Introduction

At the start of a seminar he convened at UCLA in 1992, Harold Garfinkel warned a visitor, “you must do what I call perspicuous settings, or tutorial problems, or when I’m in a bad mood I call them exercises. I never call them experiments.” He did call them experiments decades earlier, though he qualified this by saying that they were not “properly speaking experimental,” and that they were “demonstrations” that (in a phrase he attributed to phenomenologist Herbert Spiegelberg) provided “aids to a sluggish imagination” (Garfinkel 1967, 38). Regardless of what names he chose to give them, the various “experiments” he devised over many years demonstrated anything but a sluggish imagination, and they offered varied tasks, difficulties, and lessons for his students. Most, but not all, of the exercises used “trouble” as leverage for gaining insight into the routine organization of social activities. Some troubles were deliberately induced disruptions, such as in the simple case of playing the game of tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) when the “experimenter” would make a move by inscribing a mark straddling a line separating adjacent squares in the 3 × 3 matrix. This maneuver regularly drew the objection from the opponent that it was “against the rules,” but the rule in question was invoked consequent to the move, rather than being an explicitly stated precondition of play. Other exercises required students to perform activities while remaining alert to troubles that regularly occur—such as getting lost in the course of following directions.

Drawing from Garfinkel's published writings, as well as transcripts of lectures and seminars in the Garfinkel Archive, I begin with a discussion of some of his early experiments, comparing them with contemporaneous social psychology experiments and discussing how they were commonly presented in sociology textbooks as methods for exposing background knowledge and tacit presuppositions that operate beneath the awareness of social actors. After suggesting that some of the early experiments and Garfinkel's commentaries on them exhibited more problematic implications for sociology, this chapter goes on to examine a raft of exercises and demonstrations that Garfinkel deployed in a later phase of his teaching and research.