“The data’s the data”: a method for the “resolution” of reality disjunctures in political life

• In Event: Research in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis: Categories and Identities in Interaction I

Abstract

One of the most harrowing and disorienting experiences in our social lives is the sense that we fundamentally do not share a reality with others. Nowhere is this more visible or potentially more damaging than in politics, where such divergences and polarizations can make a difference that affects human lives. Our paper focuses on a set of interactional practices through which political actors manage a particular kind of interactional bind described as a “reality disjuncture.” Specifically, we emphasize the ways that these political actors, in the context of a political news interview in which they and the interviewer have discrepant accounts of the nature of reality, work to resolve that discrepancy. While previous accounts of efforts to resolve reality disjunctures in everyday life and traffic court emphasized a tendency towards methods that preserved solidarity, our data, which center right-wing affiliated politicians, demonstrate an alternative. That is, in this context and for these members, the orientation to their account of reality as self-evident and, thus, the presentation of any alternative as indicative of either a faulty or motivated apprehension of the world predominates. More simply, rather than an effort to preserve social solidarity in the face of discrepant accounts, we routinely see efforts to undermine solidarity through accusations of political motivation or faulty observation. These findings are particularly valuable in the wake of the past decade, in which we have seen a rise of reality disjunctures (sometimes described as incommensurability or polarization) in the political arena, especially given that the majority of cases in our collection come from actors on the political right and those identified as and/or treated by interviewers as otherwise marginal political actors. Illuminating these practices might help us understand better how extreme actors work to present themselves as other-than-extreme, namely by presenting the other as non-normative.

Authors

• J Sterphone, Wheaton College

• Jessica Robles, Loughborough University