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Between  Situations:  Anticipation,  Rhythms  and  the  Theory  of  Interaction    Iddo  Tavory,  NYU    Abstract  This paper tries to push interactionist sociology forward. It does so by drawing out the implications of a simple idea, that to understand the situation—the mise en scene of interactionist theory—we must understand it in relation not only to past-induced habits of thought and action but to future situations already anticipated in the interaction. Focusing on the rhythmic nature of situations, the paper then argues that such a recalibration both unsettles core tenets interactionism, and helps solve some problems in the sociology of culture. It focuses on two such puzzles—the place of disruption in interaction, and the relationship between the notion of “boundaries” and “distinctions” in the sociology of culture.  Social  action  takes  places  in  a  specific  situation,  in  the  present-­‐progressive  unfolding  of  interaction.  And  yet,  alongside  the  pressures  that  such  a  present  produces,  situations  are  saddled  both  by  their  history  and  by  their  anticipated  futures.  Actors  do  not  simply  hop  from  one  situation  to  another,  but  reside  between  them.  And  while  sociologists  have  thought  about  how  histories  shape  actors  and  interaction,  and  have  appreciated  how  agency  requires  us  to  think  about  futures,  we  have  yet  to  develop  a  good  way  of  understanding  how  the  anticipations  and  rhythms  of  social  life  shape  it.    

To  theorize  social  life  in  such  a  way,  the  paper  begins  from  a  core  theoretical  tension  in  the  sociology  of  action—between  present-­‐located  situational  pressures  and  past-­‐located  dispositional  accounts.  As  I  then  show,  thinking  carefully  about  the  future,  already  present  in  the  situation  as  a  set  of  explicit  and  implicit  anticipations,  changes  the  way  we  think  about  “the  situation.”  Rather  than  thinking  about  it  situations  as  bounded,  thinking  about  them  in  relation  to  the  anticipations  of  future  they  embody—and  especially  to  the  rhythms  of  social  life—propels  us  to  think  “between  situations.”           This,  as  I  argue,  is  not  simply  an  additional  wrinkle  in  interactionist  time.  It  is  not  simply  that  now,  instead  of  having  one  arrow  we  need  to  account  for  in  the  analysis  of  the  situation—that  between  past  and  present—we  now  add  the  additional  arrow  shot  into  the  future.  While  true,  this  is  somewhat  obvious.  It  is  rather  that  thinking  “between  situations”  provides  us  with  new  questions  as  well  as  ways  to  think  about  “old”  questions  both  in  interactionist  theory  and  in  other  fields,  such  as  in  the  sociology  of  culture.      

To  exemplify  the  proposed  utility  of  this  theoretical  move,  I  present  two  problems.  The  first,  developed  with  Gary  Fine,  investigates  the  role  of  disruption  in  the  interaction  order—unsettling  the  emphasis  on  smoothness.  The  second,  which  I  bumped  against  in  my  ethnographic  work,  is  about  the  relationship  between  boundaries  and  distinctions  in  social  life.  In  both  cases,  I  argue  that  the  solution  to  the  problem—rooted  in  an  appreciation  of  the  futures,  and  especially  rhythmic  futures,  of  interaction—provides  a  blueprint  for  new  empirical  engagements.  That  is,  I  hope  that  the  solutions  are  not  only  theoretically  aesthetic,  but  empirically  useful.    

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 Between  Disposition  and  Situation    The  Interactionist  insight,  still  not  blunted  after  half  a  century,  is  that  there  is  a  radical  potential  to  interaction.  It  is  in  this  sense  that  Blumer’s  (1969)  three  tenets  of  interactionism  with  which  he  begins  his  Symbolic  Interactionism—that  people  act  upon  the  meanings  things  have  for  them,  that  such  meaning  is  made  in  interaction,  and  that  meanings  change  (or  stay  the  same)  through  interaction—is  still  provocative.    

This  position  locates  interactionism  in  the  midst  of  a  key  tension  in  the  theory  of  action,  that  between  “disposition”  and  “situation”  (see  Lahire  2011).  That  is,  even  if  we  accept  that  meaning  is  always  made  in  a  particular  situation,  it  is  not  clear  how  important  what  happens  in  the  situation  is  for  shaping  meaning.  Do  we  need  to  primarily  understand  the  past,  when  potentials  to  act  were  inculcated,  habits  formed  and  crystallized?  Or,  alternatively,  is  the  present-­‐progressive  unfolding  of  the  situation  and  its  endogenous  pressures  “where  the  action  is”?    

This  tension  is  brought  into  sharp  relief  if  we  compare  two  of  the  late  20th  century  most  compelling  accounts  of  potentiality  and  situational  actualization:  Bourdieu’s  theory  of  the  “habitus”  and  Garfinkel’s  ethnomethodology.  Perhaps  the  clearest  moment  where  Bourdieu  puts  his  foot  down,  in  clear  reference  to  both  ethnomethodology  and  interactionism,  came  in  his  first  major  theoretical  work  (1977)  Outline  of  a  Theory  of  Practice.  As  he  often  does,  Bourdieu  begins  with  philosophy:    

"Imagine”,  Leibniz  suggests,  "two  clocks  or  watches  in  perfect  agreement  as  to  the  time.  This  may  occur  in  one  of  three  ways.  The  first  consists  in  mutual  influence;  the  second  is  to  appoint  a  skillful  workman  to  correct  them  and  synchronize  them  at  all  times;  the  third  is  to  construct  these  clocks  with  such  art  and  precision  that  one  can  be  assured  of  their  subsequent  agreement.”  (Bourdieu  1977:  80).  

Bourdieu  takes  this  image  of  the  two  clocks  as  a  metaphor  for  the  way  actors’  lines  of  action  intersect,  and  their  ability  to  coordinate  their  actions.  The  first  of  these  images,  notes  Bourdieu,  is  the  image  espoused  by  interactionism  and  any  sociology  that  locates  the  locus  of  action  in  the  situation.  Here,  actors  are  constantly  calibrating  meanings  and  lines  of  action  in  relation  to  each  other.  The  second  is  a  simplistic  view  of  power,  with  the  powerful  constantly  nudging  the  world  to  follow  their  interests.  The  third  image,  provocatively,  is  Bourdieu’s.  But  quite  distinct  from  any  metaphysical  law  governing  monads,  it  is  the  habitus—the  deeply  inculcated  “principles  of  vision  and  division,”  as  well  as  the  complicity  between  habitus  and  field—that  plays  the  role  of  the  master  watchmaker.  Thus,  for  Bourdieu,  the  interactionist  view  is  a  naïve  illusion,  blind  to  the  power  of  history  to  shape  our  ways  of  sensing  and  acting  in  the  world:    

“To  describe  the  process  of  objectification  and  orchestration  in  the  language  of  interaction  and  mutual  adjustment  is  to  forget  that  the  interaction  itself  owes  its  form  to  the  objective  structures  which  have  produced  the  dispositions  of  the  interacting  agents  and  which  allot  them  their  relative  

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positions  in  the  interaction  and  elsewhere.  (…)    In  short,  the  habitus,  the  product  of  history,  produces  individual  and  collective  practices,  and  hence  history,  in  accordance  with  the  schemes  engendered  by  history.  The  system  of  dispositions  -­‐  a  past  which  survives  in  the  present  and  tends  to  perpetuate  itself  into  the  future  by  making  itself  present  in  practices  structured  according  to  its  principles.”  (ibid,  81,  82).  

Of  course,  Bourdieu  is  right  in  emphasizing  that  we  do  not  arrive  at  the  interaction  as  blank  slates;  that  we  carry  our  pasts  with  us.  And  yet,  in  the  move  to  the  third  clockwork  image,  Bourdieu  ends  up  jettisoning  interaction.  A  certain  situation  may  propel  actors  to  creatively  activate  specific  disposition,  but  this  creativity  is  not  the  creativity  of  interaction,  but  Wittgenstein’s  (1953)  creativity  of  “following  a  rule.”  Tellingly,  whereas  Bourdieu  starts  by  discussing  interaction,  by  the  end  of  the  section  he  writes  of  practices.    

While  this  clockwork  image  is  a  vivid  exemplification  of  the  notion  of  disposition  and  an  image  of  the  past  as  the  key  to  understanding  what  happens  in  the  situation,  ethnomethodology,  and  its  most  salient  progeny,  conversation  analysis,  presents  the  closest  we  have  to  an  analysis  that  focuses  on  the  temporality  of  the  situation  itself.  In  classical  ethnomethodology,  this  was  done  by  intentionally  “bracketing”  pre-­‐existing  order  and  meaning  (Garfinkel  1967).  As  Garfinkel  argued,  the  challenge  had  always  been  to  show  how—in  a  specific  situation,  with  just  the  resources  at  hand—people  make  their  world  meaningful;  so  show  that  notions  like  “order”  or  “norms”  are  constantly  done  in  situ  rather  than  providing  a  blueprint  for  action.    

This  is,  for  Garfinkel,  why  ethnomethodology  and  sociology  were  “alternate  technologies”  (Garfinkel  1988).  One  analytic  “technology”  focused  on  the  “just-­‐thisness”  of  action  and  interaction,  on  meaning-­‐making  with  all  its  post-­‐hoc  forms  of  reasoning  and  interactional  messiness;  the  other  simplified  the  world  by  assuming  a  pre-­‐existing  social  order  and  shared  meanings,  patterns  that  precede  and  structure  the  situation.    At  their  most  radical,  ethnomethodologists  showed  that  even  the  assumption  that  we  share  a  world  in  common  needed  to  be  done  in  concrete  situations  (Pollner  1987).       While  increasingly  scaling  back  the  radical  avoidance  of  generalization  (see,  Tavory  frth.)  the  study  of  talk-­‐in-­‐interaction—ethnomethodology’s  most  direct  progeny—has  constructed  a  methodologico-­‐theoretical  agenda  that  continues  to  be  highly  suspicious  of  pre-­‐existing  social  and  cultural  patterns  setting  up  the  unfolding  of  interaction.  While  Schegloff  (one  of  the  two  main  architects  of  conversation  analysis)  argued  that  researchers  should  be  attentive  to  the  “balance  between  the  focus  on  social  structure  and  the  focus  on  conversational  structure  in  studying  talk-­‐in-­‐interaction,”  since,  “these  two  thematic  focuses  (we  would  like  to  think)  are  potentially  complementary”  (1991,  57),  they  are  methodologically  separated.  To  take  the  most  important  example  of  such  commitment,  the  meaning  of  any  utterance  in  conversation  analysis  is  always  analyzed  retrospectively,  through  the  way  it  is  responded  to  in  the  next  turn.  Rather  than  assuming  meaning  as  pre-­‐existing,  it  is  methodologically  located  “backwards”  in  interactional  time.  “Culture”  in  this  view,  is  but  a  gloss  on  the  local  production  of  meaning.  It  is  not  only  that  we  

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can’t  assume  to  know  what  actors  meant  in  their  heart  of  hearts,  but  that  meaning  is  importantly  made  retrospectively  within  the  situation.    **    Thinking  through  this  tension  between  dispositional  and  situational  accounts  seems  especially  important  if  one’s  theory  begins  with  interactional  ethnographic  data.  How  can  we  free  interactionism  from  being  locked  in  the  situation  without  analytically  sidelining  what  happens  in  it?  In  other  words,  how  can  interactionism  re-­‐discover  the  aspects  of  the  situation  that  temporally  overflow  it  while  staying  attentive  to  the  situation  and  to  the  real  ways  in  which  that  meanings  and  selves  are  made,  stabilized  and  changed?  

A  first  answer  suggests  itself:  despite  Bourdieu’s  diagnosis,  pragmatism-­‐inspired  interactionism  was  never  as  radically  situational.  Interactionists  never  disavowed  the  pragmatist  emphasis  on  the  crucial  importance  of  actors’  habits  of  thought  and  action  in  structuring  interaction,  even  if  they  downplayed  it  in  their  writing  (Camic  1982).    

Thus,  explicitly  reclaiming  the  pragmatist  emphasis  on  the  importance  of  habits  of  thought  and  action  provides  sociologist  with  one  obvious  way  forward.  For,  if  habits  of  thought  and  action  are  crucial  for  both  selfhood  and  meaning-­‐making,  then  the  we  are  already  on  the  golden  middle-­‐road:  pasts  are  crucial,  but  so  is  creativity  in  interaction.  Indeed,  as  pragmatists  remind  us,  there  can  be  no  creativity  without  habit  (Joas  1996).  Now,  all  we  need  to  do  is  the  “ratios”  of  different  temporalities  within  the  situation—the  relative  weight  of  the  past  and  the  present-­‐progressive  in  structuring  action.    

Such  reclamation  of  habits,  of  course,  does  not  solve  the  tension  as  much  as  it  points  in  a  general  direction.  From  the  dispositional  point  of  view,  it  is  not  by  chance  that  some  of  the  most  important  figures  in  the  current  pragmatist  revival  in  American  sociology  gravitate  so  easily  back  to  Bourdieu  once  they  have  found  their  way  to  habits  (e.g.  Emirbayer  and  Desmond  2015;  Gross  2009),  or  even  that  Bourdieu  himself  could  be  found  to  ally  himself  to  pragmatist  thought  (Bourdieu  and  Wacquant  1992).    

And,  from  the  other  situational  side  of  the  theoretical  divide,  those  who  focus  on  the  unfolding  of  interaction  are  not  likely  to  change  their  theoretical  outlook  even  if  they  freely  admit  that  we  come  into  situations  with  habits,  and  these  habits  are  shared.  Thus,  when  Becker  (1982)  wrote  about  interactionists’  view  culture,  he  likened  it  to  the  set  of  songs  that  jazz  players  come  armed  with  when  they  perform  a  gig.  For  Becker,  although  such  background  knowledge  and  skills  are  necessary,  they  are  dismissed  as  relatively  uninteresting  set  of  background  expectancies  upon  which  the  crucial  crafting  of  meaning  operates  situationally.  If  we  want  to  understand  Jazz  in  the  flesh,  says  Becker,  we  need  to  attend  to  what  actually  happens  during  the  show.  In  short,  by  itself,  an  interactionist  reclamation  of  habits  acts  to  sooth  our  theoretical  misgivings  rather  than  pushing  us  towards  better  accounts  of  what  happens  in  the  situation.  

This  is  not  to  say,  of  course,  that  there  are  no  compelling  accounts  of  interaction  that  try  to  understand  how  these  different  temporalities  intersect.  Thus,  

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for  Fine  (e.g.  1979;  2011),  the  way  forward  is  through  “small  group  culture”—or  idiocultures.  Doing  so,  Fine’s  intellectual  project  melds  “the  past,  which  survives  in  the  present”  and  the  importance  of  situational  emergence  by  empirically  tracing  the  ways  in  which  groups  come  to  develop  shared  histories  and  ways  of  acting.    Idiocultures  give  interaction  the  materials  it  draws  upon,  with  every  new  creative  moment  in  interaction  inscribed  in  group  life  for  further  reference.  Like  earlier  work  on  the  development  of  “group  perspectives”  through  interaction  (Becker.  et  al.  1961),  Fine  shows  that  what  we  call  culture  is  built  through  the  sedimentation  of  the  small  moments  of  interaction.      

Using  a  different  language  and  theoretical  underpinnings,  but  with  a  similar  temporal  logic,  Collins’  (2004)  work  on  interaction-­‐ritual-­‐chains  recruits  Goffman  and  Durkheim  to  show  how  actors’  past  is  emotionally  sedimented  in  a  way  that  shapes  subsequent  interaction.  Using  the  metaphor  of  “emotional  energy”  Collins  argues  that  each  successful  (or  unsuccessful)  interaction  ritual  is  sedimented  in  actors  as  a  store  of  “energy,”  which  then  shapes  the  next  time  they  interact  in  relation  to  a  particular  symbol—all  the  while  still  attentive  to  the  structure  of  the  present  interaction  ritual  itself,  which  may  modify  our  proclivity  to  feel  in  certain  ways  in  the  situation.    

Important  for  our  purposes,  for  both  Fine  and  Collins  actors’  past  formation  (in  interaction  and  ritual)  is  analyzed  chiefly  as  a  layered  set  of  pressures  and  resources  for  sense  making  in  a  present  interaction.  And  while  these  approaches  are  important,  they  are  also  partial.  They  treat  the  formation  of  actors  as  the  antecedent  which  present-­‐interaction  modifies,  crystallizes,  or  amplifies.  The  situation,  in  temporal  terms,  spills  far  into  the  past,  and  more  slightly  forward  into  the  immediate  future  of  action.    

But,  thinking  in  these  temporal  terms,  shows  another  kind  of  situational  shading—into  the  future.  Habits  of  thought  of  action,  though  they  emerge  from  our  histories,  are  potentialities  of  action,  imagination,  and  anticipation.  That  is,  while  we  often  think  of  habits  as  setting  up  tastes,  and  modes  of  seeing  the  world,  habits  are  no  less  about  modes  of  anticipating  trajectories  and  temporal  landscapes—about  our  implicit  and  explicit  orientation  towards  futures.  Such  habits  of  anticipation  and  imagination  are  crucial.        Pitching  into  the  Future    That  action  is  pitched  into  a  future  does  not  quite  come  as  a  shock.  Any  account  of  human  action  or  “agency”  requires  us  to  think  about  our  constant  movement  forward  in  time  (see,  e.g.,  Emirbayer  and  Mische  1998;  Giddens  1984;  Hitlin  and  Elder  2007;  Hitlin  and  Kirkpatrick  Johnson  2015).  A  movement  into  the  future  is  inherent  in  the  structure  of  meaning  making,  an  important  aspect  of  pragmatist  semiotics  (Peirce  1992-­‐1999).    The  semiotic  triad  that  Peirce  describes  as  constitutive  of  meaning  making  has  temporal  movement  as  one  of  its  “three  legs,”  captured  by  his  description  of  the  “interpretant,”  the  effect  of  the  sign-­‐object  which  turns  into  the  sign  for  the  next  iteration  of  meaning  making.      

The  way  we  are  pitched  into  the  future  organizes  our  actions  at  any  given  moment,  and  makes  them  legible.  Think  of  our  own  work.  Professors  tell  graduate  

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students  not  to  publish  in  edited  volumes  because  of  how  their  CV  will  be  read;  Assistant  professors  sometimes  confess  to  be  working  on  projects  that  bore  them  to  tears  while  fantasizing  about  their  “post  tenure  project”;  graduate  students  “network”  at  conferences  in  the  vague  hope  that  it  will  pay  dividends  come  job-­‐market  time.  Understanding  any  situation  requires  a  rudimentary  understanding  of  both  explicit  imaginaries  of  the  future,  and  the  implicit  and  well-­‐grooved  anticipations  of  what  would  happen  next.    

More  theoretically,  a  number  of  the  core  accounts  of  action  in  sociology  have  tried  to  parse  out  the  implications  of  our  future  orientation,  and  the  analytic  variation  in  what  the  term  connotes.  Thus,  criticism  of  his  “clockwork  image”  aside.  Bourdieu’s  early  work  (1963;  1973)  has  shown  the  importance  of  the  relation  between  poor  Algerians’  disintegration  of  the  immediate  “sense  of  the  game”  and  their  long-­‐term  projects  under  colonialism;  the  very  notion  of  a  “sense  of  the  game,”  an  important  aspect  of  his  theorization  of  the  “habitus,”  includes  the  immediate  way  in  which  actors  anticipate  their  future—what  phenomenologists  called  their  “protentions”  (e.g.,  Bourdieu  1977;  2000).  Alfred  Schutz  (Schutz  and  Luckmann  1973)  was  intensely  interested  in  the  way  we  structure  our  action  in  the  future,  how  we  imagine  future  scenarios  in  the  future-­‐past  tense  as  actions  we  “will  have  done,”  how  these  imaginations  vary  in  the  richness  of  their  details  and  their  concreteness  according  to  how  close  or  far  they  are  from  our  lifeworld,  as  well  as  how  our  protentions  are  socially  structured.  And,  more  recently,  there  is  a  new  surge  of  interest  in  how  we  are  pitched  into  the  future,  drawing  on  the  image  of  the  “risk  society”—a  society  that  has  changed  its  relation  to  the  future  as  it  is  increasingly  pitched  into  uncertainty,  constantly  needing  to  come  to  terms  with  future  effects  of  its  actions  (e.g.  Beck  1992).    

More  recently,  Ann  Mische’s  (1998;  2014)  ongoing  work  on  the  dimensions  of  projectivity  (such  as  clarity,  contingency  or  volition)  provides  a  set  of  transposable  considerations  for  the  way  future-­‐imaginations  structure  our  understanding  of  possible  courses  of  action.  And,  in  another  theoretical  project,  John  Hall  ‘s  (e.g.  2016)  has  been  developing  a  structural  phenomenological  account  of  time,  examining  the  way  in  which  different  notions  of  time—diachronic,  strategic,  and  pre-­‐  and  post-­‐apocalyptic—intersect.    

While  the  above  are  all  crucial  contributions,  they  do  not  pay  much  attention  to  interaction.  While  there  is  action  aplenty—after  all,  the  Weberian  “project”  is  a  future-­‐leaning  term—there  is  less  work  on  the  way  in  which  futures  are  analytically  important  for  understanding  how  it  plays  into  the  co-­‐construction  of  meaning  in  the  back  and  forth  of  interaction.    And,  equally  important,  how  taking  interaction  seriously  changes  the  way  we  theorize  the  future.  

One  corrective  is  thus  to  pay  careful  attention  not  only  to  what  occurs  in  interaction,  but  to  the  expectations  that  may  play  out  within  them.  A  poignant  and  troubling  exemplification  of  this  point  comes  from  a  study  of  unwanted  sex,  (Ford-­‐van  Ness,  nd).  As  the  author  shows  through  interview  data  with  women  who  had  unwanted  sex,  women  sometimes  went  through  such  sexual  encounters  because  they  were  afraid  that  if  they  try  to  put  a  stop  to  them,  the  situations  will  turn  into  violent  rape.  That  was,  significantly,  even  when  there  was  no  sign  that  the  interaction  would  turn  violent.  Instead,  in  an  important  specification  for  what  the  

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moniker  “rape  culture”  may  interactionally  mean,  a  constantly  impending  possibility  of  rape  loomed  over  sexual  encounters.  Rape  was  constantly  imagined  “in  the  next  turn“  of  interaction.    

But  there  is  also  a  sense  in  which  taking  interaction  seriously  allows  us  to  theorize  our  relation  to  the  future  anew.  Taking  a  step  in  that  direction,  in  previous  work  (Tavory  and  Eliasoph  2013),  Nina  Eliasoph  and  I  tried  to  specify  this  interactional  relevance  by  laying  out  the  modalities  of  future  orientations  that  actors  need  to  coordinate.  We  specified  three  such  modalities.  First,  following  classical  phenomenology,  actors  are  constantly  engaged  in  “protention”:  pitched  to  the  immediate  shading  of  the  present  into  the  future.    This  sense  of  the  impending  future  is  different  than  the  trajectories  actors  implicitly  or  explicitly  imagine.  Some  of  these  trajectories  are  explicit—the  projects  we  construct;  others  are  more  naturalized:  high  school  is  a  4-­‐year  affair,  where  every  year  “automatically”  follows  the  others  (we  even  have  words  like  “freshman”  or  “sophomore”  to  follow  this  transition).  Lastly,  some  trajectories  are  so  general  and  naturalized  that  they  feel  like  the  neutral  temporal  landscape  upon  which  trajectories  and  protentions  take  place—e.g.  the  days  of  the  week,  or  our  location  in  relation  to  the  impending  apocalypse  (or,  more  optimistically,  rapture)  that  some  religious  groups  anticipate  (see,  e.g.  Adam  1990;  Zerubavel  1989).    

While  these  different  modalities  of  the  future  are  culled  from  others,  taking  interaction  seriously  allows  us  to  see  that  these  are  not  simply  nested  aspects  of  futurity.  Thus,  for  example,  David  Gibson’s  (2011)  work  on  the  deliberations  surrounding  the  Cuban  missile  crisis  shows  that  actors  can  coordinate  their  protentions  perfectly,  while  hurting  their  ability  to  coordinate  a  shared  project  (avoiding  nuclear  holocaust,  in  this  case).  When  negotiators  attended  each  other’s  talk,  following  the  endogenous  pressures  of  interaction,  they  often  precluded  the  deliberation  of  important  scenarios—an  oversight  that  could  have  had  catastrophic  effects.  Thus,  while  trajectories  are  made  through  protentions,  interactional  pressures  mean  that  they  are  not  always  aligned.       Similarly,  as  Eliasoph  (2011)  shows  in  her  study  of  youth  volunteers,  the  fact  that  some  of  these  volunteers  were  middle  class  kids  on  their  way  to  college,  while  other  were  “high  risk”  youth,  often  mattered  for  interaction  in  unexpected  ways.  While  youth  volunteers  could  usually  coordinate  their  action,  at  certain  junctures,  the  imagination  of  how  action  was  connected  to  futures—buffing  up  their  CVs  for  college  vs.  “staying  out  of  trouble—created  moments  of  tension  that  needed  to  be  smoothed  over.    

This,  as  we  return  to  in  more  detail  below,  means  that  we  have  to  incorporate  potentiality,  imagination  and  anticipation  into  the  analysis  of  “the  situation.”  Although  there  are,  as  Goffman  and  others  showed,  interactional  pressures  endogenous  to  the  situation,  these  are  importantly  modulated  by  our  imaginations  and  anticipations.  To  return  to  the  example  of  Ford  Van-­‐Ness,  while  there  are  Goffmanian  pressures  toward  “interactional  smoothness”  in  any  situation  and  people  often  don’t  stop  a  sexual  encounter  simply  because  it  “would  be  weird”  (Ford  Van-­‐Ness  frth.),  such  endogenous  pressures  become  all  the  more  pressing  when  coupled  with  the  threat  of  swift  change  in  the  definition  of  the  situation.  Thus,  a  “situation”  is  never  contained.  It  emerges  from  the  past  through  our  habits  of  

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thought  and  action  and  sends  its  tentacles  into  a  future  without  which  we  cannot  understand  its  shape.    Rhythms  and  Social  Life    So  far,  we  have  talked  about  the  future  in  a  relatively  linear  way.  Whether  in  terms  of  protentions,  trajectories  or  temporal  landscapes  it  seems  as  if  we  move  forward  in  time,  so  that  even  in  the  tiny  moments  of  protention  things  are  propelled  inextricably  forward.  Most  expectations  of  social  life  are  not  so  linear.  People  instead  experience  their  life  in  a  “wave  form”  (Bachelard  2000,  145).  While  we  move  forward  in  time,  we  spiral  through  the  familiar  rather  than  take  a  beeline  to  our  destination.  Most  domains  of  our  life  are  rhythmic,  a  “patterned  movement  of  presences  and  absences”  (Snyder  2012,  16).  Both  the  calendars  of  religious  and  secular  life  are  rhythmic  (Eliade  2005;  Leach  1961).  The  time  for  festivals  and  commemorations  recur,  rituals  are  re-­‐enacted.  All  great  historical  moments  and  personages,  apparently,  appear  at  least  twice.    

To  invoke  the  classics  (itself  a  rhythm  of  sorts),  for  Durkheim  our  very  experience  of  time  emerges  out  of  the  presences  and  absences  of  the  sacred  and  the  profane  (1965  [1912]).    As  Susanne  Langer  (1953,  127)  put  it,  “one  can  sense  a  beginning,  intent,  and  consummation,  and  see  in  the  last  stage  of  one  the  condition  and  indeed  the  rise  of  another.  Rhythm  is  the  setting-­‐  up  of  new  tensions  by  the  resolution  of  former  ones.”  

These  rhythms  are  intimately  familiar.  Come  August,  there’s  the  ASA.  And  so,  we  tell  ourselves  we  will  be  well  prepared  for  once.  But,  yet  again,  we  find  that  summer  intervenes.  Yet  again,  we  scramble  at  the  last  minute.  Yet  again,  we  wish  we  could  have  done  better.  And,  yet  again,  we  then  rush  to  prepare  and  update  our  classes,  which  start  all  too  soon.  As  a  colleague  put  on  his  facebook  page  as  I  was  writing,  “academic  calendars  should  change  the  name  on  this  month's  entry  to  ‘Holy  shit  it's  August.’”  And  then,  there  are  other  rhythms  of  academic  teaching:  the  excitement  of  beginning,  the  shock  around  week  seven  when  we  realize  that  half  of  the  semester  is  over,  the  fatigue  that  sets  (optimistically)  around  week  eight,  the  desperation  of  week  nine,  or  the  dash  of  the  last  two  weeks.  Similarly,  in  the  business  world,  there  are  quarterly  rhythms  at  play—the  usual  lethargy  or  soul  searching  of  Q4,  the  dedicated  optimism  of  Q1,  and  the  frantic  rhythms  of  work  at  Q2  and  Q3.  

Rhythms,  as  Zerubavel  has  shown  (1985;  1989)  are  crucial  for  our  coordination  of  action.  This  is  true  both  for  the  way  we  imagine  our  temporal  landscapes  as  for  more  mundane  expectations  of  organizations,  social  worlds  and  relationships.  Thus,  while  the  French  revolutionaries  made  deep  changes  to  French  society,  their  attempt  to  change  the  week  has  been  a  dismal  failure,  as  it  was  deeply  woven  into  the  fabric  of  market-­‐days,  and  other  communal  activities.  Organizations,  as  he  has  shown  earlier,  can  be  understood  precisely  as  a  coordination  of  different  rhythms  that  both  patients  and  staff  live  through.    

Similarly,  a  “social  world”  can  be  defined  precisely  as  a  set  of  rhythms.  As  I  tried  to  work  through  (Tavory  2016),  the  experiential  “density”  of  the  Orthodox  Jewish  neighborhood  I  studied  came  precisely  through  the  overlapping  of  rhythms.  

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The  schools,  the  synagogues,  the  observances  of  the  holidays,  the  religious  classes  and  life-­‐course  events  all  “colluded”  so  that  actors  were  constantly  summoned  into  being  in  a  myriad  of  complementary  ways.    Coser’s  (1973)  evocative  notion  of  a  “greedy  institution”  pulling  people  in  both  in  terms  of  identification  and  action,  can  be  specified  precisely  through  looking  at  the  relationship  among  these  rhythms,  and  the  identifications  they  evoke.  A  “greedy  social  world”  such  as  the  one  I  described,  emerges  through  the  thick  overlaying  of  rhythms.  And  while  these  rhythms  may  clash  at  points  (should  I  go  to  one  synagogue  event  or  another?  Where  should  I  invest  my  tithe?),  they  evoke  a  similar  identification.      

This  kind  of  analysis,  mapping  the  way  in  which  actors’  experience  of  social  life  is  comprised  of  different  rhythms  coming  together  and  drawing  apart,  is  indebted  to  LeFebvre  (2004).  As  he  put  it  in  his  Rhythmanalysis,  much  of  social  life  can  be  captured  in  terms  of  the  relationships  between  different  rhythms.  Whether  it  is  the  inculcation  of  personal  rhythms  in  what  LeFebvre  called  the  “dressage”  of  social  life,  or  the  wider  intersection  of  rhythms  (some  of  which  are  social,  others  natural)  through  which  we  live.  This  theorization  of  social  life,  in  turn,  defines  new  objects  of  analysis.  There  are,  rarely,  moments  of  “eurythmia,”  when  different  rhythms  lives  seamlessly  come  together  (on  the  level  of  identification,  the  example  of  my  work  above  may  be  such  a  case).  But  there  are  also,  much  more  commonly,  situations  in  which  multiple  rhythms  take  place  side  by  side,  or  situations  of  “arrhythmia,”  when  the  rhythms  we  live  through  clash.    

Such  a  clashing  of  rhythms  structures  Snyder’s  (2016)  work  on  the  work  of  truck  drivers.  As  Snyder  shows,  truck  drivers  are  located  between  two  kinds  of  temporal  rhythms.  On  the  one  hand  are  the  rhythms  imposed  upon  them  by  federal  “hours  of  service”  work  regulations,  which  dictates  periods  in  which  they  need  to  rest  and  work.  T  hey  cannot  work  more  than  14  hours  straight,  and  must  rest  for  10  hours  after  11  hours  of  driving.  On  the  other  hand,  however,  are  the  rhythms  of  freight  work—of  loading  and  unloading,  of  fluctuations  in  traffic,  of  night  and  day.  Snyder  shows  that  these  rhythms  rarely  align.  Instead,  the  hours  of  service  regulations  supposed  to  get  the  drivers  to  rest  more  and  drive  safely  come  to  mean  that  they  often  feel  like  they  need  to  use  all  the  allotted  driving  time  even  if  they  are  tired,  and  spend  long  times  without  driving  when  wait  times  make  them  “go  over”  their  14  hours.  Thus,  as  Snyder  shows,  the  clash  of  rhythms  is  translated  to  even  longer  hours  of  wakefulness,  and  makes  it  harder  to  make  ends  meet.  The  drivers’  bodies  and  salaries  end  up  bearing  the  cost  of  arrhythmia.    

 Between  Situations    While  the  above  shows  that  rhythms  are  important,  the  question  is  still  what,  if  anything,  this  rhythmic  approach  means  for  an  interactionist  project  and  for  sociological  theory  more  generally.    

As  with  the  encroachment  of  the  past  through  the  pragmatist  notion  of  habits,  one  poignant  lesson  is  that  interactionists  cannot  limit  themselves  to  the  present-­‐progressive  confines  of  the  situation.  While  the  “Jazz”  of  social  action  occurs  in  interaction,  the  embodied  memories  that  actors  bring  with  them  to  the  situation,  and  how  they  anticipate  the  situation  in  relation  to  future  situations  (which  is,  again,  

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a  habit  of  sorts)  is  crucial  for  casting  it.  Playing  a  regular  gig  in  a  small  dive  bar  will  be  different  if  the  players  know  that  a  recording  studio  agent  is  sitting  in  the  audience.  And,  once  we  acknowledge  that  such  anticipations  are  patterned,  this  necessarily  takes  us  back  to  something  like  the  notion  of  culture.  While  interactionists  still  need  to  show  which  pasts  and  futures  are  relevant  in  interaction,  any  accounting  of  the  situation  that  ignores  these  shared  patterns  of  meaning  would  be  incomplete.    

At  this  point,  two  intertwined  critiques  may  be  leveled  against  the  project  developed  in  this  paper.  The  one  culturalist,  the  other  analytic.  From  the  first  point  of  view,  one  can  read  this  work  as  a  late  interactionist  mea  culpa.  We  should  have  looked  at  culture  more  carefully  to  begin  with.  And  now,  in  a  long-­‐winded  way,  we  are  finally  re-­‐discovering  the  wheel.  The  second  critique,  coming  from  a  very  different  sensibility,  would  be  something  like  the  following:  despite  their  limitations,  theories  of  interaction  and  the  interaction  order  have  gotten  us  traction  precisely  because  they  shaved  away—methodologically  and  analytically—aspects  of  both  pasts  and  futures.  Now,  in  a  kind  of  Borges-­‐like  dash  to  capture  reality  in  all  its  complexity,  we  are  adding  layers.  But  with  each  addition,  the  analytic  power  of  our  description  diminishes.  And,  at  the  end  we  may  have  good  description  of  what  occurs  within  a  particular  interaction,  but  very  little  analytic  purchase  on  general  patterns  of  social  life.  

Both  these  critiques  are  useful.  If  indeed  we  lose  the  dynamics  of  interaction  in  our  effort  to  incorporate  its  future  we  would  be  trading  the  futures  for  what  made  interactionism  interesting  to  begin  with.  Nor  is  point  to  “complicate”  interactionist  analysis.  Simply  adding  complexity  for  its  own  sake,  as  Healy  (2017)  notes  in  his  understated  critique,  is  analytically  unhelpful.    

Rather,  my  argument  is  that  by  being  more  attentive  to  rhythms  some  of  the  core  theoretical  questions  can  be  approached  in  a  new  ways,  help  us  define  new  questions  and  craft  new  solutions  for  old  questions.  First,  within  the  confines  of  interactionist  theory.  What  does  it  mean  for  the  interaction  order  that  we  are  pitched  into  the  future?  Do  futures  simply  modify  the  pressures  of  the  present  progressive,  or  do  they  change  them  more  radically?  Second,  and  more  generally,  thinking  between  situations  should  also  change  the  way  we  think  about  culture.  Locating  actors  between  situations  needs  to  add  something  to  the  way  we  understand  meaning  making  more  generally.  

In  short,  for  the  approach  developed  here  to  be  more  than  a  theorist’s  version  of  inside  baseball,  it  needs  to  make  a  difference.  Below  I  map  out  two  theoretical  problems  that  this  approach  helps  us  think  through.  Following  the  considerations  above,  I  have  chosen  puzzles  that  are  embedded  in  two  different  sociological  worlds—one  relates  to  core  aspects  of  interactionist  theory,  the  other  to  tenets  of  cultural  sociology.      Disruptions  as  constitutive  of  the  interaction  order    The  first  problem,  culled  from  ongoing  work  with  Gary  Fine  (Tavory  and  Fine,  nd)  is  that  of  importance  of  disruption  to  the  interaction  order.  In  interactionism,  from  the  symbolic  interaction  of  the  Chicago  school,  through  the  work  of  Goffman,  as  well  as  

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in  conversation  analysis,  the  pressures  of  interaction  are  towards  a  “successful,”  smooth,  exchange.  For  Chicago-­‐interactionists,  negotiating  and  reaching  a  shared  definition  of  the  situation  was  paramount;  in  Goffman’s  early  work  (e.g.  1959;  1967)  “the  veneer  of  consensus”  is  both  a  practical  requirement  of  interaction  and  an  aspect  of  what  Rawls  (1987)  insightfully  described  as  a  “communicative  morality”  of  interaction.  Theoretically,  the  focus  on  smoothness  both  allowed  interactionists  to  theorize  how  lines  of  action  are  brought  together  and  coordinated,  as  well  as  the  mundane  and  artful  ways  in  which  we  achieve  intersubjectivity—the  capacity  (even  if  limited)  to  experience  the  other.    

The  problem  with  this  image,  however,  is  that  both  the  coordination  of  action  and  intersubjectivity  rarely  arise  through  the  smoothness  of  interaction  alone.  First  is  the  problem  of  intersubjectivity.  There  is  compelling  work  in  conversation  analysis  about  the  ways  in  which  people  constantly  calibrate  their  talk,  and  thus  repair  disjunctures  in  interaction  to  achieve  intersubjectivity  (see,  Sacks,  Schegloff  and  Jefferson  1974;  Schegloff  1992).  The  mechanics  of  turn-­‐taking  and  especially  “interactional  repair,”  as  Schegloff  poetically  put  it,  are  the  “last  structurally  provided  defense  of  intersubjectivity.”    

We  note,  however,  that  a  completely  smooth  interaction  may  be  quite  unnerving  precisely  from  the  point  of  view  of  intersubjectivity.  If  the  other  party  to  interaction  constantly  agrees  with  us,  we  may  slowly  come  to  suspect  that  there  is  nothing  behind  the  veneer  of  consensus  and  that  we  do  not  actually  know  with  whom  we  are  talking—what  we  call  “the  cocktail  party  dilemma.”i  Smoothness  can  thus  create  problems  of  intersubjectivity  much  as  it  can  solve  them.  Not  simply  a  matter  of  theoretical  speculation,  these  kinds  of  interactional  problems  routinely  emerge  in  situations  where  smoothness  is  best  achieved.    

Rather  than  smoothens  alone,  we  argue  that  intersubjectivity,  especially  in  ongoing  relationships,  emerges  from  the  back  and  forth  between  moments  of  smoothness  and  disruption,  through  the  ways  in  which  actors  challenge  each  others’  definition  of  the  situation  and  the  definition  of  the  actors  populating  it,  recalibrating  it  over  and  again  (see  also  Katz  1999).  While  interactional  disruption  is  theorized  as  a  disruption-­‐of  the  interaction,  such  disruptions  are  often  productive  disruptions-­‐for  interaction.     But  it  is  in  the  coordination  of  action  where  the  importance  of  futures  comes  to  the  fore.  The  idea  that  a  “veneer  of  consensus”  coordinates  action  in  the  situation  is  powerful.  But  smoothness,  in  itself,  coordinates  action  only  within  the  situation.  Indeed,  in  a  fleeting  situation,  where  parties  will  probably  not  see  each  other  again,  smoothness  is  the  most  important  way  to  coordinate  action  (although,  interestingly,  it  is  also  where  repercussions  of  disruption  may  be  minimal).  The  focus  on  smoothness  is  intimately  connected  to  the  assumption  that  the  interaction  order  needs  to  “stay  within”  the  bounds  of  the  situation.  However,  if  we  assume  that  actors  live  between  situations—that  they  need  not  only  coordinate  their  present  situation,  but  also  anticipate  their  futures—the  importance  of  interactional  disruption  comes  to  the  fore.    

In  this  sense,  relationships  appear  as  anticipatory,  rhythmic,  structures.  An  interaction  with  a  close  family  member—even  if  the  interaction  is  fractious—is  usually  assumed  to  be  one  moment  in  a  cadence  of  interactions.  Whether  or  not  we  

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disrupt  the  interaction,  even  quite  radically,  we  assume  we  will  see  each  other  again,  come  the  holiday  season  or  thanksgiving.  Indeed,  keeping  with  a  Goffmanian  “morality  of  interaction”  in  such  situations  may  itself  seem  to  be  an  affront.  As  Tannen  (2001)  puts  it,  intimate  relationships  are  often  marked  precisely  by  disruption.  The  adage  “I  am  only  saying  this  because  I  love  you,”  clichéd  as  it  is,  points  towards  the  complex  relationship  between  the  interactional  moment,  and  broader  relational  expectations.  Thus,  even  if  the  interaction  is  disrupted,  the  relationship  may  not  be.    Actors,  within  the  confines  of  the  situation  itself,  will  expect  it  to  be  stitched  together  later.    

Thus,  the  people  experience  the  interaction  as  part  of  a  rhythm  of  interaction  that  forms  a  relationship  is  crucial  for  the  theory  if  interaction.  It  means  that  the  pressures  of  interaction  towards  smoothness  are  variable,  and  that  for  most  interactions,  the  question  is  how  moments  of  smoothness  and  disruption  alternate.  In  that,  it  opens  up  questions  that  interactionists  have  often  been  reluctant  to  take  on—it  assumes  that  cultural  expectations  necessarily  invade  the  situation  and  opens  up  questions  about  the  distribution  of  the  ability  to  disrupt  situations.  It  does  so,  importantly,  from  within  interactionist  theory.  For  it  is  not  simply  that  smoothness  is  the  domain  of  interaction,  and  disruption  where  broader  cultural  and  relational  expectations  come  to  the  fore.  It  is,  rather,  that  the  alternation  between  smoothness  is  what  the  interactionist  order  is  made  of.    Boundaries  and  Distinctions      While  the  issue  of  “disruption”  allows  us  to  see  that  cultural  and  relational  anticipations  and  rhythms  are  a  crucial  aspect  of  the  interaction  order,  the  second  problem  I  would  like  to  raise  here  takes  on  a  problem  not  in  interactionist  theory,  but  in  the  sociology  of  culture.  That  is:  how  to  conceptualize  the  lived  relationship  between  boundaries  and  distinctions,  two  ways  in  which  sociologists  think  about  the  way  in  which  actors  construct  social  difference.  

Both  these  understandings  of  difference  have  their  root  in  the  De-­‐Saussureian  semiotic  tradition  (see  De  Saussure  1986  [1916]).  That  is,  the  powerful  idea  that  stuff  is  defined  by  its  relation  to  what  it  is  not.  A  horse  is  not  a  zebra;  a  cat  is  not  a  dog;  the  phoneme  “ma”  is  not  the  phoneme  “ba.”  The  idea,  however,  was  developed  in  two  complementary  ways.  First,  as  binary  boundaries  between  what  is  “in”  and  what  is  “out”  of  a  category;  second,  as  a  field  of  differences  where  things  are  organized  not  in  binary  fashion,  but  in  a  system  of  complex  hierarchies  and  struggles.  To  put  it  in  the  language  Marion  Fourcade  (2016)  used  in  this  forum  two  years  ago,  it  is  the  difference  between  a  nominal  and  an  ordinal  organization  of  differences—those  referring  to  a  difference  in  essence  and  those  referring  to  a  difference  in  relative  position.  

Although  already  apparent  in  Durkheim’s  work  on  classification  (which  influenced  de  Saussure  to  begin  with),  the  notion  of  boundaries  appeared  in  the  form  we  know  it  later  on.  From  political  and  historical  sociology,  it  re-­‐emerged  through  Barth’s  (1969)  study  of  nationalism,  where  he  shows  that  groups  are  defined  by  “the  others”  across  the  border.  And,  from  the  point  of  view  of  our  use  to  categories  more  generally,  this  semiotic  idea  has  been  important  to  cognitive  

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sociology,  with  its  focus  on  what  we  lump  together  and  what  we  split  apart  (Zerubavel  1996).    

Using  the  language  of  boundaries,  this  tradition  has  been  given  two  of  its  most  important  treatments  in  Lamont  and  Molnar’s  (2002)  review  of  the  literature  on  social  and  symbolic  boundaries,  and  in  the  work  by  Bowker  and  Star  (1999)  about  categorization.  In  both  these  pieces,  boundaries  serve  as  a  powerful  way  of  thinking  about  social  life  since,  bringing  different  sociological  questions  together.  Bowker  and  Star  flit  between    subjects  as  different  as  racial  classification  and  forestry;  Lamont  and  Molnar  build  their  review  precisely  by  moving  among  subjects,  and  insisting  on  the  differentiation  between  the  institutional  enactment  of  boundaries  in  the  form  of  “social  boundaries”  and  the  kind  of  “symbolic  boundaries”  done  in  talk.    

The  second  semiotic  notion  that  has  been  crucial  to  sociologists  is  that  of  “distinction.”  This  term,  in  turn,  is  intimately  connected  to  that  of  “field,”  a  metaphor  ambiguously  set  between  that  of  a  game  and  a  physicist’s  magnetic  field  (Martin  2003)  and  connoting  a  relational  structure  of  positions.  As  with  boundaries,  positions  are  defined  by  where  they  are  not.  But  a  field  is  a  much  more  complex  space,  raising  the  question  of  relative  position—of  distinction.  A  field  implies  multiple  locations  in  relation  to  a  center,  defined  as  the  position  from  which  one  can  legitimately  define  the  good.  Rather  than  an  idealized  binary,  a  field  is  a  multi-­‐dimensional  totem  pole,  with  different  actors  vying  to  both  move  to  the  center  of  the  field,  as  well  as  to  re-­‐define  the  field  so  that  where  they  happen  to  be  is  retroactively  defined  as  its  center.  And  whereas  some  notions  of  field  use  it  mainly  as  a  category  of  analysis  (e.g.  DiMaggio  and  Powell  1983;  Fligstein  and  McAdam  2012)  the  notion  play  within  fields  as  they  create  distinctions  is  crucial  for  Bourdieu.  

 Thus,  while  the  theorization  of  boundaries  and  of  fields  are  both  important  (and  often  to  the  same  sociologists),  the  differences  between  the  way  them  have  not  received  as  much  attention  (cf.  Fourcade  2016).    The  Bourdieusian  notion  of  distinction  assumes  a  shared  good,  and  some  sort  of  shared  definition  of  what  it  means  to  be  “at  the  center.”  There  is  an  “Illusio”  that  gives  a  field  its  relative  coherence  as  a  field.  We  can  define  the  good  in  academia  in  different  ways,  but  not  in  endless  ways,  and  the  importance  of  producing  knowledge,  of  publishing,  or  teaching,  and  the  structures  of  consecration  around  them  bind  as  a  field.  Boundaries,  on  the  other  hand,  which  define  the  in-­‐group  and  the  out-­‐group,  make  no  such  assumptions  about  commonality.    

A  field  thus  cannot  be  described  as  a  complex  set  of  boundaries  set  in  space.  Fields  and  boundaries  do  not  connote  levels  of  “granularity”  of  the  same  phenomena  but  different  theoretical  insights  and  existential  relationships  from  the  point  of  view  of  actors.  In  other  words,  although  boundaries  and  distinctions  are  obviously  sociological  “categories  of  analysis,”  they  make  certain  assumptions  about  the  experience  of  actors  that  go  with  them.  Given  that  the  “making  of  a  difference”  is  central  to  symbolic  boundaries,  it  assumes  that  when  people  make  such  boundaries,  they  experience  the  world—if  only  momentarily—in  binary  fashion.  On  the  hand,  given  that  a  shared  illusio  is  central  to  Bourdieusian  distinction,  we  assume  that  as  actors  make  the  distinctions  while  “sensing”  (explicitly  or  implicitly)  that  they  are  tied  together  within  the  same  field.    

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All  of  this,  finally,  leads  us  to  the  problem,  which  emerged  for  me  as  I  was  doing  my  ethnographic  work  on  the  Orthodox  Jewish  residents  in  a  neighborhood  in  Los  Angeles  (Tavory  2016).  In  any  specific  ethnographic  case,  the  difference  between  a  “boundary”  and  a  “distinction”  seemed  to  lose  its  contours.    What  seemed  like  a  sharp  boundary  sometimes  “behaves”  like  a  distinction;  and,  most  prominently,  what  seemed  at  times  to  be  a  distinction  ethnographically  seemed  like  a  boundary  in  many  situations.    Thus,  for  example,  although  the  distinction  between  “Jew”  and  “non-­‐Jew”  can  be  described  as  the  key  symbolic  (and  social)  boundary  for  Orthodox  Jews,  I  have  been  to  conversations  in  which  Orthodox  Jews  described  conservative  Evangelical  Christians  as,  basically,  “one  of  us”—especially  when  it  came  to  gay  marriage  (which  almost  all  the  Orthodox  Jews  I  talked  to  opposed).  And  then,  again,  some  of  the  most  important  axes  of  distinction  in  the  neighborhood—between  different  strands  of  Orthodoxy,  between  newly  religious  and  those  born  to  Orthodox  families,  between  Orthodox  and  Reform  Jews—where  often  enacted  as  sharp  boundaries.      

What  then,  is  the  relationship  between  boundaries  and  distinctions.  Is  it,  simply,  that  differences  are  “sometimes”  enacted  as  boundaries  and  sometimes  as  distinctions?  This  would  seem  to  fit  the  empirical  evidence,  but  it  completely  ignores  the  way  that  actors  understood  their  own  lives.  Thus,  when  actors  reflected  on  their  community,  this  form  of  blurring  was  often  clarified  (yes,  it  really  as  only  for  Orthodox  Jews;  And  yes,  although  he  may  be  lower  on  the  totem  pole,  a  newly  religious  member  was  obviously  “one  of  us”).  And,  beyond  these  reflective  moments,  even  while  people  enacted  one  kind  of  difference  they  were  aware  of  the  other  situations  in  which  these  differences  are  made  differently.  Thus,  even  as  people  told  me  that  they  felt  like  “outsiders,”  they  simultaneously  seldom  doubted  whether  that  they  “really”  were  bona  fide  Orthodox  members.    

In  other  words,  actors  were  aware  of  the  rhythms  of  situations  in  which  these  differences  were  enacted,  and  understood  the  situational  formations  of  difference  in  this  light.  Whether  a  particular  difference  is  understood  as  a  boundary  or  as  a  distinction  is  the  outcome  not  only  of  the  situational  enactment—although  it  is  surely  important—but  also  in  the  way  that  actors  understand  this  situational  enactment  in  relation  to  the  rhythm  of  other  situations  that  they  anticipate.  Thus,  for  example,  while  a  newly  religious  person  would  be  of  lesser  status,  they  would  count  for  the  daily  quorum,  take  part  in  classes  offered,  be  counted  as  dues-­‐paying  synagogue  members.  Thus,  while  a  situational  boundary  was  indeed  constructed  between  groups  in  some  situations,  it  was  transcended  in  many  others,  and  it  impossible  to  understand  the  experience  of  difference  without  taking  these  rhythms  into  account.  

If  we  are  to  understand  the  way  differences  are  made  and  experienced,  then,  we  need  to  take  into  account  both  the  situational  structure  of  difference-­‐making  and  how  this  situational  enactment  is  related  to  other  situations  anticipated  by  actors.  It  is  this  interplay  that  makes  this  approach  a  theoretically  and  empirically  generative  one,  rather  than  only  one  that  settles  situational  evidence  and  interview  data.    This  is  because  this  approach  knits  in  historical  instability  and  the  possibility  of  change  into  the  fabric  of  meaning  making.  Since  interactions  have  their  creative  potential,  and  since  the  rhythms  overlap,  changes  in  one  set  of  situations—either  caused  by  

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external  shocks,  or  caused  by  the  creativity  of  interaction—can  shift  the  experience  of  difference  radically.    

It  is  this  sense  that  this  rhythmic  reorientation  of  the  relationship  between  boundaries  and  distinctions  may  prove  useful.  We  do  not,  as  yet,  have  a  good  account  of  why  it  is  that  in  some  situations  seemingly  minor  shifts  produce  what  seem  to  be  large-­‐scale  cultural  changes  (e.g.  the  acceptance  of  gay  marriage  in  the  US).    A  rhythmic  approach  allows  us  to  both  understand  the  stability  of  cultural  categories  despite  their  situational  breaching—understood  against  a  backdrop  of  rhythmic  anticipations—but  also  why  changes  can  emerge  from  small  situational  changes.  To  remain  with  example  of  Orthodox  Jewry  presented  here,  if  a  certain  religious  community  would  decide  that,  since  they  cannot  know  the  newly  religious  person’s  marriage  history,  they  can’t  trust  them  to  be  part  of  their  prayer  quorum  (perhaps  there  is  a  non-­‐Jew,  or  a  non-­‐kosher  divorce  and  wedding  in  their  family’s  past,  rendering  them  non-­‐Jewish  or  a  “bastard”),  then  their  position  would  probably  change  radically.  What  used  to  be  understood  as  a  distinction  would  become  understood  as  a  boundary,  even  if  this  difference  would  still  be  enacted  as  a  distinction  in  some  situations.  As  the  expectations  about  the  rhythms  of  interaction  shift,  the  entire  experience  of  difference  changes.      Anticipated  Directions    This  article  argued  that  taking  anticipation  and  the  rhythms  of  interaction  seriously  does  more  than  add  another  ingredient  to  the  sociological  cookbook.  The  habits  of  anticipation  and  imagination  we  carry  with  us,  and  the  organizations  of  the  institutions  we  are  enmeshed  in,  lean  into  the  future.  The  situation,  the  mise  en  scene  of  interactionism,  thus  needs  to  be  opened  up.  The  situation  spills  over  into  its  anticipated  futures  of  action,  along  with  these  futures’  patterned  regularities.  And,  if  this  is  so,  both  aspects  of  interactionist  theory  and  some  core  aspects  of  the  sociology  of  culture  need  to  be  thought  anew.  In  both  cases,  thinking  in  terms  of  actors’  rhythmic  anticipations  also  open  up  new  empirical  questions  and  research  agendas.      

In  closing,  I  would  like  to  offer  some  less  structured  thoughts  about  the  directions  that  such  a  rhythmic  conception  of  interaction  can  take.  I  offer,  tentatively,  three  such  sketches.  

First,  as  the  work  with  Gary  Fine  above  points  towards,  the  notion  of  rhythm  needs  to  be  understood  in  relation  to  disruption.  And,  more  generally,  rhythm  needs  to  be  understood  in  relation  to  the  moments  in  which  the  regularities  of  social  life  are  ruptured.  This  relationship  takes  a  myriad  of  forms.  It  occurs  as  we  attempt  to  domesticate  the  ruptures  of  historical  events  (Wagner  Pacifici  2017),  as  experiential  careers  are  punctuated  by  moments  of  rupture  and  rapture  (Surak  2017;  Tavory  and  Winchester  2012),  and  as  settled  and  unsettled  times  ebb  and  flow  both  historically  and  biographically  (Swidler  1986).  In  all  these  cases,  understanding  how  rhythms  become  disrupted,  and  how  these  ruptures  are  re-­‐incorporated  into  new  anticipations  provides  rich  grounds  for  empirical  studies.      

Moving  in  this  direction,  however,  sociologists  would  need  to  resist  the  urge  to  treat  rhythm  and  rupture  as  opposing  forces,  the  Eros  and  Thanatos  of  social  life.  

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First,  in  some  situations,  it  is  the  moments  of  rupture  that  give  rhythm  its  staying  power.  It  is  often  the  rare  moment  of  rapture  that  gives  meaning  to  the  bodily  discipline  of  religious  life.  But  more  interestingly,  as  different  rhythms  and  worlds  overlap,  the  cadence  of  one  world  may  become  the  rupture  of  another.    Thus,  for  example,  as  Caitlin  Zaloom  (2016)  shows  in  her  study  of  Evangelical  finance,  moving  moments  of  divine  presence  emerge  through  the  overlaying  of  Evangelical  practices  and  the  “regular”  ways  in  which  people  order  their  finances.    Things  that  happen  regularly  in  the  Evangelical  world—such  as  giving  small  gifts  of  money  to  those  who  might  be  in  need—never  happen  in  the  other.  It  is  in  the  disruption  of  one  rhythm  by  another  that  miracles  are  social  produced.    

A  second  avenue  opened  up  by  such  an  approach  brings  it  into  closer  connection  to  the  theory  of  habit,  selfhood  and  identity.  It  is  (mostly)  through  routines  and  rhythms  that  habits  are  inculcated.  And,  since  these  rhythms,  as  we  have  shown,  tend  to  be  complex,  overlapping,  and  seldom  have  a  simple  eurythmic  structure,  the  landscape  of  habits  needs  to  be  thought  through  thoroughly.  Perhaps,  as  Bernard  Lahire  (2011)  argued,  such  a  rhythmic  approach  means  that  people  are  constantly  switching  between  loosely  connected  habit-­‐sets  that  are  evoked  by  the  situations  they  find  themselves  in.  Such  an  approach  does  not  necessarily  assume  a  disjointed  and  completely  situationally  bound  self,  as  some  theorists  were  too  quick  to  claim  (e.g.  Lifton  1993).  Taking  actors’  anticipations  seriously  means,  precisely,  that  we  must  resist  the  urge  to  remain  locked  within  a  theory  that  posits  a  series  of  situationally  emergent  selves.  It  does,  however,  mean  that  sociologists  should  pay  more  attention  to  the  moments  that  remain  severed  from  each  other,  and  those  which  actors  connect  to  each  other,  fuse  or  otherwise  aggregate  (see,  e.g.  Cornelissen  2016;  Tavory  2011).  

Lastly,  taking  rhythms  and  anticipations  seriously  can  provide  new  ways  to  think  about  the  processes  through  which  historical  change  occurs.  Tracing  how  rhythms  shift  and  how  actors  perceive  and  aggregate  these  shifts  can  help  explain  how  local  changes  produce  larger  social  “gestalt  switches.”  To  take  an  example  from  the  sociology  of  religion,  much  of  the  debate  over    “the  secularization  thesis”  asks  whether  people  are  more  or  less  religious,  or  whether  religious  organizations  are  stronger  or  weaker  than  they  were  in  earlier  times  (e.g.  Berger  1967).  Yet,  as  a  series  of  cogent  critiques  have  shown,  the  assumptions  underlying  “secularization”  are  dubious—it  is  unclear  how  religious  people  used  to  be,  and  how  unreligious  they  currently  are  (Stark  1999),  and  religion  appears  to  have  become  increasingly  salient  in  the  public  sphere  (Casanova  1994).  More  importantly,  this  kind  of  question  glosses  over  a  much  more  interesting  puzzle:  what  happened  to  the  place  of  religion  so  that  sociologists  and  lay  people  alike  assumed  secularization  is  taking  place  (Gorski  and  Altinordu  2008;  Warner  1993)?    

Approaching  the  question  of  “secularization”  through  anticipations  and  rhythms  would,  instead,  ask  in  what  situations  do  people  anticipate  religion  to  be  important.  The  study  of  “secularization”  then  becomes  a  question  of  anticipated  locations  and  rhythms.  What  we  would  look  for  in  such  a  study  is  not  a  clean  “secularization”  story  (for  many  of  the  reasons  its  critics  bring  up).  But  neither  would  we  replace  the  question  of  religion  with  that  of  religious  authority  (Chaves  1994).  Instead,  we  would  look  for  shifts  in  the  arenas  and  the  moments  in  which  

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people  anticipate  god  to  be  invoked  and  evoked,  and  the  situations  in  which  religious  institutions  make  their  appearance.  And,  much  as  with  the  questions  of  distinctions  and  boundaries  above,  we  would  pay  attention  to  the  ways  in  which  people  make  sense  of  these  overlapping  rhythms,  aggregating  the  different  anticipations  to  make  sense  of  the  place  of  religion  in  their  lives.    

These  theoretical  suggestions  are,  of  course,  but  sketches.  Yet,  I  hope,  they  are  useful  provocations  for  further  theoretical  development  and  empirical  research.  Thinking  about  anticipations  and  rhythms  is  one  key  to  tie  interactions  and  situations  to  the  larger  social  stories  we  tell.  It  is  not  the  key.  No  master  key,  I  suspect,  exists.  It  does  not  open  all  doors.  Yet  it  does  open  certain  doors,  some  of  which  we  didn’t  even  realize  existed.          

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Endnotes:                                                                                                                    i  We  chose  this  term,  probably,  because  we  are  both  personally  averse  to  cocktail  parties,  but  see  Schiffrin  1984,  for  a  complementary  explanation  of  our  aversion  to  smoothness.