The Haunting Question of Textual Agency: Derrida and Garfinkel on Iterability and Eventfulness

摘要

In this article, I propose to broaden and deepen the concept of agency by focusing on what is called textual agency, the capacity of texts to do things in specific settings, and from that analysis, I draw implications for the way one conceives of how interaction works. This concept is drawn from complementary elements in Derrida's (1988, 1994) and Garfinkel's (1967, 2002) work in which deconstruction shows that for order to be found in situ, for order to be endogenously produced, as ethnomethodology contends, it is also the product of a variety of sources beyond the scope of people's ethnomethods. People's ethnomethods are crucial and intractable aspects of this order, but they do not exhaust the variety of its sources.