The Transcendence and Non-Discursivity of the Lifeworld - Springer Link

Hum Stud (2008) 31:323–342 DOI 10.1007/s10746-008-9098-5 RESEARCH PAPER

The Transcendence and Non-Discursivity of the Lifeworld Wing-Chung Ho

Published online: 30 July 2008
Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract This paper points to two little-discussed interrelated features—among sociologists—about the nature of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt): that the experience of transcendence is an essential component of human actions, and that lived experience (Erlebnis) is founded on the non-discursivity of the lifeworld, i.e., the pre-predicative background expectancies from which the discursive arises. I examine the intellectual route of Alfred Schutz who developed his mundane lifeworld theory from appropriating Edmund Husserl’s notions of appresentation and apperception. Harold Garfinkel later extended Schutz’s concept of lifeworld to the empirical investigations of constitutive social orders. By way of conclusion, I warn against a strain of constructionism in sociology, which tends to ignore the two said features of lived experience and inaccurately conceives social realities as essentially the actor’s discursive accomplishments. Keywords Husserl
Schutz
Garfinkel
Lifeworld
Experience
Transcendence
Non-discursivity

Introduction Alfred Schutz was a pioneer in making available for contemporary sociological investigation the lived experience (Erlebnis) in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). In his early major work, The Phenomenology of Social World (1980 [1932]), Schutz fully anchors Weber’s concept of social action to the experience of the Other, i.e., the alter ego. Schutz (1980) deems that the actor does not contemplate the Other as ‘‘physical object,’’ but ‘‘the other as other, that is, as a conscious living being’’ W.-C. Ho (&) Department of Applied Social Studies, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]

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(p. 144; original emphasis). Showing that such intentionality towards the other self is exactly where Weber’s definition of social action falls short,1 Schutz maintains that for one to act socially upon an Other’s consciousness, one must pay attention to the flow of his/her consciousness as it occurs in the chain of interlocking motives. Schutz also underscores the differentiation between the ‘‘in-order-to’’ and ‘‘because’’ motives. While the former is oriented toward the future and premised on fantasizing the projected action, the latter is a subjective reflection made about finished actions. Later, in his well-known 1945 paper, ‘‘On Multiple Realities’’ (Schutz 1982, pp. 207–259), Schutz states that we experience many realities (the work world, the dream world, the world of scientific contemplation and so on), each of which constitutes a distinctive ‘‘finite province of meaning’’ with a unified and specific cognitive style (p. 230). It is in this paper that lifeworld experience attains an explicit constitutive outlook as it is not ‘‘the ontological structure of the objects,’’ but ‘‘the meaning of our experiences … [that] constitutes reality’’ (p. 230). It is not until The Structures of the Life-world: Volume One that Schutz (with Luckmann) (1995[1973]) delves into each finite province of meaning as well as the cognitive style in the everyday world. His call to study the lifeworld as ‘‘meaning-compatible experiences’’ with specific experiential categories is then rendered more explicit.2 Against this backdrop, this paper aims to investigate the two least discussed features about the nature of the lifeworld among today’s sociologists. The first is that the experience of transcendence is an essential component of human actions. The second and related feature is that the lifeworld experience is fundamentally ‘‘non-discursive’’ in the sense that it is the pre-predicative domain of the lifeworld that constitutes the condition for the possibility of the discursive. In Schutz’s exegesis of the lifeworld, the experience of the ‘‘living present’’ (lebendige Gegenwart) in the orientation to the Other is possible only because of the transcendent experience of something beyond ‘‘my actual reach’’; or, in other words, because of the human agency to extend the appresentational reference to the intersubjective signs, the we-relations, or the nature and society which have been already pre-given to me and my fellowmen. In a letter to Aron Gurwitsch, Schutz makes this point explicit as he writes, ‘‘the mechanism by means of which the transcendent is appresentatively incorporated into the now-here-thus is what makes the life-world at all possible’’ (Grathoff 1989, p. 235).3 And, to speak of the nondiscursivity of the lifeworld experience by no means implies that people are dumb. 1

Schutz (1980) admits that his ‘‘interpretation of the experiences of consciousness [as] related intentionally to the other self does not completely fulfill the requirements of Weber’s definition [of social action]’’ (p. 145).

2

According to Schutz and Thomas Luckmann (1995), the six experiential categories are: (1) a ‘‘specific tension of consciousness,’’ (2) a ‘‘specific epoch,’’ (3) a ‘‘dominant form of spontaneity,’’ (4) a ‘‘specific form of sociality,’’ (5) a ‘‘specific form of self-experience,’’ and (6) a ‘‘specific time perspective’’ (pp. 24–28).

3

It should be noted that the transcendental character of the lifeworld and the non-discursivity of experience have also been vital to Gurwitsch’s account of social interaction. Attempting to locate intersubjectivity in Husserl’s ‘‘natural attitude’’ of everyday life, Gurwitsch further suggests that we are always dealing with a ‘‘equipment totality’’ (Zeugganzheit) in a particular ‘‘milieu.’’ It is by building a shared history and tradition around the shared ‘‘equipment’’ (das Zeug), a group sense of ‘‘partnership,’’ ‘‘membership,’’ is formed in relation to a common milieu. For a fuller exposition, see Gurwitsch (1979).

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Rather, Schutz (1964) claims that when interacting with others, actors always already bring to bear a stock of pre-constituted knowledge which includes ‘‘knowledge of expressive and interpretive schemes of objective sign systems, in particular, of the vernacular language’’ (pp. 29–30). What is non-discursive to actors is the sign system of language which constitutes a ‘‘meaning-context’’ of experience and is essentially a configuration formed by interpretive schemes. By the ‘‘nondiscursive,’’ I mean the ‘‘pre-predicative’’ that makes possible the experience of things prior to all discursive constructions of meaning. As will be made apparent, Schutz (and also Garfinkel) presumes that the discursive always ‘‘presupposes’’ the non-discursive. Such a presupposition should not be understood in any technical sense, but rather as the unquestioned, background expectancies from which the discursive emerges, or, I might say from a Husserlian perspective, the condition for the possibility of the discursive. Such a feature is parallel with the lifeworld as ‘‘the unquestioned but always questionable background within which inquiry starts and within which it can be carried out’’ (Schutz 1982, pp. 57, 326–327). Consequently, when something in the lifeworld is questioned through discourse, like someone asking, ‘‘have I understood you correctly?’’, the object (Gegenstand) that appears is no longer unquestioned by the actor and immediately turned into cogitatum—being thought.4 The actor then necessarily experiences a specific shock and is compelled to break through the non-discursivity of the lifeworld; from this moment on, in Schutzian terms, s/he shifts to the accent of another reality (p. 231). In the following, I will present my arguments in three steps. First, I trace the intellectual route of Schutz who develops his mundane theory of the lifeworld from appropriating Husserl’s notions of appresentation and apperception. I argue that in radically redirecting Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology to the social sciences, Schutz retains the primordiality of lifeworld experience of transcendence. Second, I attempt to outline the ways that the two said features of lifeworld experience are formulated in Schutz’s corpus of work. Third, in revealing that the two said features of lifeworld experience remain as the tenets of Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, the ways the concept of lifeworld is extended to the empirical investigations of constitutive social orders are discussed. To end this paper, I raise my concerns about the emergence of a strain of constructionism in sociology. While the proponents of this approach ostensibly avow their adherence to social phenomenology and/or ethnomethodology, they tend to ignore the two said features of the lifeworld experience. Some are even on the verge of misconceiving social realities solely as the actor’s discursive accomplishments.

Husserl’s Lifeworld: Perceiving the Unseen Husserl is the first person to systematically define the way in which the predicative domain of human experience is related to the pre-predicative domain in the intersubjective lifeworld. To him, all phenomenological reduction is grounded in ‘‘one spatio-temporal fact-world to which I myself belong, as do all other men found 4

The term originated from the Cartesian formulation of ‘‘ego cogito cogitatum’’ (Descartes 1996).

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in it and related in the same way to it’’ (Schutz 1962, p. 96). The lifeworld ‘‘was always there for mankind before science’’ (1970, p. 123); it is the ‘‘only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable’’ from the natural standpoint (1970, p. 49). Rather than ‘‘what,’’ Husserl is concerned with ‘‘how’’ our intentionality of pure consciousness toward the object (Gegenstand) can be described in the lifeworld. In question is a series of processes known as appresentations and apperceptions. To Husserl, an appresentation, according to Rodemeyer (2006), is a ‘‘co-presentation of the object before me that is not being ‘presented’ right now, but which is implied by what is given in the profile directly before me’’ (p. 48). Appresentation thus points to my common experience that an object is before me but not all its faces are within my visual gaze. For example, my perception of a dressed man walking towards me on campus goes beyond itself to other possible experiences of this man as a whole because his back is not currently in my view. That man who is perceived as not naked at his back essentially involves elements not directly presented to me. This active perception in the natural attitude that takes for granted the ‘‘unseen’’ as it actually is, and that correlates to the appresentational reference extended beyond the actual presentation of the object is known as apperception.5 The natural attitude, hence, is ‘‘the total field of possible research,’’ or in a single word, the ‘‘world’’ that is self-evidently existing before us as unquestioned givenness (Husserl 1962, p. 45). It is the general field where our practical and theoretical activities begin and end, and only when we abandon the natural attitude, can we ‘‘find ourselves in a new cognitive attitude’’ (1971, p. 83). To speak of the ‘‘fact-world’’ that belongs both to myself and to all others necessarily implies a shift from me to we. Husserl then brings to the fore the ‘‘problem’’ of constitution of intersubjectivity—a must-be-solved ‘‘problem,’’ or the whole theory slips into a solipsistic impasse. The diverging views on the intersubjectivity of the lifeworld have sharply marked where Schutz parts company from Husserl—a point that has been clearly stated by Schutz himself and his interpreters (Schutz 1975, pp. 51–91; O’Neill 1980, pp. 9–10; Wagner 1983; Spiegelberg 1994, p. 256; Zaner 2002; Yu 2005, pp. 268–270). Unlike Husserl who begins his inquiry with the subjectivity (i.e., I, the ego), Schutz (1975) begins with we (i.e., ego-alter ego) which is pregiven in the lifeworld,6 and considers intersubjectivity as not a ‘‘problem of constitution,’’ but ‘‘a datum (Gegebenheit) [a ‘‘given’’] of the life-world’’ (p. 82). Along this vein, ‘‘[n]either the fact that the world … is a world for all of us, nor the fact that my experience of the world refers a priori to others, requires explanation’’ (p. 83). But, one should be reminded that throughout his lifetime, Husserl did not share Schutz’s enthusiasm for articulating the lifeworld experience in a way as to make it 5

Rodemeyer (2006, p. 48) reminds us that the notions of appresentation and apperception are sometimes used interchangeably by Husserl.

6

To Schutz (1982), ‘‘the We-relationship itself, although originating in the mutual biographical involvement, transcends the existence of either of the consociates in the realm of every life’’ (p. 318). In interpreting Schutz’s social phenomenology, Kim (2005) rightly states that, ‘‘‘We,’ the basic relationship of the social world, is the first and most original experience given by the very ontological condition of my being in the world’’ (p. 207).

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amenable to the gaze of social scientific investigation. The paramount concern of Husserl is the foundation of sciences.7 Husserl (1970) sees the emergence of a crisis since the times of Galileo that our everyday lifeworld is being surreptitiously substituted by the ‘‘mathematically substructed world of idealities’’ (pp. 48–49). He decries that exact science has been inducing a kind of alienation among scientists that only leads them to see what the conceptual constructs created by themselves allow them to see. In question is what he calls ‘‘forgetting the meaning-fundament of natural science’’ (p. 48). To him, to prevent this ‘‘forgetting,’’ one has to master the transcendental ‘‘regression’’ technique to expose the Objectivity of a single universal science which embraces all the positive sciences (Bernet et al. 1993, p. 219). Such Objectivity is based on the ‘‘founding stratum’’ (fundierende Schicht) of the lifeworld (Husserl 1988, p. 96) which can only be explored by the phenomenological epoche, a transcendental method through which consciousness is stripped of the sense of mundaneity.8 Husserl further suggests that ‘‘the life-world does have, in all its relative features, a general structure’’ unanimously agreed by all, regardless of race or ethnicity.9 Given the different goals Husserl and Schutz think that phenomenology should pursue, it is inevitable that Schutz regards the transcendental approach on intersubjectivity as possessing limited utility in the social sciences. Schutz first casts doubt on it in The Phenomenology of Social World,10 then criticizes it as problematic in a 1942 paper, ‘‘Scheler’s Theory of Intersubjectivity and the General

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It should be noted that the meaning of ‘‘science’’ here is not restricted to natural science and technology, but takes the boarder connotation of systematic knowledge equivalent to the German term: Wissenschaftlich.

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Husserl calls this the transcendental reduction and second epoche; this is also the most controversial concept among contemporary scholars. In his fifth Cartesian Meditations (1988), the transcendental reduction has been already performed, whereby the existential belief in the world as a whole including myself as a psycho-somatic unity, is suspended so as to disclose a pure transcendental field of consciousness. Having then shown that the real existents attain sense only through the operating intentionality of my consciousness and in constitutive syntheses, Husserl carries out his second epoche. From within this egological sphere, all intentional activities and the results, referring immediately or mediately to other subjectivities, are excluded (pp. 89–92).

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Husserl (1970) is lucid on this point: ‘‘Things: that is, stones, animals, plants, even human beings and human products; but everything here is subjective and relative, even though normally, in our experience and in the social group united with us in the community of life, we arrive at ‘secure’ facts; within a certain range this occurs of its own accord, that is, undisturbed by any noticeable disagreement; sometimes, on the other hand, when it is of practice importance, it occurs in a purposive knowing process, i.e., with the goal of [finding] a truth which is secure for our purpose. But when we are thrown into an alien social sphere, that of the Negroes in the Congo, Chinese peasants, etc., we discover that their truths, the facts that for them are fixed, generally verified or verifiable, are by no means the same as ours’’ (pp. 138–139).

10 Schutz (1980) makes his stand most indicative in the following text: ‘‘[In the ‘basic We-relationship,’] the experience of the We (die Erfahrung vom Wir) in the world of immediate social reality is the basis of the Ego’s experience (die Erfahrung des Ich) of the world in general. [Original footnote: For a treatment of these questions cf. Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, IV and V.] Of course we do not have the space in the present study to deal with the difficult phenomenological questions of how this We is constituted from the transcendental Subject… In fact, however, we can for our purposes leave these questions aside. We can begin with the assumptions of the mundane existence of other people and then proceed to describe how our experiences of them are constituted from the pure We-relationship’’ (p. 165).

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Thesis of the Alter Ego’’,11 and rejects it outright at the Royaumont conference in 1957, two years before he died. In the paper, he writes that: [W]e must conclude that Husserl’s attempt to account for the constitution of transcendental intersubjectivity in terms of operations of the consciousness of the transcendental ego has not succeeded. … The possibility of reflection on the self, discovery of the ego, capacity for performing any epoche, and the possibility of all communication and of establishing a communicative surrounding world as well, are founded on the primal experience of the werelationship [rather than something to be resolved within the transcendental sphere]. (Schutz 1975, p. 82)12 Schutz’s Lifeworld: Knowing the Other as being Founded on the Unsaid Despite being troubled by Husserl’s insistence on the transcendental constitution of intersubjectivity, especially in his fifth Cartesian Meditations (1988), Schutz inherited a vast intellectual legacy from Husserl’s phenomenological descriptions of the lifeworld such that our everyday world is ‘‘the unquestioned but always questionable background’’ (Schutz 1982, p. 57); we ‘‘encounter [the everyday world] … as already constituted,’’ ‘‘already-given’’; we ‘‘are always conscious of its historicity’’ (p. 133; original emphasis) as it is ‘‘pregiven to both the man in the world of working and to the theorizing thinker’’ (p. 247). But above all, I concur with Zaner (2002) that ‘‘Schutz’s reflections on intersubjectivity were profoundly shaped by Husserl’s notion of appresentation, even while at times he was severely critical of Husserl’’ (p. 1). Yu (2005) also rightly remarks that ‘‘Schutz transformed [Husserl’s notion of appresentation] … and broadened its application, i.e., to all the experiences of transcendence in lifeworld’’ (p. 271). What is of paramount importance in Schutz’s appropriation of Husserl’s notions of appresentation and apperception is his extension of the appresentational reference to the experience of the Other that transcends the I (ego) in the concrete werelations. In the everyday world, I apperceive another ego that is ‘‘endowed with a consciousness … essentially the same as mine’’ (Schutz and Luckmann 1995, p. 4). However, constituted as it is within the unique stream of consciousness of each individual, the alter ego can never be fully perceived or directly experienced, or in Schutz’s terms (1980), it is ‘‘essentially inaccessible to every other individual’’ (p. 99; original emphasis; also Schutz 1964, p. 24). The apperceived ‘‘realness’’ of the Other can only be ‘‘appresentatively constituted’’; hence, experienced within the realm beyond the face-to-face simultaneity with the Other such that it necessarily involves the experience of transcendence. In Schutz’s terse explications (1982), the 11

Schutz (1982) remarks that ‘‘it is in no way established whether the existence of Others is a problem of the transcendental sphere at all … or whether intersubjectivity and therefore sociality does not rather belong exclusively to the mundane sphere or our life-world’’ (p. 167). 12 Early in a letter to Aron Gurwitsch dated January 1, 1956, Schutz had written: ‘‘The life-world as a common world, as historical civilization, as a special group of contemporary secret counselors, as the community of intersubjectivity, as the common substratum, as a product of collective activity, as the spiritual acquisition (that is revealed in reflection)—all that is so confused that it does not deserve the phenomenological method’’ (Grathoff, 1989, p. 397).

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Other—being so experienced (or apperceived)—must be ‘‘appresentatively constituted in my monadic sphere as an ego that is not ‘I myself’ but a second ego [i.e., the alter ego] which mirrors itself in my monad’’ (p. 125). One should remember that Schutz adopts the notion of ‘‘realness’’ from W. I. Thomas’ following iconic statement: ‘‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’’ (p. 348).13 Guided by appresentational reference, the experience of the transcendental on the part of the actor who confronts the Other face-to-face is incorporated into what Schutz (1964) calls the ‘‘Thou-orientation,’’ i.e., ‘‘a prepredicative experience of a fellow being’’ (p. 24). The essential feature of Thou-orientation is the recognition that another Self—as a human being, alive and conscious—exists before me ‘‘while the specific content of that consciousness remains undefined’’ (p. 24). But still, I can, ‘‘up to a certain point,’’ obtain knowledge about the lived experiences of my fellowmen as real; and the same also holds true reciprocally for my fellowmen with respect to me (Schutz and Luckmann 1995, p. 4). Schutz calls it perspective reciprocity in a shared time and space, within which ‘‘phases of my own consciousness’’ presuppose the ‘‘corresponding’’ phases of your consciousness, and ‘‘my fellow-man and I grow older together.’’14 The favorite example Schutz uses to illustrate this point is two individuals observing a bird-in-flight; he writes: Neither you nor I, nor any other person, can say whether my experiences are identical with yours since no one can have direct access to another man’s mind. Nevertheless, while I cannot know the specific and exact content of your consciousness, I do know that you are a living human being, endowed with consciousness. I do know that, whatever your experiences during the flight of the bird, they are contemporaneous with mine. … Therefore, I may coordinate the event of ‘‘bird-flight’’ not only with phases of my own consciousness but also with ‘corresponding’ phases of your consciousness. Since we are growing older together during the flight of the bird, and since I have evidence, in my own observations, that you were paying attention to the same event, I may say that we saw a bird in flight. (Schutz 1964, p. 25; original emphasis)15 In the natural attitude, I apperceive the world which I was born into is not my private world but a reality that transcends ‘‘I myself.’’ It is a world founded by intersubjectivity and we-relations so as to make possible ‘‘all other categories of human existence’’ (Schutz 1975, p. 82). Moreover, thanks to the intersubjectivity of the mundane world, we ‘‘know’’ what it is that another is doing, why he does it, and why he does it now and under these circumstances (Schutz and Luckmann 1995, p. 15). The experience of transcendence is premised on Schutz’s doctrine: ‘‘I know he knows that I know’’ (p. 16). It is under this light that several astute interpreters of Schutz have identified the experience of transcendence—the experience of living in 13

At one point, Schutz explicitly translates Thomas’ terminology and applies it to his own thesis of relationship towards the Other in the taken-for-granted everyday world by writing: ‘‘if an appresentational relationship is socially approved, then the appresented object, fact, or event is believed beyond question to be in its typicality an element of the world taken for granted’’ (1982, p. 349). 14

Similar formulations are also seen in Schutz (1964, p. 23; 1980, p. 163; 1982, p. 220).

15

This example is also seen in Schutz (1980, p. 165).

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a world that extends beyond one’s immediate here and now—as a prominent theme that unifies Schutz’s diverse body of writings. For example, Natanson (1986) writes that ‘‘if there is any concept which qualifies as being ‘thematic’ in Schutz’s work, I would say that it is transcendence’’ (p. 124). Natanson further claims that ‘‘[i]t is the experience of the transcendental which is the condition for our achieving human being’’ (p. 125). More recently, Stoltzfus (2003) suggests that, ‘‘[t]hroughout his writings, Schutz identifies transcendence as a fundamental category of human experience’’ (p. 184).16 Apart from acknowledging the mere existence of the Other under the apperceptive gaze, lifeworld experience also involves my knowledge of the Other’s motives for any intended activity. According to Schutz (1982), my knowledge of motives and understanding of the Other’s motives always presuppose a set of typified knowledge sedimented in my autobiographic experience. It refers to a set of more-or-less loosely connected rules and maxims of behavior in typical situations, recipes for handling things of certain types so as to attain typical results, including necessarily, ‘‘the pertinent system of appresentational references’’ (p. 348). Simply put, it is the ‘‘knowledge of the typicality of the objects and events in the life-world’’ (1975, p. 127). Schutz (1982) adds that, ‘‘[a]ll projects of my forthcoming acts are based upon my [stock of] knowledge at hand at the time of projecting’’ (p. 20). As my stock of knowledge is ‘‘socially derived,’’ ‘‘approved,’’ and ‘‘distributed’’ (pp. 348–350) for me to bring this stock into each concrete situation, I confront my fellowmen in the everyday world, this stock of knowledge is by nature ‘‘pre-constituted.’’17 It is the stock of knowledge at hand that gives the lifeworld its typicality. Once established, this network of typificatory schemes for me and my fellowmen means that our experience remains unquestioned until further notice; or in Schutz’s words (1982): ‘‘as long as the actions and operations performed under its guidance yield the desired results, we trust these experiences’’ (p. 228). Based on this typicality—necessarily guided by a ‘‘pertinent system of appresentational references’’—our lifeworld is, most of the time, ‘‘unquestioned,’’ or appears to be ‘‘not worth knowing … at least ‘for the time being,’ ‘in the present context,’ or ‘from our point of view’’’ (Schutz 1970, p. 149). In question here is how the ‘‘appresentational references’’ work so that the preconstituted-ness of the stock of knowledge—the non-discursive—takes on the appearance of the discursive in everyday life. For example, when I was working in my office, a man knocked and walked in. I did not know this particular man. Wearing a smile on his face, he said, ‘‘Hello, Dr. Ho, I am Ryan Cheng, from Prudential Insurance. Sorry for interrupting. Could I talk to you for a moment?’’ Together with his garish velour suit, I immediately recognize and perceive him as of a type—‘‘an(other) insurance guy.’’ As a sociologist, I may feel fine with the nondiscursive, and am only interested in apperceiving him as instantiating the type— insurance agent. But, as a member of society, I need to enter the discursive. Thinking that it was not the first time an ‘‘insurance guy’’ had interrupted me when 16

See also Yu (2005), Dreher (2003) and Knoblauch (1999).

17

Because of the pre-constituted-ness of the stock of knowledge, Schutz (1982) claims that ‘‘only a small fraction of man’s stock of knowledge at hand originates in his own individual experience’’ (p. 348).

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I just wanted to work, I attempted to deal with the discursive with the generic traits immanent and imbedded in the type perceived. It is the first step in constituting a discursive consciousness of the type—insurance agent. Here, I might be tempted to say that I deal with the discursive taken in intension; however, I can also consider many such instances, and deal with the discursive in extension.18 Within the natural attitude, I do not doubt the typificatory schemes, the ‘‘meaning-context’’ showed between me and the Other whom I can attend to his/her stream of consciousness, just as I can attend to my own. And, through making constant and unquestioned use of a specific epoche that neglects—for the time being—things being rendered taken-for-granted, I can, ‘‘up to a certain point,’’ obtain knowledge of what is going on in the mind of the Other. On this point, the explication from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann—former students of Schutz—on the relationship between speech (in conversation) and the silent taken-for-granted-ness is suggestive; they stress that, the greater part of reality-maintenance in conversation is implicit, not explicit. Most conversation does not in so many words define the nature of the world. Rather, it takes place against the background of a world that is silently taken for granted. (Beger and Luckmann 1991[1966], p. 172; my emphasis) Of course, Schutz (1980) reminds us that we can always question in discourse whether ‘‘Have I understood you correctly?’’ ‘‘Don’t you mean something else?’’ ‘‘What do you mean by such and such action?’’ and do it, in principle, ad infinitum (p. 140). But, once such questions are raised, I abandon the immediate grasp of the Other in the simultaneity of time and space. From now on, the Other is no longer unquestioned. I jump out of the non-discursivity of the lifeworld experience as the natural standpoint vanishes. The Other, as well as the world and its objects, no longer confronts me coevally in the intersubjective we-relation; rather, the Other is turned cogitatum. I need to step out of the stream of our experiences and begin to ‘‘think about him … like a social scientist’’ (p. 141). At times, we revise our former schemes of knowledge when special motivations emerge, ‘‘such as the irruption of a ‘strange’ experience not subsumable under the stock of knowledge at hand or inconsistent with it’’ (Schutz 1982, p. 228). But, once it is all set, I return to the natural attitude in which the world and its objects are taken-for-granted until some counterproof imposes itself. Consequently, we come to acquire sets of typifications through which the everyday world can be grasped as repeatable, continuous, and shared, and simply taken-for-granted in the attitude of commonsense, i.e., we are just satisfied with how things go. Schutz (1970) maintains that this subjective satisfaction is founded upon the non-discursivity of lifeworld experience, or what he calls the ‘‘essential opacity of the life-world’’; he remarks, It shows that our curiosity is satisfied and our inquiry stops if knowledge sufficient for our purpose at hand has been obtained. But this breaking up of our questioning is founded on an existential element of all human knowledge, 18 In formulating this example, I am indebted to Reviewer A of Human Studies for his/her valuable comments.

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namely the conviction of the essential opacity of our lifeworld. (p. 148; original emphasis) The opacity of the lifeworld points to the ‘‘unknown’’ elements of lifeworld experience, the elements which are not within my reach—for the time being—but potentially within my reach;19 the elements which are unsaid but have the possibility of being said. The existence of the non-discursive realm of the lifeworld therefore constitutes the main thesis of Schutz’s lifeworld experience. For if we were to always question (say) everything instead of leaving things unsaid, and assuming Others will understand the things we leave unsaid, our interactions with Others would become very difficult, if not impossible, as a result of the length and complexity of our conversation. Indeed, we can always question the taken-forgranted lifeworld to an extreme degree, like Rene Descartes in his famous meditation, we can question whether we are really dreaming when we think we are awake and vice versa. But, once we do that, to experience in the attitude of the natural standpoint becomes impossible. What I mean is that it is sound, both theoretically and empirically, that our everyday experience necessarily involves a certain degree of soliloquy. As Berger and Luckmann (1991) remind us, ‘‘[m]any actions are possible on a low level of attention’’ (p. 75). In a nutshell, the two features of Schutz’s lifeworld that I have elaborated are: first, our apperception of the intersubjective everyday world is paralleled by the experience of transcendence. Guided by appresentational references—as ‘‘means of coming to terms with transcendent experiences of various kinds’’ (Schutz 1982, p. 326)—one can experience the ‘‘unseen’’ faces of the Other in the natural attitude. Second, the pre-constituted typicality of the lifeworld renders lifeworld experience fundamentally non-discursive in a sense that one’s experience of meeting the Other is founded upon the essential opacity of the lifeworld. Withholding my critique of Schutz’s theory of lifeworld experience in this paper,20 I must acknowledge that Schutz has successfully incorporated habitual, typified rationality into the lifeworld experience, which makes possible the orderliness of social interactions in the everyday wor1d and hence renders the social order observable under the sociological gaze. Pursuing these possibilities, Harold Garfinkel later develops his ethnomethodology to study empirically observable (rational) structures that underlie human intersubjective experience.

19 Schutz’s notion of the ‘‘unknown’’ in his theory of lifeworld is complex and incomplete. Schutz brings forward three meanings to the notion. What have examined here only involves the first two which are: (1) the ‘‘unquestioned world as the realm of attainable knowledge’’; and (2) the ‘‘world as the realm within restorable reach’’ (Schutz 1970, p. 149). However, Schutz formulates the third meaning of ‘‘unknown’’ of the lifeworld which ‘‘resist[s] any interpretation’’ and ‘‘cannot be brought into any relation with our stock of knowledge at hand’’ (p. 151); Schutz calls it: ‘‘the unknown in the midst of the unknown’’ (pp. 151– 152). This third meaning, however, is not within the scope of the present paper. 20

Here, it is worth noting that an important line of critique of Schutz’s theory of the lifeworld lies in the inadequacy of fully understanding the experience of apperceiving my fellowman’s cogitations. Perinbanayagam (1975) remarks that there is no indication that Schutzian actors ‘‘say anything of significance to each’’ as they ‘‘are merely present to each other’’ (p. 507).

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Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology: Social Order Seen, but Unnoticed It has been widely noted in the literature that Schutz’s approach of phenomenological descriptions of lifeworld experience is later adopted by Garfinkel. Garfinkel directs Schutz’s social phenomenology to studying empirically recognizable routine patterns in everyday life though he also acknowledges his intellectual debt to Talcott Parsons, Gurwitsch and Husserl (Garfinkel 1967, p. ix; Heritage 1984; Psathas 1979; Maynard and Clayman 1991; Rawls 2002). Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology is premised on the importance of a range of empirically recognized ‘‘methods’’ which are possessed by and shared among members of society. He calls them ‘‘members’ methods’’ or ‘‘artful practices’’ (Garfinkel 1967, pp. vii–ix, 31– 34). When put into concrete situations, these ‘‘methods’’ engender the witnessable orderliness of social situations in the concreteness of things as the ‘‘‘incarnate’ character of accounting practices’’ (p. 1). Garfinkel subscribes to Schutz’s theoretical tenets that our lifeworld is from the outset intersubjective (Lynch and Bogen 1994, p. 9) such that the shared-ness of ‘‘methods’’ and the meaningful orderliness of social situations—i.e., the social order—can be empirically ascertained. Garfinkel explicitly spurns the Parsonsian functionalism in which the phenomena of the shared-ness of everyday experience would be lost through formal, normative, and over-theorized generalizations (Heritage 1984, pp. 33–34). Garfinkel insists that ethnomethodologists must return to concrete situations, to the ongoing course of producing an accountable existence of the social order. Rather than a result of theoretical abstractions (or what he calls Formal Analysis) that filter out the distracting variability and contingency of particular events, social order only exists as the local accomplishment in juxtaposition with accounting practices in situ. The theoretical premises to return to the ‘‘just thisness’’ of the social world, or the ‘‘concreteness of things’’ (Garfinkel 1988, p. 106); and to see the locally accomplished coherence of experience without mediation are all in keeping with Husserl’s phenomenological call to go ‘‘back to the thing itself’’ (Zuru¨ck zur Sache selbst). In light of the foregoing discussions of lifeworld experience, what is called into question is how locally accomplished social orders reflect the experience of transcendence as an essential component of human actions, and that the lifeworld experience itself is fundamentally non-discursive. In the classic Studies in Ethnomethodology (1967), apart from illustrating repeatedly his fundamental insights of treating facts as ongoing social accomplishments and claiming to discover the formal properties of commonsense actions ‘‘from within’’ actual settings (p. viii), Garfinkel does not formulate a unified theoretical thesis of his own (cf. Coleman 1968, p. 126). It is not until over thirty years later that Garfinkel (together with his associates) began to unravel the occasional and practical foundation of social order. In Ethnomethodology’s Program: Working out Durkheim’s Aphorism (2002), as well as several papers in juxtaposition with it, Garfinkel claims that, the programmatic task of Ethnomethodological studies [is] to specify the naturally accountable work of making and describing the social facts of

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immortal, ordinary society. These are the things of social order – the phenomena of ordinary society that Durkheim was talking about (pp. 92–93). According to Anne Rawls, the editor of Ethnomethodology’s Program, ethnomethodology ‘‘is the fulfillment of Durkheim’s promise that the objective reality of social facts is sociology’s fundamental principle’’ (p. 9). Rawls further remarks that Garfinkel is more in keeping with the later work of Emile Durkheim (p. 20) such that the fact—i.e., Garfinkel’s social order—is not something totally ‘‘out there’’ as implicated in the concept of ‘‘social fact’’ set out in The Division of Labour in Society.21 Rather, Durkheim (1960) puts forward the notion of ‘‘a double center of gravity’’ such that the fact is ‘‘[s]omething else in us besides ourselves [that] stimulates us to act’’ (p. 328). Along this line, I might say that to Garfinkel, social order is ‘‘something’’ within our subjective experience but not originating from or belonging to the subjectivity.22 Rawls (2002) explains that, [w]here Garfinkel parts company from Durkheim is in replacing the assumption that objective reality is the result of conforming with institutionalized forms of constraints, with the proposal that social facts are orderly endogenous products of local orders, as the achievement of the immortal ordinary society (p. 9). But, what are the ‘‘formal properties of commonsense actions ‘from within’ actual settings’’ that Garfinkel sets out to discover in Studies in Ethnomethodology? Various pieces of textual evidence suggest that Garfinkel points to what he calls the ‘‘phenomenal field’’ that recognizes the variability and concreteness of the locally accomplished social order. For example, Garfinkel argues in Ethnomethodology’s Program that the unique coherence of the social order rests upon ‘‘the phenomenal field properties of figural contexture,’’ (2002, p. 97). Ethnomethodology, as he states in another paper, is to ‘‘recover in … a phenomenal field of ordered details the work [i.e., local accomplishments] that makes up’’ actual settings (Garfinkel 1996, p. 10). He also stresses that the phenomenal field properties of orderlinesses are being ignored in Formal Analysis (Garfinkel 2007, p. 15). Garfinkel only discusses thematically the ‘‘phenomenal field properties of [social] order’’ in one paper coauthored with Eric Livingston (2003). Using formatted-queues-for-service as an example,23 Garfinkel suggests that the case displays the ‘‘ongoingly accountable 21

The most relevant quote here is the definition of ‘‘social fact’’ in The Rules of the Sociological Method; Durkheim (1982) wrote, ‘‘A social fact is any way of acting, whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint; or: which is general over the whole of a given society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual manifestations’’ (p. 59; original emphasis).

22 In one of his last and probably one of his least discussed papers ‘‘The Dualism of Human Nature and its Social Conductions,’’ Durkheim (1960) lucidly states that, ‘‘our inner life has something that is like a double center of gravity. On the one hand is our individuality—and, more particularly, our body in which it is based; on the other is everything in us that expresses something other than ourselves’’ (p. 328). 23 Garfinkel (2007) claims that the phenomenal field properties are best studied empirically with ‘‘formatted queue’’; he writes that, ‘‘[p]henomenal field properties of formatted queues are perspicuous research sites in which beginning students along with early authors of ethnomethodological studies learn to witness and recognize an open unrestricted list of formal properties of Durkheimian Things. These orderlinesses are produced and exhibited by all parties to the line that appears. The orderlinesses are easily observed but are best observed in tours’’ (p. 15).

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exhibited immortal, objective, transcendental, transient structures of the order of service … [and] the order of service is a Durkheimian social fact’’ (Garfinkel and Livingston 2003, p. 23). The four properties of the phenomenal field—immortality, objectivity, transcendence, and transience—in the case of formatted queue is illustrated in their text below (I add the four properties in the text in bold font): [A formatted queue’s exhibited order of service],24 [and all the order phenomena that accompany it], [appear as properties of the queue] [that transcend its production cohort’s actions.] [transcendence and objectivity] [The queue appears to be completely disengaged from the work its members do to produce and maintain it]. [It is an immortal queue] [immortality], [a queue that could continue indefinitely.] [Yet, without the members of a queue – its local, production cohort – the queue would not exist.] [It would have none of its local, particular – queue-specific properties]. [In a formatted queue the queue members have come together] [organized themselves] [managed] [and monitored their actions] [and the actions of others] [so as to produce as their achievement] [this immortal yet transient object] [transience]. [The members of a queue] [position themselves] [enter the queue] [at] [its exhibited end] [witnessably inspect the order of the queue], [distance themselves from each other] [advance] [in observably regular ways] and [orient their bodies therein to show and showing] [who is after whom] [where the queue is going] [where the end of the line is] [who is in the queue] [who is not] and [who may just be visiting]. (Garfinkel and Livingston 2003, p. 26) Of the four properties of the phenomenal field, Garfinkel only further elaborates on immortality; he remarks, Immortal is used to speak of human jobs [that can range in scale from a hallway greeting to a freeway traffic jam] as of which local members, being in the midst of organizational things, know, of just these organizational things they are in the midst of, that it preceded them and will be there after they leave it. Immortal is a metaphor for the great recurrencies of ordinary society, staffed, provided for, produced, observed, and observable, locally and naturally accountable in and as of an ‘‘assemblage of haecceities.’’ EM [ethnomethodology] places heavy emphasis on ‘‘immortal.’’ (Garfinkel 2002, p. 92, fn. 1) Characterized in the typical tortuous sentences of Garfinkel, immortality seems to refer to the nature of the social order that something pre-exists before it is embodied in the details of human interactions in concrete situations, and it ‘‘will be there after they [those interactions] leave it.’’ Clearly noted here is the conceptual connection between immortality, objectivity, and transcendence. These three concepts represent a property of social order such that it presumes the experience of transcendence akin 24 Garfinkel reminds us that the ‘‘bracketing marks and italicized words have been inserted … to mark the places for the reader to read with appropriate words the Missing-What-in-its Details …’’ (Garfinkel & Livingston, 2003, p. 25).

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to what is presumed in Schutz’s theory of lifeworld. Schutz (1982) explicitly expounds that the world ‘‘existed before my birth and will continue to exist after my death. … I know, furthermore, that in a similar way the social world transcends the reality of my everyday life’’ (p. 329). Since Garfinkel believes that members’ ‘‘methods’’ are essentially shared, his theory of social order necessarily entails the intersubjective we-relations which transcend ‘‘I myself.’’ The situation is similar to my personal experience of visiting a nearby Starbucks. When I stand in front of the counter after queuing for a while and say: ‘‘A hazelnut latte, tall please,’’ I take for granted that the baristas and all the other waiting customers ‘‘know’’ the rules so that a recognizable social order can be produced. In Schutzian terms, I presume in my experience that the world within the Other’s actual reach lies within my potential reach. I also presume that the Others in the we-relations exist, and that I ‘‘know’’ the motives of the Others which are appresented through signs and symbols—such as the dress-code, music, and the color tone of the decorations and so on—which transcend the existence of individuals, including my existence (Dreher 2003). Consequently, gazing at the methods people use for producing recognizable patterns of concrete social situations, ethnomethodology is necessarily premised on the experience of something that transcends individuals. On this point, Rawls sharply remarks that Garfinkel’s concern is not ‘‘the individual, as has often been claimed’’; she writes, The individual persons who inhabit social situations are of interest only insofar as their personal characteristics reveal something about the competencies required to achieve the recognizable production of the local order that is the object of study. Garfinkel refers to persons who inhabit, and through their activities ‘‘make’’ and ‘‘remake’’ social scenes, as local production cohorts. (Rawls 2002, p. 7) Transience—the fourth phenomenal field property of social order—marks one of Garfinkel’s theoretical innovations for he is not content with treating social orders simply as manifestations of the intersubjective ‘‘given’’ like Schutz, nor as theoretical, or conceptual, constructions like the Formal Analysts. To Garfinkel, social orders are always constitutive, as they can only be accomplished locally in ongoing accountable practices. But, unlike some (mis-) readings of him, the fact that social orders are constitutive do not mean that social realities are simply publicly constituted in language (e.g., Miller and Metcalfe 1998, p. 239). Rather, what is perceived as social reality and how we would relate with Others are informed with typified categories, occasional relevances, and many other pre-predicative matters that are bound up with the organization of a language and its communicative use. It should be noted that Garfinkel (2002) markedly delineates himself from the discursive constructionists; he writes: EM is not in the business of interpreting signs. It is not an interpretive enterprise. Enacted local practices are not texts which symbolize ‘‘meaning’’ or events. They are in detail identical with themselves, and not representative of something else. The witnessably recurrent details of ordinary everyday practices are constitutive of their own reality. They are studied in their

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unmediated details and not as signed enterprises. (p. 97; also Garfinkel 1996, p. 8) What matters to Garfinkel are the procedures of producing the social order no matter whether they involve semantic expressions (like greeting someone in the hallway) or non-discursive behaviors (like queuing for a service). These procedures are themselves unquestioned, shared among members, and founded on the nondiscursivity of the everyday world.25 To use my Starbucks visit as an example, the element of discursiveness is surely a component of my experience, but it explicates little about the phenomenal field properties of social order—immortality, objectivity, transcendence, and transience. Robert Craig makes this point precisely; he notes that since Garfinkel’s social order exists only in the embodied details of human interactions in actual settings, ‘‘verbal specifications of social facts do not constitute them as social facts but can at best serve as aids or ‘instructions’ that for competent observers can index their recognition of generic phenomena in particular cases’’ (Craig 2003, p. 474). The Alleged Oblivion of the Non-Discursivity of the Everyday Life in Sociology What I have been trying to suggest is that since Schutz, the everyday world of experience is conceived as constitutive of the transcendental and the nondiscursivity of the lifeworld; and these features have been kept intact in the studies of Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology. Here, I further assert that a phenomenologyinformed approach to sociology should direct the investigator to uncover the prepredicative meaning structures of the social world in a systematic way. The major task is to identify the non-discursive stratum of human experience from which social order and rationality are derived and empirically identifiable both to the actor and the investigator.26 Thus, to delve into lifeworld experiences, a phenomenologyinformed sociologist is urged to unravel the ‘‘essential opacity of the life-world,’’ or, to put it in more sociological terms, to identify the socio-historical conditions governing how meanings are possible before s/he pursues the question of what meanings are empirically available, in the discourse of the actor. However, there has been a recent strain of sociology, which ostensibly avows its adherence to social phenomenology and/or ethnomethodology, and implicitly or explicitly, overstates the capability of empirically recognized discourse in the constitution of reality on the other. This perspective analyzes what its proponents sometimes call ‘‘Lebenswelt discourse’’ (Tan 2002), or studies the discursive ‘‘description of the person’s lifeworld’’ (Ashworth and Ashworth 2003; Ashworth et al. 2003). Their investigations imply that the discursive is part and parcel of the lifeworld, and that the individuals’ discursive articulations of meaning constitute the field within which sociological inquiries should begin and end. I deem that this 25

For more recent examples of ethnomethodological studies which inquire into the non-discursive background expectancies of everyday life, one may refer to Garfinkel (2002) for studies inverting lenses, Helen’s kitchen, orienting with occasional maps, and freeway traffic flow. 26 Therefore, I am more hesitant than Mclain (1981) to say that the term ‘‘dialogue’’ can be employed to capture the immediacy and reciprocity of the Schutzian We-relationship (p. 122).

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perspective which evokes an active view of reality construction with an empirical emphasis on actors’ local discursive productions overlooks the phenomenological view of the constitutive experience. One consequence is that relatively less attention is paid to exploring the non-discursive domain of the lifeworld which constitutes the conditions for the possibility of any empirical meaning construction. One version of this perspective is outlined in Malcolm Spector and John Kitsuse’s Constructing Social Problems (2001[1987]) (hereafter CSP).27 This constructive approach criticizes conventional scientific preoccupations with the ‘‘expert’’ role in judging the ‘‘rationality,’’ ‘‘value,’’ and ‘‘sensibleness’’ that define what a social problem is and what caused the problem (Ibarra and Kitsuse 1993, p. 27). CSP aligns itself with ethnomethodology’s program to examine the ‘‘members’ perspective’’ (Bogen and Lynch 1993, p. 232, fn. 5), and focuses on the social problem discourse of the members, which is open-ended and contingent upon the courses taken by individuals to make claims about particular social problems. Laying heavy stress on the fluidity of the discursive definitions of the actors, CSP has been criticized for relegating to the background the objective social conditions from which particular discourses are derived. Speaking along this line of critique, Woolgar and Pawluch (1985) point out that there has been a ‘‘selective relativism’’ in CSP studies which prompts the investigator to claim the conditions of the social problems as ‘‘constant,’’ while the discursive activities of the actors derived from these ‘‘constant’’ conditions are a lot more varied, highly relative to the individualspecific social milieux.28 Another version of the sociological perspective which tends to sidestep the question of how the pre-predicative structure acquires the appearance of a discursive object is featured in a corpus of publications authored by Jaber Gubrium and/or James Holstein. Their approach adopts a constructionist gaze onto the everyday discursive practices through which domestic reality—family, not the family—is constituted (Gubrium 1988; Gubrium and Holstein 1993a; Holstein and Gubrium 1994a). Based on a similar line of critique of essentialism adopted in CSP, the Gubrium-Holstein approach opposes ‘‘family as a distinct social form, as abstract thing separate from its individual members and personalities’’ (Gubrium 1988, p. 273). They suggest that the discursive ‘‘family usage’’ can link the abstract entity of ‘‘family’’ or ‘‘community’’ to experience, ‘‘creating practical understandings of domestic reality’’ (Holstein and Gubrium 1994a, p. 232; see also Potter and Halliday 1990; Potter and Reicher 1987; Mulkay 1994). Claiming to share the ‘‘abiding concern’’ of Schutz’s phenomenology and Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology ‘‘for the interactional bases of reality construction,’’ Gubrium and Holstein emphasize discursive practice as mediating family meaning and domestic reality (Holstein and Gubrium 1999, p. 7). They adhere to a position that we make our social world concrete and meaningful through everyday talk. Their major empirical task is then to document the interactions among competent 27 This book later spurs a broader discussion of the epistemology involved in CSP. See Holstein and Miller (1993). 28 For further discussions of Woolgar and Pawluch (1985), see Pfohl (1985), Schneider (1985) and Hazelrigg (1985).

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observers by which ‘‘family realities are produced and sustained, making visible the reality work through which everyday affairs and linkages come to be publicly recognized and understood as family matters’’ (Gubrium and Holstein 1993b, p. 663). When people who are not connected by blood speak of being like a family, such as, ‘‘He’s like a brother of me,’’ ‘‘I’d do anything for the baby, anything a mother would do,’’ or ‘‘We are just like of a family,’’ the reality of a family is formulated, and made concrete and meaningful. The discourse is more than spoken or transcribed description, but tacitly constitutive of a social relationship. In this vein, family discourse conveys the meaning to the actor that the relationship under consideration is trusting, giving, and not calculating (Gubrium and Holstein 1990, p. 13). Gubrium-Holstein therefore considers that biological and legal ties are only candidate qualifications for membership in the family, contending that family is a discursive project (Gubrium 1988). I must point out here that the emphasis placed on considering ‘‘facts’’ and ‘‘happenings’’ as a process of discourse, and treating objective realities as ‘‘discursive accomplishments’’ (Holstein and Gubrium 1994b, p. 265) has been quite successful in stripping the essentialist traces that sustain ‘‘the’’ family as an abstract, idealized social form. However, what has not been thoroughly pursued is the pre-predicative meaning that makes possible a particular phenomenon meaningful to the actor that antedates explicit discursive constructions (cf. Mclain and Weigert 1979, p. 165). For example, one may ask the informants, ‘‘Why family?’’ To the sociologist, it is a legitimate follow-up question for it is also possible that a caring and non-calculating human relationship is derived from, for example, a supernaturally oriented sect, or an intimate relation between the people and the Monarch. From the perspective of phenomenology-informed sociology, in question is what constitutes the non-discursive background expectancies that make possible the empirical discursive construction of family. To this empirical question, here, I can briefly provide one possible answer. In my own study of the rise of a collective spirit in a Chinese community during the 1960s–70s, the informants attributed their fervent participation in socialist mass campaigns to the political persuasion of the ‘‘old mothers’’ (the leaders of the Residents’ Committee), and described their interresident relationship in the community during that period as being like ‘‘a big family’’ (Ho 2006). While it all sounds like merely a discursively constructed event, my investigation suggests that underlying family discourses at the surface is a nondiscursive morality of reciprocity that is woven into the fabric of the relations among residents and between the people and the socialist state. Particular family discourses being identified empirically by the sociologist could only be considered manifest derivatives of traditional Confucian ethics prior to the emergence of particular socio-historically relative meanings. Here, I am not trying to outline the total program of phenomenology-informed sociology, but merely to demonstrate a possible route towards it. What I have attempted to pinpoint is that the object of inquiry proper to the field is the prepredicative structure of the lifeworld, the pre-constituted stock of knowledge, which makes up the non-discursivity of lifeworld experience. That being said, however, is not to deny that the constitution of the lifeworld has an element of discursiveness (cf. Ashworth and Ashworth 2003, p. 205, fn. 12). Rather, one must be aware that an

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emergent strain of sociology might overemphasize the constitutive power of discourse as the determinant in the formation and maintenance of social order. This perspective tends to give up the exploration of the ‘‘essential opacity of the lifeworld,’’ or to forget that conversation ‘‘takes place against the background of a world which is silently taken for granted’’ (Berger and Luckmann 1991, p. 172). It also casts theoretical doubts over the constructionists’ own claims to possibly reveal the ‘‘rationality from within’’ (Ibarra and Kitsuse 1993, p. 27), or to disclose social categories that are anchored to individual members’ experiences and personalities in everyday naturally-occurring articulations (Gubrium 1988, p. 273; Gubrium and Holstein 1994, p. 691; Holstein and Gubrium 1994a, p. 232). As for a more articulated program of phenomenology-informed sociology, I believe that it requires a more comprehensive intellectual collaboration between the communities of philosophers and sociologists. My efforts in this direction are only tentative; but I think I am asking the right questions. Acknowledgements I must acknowledge a special debt to Mr. Lui Ping Keung. Without his guidance, I would not have developed the idea of the ‘‘non-discursivity’’ of the lifeworld during my MPhil study (1996–1998). Besides, I am also deeply indebted to the two anonymous reviewers whose critical reading and constructive suggestions have helped me revise some of the perspectives I had formed in the early draft of this paper.

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