University of Constance , Germany The Communicative Construction of Reality and Sequential Analysis . A personal reminiscence

This paper presents a historical view of the emergence of what is known as the communicative paradigm. Through a personal reminiscence of his long career, Thomas Luckmann entangles the main sources of what was a radical shift of the role of language and communication in the humanities and social sciences. In doing so, Luckmann shows that the epistemological and ontological assumptions on which the contemporary study of social interaction and communicative processes rely were practically non-existent half a century ago. While sociology and linguistics seemed to exist in separate universes during Luckmann’s student days, a dialogical approach to language and social life eventually appeared — for example, in ethnomethodology, conversational analysis and French structuralism — and laid the foundation to the (today taken for granted) idea that social realities are the result of human activities. Human social reality and the worldview that motivates and guides interaction are mainly constructed in communicative processes. If social reality is constructed in communicative interaction our most reliable knowledge of that reality comes from reconstructions of these processes. Such reconstructions have been greatly facilitated by technological innovation, such as tape— and video-recorder, which, alongside theoretical advancements, may explain the timing of the communicative turn. Finally, this paper marks the benefits of sequential analysis in enabling us to trace step-by-step the processes by which social reality is constructed and reconstructed.

I t1 stands to reason that the humanities and social sciences are more profoundly embedded in the society and culture of their time than the physical sciences. To be sure, all scientific activity is situated historically and culturally, but the humanities and social sciences are so situated in an additional sense. Their medium of communication is a particular language rather than 1 My presentation is partly based on a lecture given at the symposium in honor of Per Linell in 2004 at the University of Linköping, and a later version presented at the University of Prague in 2009. a universal algebra, and a particular language also constitutes the human reality investigated by them. They are, therefore, reflexive disciplines in a sense the physical sciences are not, and they are more directly influenced by the worldview of the society in which they are located. In their striving for objectivity and systematic accumulation of knowledge the humanities and social sciences must reckon with this inevitable circumstance.

Thomas Luckmann is an Emeritus
When investigating and interpreting the history of national literatures, the organization of their local societies, laws, and economy, the humanities and social sciences tend to distinctly exhibit -in addition to paradigmatic traditionalism -particularistic traits. Even the disciplines that try to penetrate language and social life as universal aspects of the human condition, such as anthropology and sociology, tend to suffer from the same weakness.
Modern social theory and the modern theory of language provide good examples for this observation. During the early stages of their formation, the major scholarly traditions of these theories, French, British, German, American, and Russian, followed somewhat different paths. Nonetheless, they did have two things in common beyond their subject matter. Contrary to what one would expect, and with few exceptions, they shared a lack of interest in the older traditions of the philosophy of language and social philosophy. Less surprisingly, they also ignored one another. One notable exception at the beginning of the twentieth century was the Durkheim-Meillet collaboration at the Année Sociologique, another, more general one, could be found in German and American ethnology. However, in these two countries ethnology was less closely connected to sociology than in The situation changed strikingly in the relatively short time of my academic career, from when I was a student to this day. As a living witness to this change, I may be allowed to reflect on these changes in a personal perspective. Looking back, I feel that I am justified in saying that the change was profound; with some slight exaggeration one might call it a paradigm shift. I can testify to the fact that here is a world of difference between what was taken for granted in my student days in linguistics and in sociology, as well as social psychology, and the assumptions on which we rely today in the study of social interaction and communicative processes.
In the late forties, when I began studying comparative linguistics in Europe, the dominant ap-proach was either philological in the old sense or what appeared as abstract structuralism to an impatient student who was looking in vain for la parole in the study of la langue. Arriving in the United States of America at the beginning of the fifties, I still took a Master's degree in philosophy, but then switched to sociology. As a student of Alfred Schütz, I was spared indoctrination in structural functionalism, which appeared to me to be just as far removed from social life as the dominant trend in linguistics seemed removed from the uses of language. Structural functionalism, as the widely accepted theory of society, and structuralism, as well as, somewhat later, generative grammar as the reigning approaches to language, seemed both static and abstract, remote from social reality and human communication. To use Humboldt's own terminology, they were concerned with the εργον [ergon = work] rather than the ενεργεια [energeia = energy] of language and social life. Given the nature of the reality they studied, I was also disappointed to see that sociology and linguistics were not closely connected, in fact, it seemed that they ex- The data of the social sciences are derived from these realities. Because they were constructed in meaningful social actions in a historical social world, they are to be reconstructed as data for the social sciences in a way that preserves rather than destroys their essential meaningfulness and historicity.
Nowadays, after the long dominant "positivist" era has come to an end, it seems to be widely accepted that "data" are "facta." This means that "data" -whatever reality they may represent -are acknowledged to be communicative con- Interestingly, the last link in the chain of events that changed markedly the assumptions and practices in the study of society and language during my own lifetime is not represented by a theoretical advance but by a technological innovation. 7 In the following I use some passages from my paper on the interpretation of dialogue (Luckmann 1999).
A precise analysis of the processes of social interaction, in which all the various material and immaterial components of social reality are constructed, depends on the possibility of "freezing" these processes for later, repeated inspection. 8 Possibility became fact less than a hundred years ago. 9 However, systematic social science use of the developments, which permitted auditory and then also visual recording of such processes, began much later. The analysis of the products of social interaction, from food, clothing and tools, factories, churches, jails, and cemeteries to legal codes, birth registries, music scores, and literature, certainly continues to be essential for an understanding of social reality. After all, they are what human communication and interaction is intended to produce. However, in the past decades, taking the new technologies for granted, we have been in an increasingly better position to direct our efforts to an analysis of the "production process" in relation to the "product" and in relation to the "consumption" of the "product," that is, to an analysis of interaction and dialogue both as a part of social reality and as a source of much of social reality. And, technological innovation continued to add to the arsenal of instruments by which the widest imaginable variety of social interactions could be recorded, providing the data for sequential analysis. This is the enterprise in which many of us were and are involved. The pioneer, Harvey Sacks, inspired a notable group of followers and successors.
8 Cf. Bergmann (1985). 9 Just about a century ago, one of the first uses, if not the first, of a phonograph was made for recordings of Montenegrin heroic epics, as a source of comparison for Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (cf. Parry 1930;Lord 1960).
Later, communicative genre theory used sequential analysis. As the data and most of the publications of the latter enterprise, in which I was active for many years, are in German, and translation of primary data of this nature is almost impossible, the results of our investigations did not reach monolingual investigators elsewhere. The international dialogue study group at the Reimers Foundation in Bad Homburg and those involved in the now regrettably defunct center of communication studies at the University of Linköping fared somewhat better. However, the study of the widest range of social phenomena using sequential analysis continues to be undertaken, as I noted, in the homeland of that method, the United States of America, and also in its second home, Great Britain, for example, in pioneering work of political rhetoric and the equally well-known studies of work.
Let me conclude: Sequential analysis is not the only so-called qualitative method -how ill-conceived that term is! -and, qualitative methods are not the sole salvation of sociology. Yet, I am convinced that sequential analysis provides the empirical foundation for an essential component of contemporary social theory, in particular for one of its branches, the sociology of knowledge.
It enables us to trace step-by-step the processes by which social reality is constructed and reconstructed. And that is not a minor matter.