Notes on a systematic deployment of the acknowledgement tokens “Yeah”; and “Mm Hm”;

Abstract

In one of his lectures, Harvey Sacks proposes that the social sciences have tended to view a society as having “relatively few orderly products, where then much of what else takes place is more or less random.”; He offers “an image of a machine with a couple of holes in the front. It spews out some nice stuff from those holes, and out of the back it spews out garbage.”; Where, then, “the concern to find that data generated by the machine which is orderly”; tends to focus on “what are in the first instance known to be ‘big issues’, and not that which is terribly mundane, occasional, local, and the like.”; Sacks offers as an alternative approach, that “it is perfectly possible...to suppose...that wherever one happens to attack the phenomenon one is going to find detailed order. That is, one may alternatively take it that there is order at all points.”; As a student of Sacks’, I use ‘order at all points’ as a research presupposition, a working hypothesis, a base. But every now and then it appears that I do not fully accept it. There will be some occurrence at which I will balk: But surely not here. This cannot be orderly. This has got to be “garbage”;. The phenomenon I will be reporting on is one of those. As it began to emerge, I kept thinking: No. Not here. This, surely, is garbage. And it is not that the phenomenon is too small. I have worked with much finer‐grained materials. But the fine‐grained phenomena have a certain elegance. This thing is not elegant. It seems just too “terribly mundane”;, too trivial to be one of society's “orderly products”;. And yet, on examination, it seems to be capable of orderliness.

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