Hacking on Foucault and Goffman

Partial transcript of the conversation...

There are at least two interpretations of Hacking's work here...

1) Agent <-> Structure loops * Goffman helps us study agents (a 'bottom-up' approach) * Foucault helps us study structures (a 'top-down' approach)

2) Agent <-> Structure loops * Goffman helps us study 'actual conditions' of agent-structure loops (via ethnography) * Foucault helps us study 'conditions of possibility' of agent-structure-loop ensembles (via gnlgy)

There are multiple distinctions at work here...
Bottom-up v. Top-down
Face-to-face v. Abstract (Goffman looking from within the loop, but Foucault looking at the loop)
Agent-centric v. Structure-centric (this is not helpful)

There was discussion and disagreement about the following assertion: the second distinction does not lead us to the third automatically -- we don't need to set up a methodological distinction between 'starting with agent' v. 'starting with structure' in order to make the crucial distinction between 'studying up' (Goffman, ethnography) and 'studying toward' (Foucault, abstract).