In her last email Patricia had responded very convincingly to Nell’s grievance about the King not really “embodying all those institutions”. The example was from Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality and was put forth at a point when the book was building up the connection between individual daily experience and the institution itself as a shared objective phenomenon in the knowledge of a society.
At this point Nell took a step back and looked at her own thoughts. She was sounding like the book and it was slightly scary. On the other hand she knew the only way to follow Patricia was to venture into the heart of darkness.
The girl had answered with self confidence, and that was good after all. It sounded like her own words, which as a bare minimum meant Nell was talking with the real Patricia to some degree. Well, her answers reflected internalised knowledge - to stay in the jargon.
Patricia was right, the king, Edward, really did integrate “all those institutions”. Well, not Patricia in any other sense than her enacting the knowledge and emotions of the role of a sociologist. Etc. King Edward did so by the fact that knowledge spanned his activities, knowledge of the intrinsic relevance of the kingship. And other knowledge spanned the people’s awareness of his activities, knowledge of the extrinsic relevance of the kingship.
The sinews holding society together then is knowledge, not ontology. The king is nothing of his own accord. Try saying that to his open face! Or worse, her open face. Would Henry VIII have agreed? Elizabeth I? Louis XIV?
Something teased Nell. She couldn’t write off the matter yet.
When speaking, knowledge spills over. Who’s to say from where the material of our sentences stem? One quarter is formulation of gut feeling, one half from an idea about old king’s exploits, one quarter from the pub.
We know we weave society together, and nobody controls the final look.
Knowledge, meaning, then in this optic become our infrastructure. And like with geography, a rift can form and one reality becomes two. Part 2, chapter 2 deals with that. For now, she was still examining the foundation of a society.
If knowledge was a map
The way knowledge builds up is comparable to how signs build up in a landscape.
If we imagine an “empty canvas”, a land without inhabitants, and we then imagine a handful of people dropped there.
Initially they cooperate (or systematise their disagreements). They can find their way around a small part of the land without explicit sign posts. Faint trails between main areas of activity starts to form. Every morning A1, A2 and A3 goes to the kitchen garden and B1, B2 and B3 heads for the well and pumps up water for the livestock. Each requires their own peculiar routines for maintenance.
The kitchen garden and the grazing fields become social stocks of knowledge.
As the moment approaches when they have to hand over the baton to new generations, they realise they have to put up a few signs to make it clear where to go and when.
Sign posts are erected and is seen by the children as “rules” on where to go and when. This is a next step in the evolution of pure objectivity.
The knowledge comes to the children as reified, already existing reality.
When the parents explain them about the grazing fields, they can step outside and see the truth of it as the signs are there already, in the world. When the children talk with their parents, this reality is subsumed in their talk, and even their parents now see the institution of grazing fields as something external.
Alongside objective reality, the area grows from definite, limited clusters, and eventually they meet up. The “kitchen garden dwellers” and the “grazing field dwellers” are no longer two distinct subgroups but form a larger society together. They always did, but now a new fence is erected around the entire cluster.
A council for this new city is elected, and “then came the rules” as the song goes.
“Not bad?” Nell thought to herself, mirroring an exclamation in the book which followed a fictitious anthropological travesty the authors themselves had concocted.
The world was created in two stages, the dry land by the creator god copulating with his sister, the sea in an act of mutual masturbation by the latter and a twin goddess. And when the world was thus made, the creator god joined the twin goddess in the great flower dance, and in this way there came to be flora and fauna on the face of the dry land. The existing triangulation of heterosexuality, Lesbianism and flower cultivation is thus nothing less than a human imitation of the archetypal actions of the gods.
Not bad?
It obviously was excessively bad, which was the point of the ambiguity in the comment.
It wasn’t the first time Nell had put down the book wondering if Berger and Luckmann were even serious about it. But that particular example somehow spelled out with absurd self awareness how the process of social construction of reality cannot be imitated, neither engineered synthetically. It just didn’t feel real.
And that was ultimately the bane of the sociological method: It was retrodictive, not predictive.
What a sad thought. Humans are chasing “realities” or perhaps running away from them or fighting them. The project of sociology had in that vein managed little more than to steal the previous legitimiser’s thunder. Now the sociologists had captured the genies of the world and moved them to safer storage with their post hoc theorising.
What remained were feelings and allergic reactions to being scrutinised by sociologists.
The whole science was ever just a testament to the inescapable fact that however much anything seems real, it has a nasty habit of disappearing when society undergoes structural changes.
Gods were social constructs. Jahve exits the stage, Jesus enters and later struggles with Allah. It’s all papier-mâché for the gullible. The real truth lies in sociological laws.
The monkey feels his way with his fingertips. Hot yet? Keep searching. The method has not changed in a million years: We grapple in the dark for whatever speaks to us.
It reeked of self defeat. But what should she write to Patricia now? Patricia eloquently won the first round. Because she was wonderful and bright and … oh dear, the pain again.
She had to finish the last part of her notes.
Representation, reification
Once having established how all human thought follows the pathways of knowledge, which itself emerges from the fundamental traits of typification and language’s ability to objectify, we now ask about institutions.
The book is more than anything dedicated to a kind of materialism. The matter in question is that of social artefacts. For instance, names for things.
Hence institutions as such only exist once a society has - through processes of integration and legitimisation - produced words for the institution, its roles, procedures, rituals and other aspects.
How much of an individual’s knowledge is controlled by institutions depends on the society in question.
Shared relevance structures is the name given by the authors to draw contour lines in the space of knowledge around that part which deals with common problems.
Shared knowledge shapes our minds. Private knowledge is shaped by our minds.
Hypothetically we can imagine a society where all problems are shared, and hence there is no knowledge in the minds of its inhabitants that is not enveloped by society’s knowledge.
Similarly we can imagine a society where just one problem is shared (the assumption being that if the number was zero, there wouldn’t be a society there after all). Most of the knowledge in each one’s mind would be private and not fall under the control of a shared reality.
As mentioned earlier, roles occupy a bridgehead between microscopic and macroscopic levels of society.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY - p.92-93 - 2.1.4 - ROLES
The roles represent the institutional order.
[…]
Only through such representation in performed roles can the institution manifest itself in actual experience.
Reification is a stronger version of sedimentation. Objective knowledge may be shared, but we retain an idea that we also originated it. When reified, we no longer recognise its human origin.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY - p.106 - 2.1.5. SCOPE AND MODES OF INSTITUTIONALIZATION
[…] reification can be described as an extreme step in the process of objectivation,
whereby the objectivated world loses its comprehensibility as a human enterpriseand becomes fixated as a non-human, non-humanizable, inert facticity.[…] p.107
Reification is possible on
both the pre-theoretical and theoreticallevels of consciousness.
Post theoretical thoughts belongs to legitimation and symbolic order which part 2 chapter 2 deals with.
Reification is a dialectic phenomenon along typification and other functions of the brain. Reification, the way it is described, seems to be responsible for the feeling that something is real and has actual existence.
[…] p.107
The basic ‘recipe’ for the reification of institutions is to
bestow on them an ontological status independent of human activity and signification.
“This tradition came from our ancestral and divine forefathers. It existed before the Gods had thought of man”.
Or:
“Those predators across the plains really do eat human brains. They can modernise and change all they want, I won’t go there.”
It wasn’t much, she admitted to herself. Left out where all the fighting she been through herself with the shadows cast by the book. She had trouble ascribing the immense significance to typification as the authors apparently did. She struggled with their strange apolitical version of a very political discipline. She found their incessant reference to old religious rituals as explainable by legitimation processes incompatible with rural life in antiquity. Legitimation belonged to politics, she thought. Then again, she knew little about antiquity. Perhaps these people were right. Perhaps Patricia had seen that easily.
Subject: More notes, if you have time
Dearest Patricia
I would like to surrender wholeheartedly to your argument, but I am too old and stubborn, so let me meet you halfway. ❋Smiles and bows❋*
Your fellow student who said representation belonged to the later stage of legitimisation seems to have it wrong, I think.
In every formulation I try to watch my step. This is difficult to speak about, as the book early on establishes a ban against metaphysics. Knowledge is a social product, and the matters spoken about have no further existence than an outwardly projected map in which we spend our days.
Our discussion must then also be bound by that maxim:
We cannot talk of anything that the society in question has not invented a word for yet.
When Berger and Luckmann discusses representation, they are clearly using a word which likely does not correspond to a social artefact in the given society.
Barring an artefact to study, we must resort to analysing how the authors use the word. Never mind anybody’s definitions of a concept, what matters is how they use it.
The word “representation” was used to erect a two-way street between the grand institution (presumably as the society in question sees it themselves) and the role taken on by someone else.
One possible outcome would be that the people saw Edward as representing the total unification of all activities in the kingdom. Or Edward himself saw it like that. Alternative accounts could also be imagined easily. Their theory is in my view dangerously close to being nothing but a big post hoc machinery.
I had a few more notes which I wonder if you can take a look at?
Should she rather just have agreed with Patricia? Let herself be educated. Now she run the risk of the whole debacle to evolve into an argument. What a nightmare that would be.
Answers
Patricia was quick to respond.
Subject: Re: More notes, if you have time
Boy, Nell, you always have to be philosophical ❋friendly laugh and smile❋.
In principle, you are probably right. Tomorrow I will try to talk with someone else to check what I say now.
First of all, I think your notes look correct. It sounded a lot like what we talked about in class earlier on.
What you said about the non-existence of anything not underscored by a social artefact was odd. I tried rereading a few chapters, and they looked unfamiliar to me.
Now I wonder if I rather projected what I learned in class into the text. Perhaps I envy you, sitting all alone there and reading an important book with nothing to cloud your judgement but yourself.
And yet, you are clouding my judgement, aren’t you. That is still just me being dependent.
Let me type up a proper answer.
/Patricia
Pain again. But Nell had acted clumsily.
She sat and waited, but already the trail felt cold.
Half an hour later an email ticked in.
Nell, I’m sorry for my unfortunate choice of words. I didn’t see it until just now, and I probably hurt you with them.
What I meant to say was: I used to love it when you were clouding my judgement with insight. Now I realise I still do!
I like it when we think, and remembering our conversations… didn’t I sometimes say something clever also?
Anyway, time to respond to your critique of Berger and Luckmann:
Is theory of knowledge just a perspective? Don’t be offended, but I sense they in a pragmatic way are on to something concrete here. Pragmatically speaking, their theory is sound. It is a good way to discuss sociological issues.
I agree that they suddenly move beyond their phenomenological cover, but when that happens, they are usually still covered by various language theories.
You could argue that as their model grows taller, the top layers decreasingly becomes the only theory you would consult. If I were to analyse a society, I would pick many different methods and not lock myself up with theirs exclusively.
Look, I’m not saying you can’t punch holes in their account. Somehow that doesn’t invalidate their approach.
The unexpected relief almost made her weep.
The Untypifiable
She couldn’t care less about the veracity or falsity of that book. As long as she could enjoy a second more on this planet in conversation with a friend.
Subject: You always were the clever one! Was: Re: More notes, if you have time
Oh Patricia dear. As I remember our conversations, I sounded like a boring record reciting books. You supplied the juice that made it all turn alive. I just miss talking with you, that’s all. Indulge a little from time to time.
And if you in my complaints detect a defiance against being sociologically catalogued or have my innermost feelings pinned to a rack and labelled as a specimen by an entomologist, don’t read too much into it.
Most holes I can poke with a finger, I can also easily repair again.
But all the way through, I cannot convince myself that the two gentlemen have not also just convinced themselves of the validity of what they hold as truth.
Knowledge, like rivers, wanders, transforms, change curvature. What is real and important today can change rapidly as the flock herds to greener pastures.
Untypifiable experiences
One example of the durability of their theory came from a critique and a remedy I wrote down when I first read about their interpretation of dreams as remote reality.
This unknown they address (e.g. dreams) are unlike finite provinces of meaning, which in a given society is just someone else’s paramount reality.
Rather they are unknowable, or rather, untypifiable experiences whose primary threat is that they can cost time to assess whether they represent a danger or not.
This costliness warrents that the legitimation experts in the culture must invest time in assessing the threat using theory.
Embedding in a symbolic order then becomes a “routine” solution to handling disruptions in knowledge order. That suggestion breaks down when we talk about art and religion as symbolic orders, but I’m not sure we ought to either.
The little detour accomplished little more than suggest to me how resilient society really was.
An alien could land on the lawn of the White House and it wouldn’t take long before the cognitive dissonance was insulated. Although the press would immediately offer themselves as custodians of reality, they would probably be unnecessary.
Monolith
Nell thought back on her cleverly constructed attempt to break out of the straitjacket which fielded the monolith from 2001 A Space Odyssey landing in the midst of a society. Worth another email.
My thought experiment on what would happen if an ordered society was confronted with an oracle.
Subject: Science fiction time
A monolith lands
So if you take the mythologized monolith from 2001 A Space Odyssey and plant amongst humans, institutionalism breaks down?
It defies habitualisation as it defies repetition: Ask the oracle twice and you get two contradictory answers (but both completely true in an epistemological sense).
Let two people pose the same question and they look at each other and know they agree, but in reality they understand two different things. When they meet next time, they will clash over their disagreements. It is a limitless source of knowledge and change. The next generation will find it and repeat the whole process of change.
Don’t bite! I am aware that the experiment doesn’t hold. But I wanted to hear your thoughts.
Late next day the answer arrived.
Subject: Re: Science fiction time
What a vivid example!
Okay, so my guess is that in case it leads to conflict, the conflict itself would become an institution. This is the point where the word in its true sociological sense diverges from our normal use. An institution is a pattern in our knowledge, perhaps it has become reified through time.
Nobody would deny that the age old conflicts of our world has objective existence. If we can’t agree on who is to blame, then at least that very disagreement is the institution.
Miss you
Patricia
Nell went to bed, giving herself over to wondering.
Had she grown dependent on Patricia’s vulnerable constitution? Now she was self-confident and a voice for an all-pervasive institution.
No, ridiculous. And still… the problem with all these tall tales of explanation is that they all come up with reasons why our own account is false. As we grow accustomed to that, we habitually (haha) reject all personal explanations as self-delusion.
And here lay Nell, convinced that the real reason she missed a Patricia on the ropes was not to be her saviour and safe haven, but that the unstable girl had moved them both beyond the limits of the known.
Nell had grown addicted to living outside the known. Something inside her craved the annihilation of knowledge.
•P•A•R•A•D•O•X•