'Garfinkel your life away'

‘Garfinkel your life away’ (Tumblr 2012)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryb2WawuV4g

The vibe that I get from this reading is that Garfinkel is challenging the ‘institutionalised norms of conduct’ and the formula of ‘recipe knowledge’. This video shows a teacher who is trying to encourage his students to ‘Carpe Diem’ or ‘Seize the day!’. Do we each need to undertake Garfinkel experiments and indeed ‘seize the day’ by changing the rules in order to understand the rules? I did.

In class today we were part of a secret experiment of causing ‘interactional breakdowns’ (Heritage 1984, p 81) through specifically performing an action that broke the rules of a game by which we live: it took form in the tapping of a pen – constantly. It was through being a rule-breaker that I understood how strongly the rules are embedded within each of us. One girl who was sitting next to me kept glancing between the pen and my face, back and forth, but said nothing. Another girl did not say anything until she was told that the experiment took place and it was after this that she admitted she was going crazy when the pen was being tapped. Interestingly enough, she became the ‘lay functionalist’ who continued to perpetually create the continuance of an ‘existing symbolic order’ (Heritage 1984, p 97).

I personally think Garfinkel was not all too kind on his subjects through his experiments: Heritage refers to the ‘victims’ of the experiment (1884, p 80). Victims, they certainly were, as I discovered through my role in the class experiment.

Consequently, we can clearly see why the rules of ‘seizing the day’ and of challenging institutionalised norms of conduct are often created – things will break sometimes. However, sometimes the rules of the game need to be broken in order to expose the ‘presupposed underlying patterns’ (Heritage 1984, p 84) that we interact within.



References:

GreenDaleDaily 2009, Community: Stand On Your Desk!, accessed 05/09/2007, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryb2WawuV4g.

Heritage, J 1984, ‘The morality of cognition’, in Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology, Polity Press, Cambridge, pp75-102.

Unknown 2012 ‘Stand backwards in an elevator’, weblog post, Betty Louise Plotnick, April, accessed 05/09/2012, http://maraglen.tumblr.com/post/19358031575/stand-backwards-in-an-elevator.