Some notions on representation, interaction, discourse, and reality, from Berger & Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality.
The social reality we inhabit must be constantly constructed and
reconstructed and reproduced through socialization. Berger &
Luckmann differentiate the primary socialization acquired in childhood,
which gives the individual a social identity, and secondary
socialization, e.g. education, professional training, etc., which gives
the individual a number of roles in society, a profession or provisional
identity which may be more or less fluid or permanent according to
circumstances and social complexity.
The social reality is a system of institutions, externally speaking, but
they must be interiorized by the individual to become a subjective
reality—through a number of techniques. "The more these techniques make
subjectively plausible a continuity between the original and the new
elements of knoweldge, the more readily they acquire the accent of
reality" (163); just as we build a second language knowledge on our
mother tongue, we build secondary socializations on our primary
socialization. In complex societies there is a socializing personnel
(e.g. teachers) who may become significant others to the
subject—especially if the secondary socialization requires intensity and
dedication, a commitment of the self-identity so to speak. Socializing
tasks vary much from one society to another, just as the distribution of
knowledge.
Maintenance and Transformation of Subjective Reality.
"Since socialization is never complete and the contents it internalizes
face continuing threats to their subjective reality, every viable
society must develop procedures of reality-maintenance to safeguard a
measure of symmetry between objective and subjective reality" (167)
"Primary socialization internalizes a reality apprehended as inevitable.
This internalization may be deemed successful if the sense of
inevitability is present most of the time, at least while the individual
is active in the world of everyday life". There are the sinister
psychological metamorphoses of reality threatening it, usually
marginally; mental distortions of reality
which must be kept under control in the individual's subjectivity.
"There are also the more directly threatening competing definitions of
reality that may be encountered socially" (167)—people living with other
cultural assumptions, in another reality so to speak.
If a secondary socialization is to be strongly internalized, the
socialization procedures (discipline, control, etc.) will have to be
intensified and reinforced accordingly. (E.g. the military, the
clergy...);
"the reality of everyday life maintains itself by being embodied in
routines, which is the essence of institutionalization. Beyond this,
howerver, the reality of everyday life is ongoingly reaffirmed in the
individual's interaction with others. Just as reality is originally
internalized by a social process, so it is maintained in consciousness
by social processes. These latter processes are not drastically
different from those of the earlier internalization. They also reflect
the basic fact that subjective reality must stand in a relationship with
an objective reality that is socially defined" (169).
So, reality (the human reality of individuals, projects, actions,
institutions, customs, etc.) is made and remade through interaction—this
much Berger & Luckmann share with other propounders of symbolic interactionism. Reality is made (to put it otherwise) of a collectively sustained set of self-fulfilling expectations.
Due to their interactionalist account of socialization, Berger and
Luckmann are ideally placed as major theorizers of what I used to call the relational self—the
notion that the self is not a substance with a stable core but rather a
dynamic system of social relationships—a structure defined by its
position in a social network. We do not have social relationships; we are our
social relationships, so to speak (if this does not account for the
whole of the reality of the self it does place a useful focus on a side
of the self that is usually neglected or ignored). Each of the people we
meet has a corresponding relational reality, and brings to ours a
partially alien world which partly defines ours. We inhabit, or
construct, a differen reality (partly different, provisional,
interactional) with each of the people we interact with. Especially with
the most significant persons.
Significant people define your reality with you, and you define theirs.
Which is why many communities don't find it advisable for their members
to have significant relationships (marriage, love, friendship) with
members of other communities holding different beliefs—inhabiting
another reality, so to speak. A foreigner's look threatens the very core
of reality, it is an intrusion from another dimension. "There is no
salvation outside the Church" —a doctrinal point which is given a more
general, and rather ironic, reading, by Berger and Luckmann.
Individuals may inhabit a fairly consistent reality, or experience
tensions between different realities which assert their claims. "The
individual then faces a problem of consistency, which he can, typically,
solve either by modifying his reality or his reality-maintaining
relationships" (170). E.g. accepting that one is a failure, or turning
to other people that give back a more satisfying image of oneself and
our activities. Human realities only partially overlap, and that there
is often a conflict of realities among diverse social groups; see e.g.
my paper on the battle for reality between the Gnostics and the early
Christians, as portrayed in The Gospel of Judas ("La Visión del Templo: Espiritualidad antieclesiástica en el Evangelio de Judas y la Batalla por la Realidad").
There is a whole job of reality-management and reality-maintenance,
especially in a globalized world in which different communities and
different realities run into chaotic and absurd juxtapositions with each
other:
"Reality-maintenance and reality-confirmation thus involve the totality
of the individual's social situation, though the significant others
occupy a privileged position in these processes" (Berger and Luckmann
171).
A continual interaction with significant others is thus the major
vehicle for reality-management and reality maintenance. Conversation is
singled out by Berger and Luckmann as the major mode of interaction
(though love-making or sports can arguably be just as effective in many
cases):
"The most important vehicle of reality-maintenance is conversation. One
may view the individual's everyday life in terms of the working away of a
conversational apparatus that ongoingly maintains, modifies, and
reconstructs his subjective reality" (172)—conversation surrounded by
non-verbal communication, and taking place "against the background of a
world that is silently taken for granted" (172). One could thus modify
Berger and Luckmann's account by saying that it is shared expectations or presuppositions
(on which conversation rests, and which conversation helps to manage or
modify) that constitute the most important tool of reality maintenance.
Reality sustained by mental communication, then, of which actions and
words only minimally modify the surface. Casual conversation is then a
crucial sign that the world stands in its place and is what it is; "its
massivity is achieved by the accumulation and consistency of casual
conversation—conversation that can afford to be casual precisely
because it refers to the routines of a taken-for-granted world. The loss
of casualness signals a break in the routines and, at least
potentially, a threat to the taken-for-granted reality" (172). What is
voiced out is singled out for attention; "conversation gives firm
contours to items previously apprehended in a fleeing and unclear
manner. One may have doubts about one's religion; these doubts become
real in a quite different way as one discusses them." (173).
Conversations must be managed—Berger & Luckmann mention
conversations through correspondence when physical conversations are not
possible. "On the whole, frequency of conversation enhances its
reality-generating potency, but lack of frequency can sometimes be
compensated for by the intensity of the conversation when it does take
place. One may see one's lover only once a month, but the conversation
then engaged in is of sufficient intensity to meke up for its relative
infrequency" (174).
One might as well note, too, the importance of reading as world-making conversation,
reading (literature, philosophy, science, etc.), interacting with the
dead, or with communities and worlds far away in time or space,
sometimes to find a loophole to gaze out of the reality defined and
circumscribed by our everyday life and by the conversation of our
significant others, or, again, turning people living long ago and far
away into our significant others. One might also expand on the prominent
role of telephones and communication technologies in the present, as
reality-management and reality-producing media.
Thus individuals manage their identities and realities, even when they
are cut off from daily conversation with their reality-sustaining
community. Rituals may be engaged in to keep this contact and prop up
this reality. The "plausibility structures" as they are termed by Berger
& Luckmann may become threatened and it is then that
reality-sustaining strategies become more active and visible:
"In crisis situations the procedures are essentially the same as in
routine maintenance, except that reality-confirmations have to be
explicit and intensive. Frequently, ritual techniques are brought into
play." (175). Taboos, exclusions, scapegoats, curses and exorcisms, etc.
are used to sustain the official reality. "The violence of these
defensive procedures will be proportional to the seriouness with which
the threat is viewed" (176).
An extreme case noted by Berger and Luckmann is "world-switching" or
conversion—when an individual leaves behind an old identity and its
associated reality, and is "born again" into a new identity, often with
the guide of significant others in the new sphere. "These significant
others are the guides into the new reality. They represent the
plausibility structure in the roles they play vis-à-vis the
individual (roles that are typically defined explicitly in terms of
their re-socializing function), and they mediate the new world to the
individual (177). Religious conversion (Saul into Paul) is the model
instance of such reality-switching. "The plausibility structures of
religious conversion have been imitated by secular agencies of
alternation. The best examples are in the areas of political
indoctrination and psychotherapy" (178). Correspondingly, the
reality-switching individual cuts off the ties and conversation with the
old social sphere and previous significant others; "The alternating
individual disaffiliates himself from his previous world and the
plausibility structure that sustained it, bodily if possible, mentally
if not" (178)—"Once the new reality has congealed, circumspect relations
with outsiders may again be entered into, although those outsiders who
used to be biographically significant are still dangerous. They are the
ones who will say, 'Come off it, Saul', and there may be times when the
old reality they invoke takes the form of temptation.
"And in conversation with the new significant others subjective reality
is transformed. It is maintained by continuing conversation with them,
or within the community they represent. Put simply, this means that one
must now be very careful with whom one talks. People and ideas
discrepant with the new definitions of reality are systematically
avoided" (177-78).
One must be careful with what one reads, too, and with the films and TV
programmes one watches. Representations of reality make and remake
reality, and they sustain it all day long.
This analysis should be supplemented with a study of mechanisms of
avoidance and coexistence—that is, communicative conventions and
protocols which allow people to carry out interaction in some areas
(e.g. work) with people sustaining other worlds or inhabiting other
partial realities, without thereby challenging the hidden, private,
different, eccentric or sacred aspects of their own reality. Thus it is
advisable to avoid subjects such as politics, religion, etc. in casual
conversation, especially if members of a minority creed are present. The
weather is thus the safest interactional topic and the prime sustainer
of the everyday reality we all share. Sports or celebrity TV are an area
where conventional difference is encouraged, a symbol of those other
differences which might threaten the plausibility of the world if they
came into overt conflict. It is through heated differences on sporting
matters that this issue is both recognized, hidden, and exorcized.
Conversation on the weather and on sports and celebrities, which in
their own ways are irrelevant topics, thus helps to sustain our sense of
a coherent and shared social world.
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Interaction as Reality-Maintenance en Ibercampus.
—oOo—
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