Ontological disobedience - definitely!

{maybe}1
Steve Woolgar

In Stephen P Turner and Alan Sica (eds) A Disobedient Generation (Chicago:

Chicago University Press, 2005) 309-324

Laudisi: All I’m trying to say is that your curiosity…is insufferable. If for no other
reason than it’s quite pointless.
Sirelli: Pointless?
Laudisi: Pointless!….
Mrs Cini: Pointless? Our trying to find out?
Laudisi: Forgive my asking…find out what? What can we really know about other
people? Who are they? What sort of people they are? What they do? Why
they do it?
(Pirandello, 1962 [1913]: 21)

1. Introduction: how to respond to this exercise?2

The construction of this little piece has been a struggle, not least because the exercise
of writing autobiographically poses several temptations. First, I have to overcome the
intuition that an exploration of my personal background and experiences is a conceit.
Who on earth could be remotely interested in my personal biography? I myself find it
pretty boring. Second, my training (qua sociologist) tells me to be suspicious of
narratives which overly individualise personal experiences. The temptation is to
fashion instead a narrative which stands as “an account of anyone”. The narrative
options here include generalised historical and sociological forms – please understand
everything related here as typical of “the period” or of “the generation”. Sometimes
the tension between the personal and the general is addressed through the classic

1 This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Sheila McKechnie (1948-2004), a self professed “fully
paid up member of the awkward squad”, who purveyed an admirably influential and fruitful form of
disobedience.
2
For their comments and suggestions I thank Catelijne Coopmans, Paul Drew, John Holmwood, Janet
Low, Daniel Neyland, Alan Sica and Steve Turner. And also my therapist.

1
compromise of the lucky witness - I just happened to be in the right place at the right
time - as classically found in the false modesty of Nobel prize acceptance speeches
and Academy Award ceremonies. Third, we need to avoid the temptation of
retrospective reconstruction, the writing of Whiggish histories which re-populate the
past with just those events which must have happened in order to lead to the present.

Characteristic of all these temptations is the concept of “influence”. The editors invite
us to identify, reflect upon and discuss “influences” upon our position, approach or
perspective. So the biggest temptation of all, a sort of meta temptation if you will, is
to present a story of the past which embodies this orthodox view of the relation
between influence and action. An ethnographically sceptical treatment of “influence”
starts from the view that there is no clear connection between influences and
outcomes. Yet trying to resist this temptation is especially difficult because it requires
going against ingrained conventions of narrative construction. These conventions not
only enact and support the idea of influence; they also reaffirm the basic premises of
causal relationships and explanations (for example, that influences gave rise to a
view, perspective or action).

We could try to reject the tyranny of “influences” either by adopting a form of “post
modernist” exposition, a kind of radically alternative narrative form3 or, in contrast,
by espousing a purportedly more “rigorous scientific” procedure for identifying the
actual causal connections. Both responses are inadequate because they in effect “jump
out of” the problem frame. The preferred alternative is to stay engaged with the
problem while remaining sceptical. In a sense this merely follows a familiar
anthropological mode of managing being an insider and an outsider at the same time.
One is simultaneously a member of and a stranger to one’s (own) argument, so that
one produces (what looks like) a “conventional” text that at the same time develops
and advances its own critique. The aim here is to see if we can produce an unstable
argument which needs to be taken seriously, an argument which also constitutes its
own ethnography, a text which is simultaneously at rest with and critical of itself4.

So let us be clear that this whole project is nuts5. The editors invite contributions to a
volume which documents the influences upon the early careers of social scientists.
Are they really asking us to present an account of knowledge activities, career moves,
intellectual direction in terms of the “influences” which gave rise to them? They
clearly fail to understand that a key article of disobedience, at least to this member of
“the generation”, is the rejection of just this kind of proposition. Come on, give me a
break, surely6 one of the key achievements of the disobedient generation was the
disavowal of precisely this kind of conventional style of argument. This means, then,
that our response should take the path of itemising the long list of problems with the
editors’ expectations. This list would constitute a pretty much watertight case for not
going along with the editors’ request.
3
No, it’s okay this is not one of those weird post modern pieces. I fully subscribe to the argument that
we have never been modern (Latour, 1991) let alone postmodern.
4
Sorry about this last cliché. “Sounds very much like a ton of lit crit stuff I’ve read over the last 20
years” (Sica, 2004). But I do think the aspiration is correct. It’s just that during all those years nobody
bothered to try to work out what it means.
5
“Nuts”? There, after all these years, such an exalted standard of erudition.
6
“Surely”? One of my school teachers impressed me with the observation that a speaker’s use of
“surely” is a (sure) sign that the speaker is about to lose the argument.

2
And yet….

This whole project is delightful. The whole point of disobedience is non compliance.
The editors invite us representatives of a “generation” to reflect upon our own non
compliance while still compliantly operating within the editors’ framework. To be
truly disobedient, and so deserving inclusion in this volume, one would have to refuse
to be included. In a nice inversion of the old Groucho Marx joke, one could only
really qualify as a fully paid up member of the disobedient generation by refusing to
become a member. So the very nature of the project admits and encourages
explorations of a series of complex contradictions and reflexive loops. Of course,
some objectivist philosophers still depict these issues in terms of “inconsistencies” or
as “aporias”. They are viewed as “logical traps” to be avoided lest they threaten the
entire basis of reasonable (?) argument. By contrast, for the rest of us, these same
issues offer a great opportunity to lift ourselves from the hum drum hagiographies of
linear retrospective flat text autobiography.

2. Two kinds of disobedience

Did the disobedience of our generation lead merely to the displacement of the status
quo by an alternative, but stable project? Or did it open the way to more lasting
critique? The contrast is simple but important. Crudely expressed, it is a contrast
between disobedience designed to bring about change, and in particular a move to an
alternative stable state – which we can call instrumental disobedience – and
disobedience which takes the form of an enduring restlessness, discomfort,
dissatisfaction and scepticism – which we shall call dynamic or ontological
disobedience. The first kind is an instrumental means for articulating and achieving
an alternative position; the second is more a kind of credo, an attitude and perspective
for sustaining a form of life.

The first sense of disobedience is directed against an existing orthodoxy. But it is

limited in the sense that it often seems destined merely to usher in another, alternative
orthodoxy. As is widely documented in the analysis of political change, from George
Orwell to Nelson Mandela, yesterday’s protesters become members of today’s
establishment. The radical terrorists who succeed commonly go on to assume
positions of orthodox political power. In Tony Benn’s apt phrase even the most
heinous enemies of the state frequently end up “taking tea with the Queen” (Benn,
1995). In respect to the political protests of “our generation” such transformations
give rise to ironic renditions of the “fate” of the radical student revolutionaries of the
1960s. Under newspaper and journal headlines such as “Where are they now?” we
learn that a prominent student radical figure on the barricades in 1968 Paris – “Danny
the Red” – is now selling life insurance. Ironic treatments of radical theoretical and
intellectual change in the social sciences are less common. A noteable exception is
Mel Pollner’s (1991) well known account of the institutionalisation of
ethnomethodology. The radical reflexivity of early ethnomethodology, writes Pollner,
has now “settled down and moved out to the suburbs”. Did the apparently radical
disobedience of 1967 ethnomethodology – the bete noire of much traditional
sociology at the time - merely presage the routinised, formulaic, normal science
practice of conversational analysis? Or, to take another example, has the angry
relativism of early sociology of scientific knowledge – which throughout the 1970s

3
and 1980s sent legions of objectivist philosophers of science spinning in their graves
– now given rise to a tamed formula for representing the social dynamics of science
entrepreneurship and science policy? Has the provocative disobedience of later calls
to flatten the ontological landscape, to advance a symmetry between the attributes of
humans and non humans as a heuristic starting point, now merely lead to the
mechanical application of actor network “theory”?7

By contrast, dynamic or ontological disobedience envisages a form of continual

revolution. The central question here is what sustains persistent disobedience. If the
target is less specific than in instrumental disobedience, the related question is why is
persistent revolution necessary or desirable? The disobedience envisaged here is
intended to be constantly unsettling, challenging, destabilising, but with no specific
end in mind. It provides a reservoir of continual questioning but for what purpose?
Where does it end? And if it is indeed “without purpose” does not continual
disobedience imply a kind of petulance, a form of disobedience for its own sake?

For ontological disobedience, merely to ask these questions is already to embrace

unwarranted compromise. For ontological disobedience there is no end. Rather, there
is a constant injunction to be disturbing and challenge. This also begins to account for
an important difference between the instrumentality of many forms of political
radicalism and the open ended-ness of dynamic disobedience. Ontological
disobedience is far more radical than mere political disobedience. It is especially
important to note that the former also challenges the presumption of the latter that
political action necessitates objective commitment (see for example Herrnstein Smith,
1997).

This simple contrast enables us to discern some important constraints endemic to our
task. For the very phrase “disobedient generation” connotes a form of instrumental
rather than ontological disobedience. It does so because it ties the nature of the
disobedience to a social category (a younger generation) which is directed against its
contrastive pair part (the older generation). This implies a lot about the kind of
disobedience. It is the voice of the child raised against the dominant parental
authority, a parental authority that can be played out also in the guise of the state,
government or scientific authority. But there is more than a suspicion of temporary,
limited disobedience about it. Children, after all, are just like that. It’s just a
generational thing. In the end the disobedient generation will grow up8.

3. Some autobiographical origins of ontological disobedience

7 These questions raise further questions about the nature of instrumental disobedience. If this kind of
disobedience inevitably gives rise to the appropriation and institutionalisation of radical ideas, in what
sense was it ever truly radical? No sociologist sensitive to the problems of essentialism and its
attribution would want to claim that ideas are intrinsically (essentially) radical. This alerts us instead to
inquire about the nature of the social dynamics and the sets of social relations that sustain perceptions
of disobedience; and how these relations change so that disobedience becomes attenuated. Fortunately,
there is insufficient space here fully to examine the processes of retrospective construction of “Steve
Woolgar” as a disobedient theorist.
8
The same grown ups sometimes evince disappointment that their own offspring are insufficiently
disobedient. Harking back to his own disobedient teenage treatment of texts with which he disagreed,
my famous French friend is concerned that his teenage son “is yet to burn his first novel”.

4
So in autobiographical terms, where does this leaning towards dynamic disobedience
come from? I went on some of the marches in central London in 1967 and 1968. I
don’t much recall feeling especially politicised nor that some political motive was my
reason for going. But I do recall being impressed by the volume and raucousness of
the crowd, by the power and energy of the protest. Especially impressive was the look
on the faces of the police and the passers by. They seemed to be looking at us in awe
of disobedience itself, not because they feared the perspective of specifically left wing
politics, or whatever. I remember thinking that maybe “anarchy” was an interesting
idea, and struggled with one or two worthy but seemingly opaque tracts on the topic.

But this was also the time of satire. A school trip was organised to a West End
Theatre where I watched a production of Behind The Fridge, itself a parodic successor
to Beyond The Fringe, the shows which brought Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan
Bennett and Jonathon Miller to prominence, the precursor to traditions of irreverent
British humour including That Was The Week That Was, David Frost and Monty
Python. Again, it seemed to me, the vitality of the protest, the extent of the trouble
and unnerved reaction which it provoked, was much more impressive than any
specific, let alone coherent, political standpoint that prompted the protest in the first
place. At school, a brave friend started an “underground” magazine entitled “Yellow
Socks”. Brave because these very garments of clothing had recently sent our
headmaster into paroxysms of rage when one of the boys was discovered wearing
them. A clearly deliberate violation of the rules of school uniform (a uniform “royal”
blue from head to toe). The whole school was brought to a special assembly to have
the matter expurgated. What seemed both delightful and absurd was the vehemence of
“their” reaction to this episode. In and through the reaction to it, the behaviour
became a gesture of defiance. One could dress up this episode, so to speak, as
a(nother) manifestation of the more general eruption of a whole generation of youth in
the face of stifling post war orthodoxy. But it didn’t seem that way at the time.

Of course, this was also “the time” of significant new musical trends. Many such as
Baez and Dylan were associated with protest and anti war movements. Although these
were clearly worthy sentiments, to me they seemed rather dull compared to the shock
value of The Pretty Things, The Rolling Stones and The Velvet Underground. Again,
although it is possible in retrospect to enrol these latter forms of expression into an
account of cultural upheaval aimed at prevailing political orthodoxy, the notably
striking effects at the time were the outrage and consternation generated by these new
musical forms. They seemed to me, to the extent that I could then articulate the
feeling, to promise an engine of continual disruption and challenge, more than an
instrument for targetted political change.

So the emerging sense of disobedience here is one of being awkward or difficult in

the face of orthodoxy – dynamic or ontological disobedience. These latter terms seem
to capture my experiences of disruption and challenge much better than the idea of
“rebellion” – instrumental disobedience - with its rather earnest, steely Leninist
overtones and associated suggestions of political (re)organisation.

If I was looking for a forum for articulating my sense of the intrigue and challenges of
awkwardness and disobedience, the move from a minor public school to Cambridge
did not at first seem promising. The Cambridge degree course in engineering afforded
few possibilities for disobedience. On the whole my fellow engineering

5
undergraduates seemed grey (as I no doubt also seemed to them), we attended lots of
lectures, experiments, practicals and demonstrations, while our contemporaries
seemed to have lots of time to engage in more exciting diversions. We seemed over
concerned with the dull aspects of mechanical science, our rooms bore few of the
flamboyant, colourful posters and decorations of fellow students in the arts and
humanities. When one of the Lecturers on the introductory thermodynamics course
made a joke about the operation of the internal combustion engine - “everyone knows
that to start a revolution you need a crank” - he seemed to embody a kind of
engineering mindset that casts aspersions on political figures. I was intrigued to learn
that engineering students at one university on the other side of the world (Simon
Fraser University I think it was) wore bright red jackets with “engineering”
emblazoned across the back and operated as a kind of vigilante force for breaking up
student demonstrations. Not surprising that few Cambridge engineers turned out for
the demo against the junta at the Greek Restaurant; very surprising to me that some
minor damage to property was subsequently transformed through media descriptions
into the “the Garden House riots”.

The lack of disobedience seemed enshrined in the degree course organisation.

Interminable practicals required routine but uncommitted engagement. They needed
to get done, not to be thought about. It was shocking to discover that many
investigations were simply copied from reports submitted by previous year’s students.
There seemed little intellectual challenge. One was not encouraged to wonder and
reflect, just to get through; and to do so by means of ferocious organisation.
Engineering seemed the scientific/technical equivalent of what I imagined to be a
training in the law. Stamina and organisation, rather than curiosity and challenge,
were the necessary virtues.

But a great virtue of Oxbridge was (and is) its interdisciplinarity, founded on the
enduring conceit of the Renaissance Man, that if you are clever and knowledgeable
about any one subject, you are potentially clever and knowledgeable about many
others. This view is institutionalised through the college system that encourages
undergraduates to mix lives and social activities irrespective of their degree course. In
this context, one Cambridge friend, John Holmwood, provided me with an
introduction to social science, or at least to one image of it. Social science was clearly
about argument. John argued with gusto, great seriousness, determination, intensity
and enormous conviction. Things in the world beyond engineering were clearly black
and white but, strikingly, they needed to be argued that way. It was enormously
impressive to experience John in full flow: this was bravado intellectual performance.
For someone unenculturated into this (social science) mode of argument it was also
intriguing to notice the catastrophic effect of interjecting the occasional flat denial.
These were moments when I am sure I just came across as being difficult.

John subsequently spent a year as a Teaching Assistant at UCLA Department of

Sociology. Before he went, he presented me with a copy of Studies in
Ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967). On his return a year later, he gave me some
incomprehensible notes he had taken from a Garfinkel lecture (circa 1972)9. The book

9
It took some time to realise that these were actually: “notes on an incomprehensible Garfinkel
lecture”. As a comparatively junior academic, I was surprised when Garfinkel turned up in Oxford
some ten years later and gave exactly the same lecture. A version of it appears in the discussion of
“hearably summoning phones” in Garfinkel (2000).

6
and the notes joined my embryonic, eclectic collection of obscure sources that I felt I
should one day try and make some sense of. I put considerable energy into
investigating alternatives to a third year of undergraduate engineering, even arranging
to transfer to a medical sciences degree course, before finally signing up for the
“management option” of the Engineering Tripos. Academic management at
Cambridge at that time comprised sociology of organisations and industrial relations,
mathematically based operations research and statistics. I suddenly discovered I
enjoyed reading the sociology books and writing essays, to the extent that I was
invited to stay on to do a PhD.

After a year, my Cambridge PhD supervisor Mike Mulkay moved to take a position at
York, “a real university” and suggested I follow him. I joined a “real” Department of
Sociology but headed by a strange bloke called Laurie Taylor, who always seemed to
be away in London appearing on the radio and television. Laurie had made his
reputation as a leading light in the new wave of sociology of deviance. It was curious
to observe some of the more politically radical graduate students at York accusing
Laurie of backsliding on issues such as whether or not IMG should join forces with
student movements in open rebellion on the streets. Another newcomer to the
Department was Paul Drew (see photograph). Paul taught graduate classes in
ethnomethodology and purveyed an especially impressive, well honed version of
scepticism directed at just about every known form of traditional sociological
theorising. This was high church ethnomethodology and conversational analysis at its
ascetic best. It involved the articulation of difficult and devastating questions which
could be addressed to any conceivable sociological claim. My neophyte attempts at
flat denial in the face of sweeping sociological argument now admitted some minor
refinement. I learned to ask “exactly what do you mean by …..?” I also learned that
“the social”, in so far as it could be said to exist anywhere, was achieved and
accomplished as part of the enormous richness and complexity of everyday, ordinary,
commonsensical, mundane, practical activities. Paul and I shared a house for a year,
during which I struggled over (what I later recognised as) the enormous and profound
awkwardness of our everyday, ordinary, commonsensical etc exchanges:

((Paul is vacuum cleaning the stairs))

Me: “What are you doing Paul?”
Paul: ((gives me a fixed stare, 5 seconds silence, clutching vacuum cleaner))

Or

((Phone rings))
Paul: ((Picking up the phone)) “Yes”

There is no question that this, the lived experience of the actual whatness10 of the
everyday, ordinary (etc) enormously aided my subsequent appreciation of Garfinkel.
In particular, it became clear that the famous “breaching experiments” are actually
paradigmatic exercises in disobedience. They are awkwardness generating practices
which show up our profound reliance on order and structure. The awkwardness arise
because they profoundly challenge what we take for granted. And the programme
which they suggest is in principle unlimited in its potential application to all areas of

10
The technical term for whatness is “quiddity”.

7
activity. Arguably, the ontological disobedience at the heart of these and other
features of early ethnomethodology has since been lost in the move to institutionalise
a formulaic, “scientific” perspective on practical actions. Thus a resulting
institutionalised response to what was called “traditional sociology” is the “science”
of conversational analysis. The profound scepticism to be found in early Garfinkel has
since been rewritten as a form of merely instrumental disobedience11.

My path through ethnomethodology reached its apogee a few years later when I
joined the unsung elite who had been “ripped off by Harold”. When the great man
visited Oxford on sabbatical, he persuaded me that the glittering prizes awaited just
those sociologists who could bring to bear a unique perspective on the work of
science. My thesis work on the discovery of (radio) pulsars had involved my
acquiring from the American Institute of Physics an audio tape recording of the first
optical pulsar discovery. The discoverers had unwittingly left the audio channel of
their recording equipment running as they tried to make sense of the observations
unfolding before them. Through an analysis of the actual whatness of the night’s
work, Garfinkel explained to me, and in virtue of the unique adequacy of our
methods, we would have access to the very kernel of what is special about scientific
discovery. He should “get me to California” to work with him and his team on this. I
handed over the tape. The next time I heard of it/from him was when he presented a
paper on its analysis at a Toronto conference in 1980 (Garfinkel et al, 1981).

I had previously met Bruno Latour at a 1976 conference on “The Use of Quantitative
Methods in the History of Science” in Berkeley. Who knows what either of us was
doing at that meeting? I was invited on the strength of my first ever publication, a
sustained whinge about the theoretical paucity of some contemporary quantitative
analyses of science (Gilbert and Woolgar, 1974), to speak about the emerging field of
social studies of science in the UK. In the context of the feeling that US,
predominantly Mertonian inspired sociology of science, had yet to take seriously the
emerging British traditions in the sociology of scientific knowledge, I had entitled my
conference paper, with what I imagined to be telling irony, “News from Nowhere”.
Bruno was there because he was just starting work at the Salk Institute, on a project
which set out to research the careers of great scientists. I was probably the first person
from civilisation - by which I mean the world of social studies of science - to visit him
there among his tribe. In giving me an initial tour of the laboratory he introduces me
to the equipment (not the people) that populates the spaces in and around the
laboratory. He gently picks up a pipette and explains to me: “This, they believe, is
something which measures what they call a ‘volume’ of liquid”. Such delightful
disrespect for the given, such wonderful ethnographic distance, such promise of
ontological disobedience!

I had only barely heard of Mary Douglas’ (1978) famous distinction. Yet the danger
associated with thinking along lines similar to Garfinkel and Latour seemed much
more attractive than the aspirations to purity associated with attempts to establish safe
explanatory formulae as offered, for example, by the strong programme in the
sociology of scientific knowledge or SSK. The great disappointment of the latter, it

11
While this reading of the radical origins of ethnomethodology is contentious, it is underpinned by the
memory of various aphorisms offered to me by Garfinkel along the lines that “everything is
programmatics” or that “conversational analysis is the jewel in the crown of ethnomethodology but we
don’t believe a word of it”.

8
turned out, was that its disobedience led merely to replacing one relatively stable
system of explanation with another. Meanwhile, at York, the emerging dynasty of
Mike Mulkay’s postgraduate students began a series of workshops exploring the
dangers of discourse and reflexivity.

3. On sustaining disobedience (and concealment)

Sirelli: You’ll forgive my asking, but what do you hope to achieve

with all this rigmarole?
(Pirandello, 1962 [1913]: 24)

This is all very well. My account has thus far offered a few characterisations of “the
time”, which are loosely tied to my emerging analytic proclivities. I’ve tried to
organise these observations around a distinction between instrumental and ontological
disobedience. Are you kidding? Only two kinds of disobedience? Are they really so
distinct? Can we so easily categorise some forms of political protest as merely
instrumental, and others as dynamic? Can we not argue that the disobedience of
musicians is often instrumentalised as part of their marketing?12 For example, the
brothers Gallagher achieved fame to some extent for being disobedient13. Artists like
Eminem thrive on their reputation for disobedience. But does this kind of notoriety
necessitate ontological disobedience? Whether or not forms of disobedient action and
behaviour are ontological or instrumental presumably has a lot to do with how these
behaviours are appropriated and reformulated. And, in any case, is the non enduring,
finite quality of instrumental disobedience always such a bad thing? What about the
clear benefits of temporary disobedience, for example in the emerging argumentative
genre of the “rant” (Osborne, 2002)? By contrast, is not enduring disobedience
sometimes rather negative, one thinks for example of the embarrassing spectre of the
Rolling Stones still carrying on after all these years?14 And is not a key feature of
disobedience that responses will vary between audiences and over time? Disobedience
for whom, how and when?

Surely?

So the central question is still left hanging: what origins might eventually lead an
aspiring engineer to become a quasi Garfinkelian arch reflexive tropist ontologically
disobedient Chair of Marketing?15

To dig a bit deeper we need to follow a different tack: I must now reveal that the
biggest influence on my early thinking was undoubtedly the playwright Luigi
Pirandello. But to be entirely consistent with the earlier point about the problematic
nature of influences, I should make it clear that Luigi didn’t realise this at the time.
More to the point, nor did I. Indeed it was only many years later that I realised this

12
Come to think of it, just about every Rolling Stones record I’ve heard includes an instrumental break.
13
Thanks to Catelijne Coopmans for reminding me that Oasis released a 1994 album entitled
“Definitely maybe”.
14
I owe this example to Daniel Neyland.
15
A yet more central question, of course, if we take seriously anything about ontological disobedience,
is how can we begin to address this former question without taking into account the kind of answer
with which the person in question would feel comfortable?

9
influence, when I first met him through a popular revival of his play - Absolutely
{perhaps}16 - in London’s West End.

A popular conception of social action derives from Goffman’s (1990) dramaturgical

vision of social players on the stage. But Pirandello proposes some very contrasting
views. For Pirandello, the settled, fathomable outcome of narrative and plot is
anathema. Absolutely {perhaps} is built around two characters each of whom says the
other is mad. The play revolves around the morally charged efforts of the other
characters to settle who is right. The playwright “intrigues us into chasing as excitedly
as the neighbours after the solution to the mystery; and he leaves us, as he leaves
them, with the mystery returned to [us]” (Browne, 1962: 8).

Mrs Ponza: ….I am just whoever you think I am!

(Pirandello, 1962 [1913]: 87)17

Pirandello is precisely concerned with the absence of a solution to puzzles about the
relation between the act and its underlying reality, between imagination and reality.
But this is much more than mere games playing.

Mine is a serious theatre. It requires the total participation of that moral entity –
man. It is not comfortable theatre. It is a difficult theatre, even a dangerous one.
(Pirandello, 1935)

By “the total participation of that moral entity – man”, I think Pirandello means to
articulate and explore situations where there is no escape, no boundaries which can
keep the phenomenon being discussed safe, divided off, stable, contained. Indeed,
towards the end of the play, several presumed boundaries are shown not to be what
they appear. The distinction between actors and audience dissolves when several
“members of the audience” start to join in the discussion with those on stage. The
distinction between actors and playwright breaks down when it eventually becomes
apparent that the central character of the Professor (ahh!) is actually (playing) the
playwright. Right at the end the principals huddle together to form an impenetrable
circle around which we now see has flowed the whole course of accusation and
counteraccusation of madness, consternation and irresolution.

I think that life is a very sad piece of buffoonery because we need to deceive
ourselves constantly by creating a reality (one for each and never the same for
all) which from time to time is discovered to be in vain and illusory (Pirandello,
1935)

In Pirandello, then, the instability and unresolvability of the reality/illusion couple is

paramount18. So Pirandello injects a fluidity and uncertainty into the idea of social
action that far surpasses Goffman. A sign of our post-modern times? Well, no, since

16
Written in 1913, Cosi e {se vi pare!} has been variously translated as And That’s The Truth in 1925,
as Right You Are (If You Think So) in 1962, as Absolutely! {perhaps} in 2003 and as Definitely!
{maybe} in 2004 .
17
Surprisingly, it turns out that Pirandello was also a major influence on Eminem: “I am whatever you
say I am” (Eminem: the Marshall Mathers LP, 2000).
18
This is of course perfect for a Chair of Marketing, to whom issues of the relation between reality and
illusion are paramount (cf Woolgar and Simakova, 2003).

10
Pirandello wrote Absolutely {perhaps} in 1913! So was he “ahead of his time”? A
post modernist stuck in the 1900s? Perhaps there is something in this since he is now
hailed as a forerunner of existentialism, the theatre of the absurd, and Ionesco, and
direct lines are drawn from him through surrealist comedy to Monty Python.

The importance then of Goffman type models of social action is not (just) that they
provide another convenient way for analysts to divide up the world, but that in
suggesting that the world is other than it seems, they signal a moment of uncertainty,
and instability, of suggesting that what seems to be the case is not the case. On the
whole, we respond to these moments of uncertainty by trying to get through them as
quickly as possible, to get to the other side, to return to a normal order. Indeed the
extent of our dependence on order and normality is indexed by the extent of
consternation (alarm, upset, or humour) associated with disruptive moments. But the
point of the Pirandellan, as opposed to the Goffman, reading is that we glimpse the
possibility of constant consternation and hence appreciate the continual work needed
to maintain and renew social order.

Consideration of Pirandello underscores the difference between relatively static (or

stipulative) and relatively dynamic (or technographic) models of social action. This
difference maps well on to our earlier distinction between instrumental and
ontological disobedience. The former stresses stability and certainty whereas the latter
encourages us to emphasise the uncertainties associated with interpretation.

4. Conclusion

We can conclude that the forms of disobedience which differentially inform our
perspectives as social analysts definitely have profound consequences for the nature
and kinds of inquiry which we perform. Whereas instrumental disobedience is aimed
primarily at the safe displacement of one orthodoxy with another, ontological
disobedience (maybe) encourages a much more theoretically dangerous attitude.

If our own (social scientific) theatre is unidimensional, static, predictable, safe, we

will doubtless continue to pull in the crowds. Audiences may be attracted, perhaps by
the promise of becoming better informed about the nature of the (social) world. But if
we also want to make them think, to disturb existing preconceptions and assumptions,
our theatre will have to espouse a form of disobedience which is much more dynamic,
unpredictable, unstable, provocative and, above all, dangerous.

The audience was outraged at the play’s conclusion. They were shocked by it.
There had never been an ending like that in the history of drama. It broke all the
rules. At the curtain call when the author appeared some of the audience
cheered. But some of them yelled obscenities. One irate customer tore his
theatre seat from its moorings and hurled it onto the stage. It narrowly missed
Pirandello’s head (Zeffirelli, 2003)

Clearly, some members of the audience concluded that the playwright had wilfully
concealed the very information they were expecting from him.

5. References

11
Benn, Tony (1995) The Benn Diaries (Arrow Books: London)

Browne, E Martin (1962) “Introduction” to Pirandello (1962)

Douglas, Mary (1978) Purity and Danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution
and taboo (Routledge: London)

Garfinkel, Harold (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology (Prentice Hall: Englewood

Cliffs, NJ, USA)

Garfinkel, Harold (2002) Ethnomethodology’s Program: working out Durkheim’s

aphorism (Rowman and Littlefield: Oxford)

Garfinkel, Harold, Lynch, Michael and Livingston, Eric (1981) “The work of a
discovering science construed with materials from the optically discovered pulsar”
Philosophy of the Social Sciences 11: 131-58

Gilbert, G Nigel and Woolgar, Steve (1974) “The quantitative study of science: an
examination of the literature” Science Studies 4 279-294

Goffman, I (1990) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Penguin Books:

Harmondsworth)

Herrnstein Smith, Barbara (1997) “The Unquiet Judge: activism without objectivism
in law and politics” chapter 1 in Beliefs and Resistance: dynamics of contemporary
intellectual controversy (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass.)

Latour, Bruno (1991) We Have Never Been Modern (trans Catherine Porter;
Harvester Wheatsheaf: London)

McLennan, Gregor (2000) “The new positivity” 17-32 in Eldridge, John, Macinnes,
John, Scot, Sue, Warhurst, Chris and Witz, Anne (eds) For Sociology: legacies and
prospects (Durham: Sociologypress)

Osborne, Thomas (2003) “Against creativity: a philistine rant” Economy and Society
32 (4) 507-525

Pirandello, Luigi (1935) Interview, cited in Zeffirelli (2003)

Pirandello, Luigi (1962[1913]) Right You Are! (If You Think So), All For The
Best and Henry IV (introduced and edited by E Martin Browne; Penguin Plays:
London)

Pollner, Mel (1991) “Left of ethnomethodology: the rise and decline of radical
reflexivity” American Sociological Review 56 (3) 370-80

Sica, Alan (2004) Personal communication.

Woolgar, Steve and Simakova, Elena (2003) “Marketing marketing” paper presented
to Skebo workshop on Marketing Practices, Sweden, June

12
Zeffirelli, Franco (2003) “The division between reality and imagination: Martin
Sherman talks to Franco Zeffirelli about Pirandello” in Programme Notes for
Absolutely! {perhaps} (London: Wyndhams Theatre)

13