'mass psychology of misery' names something that critical theory has often gestured toward but rarely examined in its practical constitution: the diffuse unhappiness, the background anxiety, the sense that something is deeply wrong despite—or because of—the administered abundance of late modern life. Zerzan locates this misery in the alienating structures of technological civilization itself. What his analysis lacks, and what I aim to provide, is attention to how this misery is practically managed, how it is made bearable, how people do their lives within it.

Practice-oriented traditions offer a corrective. Phenomenological sociology, from Schutz to Merleau-Ponty, foregrounds the lived texture of social life: how time, space, embodiment, and meaning are experienced (Schutz 1967; Merleau-Ponty 1962). Alfred Schutz's analysis of the lifeworld—the taken-for-granted background of everyday existence—provides essential conceptual resources. The lifeworld is not a thing but an accomplishment, continuously sustained through what Schutz called the 'natural attitude': the practical suspension of doubt that allows everyday life to proceed. Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, in turn, provide methodological tools for examining how social order is locally produced through accountable practices (Garfinkel 1967; Sacks 1992; Schegloff 2007). Harold Garfinkel's breaching experiments demonstrated that the orderliness of social life depends on members' continuous interpretive work—work that becomes visible only when it fails or is disrupted.

What is often missing is a sustained effort to hold these traditions together with critical attention to power and suffering. Phenomenology without ethnomethodology risks becoming impressionistic—rich in description but vague about mechanism. Ethnomethodology without phenomenology risks becoming technical—precise about practice but silent about what those practices feel like. Critical theory without either risks abstraction—naming structural violence without showing how it is lived. Doing modernity names an analytic commitment to all three: to lived experience, to the interactional work through which that experience is produced, and to the unequal distribution of suffering that modern arrangements generate.

III. Doing Modernity in Specifiable Practices

Doing modernity is observable. It occurs in ordinary, repeatable scenes. What follows are not metaphors or illustrations but members' methods: the practices through which modern life is made recognizable as orderly, responsible, and intelligible. I render these scenes in extended form because the phenomenological yield depends on descriptive density. The details are not decoration; they are the analysis.

The Benefits Office

The waiting room is full by 8 a.m. I arrived at 7:15, having taken two buses to reach this office on the edge of town—a location that requires those who most need services to travel furthest to reach them. This is not accidental. The geography of social services performs a sorting function, filtering out those whose need is not acute enough to justify the journey.

I have assembled documents—identification, proof of address, pay stubs from a job I no longer hold, a letter from my previous caseworker whose name I have misspelled. I do not know whether these are the right documents until someone tells me they are not. This uncertainty is structural, not incidental. The requirements shift; the website says one thing, the intake worker another. I have learned to bring everything, to carry my life in a folder, to produce legibility on demand.

When my name is called—mispronounced, as always—I must narrate my situation in institutionally recognizable terms. The caseworker does not want to hear that I am frightened, that I did not sleep, that I am not sure how I arrived at this point in my life. She wants categories: 'change in household income,' 'loss of employment,' 'housing instability.' I have learned this language. I produce it fluently now, translating my existence into checkboxes. This is a skill, acquired through repetition, and I am not ungrateful for it. Competence in bureaucratic self-presentation is a survival resource.

I must demonstrate deservingness without appearing entitled. This is a delicate performance. Too much distress and I am flagged as unstable, a case that will require more resources than the system wants to provide. Too little distress and I am suspected of fraud, gaming a system designed to be gamed against. I have learned to modulate: concerned but not desperate, grateful but not servile, articulate but not so articulate that I seem like I do not really need help.

The caseworker informs me that a form I submitted three weeks ago is missing from my file. I feel the familiar flush of shame and anger, held carefully beneath the surface. I do not argue. I have learned that arguing extends the interaction, creates notes in the file, marks me as difficult. 'What do I need to do now?' I ask, my voice steady. She tells me. I write it down. I will return tomorrow with the same form, re-signed, re-dated, and I will not mention that this is the third time.

This is doing modernity. Not the grand narrative of bureaucratic rationalization, but the actual work of producing oneself as a recognizable case within an institutional order that demands accountability while systematically generating the conditions for failure. I am held responsible for paperwork the system lost. This is not a bug; it is the design. The system is not failing me; I am being failed by design, which is different.

The Clinic

I have fifteen minutes. The automated check-in system has already consumed five of them, requiring me to enter my date of birth three times before accepting it. I have navigated the insurance verification, the prior authorization for this visit, the referral from my primary care provider who I have seen once and who does not know my name.

The physician enters. She does not sit. I understand that sitting would extend the interaction beyond what the schedule allows. I describe my symptoms in language calibrated to the situation: specific enough to warrant attention, not so alarming that I am flagged for intervention I do not want and cannot afford. I have learned, through trial and error, which words open doors and which close them. 'Chronic fatigue' gets a blood panel. 'Depression' gets a referral to behavioral health with a six-week wait. 'I want to die' gets a 5150 hold. I navigate carefully.

She uses terminology I do not fully understand—something about titrating, about half-lives, about contraindications with a medication I may or may not still be taking. I nod. I have learned that asking too many questions signals something: non-compliance, perhaps, or anxiety that requires its own treatment. I perform understanding I do not possess.

She prescribes medication. I thank her. I do not mention that I cannot afford it, that my insurance covers a fraction of the cost, that the pharmacy closest to my home closed last year. I have been down this road. Mentioning cost invites a conversation about patient assistance programs that require additional documentation, additional appointments, additional production of my legibility as a deserving poor person. I do not have the energy today.

When I do not fill the prescription, my chart will note 'non-compliant.' No one will ask why. The category will follow me into future encounters, shaping how I am seen, what resources are offered, what assumptions are made about my capacity to manage my own care. This is the moral structure of clinical modernity: accountability without power, responsibility without resources, individual failure as the only available explanation for systemic dysfunction.

The Street

I did not intend to write about this. For years, I kept what I knew from the street separate from my academic work, as if the two could not speak to each other, as if my training in ethnomethodology had nothing to do with my understanding of how to survive without housing. But the separation has become untenable. The phenomenology I am developing requires honesty about its sources.

When you are on the street, doing modernity does not stop. It intensifies. You must find somewhere legal to exist, and such places are scarce. The bench that looks inviting is marked with armrests designed to prevent sleeping. The awning that offers shelter from rain is monitored by cameras that will bring police if you linger. Public space is engineered against you, and navigating it requires continuous assessment: Where can I sit without being moved? Where can I sleep without being arrested? Where can I exist without being seen as a problem?

You must manage your belongings, which is to say you must protect everything you own while carrying everything you own. The shopping cart, the backpack, the layers of clothing that serve as both wardrobe and bedding—these must be maintained, organized, defended. Theft is common. Loss is constant. The work of keeping track, of knowing where things are, of not losing the documents that institutions demand—this is labor, exhausting and uncompensated.

You must present as safe to avoid police contact, which means managing your appearance, your demeanor, your location. You learn the semiotics of threat: how standing versus sitting, moving versus staying, making eye contact versus avoiding it, being alone versus being in a group—how all of these are read, and misread, and used to justify intervention. You perform harmlessness, even when you feel rage, because rage is a luxury you cannot afford.

You must narrate trauma on demand. Every service provider, every intake worker, every well-meaning volunteer wants to know your story. Why are you here? What happened? What choices did you make? The questions presume that homelessness is a biographical outcome, a result of individual decisions that can be traced and, implicitly, judged. You learn to give the narrative that opens doors: addiction, abuse, mental illness—the acceptable categories of misfortune that make you legible as deserving. You do not mention the rent increase, the medical debt, the job that ended without notice. Those explanations do not fit the forms.

I could continue. The details are endless and endlessly specific. But the point is not cataloguing suffering. The point is that doing modernity does not cease when institutional support collapses. It continues—the same demands for competence, choice, and recognizable selfhood—but without the resources that make such performance possible. This is not the outside of modernity. It is modernity stripped of its promises but not its disciplines.

IV. Doing Modernity at the Edge: Abandonment and the Persistence of Moral Order

Philippe Bourgois and Jeffrey Schonberg's Righteous Dopefiend (2009) provides the canonical empirical account of what I am calling abandoned modernity. While the book is often read through the frameworks of political economy or structural violence, its deepest contribution is phenomenological: a sustained rendering of how modernity feels when institutional support collapses but demands for self-management persist.

I read Righteous Dopefiend differently than most sociologists, I suspect, because I recognize it. Not the specific encampments—I was not in San Francisco, and my circumstances were different in ways that matter—but the phenomenological structure. The temporal compression. The bodily exposure. The moral triage. The relentless, exhausting work of getting through the day. When Bourgois and Schonberg describe how their subjects experience time, I do not have to translate. I know what it is to wake not knowing what day it is, not because of confusion but because the day of the week has ceased to structure anything. I know the cycle of urgency and waiting, the present compressed into immediate need, the future foreclosed.

What Bourgois and Schonberg render ethnographically, I came to know as lived reality. This convergence is not incidental. It confirms that a phenomenology of modernity must include its underworlds, its failures, and its sacrificial populations if it is to remain honest.

Doing Time Under Abandonment

Time, in Righteous Dopefiend, is not experienced as linear progress or biographical narrative but as a cycle of urgency, waiting, and collapse. Withdrawal compresses the present into a narrow corridor of bodily necessity. The future loses its phenomenological function—not because of cognitive deficit, but because institutions have rendered planning structurally unavailable. When you do not know where you will sleep tonight, planning for next week becomes not just difficult but phenomenologically incoherent. The future requires a stable present from which to project; absent that stability, futurity dissolves.

This is modernity lived as permanent emergency. The temporal structure of modern life—the calendar, the schedule, the appointment, the deadline—assumes a subject who can orient toward future states and organize present action accordingly. When that capacity is disrupted, one does not cease to be modern; one simply fails at modernity in ways that are attributed to personal deficiency.

Doing Embodiment Under Moral Scrutiny

The addicted body in Righteous Dopefiend becomes a site where modern power inscribes itself visibly. Abscesses, scars, trembling hands, and emaciated frames function as moral documents—read by police, clinicians, journalists, and passersby as evidence of failure. The body is not merely disciplined; it becomes the medium through which the world announces its hostility.

Merleau-Ponty taught us that the body is not in the world; it is how the world shows up. In abandoned modernity, what shows up is pain, suspicion, and relentless moral scrutiny. The body that cannot be cleaned, clothed, and composed according to institutional expectations is a body that announces its failure before any word is spoken. I learned this directly: the way a clerk's expression changes when you approach the counter, the way a physician's tone shifts when she examines your arms, the way space opens around you on public transit. These are not metaphors. They are observable features of interaction, as real and as consequential as any utterance.

Doing Moral Life Without Institutional Support

Yet Righteous Dopefiend also documents a moral lifeworld that refuses reduction. The title names something real: righteousness. The men and women Bourgois and Schonberg follow articulate codes of reciprocity, loyalty, toughness, and dignity that persist under extreme deprivation. Moral accountability does not disappear; it is relocalized. Shame is not constant but interactionally triggered, intensifying in encounters with hospitals, courts, shelters, and media representations.

This resonates with Goffman's insight that moral life is not housed inside individuals but produced in scenes, rituals, and moments of exposure. What changes under conditions of abandonment is not the presence of moral order but its terms. The person who shares their last cigarette, who watches your belongings while you use the bathroom, who warns you about an aggressive cop—this person is doing moral life, accomplishing accountability, within a normative order that differs from but does not cease to be an order.

What Righteous Dopefiend ultimately reveals is a world structurally incapable of repair but relentless in its demands for self-management. Modernity here appears not as liberation or rationalization but as a moral order that disciplines without providing viable paths to dignity. Addiction, in this light, is not deviation from modernity but one of its most honest expressions: a rational response to a world that has collapsed the future while intensifying the present.

V. Precarious Inclusion and Abandonment: An Analytic Distinction

The difference between doing modernity from positions of precarious inclusion and doing modernity under abandonment is not structural but positional. The same systems operate; the same logic of individual accountability prevails. What differs is one's location relative to the juggernaut—whether one remains tenuously inside or has been expelled from its promises while remaining subject to its disciplines.

This distinction has analytic consequences. Abandonment does not require a separate theory. It requires the same analytic frame applied to limit cases where the structure reveals itself most sharply. The woman at the benefits office and the man in the encampment are doing the same work—accomplishing competence, performing choice, managing accountability—but with radically different access to the tools that make such accomplishment possible.

I have occupied both positions. I have sat in the waiting room with documents in order, performing the precariously included person whose situation is temporary and manageable. I have also been the person without documents, without address, without the resources to perform includability. The phenomenological difference is real—the fear, the shame, the bodily experience of exposure—but the underlying structure is identical. In both cases, I was doing modernity: producing myself as a recognizable, accountable subject within systems that demanded such production while making it variably possible.

The abandoned are not exceptions to doing modernity. They are its truth. They reveal what the system requires when its supports are withdrawn: the same competence, the same accountability, the same individual responsibility—but without resources, without stability, without the conditions that make such performance achievable.

VI. Methodological Synthesis: Ethnomethodology, Phenomenology, and Autoethnographic Discipline

This essay holds three methodological commitments simultaneously.

Phenomenology provides access to lived texture—how modernity feels in the body, how time and space are experienced, how shame and exhaustion accumulate. It insists that these are not epiphenomena but constitutive features of modern life. Without attention to how institutions are experienced, we cannot understand what they do.

Ethnomethodology shows how that texture is produced—through locally organized, interactionally accountable practices that are observable in principle and often in fact. The waiting room, the clinic, the street corner—these are not just sites of experience but sites of accomplishment, where social order is generated through members' methods.

Autoethnography, as I employ it here, is not confession. It is not memoir dressed in academic language. It is disciplined observation of one's own participation in the accomplishment of social order. The training I received at UCSB—the relentless attention to detail, the refusal of explanations that outrun observation, the insistence on specifying the practices through which order is produced—this training does not disappear when the observer is also the observed. If anything, it intensifies. I know what I did in the waiting room not because I have reconstructed it imaginatively but because I watched myself do it, with the analytic attention my teachers cultivated.

Doing modernity insists on holding these together. It treats lived experience not as epiphenomenal but as constituted in and through practice. It refuses the separation of subjective and objective, inner and outer, experience and conduct. What I feel and what I do are not two things but one thing observed from different angles.

VII. Conclusion: Modernity as Work

Doing modernity is work—unpaid, unrecognized, morally demanded, unevenly distributed, and relentlessly individualized. It is the work of producing oneself as a competent, choosing, accountable subject within systems that require such production while systematically undermining the conditions that make it possible.

A phenomenology of modernity that excludes its underworlds, its failures, and its sacrificial populations is not honest. The abandoned do not stand outside modernity; they reveal its structure when its promises are withdrawn but its demands remain. To understand modernity, we must look not only where it succeeds—where people manage to accomplish competent, recognizable selfhood—but where it fails, where the work becomes impossible, where the system's demands exceed the resources it provides.

I have tried, in this essay, to think from both positions: the sociologist trained to observe and the person observed by systems that did not know he was watching back. The convergence is not comfortable, and I do not offer it as a credential or a bid for authenticity. I offer it because the phenomenology requires it. To know what doing modernity feels like, one must do it. To analyze what doing modernity involves, one must watch. I have done both, not by design but by circumstance, and this essay is my attempt to honor what that convergence taught me.

Doing modernity means accomplishing competence, choice, and recognizable selfhood—moment by moment, in the body, under observation—inside systems you didn't make, can't stop, and will be blamed for failing to navigate. That is not a slogan. It is a description of what I saw, and what I lived, and what I continue to watch others live every day in the streets of Santa Barbara where I now conduct outreach. The juggernaut has not stopped. We are all, still, doing modernity. The question is whether we can see it clearly enough to imagine doing it differently.

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