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2023 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Varieties of Trans-Sequentiality: Diagnostics of Contemporary Capacities for Problem-Work, Developed from Ethnographies of the State

Author : Thomas Scheffer

Published in: Materiality of Cooperation

Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

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Abstract

This article respecifies trans-sequential analysis and its object-centred methodology. It distinguishes ways of relating events and processes: occassionally, organisationally, procedurally. The varieties of trans-sequential, accumulative work are put under immense pressure in times of existential problems, such as the global heating, poverty, or war.

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previous chapter Creating Trans-Situativity: Air Travel and Its Media

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I am thankful for helpful comments by Ronja Trischler, Martina Kolanoski and Robert Schmidt. The discussions in the Working Group on Political Ethnography at the HU Berlin and at the Goethe University Frankfurt provided crucial encouragement and inspiration.

Ethnomethodological studies of institutional settings name such reference problems or tasks as follows: ‘to delimit a therapeutically relevant problem’ (Roca-Cuberes, 2014, p. 314) for psychiatric admission interviews, or ‘to probe politicians’ answers’ (ibid.) for interviews with politicians, or even the elimination of threats in military ‘counter-insurgency’ (cf. Elsey et al., 2018).

By reference to the object and its practical implications, trans-sequential analysis gains distance from methodological individualism. The latter is not rejected, but empirically relativised. This means that the practical relevance of motives and intentions for action, but also of agency, is not generally decided in advance, but empirically questionable (cf. Schmidt, 2012).

Trans-sequentiality differs from ‘inter-situativity’ (Hirschauer, 2014) by centring on the object. The concatenation does not remain ‘flat’ between situations but becomes available at the object. It is not chains of situations but ‘object careers’ (Scheffer, 2012). The object is promoted in its status.

See, for instance, the popular, quick and dirty interjections of the forty-fifth US President Donald Trump. Here, the risk of immature contributions is reduced by lowering expectations of his public speech. Something should then no longer be taken literally, be binding, meet higher consistency requirements, etc. All in all, a hyperactive loquaciousness institutionalises itself here, which undermines the relevance of state representation and the binding force of democratic publicity.

Thus, strictly speaking, it is not social situations but episodes that are linked. The episodes have to be wrested from social situations, as it were. Certain social events, such as committee meetings, sometimes transport different objects one after the other into a new status, for example from ‘1st version’ to ‘draft’ (Scheffer et al., 2010a, b, trans. TS).

The practical need for objectivisation is greater where episodes are spread over different social situations and the memory functions of co-presence are not available. At the same time, objectification is also found where a situation is assumed to be conflictual or the perspectives involved are assumed to be antagonistic. Here, the members seek to document intermediate states in order to secure progress in negotiations, for example.

Other object formations come into play where the work—of the psychologist, for example—refers to the unlocking, dismantling, opening of already pre-consolidated objects. Here too, however, the work on the object leads to a limited ability to retrieve changes once they have been made. Once a loosening or opening has taken place, it cannot be reversed.

On ‘gossip’, for example, see Bergmann (1993).

An interesting case here would be the ‘incidental’ production of symbols. In this case, for example, ‘inference-richness’ (Sacks, 1992) can be understood as a process of successive accumulation of information: a term or name (‘Kunduz’) with further permitted, obvious conclusions (‘many civil victims’).

Here it is mainly workplace studies that focus on specific objects in organised settings. Cf. for example Rawls (2002) and Schatzki (2006). Such studies can be seen as a countermovement to Organisational Studies and their reduction of complex work processes and their practical demands to mere rule-governed decisions.

The establishment of judgement in proceedings has a retroactive effect on fields of practice as a formal claim of accountability. Cf. the project ‘Military Accounting’ and the relevant work by Mair et al. (2012, 2013).

With the distinction between ‘strong and weak procedures’ (Scheffer et al., 2010), we have also referred to the variance of more or less self-referential and separate procedural systems.

In law today, aspects such as customary rights, individual rights, the reconciliation of interests, the weighing up of norms, etc. serve as levelling factors. Problems are thus (initially) placed in the series of cases. As an effect, they are normalised and relativized without regard to the existential distress.

Here there are parallels to Habermas’ (1981) ‘idealising’ conception of the ‘lifeworld’ and its discursive openness to all claims to validity, which in turn is achieved by the broad formation of problem views for delegation to politics and law. By means of routine, ritual, script or method, however, a thematisation of or a reference to an object can become disputed and unlikely. A life-world context would then actually be averse to certain problems.

Certain problems are emerging and becoming much noticed, where recurring events that can be named, described and explained—such as hurricanes, heat waves and floods as manifestations of climate change—interrupt, disrupt or destabilise the usual hustle and bustle, including the shared assumptions of normality (cf. Hoppe & Lemke, 2015). The same applies, in relation to other existential questions, to the performance of outbreaks of violence, epidemics or famine. Some ‘urgent’ problems become almost undeniable in their discursivity.

The examples show how concertation in response to existential threats is somehow paradoxical: society as such is called into question and restored. Some narratives would argue that it is only here when society comes into existence at all—in the moments of concertation of an otherwise disintegrated differentiation or even fragmentation.

In critical terms, this is understood as the construction of an ‘ideological apparatus’ in Althusser’s sense (1977). Studies critical of power interpret problem-solving regimes as presumptions of power. Accordingly, their reference problems are regarded as illusory problems or ideological creations (cf. Latour, 2004).

In this sense, the Green demand for Veggie Day in German canteens was both a ‘doing’ and an ‘undoing of an existential problem’. It recalled a far-reaching, general problem of the relationship between meat consumption and climate change and biodiversity on the one hand; it negated the drastic nature of the situation by greatly mitigating the necessary action on the other hand. Thus the ‘seriousness of the situation’ was simultaneously denied by the request.

The concept of the ‘zero option’ (Offe, 1986), i.e. the forward-looking prevention of organised developments such as nuclear energy or genetic engineering, was an expression of a stated overstretch. In contrast, even for existential questions the mere announcement of a problem solution dominates. This indicates the conditionality of current capacities and the need to find a solution.

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Title: Varieties of Trans-Sequentiality: Diagnostics of Contemporary Capacities for Problem-Work, Developed from Ethnographies of the State
Author: Thomas Scheffer
Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
Book: Materiality of Cooperation
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-39467-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-658-39468-4

Copyright Year: 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39468-4_11

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