“The Time of the Sign”
The discipline social sciences are already internally fragmented by diverse research programs that are attempting to discover “natural cultural arrangements.” The most developed of these counter-disciplinary sub-programs goes by the name of ethnomethodology. We once called ethnomethodology the “New California School of Sociology,” but it is not new anymore and not confined to California. Some would argue it is not even sociology. Ethnomethodology appeared on the fringes of mid-twentieth-century American sociology as if set in place by Hegel’s own hands; as the antithesis of sociological positivism. Predictably, sociology’s response has been aggressive and hostile, to the point of driving some of its most advanced thinkers out of the discipline.1 In this chapter we open the possibility, on a conceptual and theoretical level, of a rapprochement between ethnomethodology and the semiotic revolution. It seems unlikely that ethnomethodology will find room for advance within sociology, but it has much to offer semiotics and vice versa, we think.
Ethnomethodology was first practiced by a group of dissident sociologists and anthropologists under the influence of Harold Garfinkel. This group included Aaron Cicourel, Harvey Sacks, David Sudnow, and Manny Schegloff. This was a serious and somewhat self-conscious group, touchy about membership and apprenticeship and concerned about the correctness of ideas.
Like many California developments, the first ethnomethodology has involuted or become a tangle of tightly interconnected cul-de-sacs, easy to enter but not easy to get out of. We think it is possible, by steering always in the direction of a semiotics of culture, to find the heart of the first ethnomethodology and move in the direction of a second.
By now almost everyone knows (perhaps some of us have forgotten) that the domain of ethnomethodology is everyday life, that it takes seriously the subjective point of view of the individual, that it is theoretically based on phenomenological philosophy, and that it applies new ethnographic techniques to natural situations in an attempt to discover their “rational” properties: the methods people actually use to accomplish their everyday affairs.2
Note that as an offspring of sociology, ethnomethodology’s pedigree is in good order. Harold Garfinkel was a graduate student of Talcott Parsons’s at Harvard at the time when Parsons held almost the entire field of sociology spellbound. On the phenomenological side, Alfred Schutz, who was Husserl’s student, wanted to begin his career in America with an extended re-interpretation of Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action.3 In other words, the two main streams of influence on Garfinkel had begun to flow together even before he coined the term ethnomethodology. Nevertheless, its proto-semiotic leanings insured it a very confused reception by the parent discipline. And, of course, as is now well known, the early ethnomethodologists were perverse enough to enjoy their opposition to the discipline. They insisted on the importance of understanding the subjective viewpoint of the actor at a time when everyone else was frantically trying to establish the objective viewpoint of the investigator; they insisted that ethnographic description occupied a methodological ground higher than mere statistical explanation and prediction. These were reasons enough for the repressive mobilization of discipline machinery.
But we think the bedrock basis for the mutual hostility of sociology and the first ethnomethodology is buried deeper still in the bad conscience of the discipline. The most subversive aspect of the first ethnomethodology is its persistent suggestion that an understanding of culture is the key to our consciously thought-through research agenda. Goffman studied ritual and drama; Sacks studied language; Schutz, music; Berger, religion; Garfinkel, manners. These are aspects of culture, not the restricted domain discipline sociologists, even some sociologists of art, like to call “social organization.” Modern sociology had to distance itself from ethnomethodology as a defensive move to preserve the intellectual status quo: sociology contained no theory or theory fragments that were adequate to the analysis of culture.
Of course, from the vantage point of post-structural semiotics, all the hostile academic posturing within the discipline social sciences during the last ten years appears as silly slapstick. From the standpoint of semiotics, the first ethnomethodologists did not go too far, they fell short in their efforts to unravel the secrets of modern culture. Part of the reason that ethnomethodology has not advanced much beyond its campaign promises is the resistance offered it by sociology, and part is a built-in limitation stemming, we are about to argue, from its intellectual dependence on a version of Husserlian phenomenology.
We do not think the theoretical inhibitions of ethnomethodology are in the general perspective provided by Husserl. Husserl’s work remains heuristic to the social sciences. Indeed, it gave intellectual force to an encouraging attack on the discipline social sciences during the 1960s. Rather, it is on the specific ground of Husserl’s description of the “natural standpoint” and everyday consciousness that the first ethnomethodology stumbled. But let us back up a bit ...
Recall that Husserl’s starting point was exactly the same as Charles Peirce’s, a radical critique of mathematical logic, a critique that led them both (independently) to parallel attempts to establish new ground rules for science. Following Husserl, phenomenology takes as its foundation the factual world, but it refuses to join with science (as we continue to know it) and pre-conceive the things of the world to be either real or ideal. Rather, they are taken as they are, that is, as appearances. (Phaneron = appearance.) More than this, phenomenology refuses to join with science in its study of the accidental characteristics of things, their weight, volume, length, etc. Phenomenology is the study of essences, for example, the essence of thought or the essence of language, etc. Husserl’s main discovery, the principle of intentionality, assures that phenomenology cannot ultimately break with the world nor can the world break away from philosophical reflection. Intentionality means that consciousness is always consciousness of something—that thought intends its object.4 Husserl’s own investigations demonstrate quite conclusively that there is no realm of consciousness, or category of consciousness. If you examine any thought or any perception, it is not possible to discover consciousness on the edges of it, or at the end of it. The thought is consciousness—the perception is consciousness: all consciousness is consciousness of something. These matters can be clarified for some students by pointing out that Husserl’s consciousness and intentionality correspond to Peirce’s (1955:91) “thirdness”:
We are too apt to think that what one means and the meaning of a word are quite unrelated meanings of the meaning of the word “meaning.” ... In truth the only difference is that when a person means to do anything he is in some state in consequence of which the brute reactions between things will be moulded to conformity to the form to which the man’s mind is itself moulded, while the meaning of a word really lies in the way in which it might ... tend to mould the conduct of a person into conformity to that which it is itself moulded. Not only will meaning always, more or less, in the long run mould reactions to itself, but it is only in doing so that its own being consists. For this reason I call this element of the phenomenon or object of thought the element of Thirdness.
All advances in the sociology of face-to-face interaction, the ethnography of speaking, the first ethnomethodology have been based on this (Husserl’s/Peirce’s) insight. In interaction, the individual is condemned to meaningfulness. No matter how much it might be desired, as under conditions where shame and embarrassment (Sacks) are likely outcomes, it is not possible to stop the moulding of meaning to behavior in the presence of others. Even “meaningless” behavior is taken to mean that the person either is insane or is conducting some kind of experiment. (See Goffman 1963, 1967, and his other writings.) And since it is impossible to stop meaning, it is equally impossible to stop the masking and staging that goes with it.
Philosophical phenomenology, which holds itself aloof from sociological phenomenology, takes consciousness itself as its object, or attempts to describe the essence of perception, intuition, ideas, imagination, etc. There has been almost no systematic development of this philosophical field (beyond the usual classroom and textbook discussion) in the United States, but it has undergone continuous and considerable development in Europe. Prominent contributions after Husserl include Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927), Sartre’s L’imaginaire (1940) (translated into English under the unfortunate title The Psychology of the Imagination), Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la Perception (c. 1945), and Jacques Derrida’s Speech and Phenomena (1973) and De la grammatologie (1967a), which inaugurate the semiotic critique of Husserl. In order to arrive at a description of the essence of perception or the imagination, these students undertake to hold the world in brackets, to reduce it, or freeze it, so that consciousness can return to itself and examine its own features. It is through this examination of itself that consciousness returns to the world and clarifies it. This disciplined act of reflection is the phenomenological method, called the epochë, or reduction.
Critique of Husserl’s Thesis of the “Natural Standpoint”
It is here on Husserl’s positioning of the epochë that we might advance by detaching ourselves from phenomenological orthodoxy, and eventually by separating a second ethnomethodology from the first.
Recall that Husserl simultaneously justified his philosophy and staked out the domain of phenomenological sociology by describing a socio-cultural world drained of all thought:
This world is not here for me as a mere world of facts and affairs, but, with the same immediacy, as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world. Without further effort on my part I find the things before me furnished not only with the qualities that befit their positive nature, but with value-characters such as beautiful or ugly, agreeable or disagreeable, pleasant or unpleasant, and so forth. Things in their immediacy stand there as objects to be used, the “table” with its “books,” “the glass to drink from,” the “vase,” the “piano,” and so forth. These values and practicalities, they too belong to the constitution of the “actually present” objects as such, irrespective of my turning or not turning to consider them or indeed any other objects. [Husserl 1962:93, his emphasis.]
Elsewhere (91) Husserl describes the world of the natural standpoint as “simply there.” And knowledge of this world has “nothing of conceptual thought in it.”
There are two ways to approach this powerful image of a mindless world that appears to think. One angle of approach would be to treat it as the origin myth of modern phenomenology: in the beginning the world was exactly the same as it is now, only there was no consciousness.... In other words, the “natural standpoint” is a fiction of the presence of pure facts against which all thought originates in opposition. This was Charles S. Peirce’s way of describing the “natural standpoint,” what he called “Firstness,” which he developed into his phenomenology of feeling. Peirce (1955:81-82) wrote:
By a feeling, I mean an instance of that kind of consciousness which involves no analysis, comparison or any process whatsoever, nor consists in whole or in part of any act by which one stretch of consciousness is distinguished from another, which has its own positive quality which consists in nothing else, and which is of itself all that it is, however it may have been brought about; so that if this feeling is present during a lapse of time, it is wholly and equally present at every moment of that time.
Note that Peirce has written this description in such a way as to render it as unlikely as in Husserl’s hands it appears to be likely.
Peirce elaborates his idea of “Firstness” for purposes precisely the opposite of Husserl’s in describing the “natural standpoint,” namely, to begin a philosophical critique of the “natural standpoint” and to suggest or even to insist upon a radical detachment from the ideas of presence and immediacy According to Peirce (1955:91), “Firstness” is the basis of all feeling and he goes on to say:
The immediate present, could we seize it, would have no character but its Firstness. Not that I mean to say that immediate consciousness (a pure fiction, by the way) would be Firstness, but that the quality of what we are immediately conscious of, which is no fiction, is Firstness. [our emphasis]
A second approach to Husserl’s thesis of the “natural standpoint,” the approach Husserl himself appears to have taken, and certainly that of his orthodox followers, is to accept it not as necessary fiction (i.e., myth) but as a provisional but essentially accurate description of everyday social life, and to build upon it. Husserl’s remarks on the “natural standpoint” clearly announce themselves as scientific description and programs for a new science, not as fictions: “I am aware of a world.... immediately, intuitively, I experience it.” Things are “for me simply there, in a verbal or figurative sense ‘present’ ...” (1962:95). Here is the program statement:
We do not set ourselves the task of continuing the pure description and raising it to a systematically inclusive and exhaustive characterization of the data, in their full length and breadth, discoverable from the natural standpoint.... A task such as this can and must—as scientific—be undertaken, and it is one of extraordinary importance.... [1962:95]
The first ethnomethodology is a serious effort to realize and institutionalize Husserl’s program. We might question the logic and value of such procedures, not from an external standpoint as has already been done by the field of sociology, but, taking our cues from Peirce, from within.
At least three times scholars of enormous capacity—Sartre, Schutz, and Berger and Luckmann—have tried to complete the pure description of everyday life from the natural standpoint, and have failed. While it is not identified as ethnomethodology, Berger and Luckmann’s elegant Social Construction of Reality provided illustration: “Among the multiple realities there is one that presents itself as the reality par excellence. This is the reality of everyday life.” It seems so true as to be not worth questioning. It appears to have satisfied the phenomenological requirement of getting the essence of the consciousness of everyday reality. But suppose we question it nevertheless, as Peirce suggested we must. What is immediate presence? Can there be such a thing and if there is how meaningful is it in-and-of-itself? What is the basis for all these claims being made for immediacy and presence? It is certainly not based on pure description. Even a naive description of presence quickly reduces it either to nothingness or to a fiction of presence, which derives its character from thick semantic layering and syntactic extension into matters often very remote.
Viewed from this vantagepoint (which is also that of post-structural thought), the first ethnomethodology appears as a moment of forgetting or blindness, the kind of moment in the history of a culture that Juri Lotman has described so well. By pretending that consciousness does not exist in the world, but only in philosophy and theory, the first ethnomethodologists were free to create a series of new myths about the origin of the world and to name their myths “scientific discoveries”: Berger and Luckmann (1966:19) write:
The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these. [Interestingly, their emphasis.]
This is not technically a new myth, but a variant of an old Western idea about the autonomy of the individual, and we should be able to place it under a positive sign (which is clearly Berger and Luckmann’s intention) if it were an unambiguous reflection of the spirit of independence. But things are not always what they seem, and the idea of the autonomy of the individual has long since been subverted so that it now breaks up spontaneous solidarities and perpetuates the autonomy of existing organizations and corporate structures, not individuals. In other words, it functions as a myth.
In his critique of Husserl, which is sufficiently trenchant to apply equally to the followers of Husserl, Jacques Derrida suggests that the metaphysics of “presence” within phenomenology is only the latest disguise of the Western transcendental ego. It is interesting to read the following passage from Derrida (1973:6) as a comment on ethnomethodological “descriptions” of the origin of reality in everyday life, or the living present (although the passage was certainly not written as such):
One ideal form must assure this unity of the infinite and the ideal: this is the present, or rather the presence of the living present The ultimate form of ideality, the ideality of ideality.... is the living present, the self-presence of transcendental life.
Derrida adds ironically:
Presence has always been and will always, forever, be the form in which we can say ... the infinite diversity of contents is produced.
The Displacement of the Epoche and the Second Ethmethodology
Derrida’s critique is not motivated by a concern about the false consciousness produced by the myth of the autonomy of the individual. It is based on a radical philosophical semiotic which holds that it is not possible to set consciousness in opposition to a world composed of signs. Consciousness, in the form of meaning, value, is already in the world. We can return semiotic insights back to phenomenology with the suggestion that the epochē is not philosophical reflection but cultural processes. [Note that it is possible, though cumbersome, as Peirce was fond of demonstrating, to keep the analysis flowing in phenomenological rather than semiotic language. We suspect that this strategy has its limits, but since it also corresponds to the main point of this chapter, we shall follow it out here.]
Husserl defined the epochē as a bracketing of the world, a disconnection and a suspension of judgment, a delicate and unmotivated holding of the world in consciousness. This bracketing, Husserl suggested, “clamps onto an original, simple thesis and transvalues it in a peculiar way,” opening access to (the transvaluing) consciousness itself. We do not want to question the validity of Husserl’s description of the epochë; which we find to be detailed, convincing, and eloquent. Rather we want to question his desire to monopolize the epochē for philosophy while delegating to the post-disciplinary sciences the task of describing a mindless world. The question we want to raise against Husserl is When or Where does the “natural standpoint” leave off and bracketing begin? Does the break occur only in a philosophic act? Or does it exist in every object of attention, every cultural form, in every moment? Is the suspension first an aspect of the structure of the sign and only secondarily a description of the contact of consciousness and the world? In our first chapter, we suggested that Rousseau and Saussure, prefiguring Lotman and Uspensky’s version of the semiotic mechanism, imply that the process of transvaluation may operate independently of the conscious will. The ongoing sign mechanism of value creation (comparison and exchange) in the absence of any external criterion was countered in Rousseau’s work with a fictional version of a “self”; Husserl’s epochē may be a companionate ephemeral fiction.
In the works of Lotman, Kristeva, and others we find that (while it is not always presented as such) an unmodified version of Husserl’s description of the epochē reappears as a model for cultural forms that have nothing of the philosophical in them. For example, as a general class, ritual is an interpretative form that is designed to produce a disconnection from the world of everyday affairs, to freeze or bracket social meanings or values, to suspend judgment, and to produce consciousness.5 Social structural differentiation can also be read as a series of detachments or brackets that constantly produce new forms of consciousness. This is explicit in Marx’s description of class consciousness, which he bases on the worker/owner differentiation; George Herbert Mead’s description of Mind, which he based on the self/other distinction; Robert Redfield’s analysis of historical consciousness, which he based on the rural/urban distinction; Goffman’s description of self-consciousness, which he based on a front/back differentiation; and Lévi-Strauss’s description of the Savage Mind, which he based on a nature/culture distinction (he would call it opposition). Note that a probable byproduct of dislocating the epochē along the lines we are suggesting would be a badly needed re-interpretation of all modern social theory.
Our favorite example of a cultural epochē, a semiotic transvaluation, is from Rousseau’s Emile. The passage has been made all the more special for having been selected by Dürkheim (1965b:93) for quotation in his study of Rousseau. Rousseau wrote:
Good social institutions are those which are best able to alter man’s nature, to take away his absolute existence ... and to transfer the self to the community.
A second ethnomethodology, then, would be based on the principle that the epochē is not a philosophical act of reflection, but cultural semiosis; that consciousness is not opposed to the world of things, rather it operates through a world of signs; that the second ethnomethodology is semiotics.
Current Uses of the Epoche Within Ethnomethodology
As we have already suggested, the tendencies we have been describing here are being worked through in an un-self-conscious way in phenomenological sociology and ethnomethodology. The changeover to the study of cultural forms is almost complete, even though none of those whose work has been most affected have attempted an explanation of this evident process. Also, ethnomethodologists have developed an alternate, working version of the epochē. In fact, it is possible to discern three distinct operational definitions of the epochē implicit in the work of ethnomethodologists and phenomenologists.
(1) The epochē serves as method. Note that in so serving it partakes heavily of the spirit as well as the dicta of the original philosophical definition. Some ethnomethodologists begin their investigations by making a break with our familiar acceptance of everyday affairs so they can throw the essential properties of everyday life into sharp relief. Famous examples of this include the experimental fiddling with everyday expectations undertaken by Garfinkel’s students and the widespread lore of the alleged antics of Erving Goffman. This is still a fruitful line, but it would be smarter, we think, to pay more attention to the serious methods for developing new angles on social situations that have been invented in the last ten years, including some of the less colorful techniques of Goffman and Garfinkel. We might look, for example, at the logic and results of Sudnow’s (1972) use of the point of view of the still camera for his analysis of the role of the glance in social relations.6 As a form of anti-sociological method, the epochē involves displacement of the everyday attitude in order to arrive at a clarification of the essential properties of everyday life. This was the main progressive interpretation of the epochē within the first ethnomethodology, the interpretation that paved the way for the second ethnomethodology.
(2) Cultural semiosis can be approached as a pre-scientific epochē. According to this approach, cultural productions serve as consciousness of the world, providing the first organization of its meaning, and providing us with our pre-reflective understanding. This is the position of the post-structuralists, the Tartu school, and others not necessarily identified with ethnomethodology.
(3) Finally, epochē can be understood in a psychological way, making of each of us a kind of mini-philosopher, united with our fellow human beings in an intersubjective understanding of the commonalities of our ideas, perceptions, etc. In our opinion, this is the most regressive and weak form of interpretation of the epochē found in the first ethnomethodology, a definite obstacle in the path of the development of the second. This superimposition of the philosophical attitude over everyday life separates human individuals from one another and from society, reduces institutional structures to an aggregate of habits, history to the span of attention of a hypothetical individual, and it retreats from conflict, change, and the semiotic revolution.
It should be noted that a psycho-philosophical as opposed to an ethnosemiotic definition of the epochē gives not merely different results but opposing results. Perception that is grounded in the psyche is very personal and absolutely individualistic. It is impossible to get so close to another that you perceive exactly what the other perceives. On the other hand, perception that is grounded on a methodological/cultural plane, if it is going to work in the first place, indicates that what it perceives is the true character of the object. The object is more than what is seen; we know it has another side, even as we see it. Perception brings us closer to participation in a pre-personal or absolute subjectivity. We have only to turn an object around to discover that it was not the way it seemed from our original point of view—but we knew that already. Our perception was submerged in a non-contingent perceptual knowledge, in culture.
The Concept of intersubjectivity in the Second Ethnomethodology
In Schutz’s writings, intersubjectivity is assumed and behavior is deduced from it. But after Schutz we find a progressive disillusionment with this idea culminating in the second ethnomethodoiogy. Now we know that intersubjectivity is something not “given,” rather it is accomplished, worked through, or produced, and it takes the form of both revolutionary and anti-revolutionary signs. The first ethnomethodologists often believed, as Husserl suggested they should, that intersubjectivity is similar to a scientific consensus, an agreement not to deviate from a set of shared ideas and procedures. While this has been the goal of several ethnomethodological investigations, it has not been possible to demonstrate conclusively that intersubjectivity is based on shared ideas and assumptions. Everyday life works and has meaning even under conditions where seemingly critically important assumptions are not shared. There are many aspects of life—courtship is an example—which could not work if the different metaphoric possibilities for interpretation were not maintained in perfect, or near-perfect, balance in behavior.
Garfinkel has demonstrated quite conclusively, it seems to us, that it is a supreme violation, not merely of scientific praxis, but of the norms of everyday life situations, to attempt to impose a precise and literalistic interpretation on the behavior of others. The behavior of the other, in ethnomethodoiogy and in everyday life, is not in- and for-itself looked at. Rather, the behavior of the other provides a way of looking at still other behaviors and beliefs. It is looked through. Everyone sees through behavior in both the conventional (i.e., figurative) and non-conventional (i.e., literal) senses of seeing through. Concrete behavior is the basis of our perceptions of future affairs and expectations, previous conditions, and other behaviors in the same situation. When Garfinkel (1964) asked his students to look directly at the behavior of others with whom they were interacting, he found the others would become stupefied and the situation would “explode.” Here is Garfinkel’s great contribution to the semiotic revolution, where he goes beyond his teachers, Parsons and Schutz, even beyond his own invention, the first ethnomethodology: the subjective point of view of the actor in everyday life (the natural attitude) is in itself a cultural production, a sign that conserves the social order or opposes and changes it.
Compare, for example, a smile with the Pythagorean theorem. The theorem means the same thing to who so may make use of it. A smile may mean any number of things, such as “You are a stupid little man” or “Why don’t we go up to my apartment so we can ‘talk’ “; its meaning(s) depends on the manner in which it is accomplished, who smiles at whom, where it takes place, what precedes and follows it, etc. A gifted actress can manage both meanings with one smile, unambiguously. Its meaning(s) and therefore any possibility for agreement are located not in the mind but in semiosis. Meaning-in-use often appears to arise in a natural, unproblematical way even though its complexities are enormously greater than those surrounding a detail of scientific consensus that requires special training to achieve. It is this seemingly unproblematical aspect of ordinary reality that led Husserl to his thesis of the “natural standpoint.” But we are suggesting that it might also have led him in the opposite direction, to a consideration of the semiotic mechanism of culture.
Conclusion
It was Harold Garfinkel himself who gave to an essential property of everyday behavior the same name and meaning that Charles Peirce gave to one of his three primary types of signs: index or indexicality. And in his own researches, Garfinkel demonstrated the “indexicality” of behavior, the way it points through to and manipulates subjectivity. In Garfinkel’s hands consciousness appears as variations on the theme of social structure. But his material can be re-interpreted from a poststructural standpoint as opening the way to understanding structural energetics by means of an empirically based synthesis of semiosis and subjectivity.
On the empirical level, the second ethnomethodology, without negating the first, has taken leave of the homely terrain of job interviews, plans to go shopping, the dinner table, and crying babies and comforting mothers. The scope of research is expanding to cover ritual, discourse, games, insults, etc. It is the same empirical domain worked by some semioticians who have never identified themselves with ethnomethodology. We are collectively involved in the task of generating cumulative findings on the relationship between specific semiotic systems (drama, ritual, discourse, literature, monuments, design, etc.). Interestingly, the students involved in the development of the first ethnomethodology seem now to be specializing in research on language as they attempt to re-tool.
The empirical successes of the first ethnomethodology have been considerable and should be carried forward. This includes work on jury decision making, suicide prevention, the staging of dying, role conflicts (role “distance” and sex-change operations), the design of airplane cockpits, etc. Of course, we might argue that these apparent successes are spurious, there being little competition from discipline sociology.
From a traditional sociological standpoint, the main weakness of the first ethnomethodology is its retreat from questions about the structure of entire societies. Jack Douglas (1973) has suggested that interaction between individuals is the basis of society, but this formula, extending back to Georg Simmel through Blumer and Mead, still has an anxious, provisional ring to it. Post-Parsonian macrostudies, for example, the work of Bruce Mayhew, Frank Young, or Parsons himself (1977), suggest that Durkheim and Marx were closer to the truth in their claim that the elementary units on this level are not individuals, but communities, social classes, ethnicities, etc. The displacement of the epochē to this level, which is occurring in the diverse research activities, and which we have tried to document here and in the next chapter, suggests the imminent appearance of a macro-ethnomethodology. Such a theoretical development would have the potential to extend its scope to the furthest limits of sociology as we know it today and beyond.
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