Interaction as Reality-Maintenance

  

García Landa, José Angel. "Interaction as Reality-maintenance." Knowledge Commons Works 5 Sept. 2026.*

         https://doi.org/10.17613/gxvtf-qct93

https://works.hcommons.org/records/gxvtf-qct93

         2026

La realidad, según se mire

 La realidad, según se mire: https://www.academia.edu/90060236/

The (In)Definition of Reality

 

"The (In)Definition of Reality: Reframing and Contested Topsight." Knowledge Commons Works 19 April 2026.*

https://works.hcommons.org/records/704dt-08367 

 

Por si acaso, y for what it's worth, voy a poner también aquí el texto completo.

 

______

 

The (In)definition of Reality:

Reframing and Contested Topsight

 

José Angel GARCÍA LANDA

Universidad de Zaragoza

 

I shall put forward here a definition of reality, or perhaps a particular take or perspective on reality. Reality is what happens between the lines.

 

But perhaps reality as such cannot be represented, or defined. It has to be defined with respect to a specific activity, and it has to be represented from a given perspective, a selective one. In this attempt at a definition I am proposing a perspective by the very fact of emphasizing what happens between the lines—instead of emphasizing, for instance, the lines themselves. The lines might stand for "what is" obviously there, reality as presupposed or unproblematic, reality as something shared by its inhabitants. But an interactional perspective on reality must go beyond that portion of reality which is shared (or "true") for all interactants, in order to give a fuller portrait of those aspects of reality which are not shared, which may be false or nonexistent to some of the participants, or which may be perceived only by some of them.

 

Still, perhaps we do need a definition of reality which is more comprehensive, more balanced and less paradoxical. I will therefore modify my original statement, and further specify that reality is the play, the dynamic interaction, or the dialectic, between what happens for the public record, and what happens between the lines. Or again, reality is constituted by the interactional play between shared frames of action (those "lines" which are unproblematically on the page) and other frames which, though they may be active for some of the participants, are not generally shared. Reality is a play of realities—the explicit one, and other secret, discreet or alternative realities which coexist in a given situation.

 

Reality, then, lends itself to a definition (although perhaps the definition is not actually written on any labels or captions). It is defined by presuppositions, by habits, by socially regulated modes of interaction, by institutions, routines, scripts, and frames of interactional communication. These frames, schemas, and presuppositions have been studied by theorists of cognition, of pragmatics, of interpersonal communication, such as Bateson, Schank and Abelson, Sperber and Wilson, etc. It is perhaps Erving Goffman's frame analysis that provides the most comprehensive and most suggestive version of the structure of reality—including the structure of multiple interacting realities.

 

Goffman provides a powerful model for the analysis of interactional reality: dramatism. Human interaction is organized in principle by shared templates which define and narrativize the situation and provide roles for the participants. It is through these shared templates or frames that we are able to shape reality as to what is at stake, what is happening, in a given moment or situation. What happens (officially) at any moment is, for instance, a meeting at the workplace, a concert, a party, a friendly conversation over a beer: any of these archetypal scripts which orchestrate social reality inasmuch as it is living theatre—theatre played by social actors in real-life dramatic companies, and in a social space which has a theatrical structure. This is the perspective on social life provided by Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, in Interaction Ritual, or in Strategic Interaction.

 

What takes place between the lines is what Goffman calls a secondary channel—it is an alternative strip of activity which could also be described as a superimposed narrative line—a subplot which does not involve all of the participants in the main frame of activity or primary channel, but only some of them—or perhaps just one, the observer of that hidden dimension of reality which is taking place between the lines, the one who sees what the other participants cannot see—those aspects of reality that escape them and are, in a sense, both there and not there.

 

It is within this structural set of perspectival relationships that we can describe the concept of topsight. Topsight is the privileged perspectival position enjoyed by those participants who see what others don't see, the position of those observers who are aware of the secondary as well as the primary channel of interactional activity. Topsight need not be an absolute position, since there may be a number of secondary channels or sub-frames imposed on the main frame of activity, and there is no telling that one of them has absolute dominance over the others. Topsight, then, is relative to other interactant's lack of awareness of a given secondary frame, within a comprehensive frame of activity. 

 

To take a simple example, the main frame may be provided by a meeting at work. The participants are all aware of each other's presence. However, their roles are, as far as the meeting is concerned, those of spectators or listeners, given that just now the boss is doing a presentation. It may well happen that two participants at the meeting may begin to interact, whispering about their plans for the evening, while the boss preaches on and all the others dutifully listen. Now these two employees have assumed a different role in the social theatre—they are not merely there in their official capacity; they have assumed a temporary role as private individuals. Just now we'll not investigate any further whether they are lifting their official mask for a moment, or merely donning an additional mask. However that may be, reality multiplies itself and acquires another level of articulation through this secret interactional move, a move which is defined as secondary by its very location within the wider frame within which it is embedded.

 

But if this secret or discreet piece of interaction is perceived and spied upon by a third party—by another employee who feigns she is not listening, or, why not, by the reader of my example—then the structure of reality is no longer doubled, but tripled, or multiplied, in a game of interactional perspectives. Much of the structure of a narrative account of this meeting, or indeed of any interactional encounter, would consist in a description of the perspectival relationships among the agents as they are established and new dimensions of reality appear, or in the gradual and artistic unfolding of existing perspectival relationships which reveals the existing interactional and cognitive situation to a reader or a virtual observer.

 

Let us examine another example of the observational frame in an analysis of narrative structures. Take this poem from Stephen Crane's The Black Riders (IX), a micro-narrative in its own right:

 

I STOOD UPON A HIGH PLACE,

AND SAW, BELOW, MANY DEVILS

RUNNING, LEAPING,

AND CAROUSING IN SIN.

ONE LOOKED UP, GRINNING,

AND SAID, "COMRADE! BROTHER!"

 

Here the narrator is standing "upon a high place", which we might take as symbolizing his perspectival and discursive topsight in the textual structure, above the other characters. The devils are involved in their own interactional frame ("running, leaping, and carousing in sin"), and in the first sentence of the micro-narrative they are unaware that they are being observed. The narrator, the "I", commands two strips of activity: he is aware, like the devils, of the more widely shared frame, the devils' carousal. He is also aware of another strip of activity, namely his own awareness of the situation—the fact that the party is being watched from above by a non-participant, and the devils' ignorance of this. The second frame is more limited as regards participation; in principle the "I" is the only one taking part in it. The devils' party has become for him an objectified event, a spectacle which, however disgusting, can be safely enjoyed by a spectator who contemplates it from the outside; this interactional strip is self-enclosed as far as the devils are concerned, and the frame is like a theatrical fourth wall which prevents the devils from taking part in the focalizer's observational frame.  Note that the frame is for the devils the very limit of reality—in a certain sense is not even a frame because for them there is nothing outside the frame.

 

Of course, the perspectival structure posited by the first sentence is undone or deconstructed in the second sentence, which provides a narrative resolution through frame-breaking.  Although frames are constantly being broken, any frame-breaking has a somewhat paradoxical air about it (Genette's métalepses come to mind), and indeed two different realities, or two different dimensions of reality are meeting through these frame-breakings, and a new reality has to emerge dialectically. In our example, the upright and dignified verticality of the "I" is threatened by the piercing gaze of the devil, which, ascending upwards from below, and breaking through the perspectival containers, seems to threaten the very purity of heaven, and to sully with its foulness the very soul of the reader—because it was the reader, gazing down on the words and letters of the poem, those black devils involved in their own game—(cf. The Black Riders, XLVI)—it was the reader who was "I," towering over the page,  looking down, vicariously, over the narrator's shoulder. The reader, too, thought he was safe in his own extratextual frame, but he is safe no more, because the text can gaze back at him and the devil recognizes him for his brother. Even a sister can feel a jolt at the invasion of her private frame, and at her being demoted from her privileged topsight.

 

Reality is suddenly reorganized, reworked—because human reality is an interactional reality, managed through frames and their operations, through their being established and operated, through their recyclings and displacements, and through their rearrangements, dissolutions and sudden merges.

 

Stephen Crane's text might be further analysed along these lines. But our concern is now with the notion of frame itself, and its role in the managing of reality through attention.  Note that in this example, we have called the devils' party the main frame, on the criterion that it is the more generally shared one. There is a potential ambiguity here, however, because the narrator's observational frame is more potent in another sense—precisely because it is not generally shared, because it is hidden, it makes for dominance, and is the "outer" frame in its own perspectival structure, the comprehensive observational situation which includes an enclosed object of observation.  Still, the observer's frame, while it provides the outermost frame, could not exist without an object which is framed by it; in this sense it is subordinate to the devils' pandemonic party, i.e. to the most widely shared interactional frame, or primary channel.  It is advisable to keep in mind this perspectival ambivalence. The perspectives of the many provide the general interactional game on which the dominant perspectives of the few are built as a second story. But this secondary or embedded story encompasses within its perspectival structure, quite paradoxically, the general frame as a field dominated by the observers' topsight, by a viewpoint which itself escapes observation, or tries to.

 

In our account, the subject who perceives most of these interactional frames and perspectival relationships is that silent woman, the observer of the employees' small talk at the meeting; or the implied author of The Black Riders, designing a narrative structure in which narrative topsight is paradoxically questioned. It is such cognitive (or narrative) subjects that provide our model for cognitive topsight, those who perceive most dimensions of reality— the "I"s who (in our account) observe the interactional landscape from a high place, the watchtower of topsight, or of hindsight, as the case may be. This "I" who stands highest, or who comes last of all, is the observer who observes those-who-believe-that-they-are-observing-without-being-observed. It is a quasi-divine perspectival topsight; a misleading one, therefore, and one which is analyzed by Lacan in his famous seminar on Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Purloined Letter". (This structure invites recursion, and I have pursued this line of analysis further in my paper "Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism"). We have seen that Crane's poem, too, may be read as a miniature model of this deconstructive move.

 

Yet another example. We converse with someone; we listen and watch her face and body movements. What she says is one thing—a function of the officially established activity, whether work or leisure. On-record discourse is the main frame or primary channel—it is what is said. But what is shown may be something else. We watch a multimedia performance—involving proxemics, intonation, gestures, kinesics, paralanguage, style, eye contact, interactional rhythmn. The body and its theatricality, the secondary channel, is often more worth attending to; it tells the truth which is half-concealed by the words. Or, if the encounter resists interpretation, at least it is there that we try to disclose the elusive reality of the matter; not in the scripted words, but in the full theatrical spectacle, and especially in the gestures, or sub-gestures. Topsight is here an object of desire, a virtual position defining cognitive control, but one which must be imagined rather than fully inhabited.

 

Perhaps we should provide a new definition of the reality effect, to use Barthes' phrase, or a different approach to that effect. As I see it, the reality effect is not so much where Barthes located it in that famous article (in irrelevant or non-significant details—although it is there too, to some extent); it is to be found, first and foremost, in that play of perspectives where two different realities clash or come to terms with each other; two (or more) realities defined by different interactional frames. The anomic interface between these realities is the battleground or the sports field where reality is managed and organized. To be sure, it is being interactionally managed all the time, but it is in the meeting of games of in the space between them (is it baseball or football that we are playing here?) that roles must be reworked and rules must be improvised, at the very least to the extent of preventing general embarrassment. It is in such dramaturgically uncertain situations, and they happen all the time, that reality falls apart. And while it is being managed and restructured it reveals itself for what it is, a set of interactionally organized reality games which sustain the edifice of appearances. Reality at its rawest also reveals itself as an indeterminate no man's land between those games, and as the social engineering which builds briges between them, in a variety of styles ranging from the pitiful to the masterful.

 

There are many realities, possibly more than our philosophy would allow for, but they are no more equal than Orwell's animals. The dominant reality is the official, publicly recognized one, organized into familiar interactional ceremonies which are universally or at least widely shared. It must be acknowledged to have a degree of public priority, and an authority which appears to be the authority of evidence itself. Actually, such primary realities seem to be so solid that we usually forget that they are a function of the theatre of everyday life.  More specific reality games (e.g. a theatrical function embedded in everyday life) seem by contrast transitory, obviously fictional, and they contribute to the reality effect of the primary frame: if Hamlet is a play, surely I'm outside the frame and I'm not in a play myself?  The authority of the real is thereby reinforced, even though it will appear that this force of the obvious is generated by a perspectival or structural effect.

 

Still—or, what is more,— in contrast with this primary frame of everyday life, Channel 1 of the interactional life-world if you want, the secondary frames which are built upon it, Channel 2, Channel 3, etc., also have an experiential priority of their own. A secondary frame opens up a provisional strip of reality in the world, and this reality may acquire a special intensity, enticing us to an intense involvement in it. Secondary realities may be just as immersive as any first-degree life-world. Channels 2 or 3, moreover, enjoy an enhanced immediacy derived precisely from our active involvement in world-building—from their being in contrast to the primary level of reality, and from the continued existence of that primary reality as a backdrop, at once a background noise and a ground floor on which to build the upper stories. If our conversation takes place on the second floor, it is that floor which provides the immediate ground for our feet, however much the structure of the whole story may rest on the foundations of the first floor. After all, the ground floor may be built on an invisible basement, and in the last analysis the earth itself is a groundless basement floating within a system of inexplicable forces.

 

Unofficial or secondary realities, secret interactions and provisional fictions, therefore, do have a primacy of their own, an ontological priority which derives from the experiential priority of reality-management. The interactional difficulty of managing many frames and modes of reality without losing sight of our shared life-world provides us with a never-ending challenge, one which allows us to inhabit life as a slippery space of intense semiosis, a no-man's land (nor no-woman's neither) of interactional risk and uncertainty, rather than a well-rehearsed and predictable repertory play. Authentic experience is defined as such between the acts, and behind the scenes in the theatre of everyday life.

 

 

References

 

Barthes, Roland. "The Reality Effect." In French Literary Theory Today: A Reader. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Cambridge: Cambridge UP; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1982. 11-17.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972.

Crane, Stephen. The Black Riders and Other Lines: Published May 11, 1895. Online at the Stephen Crane Society website.

            http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/crane/black.htm

            2016

            http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/crane/black.htm

            2016

García Landa, José Angel. "Acritical Criticism, Critical Criticism: Critical Interaction, Reframing and Topsight." In Con/Texts of Persuasion. Ed. Beatriz Penas et al. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 2011. 233-68.

_____. "La perspectiva dominante en El Arte de la Guerra: Más aspectos de un clásico chino (Topsight in The Art of War: Further Aspects of a Chinese Classic)." Social Science Research Network 9 Nov. 2014.

            http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2520473

            2014

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Foreword by Jonathan Culler. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980. Goffman, Erving. jThe Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Rev. ed. Garden City (NY): Doubleday-Anchor, 1959.

_____. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Random House-Pantheon, 1982.

_____. Strategic Interaction. (Conduct and Communication, 1). Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P,  cop. 1969. 2nd pr., 1970.

_____. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Foreword by Bennett M. Berger. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1986.

Lacan, Jacques. "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'." Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. In The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading. Ed. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. 28-54.

Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge. Hillsdale (NJ): Erlbaum, 1977.

Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

 

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The research for this paper has been supported by the European Social Fund and the  Aragonese Government research programme H69 HERAF: Hermenéutica y Antropología Fenomenológica.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Не)определение реальности: изменение рамок восприятия и спор за контролирующую перспективу

 

"(Не)определение реальности: изменение рамок восприятия и спор за контролирующую перспективу."

https://doi.org/10.17613/cwpxk-y2387

 

 

 En traducción al original inglés: 

_____. "The (In)Definition of Reality: Reframing and Contested Topsight." Academia 9 April 2017.*

         https://www.academia.edu/32351646/

         2017

 

 

Joaquín Robles López - Sobre Apariencia y Verdad en la IA: de Platón a Bueno

 Retropost, 2005:

La realidad flojea

07 de diciembre de 2005 - 14:27 - Semiótica

 

Thou dost not see where thou hast lived so long,-
The place is called the skull where thou dost tread.

(Jones Very, "The Prison")

Las representaciones hacen vacilar nuestro sentido de la realidad, de tal manera que nuestra atención se desconecta del aquí y ahora de nuestro cuerpo y nuestro mundo, y se sumerge en el mundo representado, experimentándolo ya sea a través de otros cuerpos allí representados, ya sea en un estado nebuloso de flotación, a modo de espíritu viajero por otras mentes y espacios, sin ubicación fija.

Si la realidad puede flojear, es porque ella misma es una representación. La neurología contemporánea ha mostrado cómo nuestro cerebro es un intérprete que genera la realidad (la realidad en tanto que representación) en la que nos ubicamos. La mente es, así, una especie de pequeño dios creando su cosmos (pequeño, porque se le escapa su propio proceso creador, y se engaña a sí mismo con sus creaciones). Y si esa realidad que genera nuestro cerebro es más auténtica que otras representaciones secundarias para nosotros, unas y otras son, hasta cierto punto, intercambiables; al menos nos podemos apoyar temporalmente en otras realidades virtuales.

La realidad virtual propiamente dicha sería la simulación perfecta, mediante la tecnología de la representación, de nuestra realidad de primer nivel. No existe todavía, claro: existen simulaciones o aproximaciones, como las ha habido siempre... desde que hay teatro, imágenes o ficciones. De hecho, es en una ficción como Matrix donde la realidad virtual puede alcanzar su pleno desarrollo: allí, al ser la realidad de base también una representación (generada por ordenador en parte), la realidad virtual generada por ordenador puede implantarse en ella sin que se vean las costuras. Pero experiencias análogas hay en nuestro mundo: la inmersión del espectador en la película, o la anulación del yo frente al televisor. La absorción en la lectura. Las charadas de la política internacional, en las que todos nos vemos atrapados. El deseo de las imágenes de la moda: de los chicos, de las chicas, de los maniquís. La máscara de nuestro papel necesario en la interacción social, la máscara que se pega a la cara (¿a qué cara? A otra máscara).

Siempre me han atraído las ficciones de la realidad virtual y la reflexión sobre ella. La hipótesis cartesiana del genio maligno: quizá lo que tomamos por realidad sustancial sea realidad virtual, una ilusión generada por un genio maligno (es la hipótesis de Matrix, avant la lettre). Si la realidad tiene estructura mental, ya es una hipótesis aceptada de entrada. El mito de la caverna, por ir todavía más lejos. Claro que para Platón existía la posibilidad de salir de la caverna, posibilidad que en el estado actual de la reflexión queda descartada. Esse est percipi-- otro paso en la fenomenologización del mundo. Es importante, sí, la observación mutua. Todavía más cuando se interioriza, y nos constituimos desde dentro como resultado de la observación mutua, hecha ahora nuestra (porque quién vamos a ser, si no somos quienes nos han dicho que somos). Es lo que yo he llamado en alguna ocasión el yo relacional: un yo sin sustancia, mantenido en equilibrio enteramente por nuestra circunstancia (yo soy mi circunstancia, por así decirlo). Me gusta pensar que es una postura que tiene algo que ver con los postulados del interaccionalismo simbólico: generamos sentido mediante la interacción, y mediante la interacción interiorizada, los signos que según Blumer nos enviamos constantemente a nosotros mismos. También Goffman parece pensar en este sentido: un día de estos expondré lo que yo entiendo es su teoría de la génesis del yo mediante la interiorización estructurada de circunstancias y relaciones. Pero a lo que iba: la realidad flojea, unas veces más que otras.

Me gusta la moda actual de películas en las que la realidad flojea. Películas en las que la ilusión generada en la pantalla resulta ser dos ilusiones: la que creíamos real es doblemente ilusoria, el personaje ve cómo se le hurta la realidad en la que vivía, y que resulta ser un constructo cibernético, o psicológico, o mágico, o una simulación colectiva. Los ejemplos son muchos: he nombrado Matrix, quizá el caso arquetípico. Aquí van otros, cada uno con variantes: Total Recall, Sphere, Abre los ojos, Conspiracy Theory, The Game, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation (El ladrón de orquídeas), Los Otros, Infiltrado, La isla, Misteriosa obsesión, La memoria de los muertos,  Olvídate de mí (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)... películas todas del género que Daniel Innerarity llamaba "cine cartesiano".

Aparte de sus raíces en la filosofía idealista, hay otras más inmediatas, claro, en la literatura y el teatro, que también han jugado con niveles de representación (de hecho si este fenómeno nos llama tanto la atención es porque no hacemos otra cosa en la vida que jugar con niveles de representación, marcos dentro de marcos que diría Goffman). Es un tema frecuente en la poesía amorosa soñar cómo se hace el amor con la amada, sólo para terminar el poema con el brusco despertar del poeta. Está en Petrarca, en Quevedo - y en Milton, que añade el detalle de que despierta a una vida real en la que está ciego, pues sólo puede ver ya en sueños. Nuestros despertares son brutales, apenas más en el sueño que en la ensoñación. Así pues son la imaginación y el sueño las primeras formas de realidad virtual, que todavía dejan chiquitas a las demás. La Vida es Sueño es un ejemplo magistral de uso literario de este motivo, combinando la charada (para el espectador) con la representación onírica (para Segismundo). Los sueños, sueños son... toda la vida es sueño para Calderón, todo el mundo es teatro para Shakespeare. Totus mundus agit histrionem: todo el mundo es un actor, o todo el mundo imita a los actores (o hace el payaso). Son dos perspectivas que tienen mucho en común: viendo el teatro también representamos nuestro papel de espectadors, llamados a colaborar con el actor según Shakespeare: "on your imaginary forces work". Y quién sabe en virtud de qué papel de nuestra vida social hemos ido al teatro, de espectadores. Cuando Shakespeare utiliza disfraces sobre disfraces, o utiliza imágenes sacadas del lenguaje dramático para infundirlas en la acción "real" de los personajes, está sacando a la luz, y a la vez intensificando, la teatralidad de la vida cotidiana, y el carácter convencional de las realidades en que vivimos. Tanto más cuando somos víctimas de un engaño o de una charada, esas ficciones de la interacción que envenenan (y constituyen) nuestra vida de modo tan real.

También en la narración me fascina la realidad virtual. Las realidades virtuales que aparecen en la ciencia ficción (Stapledon ya imaginaba un control social mediante la realidad virtual tecnológicamente generada, en Star Maker). Pero antes de la tecnología, magia para quien no la entiende, estaba la magia. En un famoso cuento de El conde Lucanor, Don Juan Manuel, Petronio y Don Illán el mago de Toledo confunden a la vez al lector, al conde Lucanor y al deán de Santiago: la realidad que éste último creía sustancial, y en la que era rico y poderoso, resulta ser una realidad virtual generada por el mago, para darle una lección de humildad. En "Asem", Oliver Goldsmith también nos lleva a una realidad mágica para dar una lección al protagonista, que intentaba suicidarse, y cuando termina la lección encontramos otra vez al protagonista al borde del abismo a donde le había llevado su desesperación, pero esta vez escarmentado por su experiencia -- que no ha tenido lugar en ningún tiempo ni en ningún lugar, aparte de la realidad virtual. Las realidades hipotéticas que aparecen en el Cuento de Navidad de Dickens (o en las variantes que ha inspirado, como la película Family Man) son también fenómenos de la misma especie. Y no deja de ser significativo que tienen mucho en común estas realidades inestables con otro tipo de realidad inestable y manipulable: la que aparece en el Libro de Job, donde las circunstancias de la vida de Job son fácilmente manipulables, elementos de un experimento o apuesta entre Dios y Satanás. Y yo me preguntaba, leyando el Libro de Job, si Job no echaría en falta sus esposas anteriores, y los hijos de su otra vida, aunque Dios o el diablo le hubiesen vuelto a cambiar las circunstancias. La realidad había flojeado, para mí si no para Job, y nada volvería a ser lo mismo.

Podrían hacerse muchas tipologías sobre este tipo de ficciones que utilizan varios planos de realidad: en cuanto a la importancia relativa de una y otra, su realismo o surrealismo respectivos, la motivación utilizada para introducir la realidad alternativa (tecnológica, interactiva, mágica, artística, narrativa...), o la sustancialidad relativa de una y otra realidad. Es importante, por ejemplo, saber si la realidad flojea sólo para un personaje o también para el espectador. Por ejemplo: ¿empieza el relato con un mundo sólido de base, dentro del cual un personaje es víctima de una ilusión, todo ello a sabiendas del espectador? O (como sucede en La Isla o Matrix) creemos estar instalados, como espectadores, en un mundo sólido, junto con los personajes, y caemos también junto con ellos por una trampilla en el suelo que nos lleva a otra realidad? (¿Y esa otra realidad, es estable?).

En última instancia, todas estas obras que usan la realidad virtual nos hacen dudar de la sustancialidad de nuestra realidad, nos muestran cómo está hecha de sueños intercalados, de ficciones en las que vivimos, de otras representaciones que se han solidificado y que tomamos, provisionalmente, por la realidad que nos aprisiona. Yo sueño que estoy aquí....

¿Vivimos atrapados en la Matrix? ¿nuestra realidad es un Simulacro?

Retropost, 2005: ¿Cómo sabes que exixto?

 

 

¿Cómo sabes que exixto?

 Blog de notas, 3 de julio de 2005 - 11:26 - Filosofía

A Ivo le gustan mucho los modelitos a escala de edificios para la promoción de urbanizaciones, sobre todo si tienen figuritas y coches. Hoy hemos descubierto uno en el que aparece él, talmente, cruzando un paso de peatones de la mano de una oronda señora, y le ha entusiasmado verse a través del cristal, miniaturizado:

- Papá, ¿cómo saben que exixto?

Pregunta muy razonable; pero lo hemos oído mal, y hemos pensado que Ivo decía "cómo sabes que exixto", y que ya filosofaba. Álvaro ha contraatacado con una hipótesis extraída de las Meditaciones Metafísicas-cum-Manual de Forestales Juveniles al uso de su generación, a saber, la Guía para la Vida de Bart Simpson:

- Es cierto, ¿cómo podemos estar seguros de que no estamos soñando todo esto, y que en realidad no somos un cerebro en un frasco de algún científico loco?

En efecto, Álvaro, nunca descartes esa posibilidad. A René le asaltó la duda del Genio Maligno siendo uno de los cerebros privilegiados de Europa —su razonamiento subsiguiente refutándolo se quedó un poco cojito, porque poniendo a Dios en el lugar del genio maligno no solucionamos gran cosa. En mi generación se pasaba esta crisis existencial cuando se te juntaban la adolescencia, el estudio de la metafísica, y la desconfianza hacia la Divinidad. Y ahora ya les llega a los niños la problemática trascendentalmente reducida o condensada a través de los Simpson, en forma de parodia de cine serie B. Yo me quedo con la duda de si el ver su propio cloncillo en miniatura le ha inducido a Ivo una meditación transcendental, y le vuelvo a preguntar:

- Oye, Ivo, ¿cómo sabes que existes?

- ¡Es cierto! ¿Por qué ahí exixtía?

Está visto que nuestra sustancia existente la construimos sobre la base de las imágenes que nos representan - (Aquí René Descartes, George Berkeley, Oscar Wilde, Jacques Lacan, Miguel Bosé y Bart Simpson, cantando en sexteto a capella:) "La vida es sólo fantasía...."

 

La realidad, según se mire

 

La realidad, según se mire: https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2025/04/la-realidad-segun-se-mire.html

La proyección mental de la realidad

 Retropost, 2015:

 Va saliendo más investigación que juega a favor de mi teoría de la proyección mental de la realidad. Por ejemplo en este artículo sobre la construcción de la información visual publicado en Current Biology.

La sustancia (y ya lo dijo en cierto modo Berkeley) es que el objeto visual es construido por el cerebro, no "recibido" ya hecho desde el exterior. Yo lo llamo a veces la teoría de la  "proyección del objeto", porque el efecto viene a ser como si nuestro cerebro proyectase a la realidad el objeto que ha generado, con el resultado de que lo vemos allí afuera, cuando no está sino en nuestra cabeza. Quizá sea más apropiado llamarla, como lo hacen estos autores, la teoría de la "integración del objeto."

Integration Trumps Selection in Object Recognition

Toni P. Saarela &  Michael S. Landy

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.01.068

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822%2815%2900132-3

Highlights

• •Humans identified letter shapes defined by texture, color, and luminance cues
• •Humans integrate cues that define the same letter for improved shape recognition
• •They cannot filter out cues that define a conflicting letter, reducing performance
• •Mandatory cue integration results in a failure of attentional selection

Summary

Finding and recognizing objects is a fundamental task of vision. Objects can be defined by several “cues” (color, luminance, texture, etc.), and humans can integrate sensory cues to improve detection and recognition [ 1–3 ]. Cortical mechanisms fuse information from multiple cues [ 4 ], and shape-selective neural mechanisms can display cue invariance by responding to a given shape independent of the visual cue defining it [ 5–8 ]. Selective attention, in contrast, improves recognition by isolating a subset of the visual information [ 9 ]. Humans can select single features (red or vertical) within a perceptual dimension (color or orientation), giving faster and more accurate responses to items having the attended feature [ 10, 11 ]. Attention elevates neural responses and sharpens neural tuning to the attended feature, as shown by studies in psychophysics and modeling [ 11, 12 ], imaging [ 13–16 ], and single-cell and neural population recordings [ 17, 18 ]. Besides single features, attention can select whole objects [ 19–21 ]. Objects are among the suggested “units” of attention because attention to a single feature of an object causes the selection of all of its features [ 19–21 ]. Here, we pit integration against attentional selection in object recognition. We find, first, that humans can integrate information near optimally from several perceptual dimensions (color, texture, luminance) to improve recognition. They cannot, however, isolate a single dimension even when the other dimensions provide task-irrelevant, potentially conflicting information. For object recognition, it appears that there is mandatory integration of information from multiple dimensions of visual experience. The advantage afforded by this integration, however, comes at the expense of attentional selection.


 Este tipo de integración cognitiva en el cerebro resulta (claro está) de su complejidad de circuitos neuronales que procesan diversa información, parte proveniente del córtex, de la memoria, combinándola con "lo que se ve."  Resulta de la historia evolutiva del cerebro, y en parte de su "recableo" provocado por la ampliación del córtex y la integración de la información lingüística en la estructura del cerebro. Más al respecto hablan Deacon (ver La caverna del cerebro) y Benjamin Bergen en Louder than Words.  La estructura del cerebro, el desarrollo del lenguaje y la integración de nuestra cultura y experiencia con nuestra percepción generan así la realidad virtual o realidad aumentada  donde vivimos. Para otros seres con ojos no está ahí—pero nosotros la vemos; y es más, nos movemos por ella y vivimos en ella.

 

La noción de estroma propuesta por Gustavo Bueno viene a ser una manera de enfocar el mismo fenómeno, visto desde su teoría. El "estroma" es el objeto cultural, el meme mental podríamos decir, que tiene una naturaleza cognitiva e informacional pero a la vez es un objeto físico. Esto da lugar a una ontología de objetos materiales gestionados y organizados por la mente.

Hablaba yo de esta cuestión de la generación mental de la realidad,  a cuenta del libro de Weiskrantz Consciousness Lost and Found, de Gazzaniga, y de las neuronas espejo, y defendiendo la tesis de la "proyección" o de la "realidad proyectada", en ESPECULACIONES NEURONALES.

Esta cuestión de neurología, de lingüística y de psicología cognitiva también tiene implicaciones filosóficas, fenomenológicas y antropológicas, claro está. Así que por qué no añadir un ingrediente más al cocido de este artículo, relacionando esta noción de la realidad aumentada gestada en el cerebro, con la teoría de la mente y de la experiencia de George Herbert Mead, que veníamos discutiendo estos días por aquí también. Entre pragmatismo y fenomenología anda la cosa, pero más que rozando la metafísica, puesto que Mead pretende explicar la generación misma de la realidad, de la realidad espacio-temporal (esos irreductibles kantianos) a través del análisis de la experiencia de contacto, y explicando la genesis del tiempo mediante la auto-interacción. En fin, se lo lean en Mind, Self and Society o en La Filosofía del presente.  Mead se vio influido por muchos (Dilthey, Wundt, James, Dewey, Bergson, etc.) pero muy inmediatamente aquí por las reflexiones de Alfred North Whitehead en What Is Nature. (Oigan aquí un podcast sobre la teoría de la constitución mental de la realidad del propio Whitehead, que a su vez nos lleva más atrás—a Locke, etc.). Pero dejaremos para otra ocasión, quizá para la eternidad, la teoría de la Realidad como Realidad Virtual y la organización mental del mundo según Whitehead.

Aquí sólo traeré a colación un par de textos relevantes de Mind, Self, and Society de Mead, el primero en realidad de uno de los ensayos suplementarios llamado "El individuo biológico":

From the point of view of instinctive behavior in the lower animals, or of the immediate human response to a perceptual world (in other words, from the standpoint of the unfractured relation between the impulses and the objects which give them expression), past and future are not there; and yet they are represented in the situation. They are represented by facility of adjustment through the selection of certain elements both in the direct sensuous stimulation through the excitement of the end-organs, and in the imagery. What represents past and what represents future are not distinguishable as contents. The surrogate of the past is the actual adjustment of the impulse to the object as stimulus. The surrogate of the future is the control which the changing field of experience during the act maintains over its execution.

The flow of experience is not differentiated into a past and future over against an immediate now until reflection affects certain parts of the experience with these characters, with the perfection of adjustment on the one hand, and with the shifting control on the other. The biologic individual lives in an undifferentiated now; the social reflective individual takes this up into a flow of experience within which strands a fixed past and a more or less uncertain future. The now of experience is represented primarily by the body of impulses listed above, our inherited adjustment to a physical and social world, continuously reconstituted by social reflective processes; but this reconstitution takes place by analysis and selection in the field of stimulation, not by immediate direction and recombination of the impulses. The control exercised over the impulses is always through selection of stimulations conditioned by the sensitizing influence of various other impulses seeking expression. The immediacy of the now is never lost, and the biologic individual stands as the unquestioned reality in the minds of differently constructed pasts and projected futures. It has been the work of scientific reflection to isolate certain of these fixed adjustments (in terms of our balanced postures, our movements toward objects, our contacts with and manipulations of objects) as a physical world, answering to the biologic individual with its intricate nervous system. (350-51)

Y en la primera mitad de Mind, Self, and Society, habla de cómo la mente y la consciencia no están localizadas en ningún punto concreto del cerebro, sino que son el resultado emergente de la interacción de los circuitos cerebrales entre sí:

In the cortex, that organ which in some sense answers to human intelligence, we fail to find any exclusive and unvarying control, that is, any evidence of it in the structure of the form itself. In some way we can assume that the cortex acts as a whole, but we cannot come back to certain centers and say that this is where the mind is lodged in thinking and in action. There are an indefinite number of cells connected with each other, and their innervation in some sense leads to a unitary action, but what that unity is in terms of the central nervous system it is almost impossible to state. All the different parts of the cortex seem to be involved in everything that happens. All the stimuli that reach the brain are reflected into all parts of the brain, and yet we do get a unitary action. There remains, then, a problem which is by no means definitely solved: the unity of the action of the central nervous system. Wundt undertook to find certain centers which would be responsible for this sort of unity, but there is notheing in the structure of the brain itself which isolated any parts of the brain as those which direct conduct as a whole. The unity is a unity of integration, though just how this integration takes place in detail we cannot say. (24)

Now behavioristic psychology, instead of setting up these events in the central nervous system as a causal series which is at least conditional to the sensory experience, takes the entire response to the environment as that which answers to the colored object we see, in this case the light. It does not locate the experience at any point in the nervous system; it does not put it, in the terms of Mr. Russell, inside of a head. Russell makes the experience the effect of what happens at that point where a causal process takes place in the head. He points out that, from his own point of view, the head inside of which you can place this experience exists empirically only in the heads of other people. The physiologist explains to you where this excitement is taking place. He sees the head he is demonstrating to you and he sees what is inside of the head in imagination, but, on this account, that which he sees must be inside of his own head. The way in which Russell gets out of this mess is by saying that the head which he is referring to is not the head we see, but the head which is implied in physiological analysis. Well, instead of assuming that the experienced world as such is inside of a head, located at that point at which certain nervous disturbances are going on, what the behaviorist does is to relate the world of experience to the whole act of the organism. It is true, as we have just said, that this experienced world does not appear except when the various excitements reach certain points in the central nervous system; it is also true that if you cut off any of those channels you wipe out so much of that world. What the behaviorist does, or ought to do, is to take the complete act, the whole process of conduct, as the unit in his account. In doing that he has to take into account not simply the nervous system but also the rest of the organism, for the nervous system is only a specialized part of the entire organism. (111)

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Más sobre percepción, reconocimiento y constitución perceptual de los objetos en esta conferencia de Ned Block: Seeing-as, Concepts, and Non-conceptual Content



 

Estromas, marcos y virtualidad de lo real

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Goffman: La realidad como expectativa autocumplida y el teatro de la interioridad

 Goffman: La realidad como expectativa autocumplida y el teatro de la interioridad https://www.academia.edu/168011/

La realidad humana

 La realidad humana, y la realidad: https://www.academia.edu/67285877/

We Create Our Reality

Retropost, 2014: We Create Our Reality https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2014/08/we-create-our-reality.html

¿Quién define la realidad?

 La realidad la hacemos un poco entre todos, y cada cual habita en parte en la suya y en parte en la de todos. Ahora, cuando llega la hora de definir cuál es la naturaleza última de la realidad (por ejemplo ¿Hay Dios? ¿Cuida de nosotros? ¿Qué planes tiene? ¿Hay otra vida? ¿Vivimos en un ordenador? ¿Tenemos alma? ¿Tiene todo esto algún sentido? ¿Cuál es la sustancia y razón de lo que vemos? ¿A dónde vamos? ¿Nos llevan por buen camino?)—para todo esto, doctores tiene la Iglesia. Hacen falta expertos, toda una organización social para el Mantenimiento y Definición del Universo. De esta cuestión hablan algo Berger y Luckmann en su libro sobre The Social Construction of Reality. Veamos unos párrafos sobre estos Expertos Universales, dedicados a la teoría pura y a la legitimación de la realidad:

Because the universal experts operate on a level of considerable abstraction from the vicissitudes of everyday life, both others and they themselves may conclude that their theories have no relation whatever to the ongoing life of the society, but exist in a sort of Platonic heaven of ahistorical and asocial ideation. This is, of course, an illusion, but it can have great socio-historical potency, by virtue of the relationship between the reality-defining and the reality-producing process. (135)

Se refieren Berger y Luckmann, entre otras cosas, a que la representación de la realidad (la definición de la realidad y la teorización sobre ella se cuentan entre las más influyentes formas de representación) también modela la realidad social, y proporciona mapas y modelos de la realidad que orientan la acción sobre la realidad así como otras representaciones de la realidad.

    A second consequence is a strengthening of traditionalism in the institutionalized actions thus legitimated, that is, a strengthening of the inherent tendency of institutionalization towards inertia. (....)
   The emergence of full-time personnel for universe-maintaining legitimation also brings with it occasions for social conflict. Some of this conflict is between experts and practitioners. The latter, for reasons that need not be belaboured, may come to resent the experts' grandiose pretensions and the concrete social privileges that accompany them. What is likely to be particularly galling is the experts' claim to know the ultimate significance of the practitioners' activity better than the practitioners themselves. (....)
    This brings us to another, equally important, possibility of conflict—that between rival coteries of experts. (135-6)

¿Y cómo se han de resolver los conflictos entre doctrinas, en particular cuando se resuelven a cuestiones transcendentales, teológicas o metafísicas, que escapan a la experiencia común? Puede utilizarse la argumentación, y se usa abundantemente, pero no es eso lo que decide el triunfo de las doctrinas. Berger y Luckmann son pragmáticos desilusionados en este sentido: es el ejercicio del poder, del control y de la autoridad política lo que decide la resolución de las disputas sobre la naturaleza de la realidad, al menos en el espacio público—(y apuntemos que el espacio privado se construye en gran medida por interiorización del espacio público). Son las legitimaciones toleradas o promovidas por el poder las que acaban definiendo la naturaleza de la realidad. Al menos la realidad públicamente reconocida:

By its very nature such argumentation does not carry the inherent conviction of pragmatic success. What is convincing to a man may not be to another. We cannot really blame such theoreticians if they resort to various sturdier supports for the frail power of mere argument—such as, say, getting the authorities to employ armed might to enforce one argument against its competitors. In other words, definitions of reality may be enforced by the police. This, incidentally, need not mean that such definitions will remain less convincing than those accepted 'voluntarily'—power in society includes the power to determine decisive socialization processes and, therefore, the power to produce reality. In any case, highly abstract symbolizations (that is, theories greatly removed from the concrete experience of everyday life) are validated by social rather than empirical support. It is possible to say that in this manner a pseudo-pragmatism is reintroduced. The theories may again be said to be convincing because they work— work, that is, in the sense of having become standard, taken-for-granted knowledge in the society in question. (137)

Con esta cuestión de las definiciones oficiales de la realidad, y su cuestionamiento marginal, estaba relacionado mi artículo sobre el Evangelio de Judas—un libro que cuestiona la definición de la realidad de la ideología cristiana mayoritaria de su tiempo.

una publicación de Narratología evolucionista - Evolutionary Narratology.

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Interaction as Reality-Maintenance

 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.

Stuart Hall on Representation and Race

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Interaction as Reality-Maintenance en Ibercampus.

 

 

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