She woke in the middle of the night knowing that it mattered this time.

Subject: A thought on the strange use of the word “real”

In part 3, chapter 1, page 175, we once again hear about the need for conversation to keep a memory real, in this case for a hypothetical Catholic living alone.

Through prayer, religious exercises, and similar techniques his old Catholic reality may continue to be subjectively relevant to him. At the very least the techniques may sustain his continued self-identification as a Catholic. They will, however, become subjectively empty of ‘living’ reality unless they are ‘revitalized’ by social contact with other Catholics. To be sure, an individual usually remembers the realities of his past. But the way to ‘refresh’ these memories is to converse with those who share their relevance.

But that is a certifiably untrue thing to say, unless we are talking about different experiences. Conversation is exactly what hollows out religious experience. Every conversation you have feels like it violates the sanctity of a private experience. The way to remembrance safe from the community is quite the opposite, prayer and seclusion.

Disease is another example. The perennial sense of receiving a death sentence. We talk with doctors and research on the Internet to ward off the sense that it is all “falling apart”. These are likely the rituals of institutionalised crisis management that Berger and Luckmann talk about. The objective reality is maintained when medical staff establishes web pages and procedures that can guide the patient through the affair. The subjective reality is what we maintain when we try to convince ourselves through self-education that things can get back to normal again.

But what is real? Every word in the newly acquired glossary is written by people fighting death. Death is the transcendent reality that is no longer far away.

Death is real and untypifiable, and the integration of death into any symbolic order is a way to escape death’s ultimate reality, a reality that can only be sought once you relinquish the safety of a symbolic order. Death is not forgiveness, not punishment, not a biological inevitability, not a state. It is reality. The real reality, and the only reality. The one you cannot capture in words.

A case of the flu is a disruption of the sanity of the cycle of workdays and weekends. We lie in bed and think hazily that soon we will be back again.

Illness is real. We try to observe unknown reality because we are forced to and cannot escape. We try hard to replace it with words, but pain pulls us back to reality. Soldiers dying on the field face reality. I would like to think that physicists face it in their laboratories.

(Sometimes though, an illness becomes the opposite: A chance to escape the prison of workdays and stare out the window at a lost world.)

Under these observations (of a very introspective nature indeed) Berger and Luckmann’s subjective reality then becomes a place to feel safe. Objective knowledge becomes road signs guiding us back to that safe place.

Their concept of reality is one degree north of a purely psychological definition! It has got more to do with oncology than ontology.

Even when we try to face the unknown and surrender to the new reality, we talk about it and elaborate on it. The finer expression we can give the unknown substance, the more we can subsume it under linguistic rules and perhaps also scientific rules. We can act rather than just be easy prey.

I suppose that it is under this pressure of death that a society evolves its symbolic order. We shine a cone into the darkness with language, as the authors say themselves.

So now we have the ultimate negation of the whole premise of the book: First came our personal need for stability and for an ordered reality, where all dangers are known and accounted for. Then came subjective attachment during primary socialisation to the significant other, later supplemented by maintenance procedures, such as seeking out a group of like-minded people. On top of that comes the broader legitimations of objective reality and institutions which serve mostly the needs of the initial psychology.

No, I don’t believe that myself. I think social reality is much more chaotic than that.

ANY emotion will elicit institution building, including, but not limited to, the affective cargo of primary socialisation. Whether the source of emotion is ourselves or social waves spreading out is irrelevant. The procedure remains the same.

THEN it becomes relevant that our cognitive tools rest on language and shared activity.

Miss you ♥︎

-Nell

She gave it some thought before hitting the send button.

Then she got up and revisited the chapters on legitimation. In the last part of the book, Nell started to see an ordinary human psychology underlying everything. Individuals performed routine maintenance of their reality by leaning on a “plausibility structure”, i.e., like minded individuals, with whom one could work out a picture of the world compatible with one’s own internalised viewpoints.

Her new theory was that the book should have been presented from back to front. First came the personal need to know that everything was still operating as usual - part three. Perhaps like it did during childhood. Certainly, the authors saw in the sense of reality during childhood something akin to the “magic” many associate with the past.

That urge or compulsion towards safer days is lacking completely from the description of the formation of defences of objective society - part two. But it should have been present. As you read part two, you are bewildered about the poor explanations cited as to why the legitimation of society takes place. “To ensure proper passage from generation to generation.”

Now she could see the missing piece: Because without it, we would feel insecure.

Perhaps she ought to give the authors a bit of credit and admit that the phenomena described in part two about institutions and objective reality were simply unrelated to part three on subjective reality. It shared the dialectics of externalisation, objectivation and internalisation, but otherwise what went on in the higher echelons of institutional reality building was very different from a personal conversation to another religion.

Origins

Language makes something seem real. We may think, while our neighbour talks about salvation “okay, perhaps in your confused head”, but that runs counter to what is happening in the conversation itself: Salvation becomes real to us, not as our neighbour describes it, but as our linguistic brains hear it: Our neighbour (and likely millions of others) seeks salvation. The idea is real.

Vertical, horizontal

Legitimation is about knowledge that bridges parts into a whole. This knowledge is synthesised on top of the ordinary institutional knowledge.

Horizontal: You and I in different roles in relation to some institution - e.g., I, the student, and you, the teacher - are understood through awareness of both roles. We are part of a wider phenomenon called education.

Vertical: I, who grow up and transition through roles, must be equipped with knowledge that makes the roles part of a whole (so I understand that I have not fallen through the cracks of society as I retire.)

Normative, cognitive

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY - 2.2.1 - ORIGINS OF SYMBOLIC UNIVERSES

legitimation has a cognitive as well as a normative element. In other words, legitimation is not just a matter of ‘values’. It always implies ‘knowledge’ as well.

Language, being the ultimate objectivation of intention, and, like cash, interchangeable, fungible and liquid, constitutes objectivity by its mere use.

Affective, cognitive

Their entire theory is experience-based. Each experience has an affective aspect and a knowledge aspect.

The knowledge aspect is what they divide into a cognitive and normative element.

We also notice both a subjective and objective reality to the experience, but those lie on a different axis. Some parts seem to reside within me, some belong to the reality out there.

Notice how the book avoids figuring out what is internal and what is external? What matters is what individuals recount as a subjective part of one self and an objective part of a world out there.

Even legitimations, although pieces of large and complex symbolic order systems, are always and can only be received as something that is experienced affectively and cognitively and will be enveloped in normative limitations.

Threat to reality

Remembrance of mortality and expectation of death can tear apart the certainty of daily life. Dreams are cited as example, but with or without explanation, most people’s dreams are rarely a disturbance. Grief, depression and hopelessness erodes the certainty obligated by everyday life.

This integration of the realities of marginal situations within the paramount reality of everyday life is of great importance, because these situations constitute the most acute threat to taken-for-granted, routinized existence in society. If one conceives of the latter as the ‘daylight side’ of human life, then the marginal situations constitute a ‘night side’ that keeps lurking ominously on the periphery of everyday consciousness.

Identity is also knowledge, except we are particularly sensitive to its demise. Legitimation also aims to construct a viable set of typified identities that can anchor us to the social world.

Even if his neighbours do not know who he is, and even if he himself may forget in the throes of nightmare, he can reassure himself that his ‘true self’ is an ultimately real entity in an ultimately real universe. The gods know — or psychiatric science - or the party.

Again we see how there is no way around knowledge, even when it comes to knowing ourselves.

Identity is ultimately legitimated by placing it within the context of a symbolic universe. Mythologically speaking, the individual’s ‘real’ name is the one given to him by his god.

Levels

Levels of legitimation:

Facticity of language - pre-theoretical. Linguistic pathways control the reality.
Proverbs, maxims, sayings - pre-theoretical.
Institution-specific body of theory - invented by specialists.
Symbolic order - integrates realms of reality.

Symbolic order

Of these, the symbolic order is the most important and widest reaching legitimation.

Remember that legitimations are clusters of knowledge produced with the intent of solidifying the already existing reality (and that reality is just what we perceive to exist independent of our will).

The origins of a symbolic universe have their roots in the constitution of man. If man in society is a world-constructor, this is made possible by his constitutionally given worldopenness, which already implies the conflict between order and chaos.

Human existence is, ab initio, an ongoing externalization. As man externalizes himself, he constructs the world into which he externalizes himself. In the process of externalization, he projects his own meanings into reality.

So far this is the story of cognitive thought. On top of that, we see the very special social activity that they call legitimation: The production of understanding which goes far beyond everyday experience:

Symbolic universes, which proclaim that all reality is humanly meaningful and call upon the entire cosmos to signify the validity of human existence, constitute the furthest reaches of this projection.

She sent the note, and looking at it over again, she saw several insightful thoughts, though nothing Patricia had not heard over and over.

At the same time, she couldn’t help noticing that Patricia’s answers were increasingly delayed and sometimes they never came at all.

Why shouldn’t they be? The world itself had started to feel cold. Perhaps this is what death was like. The world around you start to die off, only to reach you at the moment when the remaining realisation is about to hit: You were the one dying.

Nell picked up the book again and turned pages until she got to one of its rare escape hatches.

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY - p. 116

The thought keeps suggesting itself (the ‘insane’ thought par excellence) that, perhaps, the bright reality of everyday life is but an illusion, to be swallowed up at any moment by the howling nightmares of the other, the night-side reality. Such thoughts of madness and terror are contained by ordering all conceivable realities within the same symbolic universe that encompasses the reality of everyday life - to wit, ordering them in such a way that the latter reality retains its paramount, definitive (if one wishes, its “most real”) quality.

For some odd reason, the sentence had hit her like a hammer.

Now she recognised Patricia’s madness. What’s worse, she saw it fester in her own mind. It was not contained at all, but thrived on all the poison sent its way by sanity’s wardens.

Knowing about socially constructed reality, the question only became all the more terrifying? What is real outside the language of society?

After all, the social dialectic was not that hard to understand. One could see beyond it.

What was outside for those who failed to seek security in society’s order?

•P•A•R•A•D•O•X•

Is There Still a Psychological Model Underneath?

Origins