journal

The Social Construction of Reality

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann

THE REALITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE

Since our purpose in this treatise is a sociological analysis of the reality of everyday life, more precisely, of knowledge that guides conduct in everyday life, and we are only tangentially interested in how this reality may appear in various theoretical perspectives to intellectuals, we must begin by a clarification of that reality as it is available to the commonsense of the ordinary members of society. How that commonsense reality may be influenced by the theoretical constructions of intellectuals and other merchants of ideas is a further question. Ours is thus an enterprise that, although theoretical in character, is geared to the understanding of a reality that forms the subject matter of the empirical science of sociology, that is, the world of everyday life.

It should be evident, then, that our purpose is not to engage in philosophy. All the same, if the reality of everyday life is to be understood, account must be taken of its intrinsic character before we can proceed with sociological analysis proper. Everyday life presents itself as a reality interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them as a coherent world. As sociologists we take this reality as the object of our analyses. Within the frame of reference of sociology as an empirical science it is possible to take this reality as given, to take as data particular phenomena arising within it, without further inquiring about the foundations of this reality, which is a philosophical task. However, given the particular purpose of the present treatise, we cannot completely bypass the philosophical problem. The world of everyday life is not only taken for granted as reality by the ordinary members of society in the subjectively meaningful conduct of their lives. It is a world that originates in their thoughts and actions, and is maintained as real by these. Before turning to our main task we must, therefore, attempt to clarify the foundations of knowledge in everyday life, to wit, the objectivations of subjective processes (and meanings) by which the intersubjective commonsense world is constructed.

For the purpose at hand, this is a preliminary task, and we can do no more than sketch the main features of what we believe to be an adequate solution to the philosophical problem—adequate, let us hasten to add, only in the sense that it can serve as a starting point for sociological analysis. The considerations immediately following are, therefore, of the nature of philosophical prolegomena and, in themselves, presociological. The method we consider best suited to clarify the foundations of knowledge in everyday life is that of phenomenological analysis, a purely descriptive method and, as such, “empirical” but not “scientific”—as we understand the nature of the empirical sciences.1

The phenomenological analysis of everyday life, or rather of the subjective experience of everyday life, refrains from any causal or genetic hypotheses, as well as from assertions about the ontological status of the phenomena analyzed. It is important to remember this. Commonsense contains innumerable pre and quasi-scientific interpretations about everyday reality, which it takes for granted. If we are to describe the reality of commonsense we must refer to these interpretations, just as we must take account of its taken-for-granted character—but we do so within phenomenological brackets.

Consciousness is always intentional; it always intends or is directed toward objects. We can never apprehend some putative substratum of consciousness as such, only consciousness of something or other. This is so regardless of whether the object of consciousness is experienced as belonging to an external physical world or apprehended as an element of an inward subjective reality. Whether I (the first person singular, here as in the following illustrations, standing for ordinary self-consciousness in everyday life) am viewing the panorama of New York City or whether I become conscious of an inner anxiety, the processes of consciousness involved are intentional in both instances. The point need not be belabored that the consciousness of the Empire State Building differs from the awareness of anxiety. A detailed phenomenological analysis would uncover the various layers of experience, and the different structures of meaning involved in, say, being bitten by a dog, remembering having been bitten by a dog, having a phobia about all dogs, and so forth. What interests us here is the common intentional character of all consciousness.

Different objects present themselves to consciousness as constituents of different spheres of reality. I recognize the fellowmen I must deal with in the course of everyday life as pertaining to a reality quite different from the disembodied figures that appear in my dreams. The two sets of objects introduce quite different tensions into my consciousness and I am attentive to them in quite different ways. My consciousness, then, is capable of moving through different spheres of reality. Put differently, I am conscious of the world as consisting of multiple realities. As I move from one reality to another, I experience the transition as a kind of shock. This shock is to be understood as caused by the shift in attentiveness that the transition entails. Waking up from a dream illustrates this shift most simply.

Among the multiple realities there is one that presents itself as the reality par excellence. This is the reality of everyday life. Its privileged position entitles it to the designation of paramount reality. The tension of consciousness is highest in everyday life, that is, the latter imposes itself upon consciousness in the most massive, urgent and intense manner. It is impossible to ignore, difficult even to weaken in its imperative presence. Consequently, it forces me to be attentive to it in the fullest way. I experience everyday life in the state of being wide-awake. This wide-awake state of existing in and apprehending the reality of everyday life is taken by me to be normal and self-evident, that is, it constitutes my natural attitude.

I apprehend the reality of everyday life as an ordered reality. Its phenomena are prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them and that impose themselves upon the latter. The reality of everyday life appears already objectified, that is, constituted by an order of objects that have been designated as objects before my appearance on the scene. The language used in everyday life continuously provides me with the necessary objectifications and posits the order within which these make sense and within which everyday life has meaning for me. I live in a place that is geographically designated; I employ tools, from can openers to sports cars, which are designated in the technical vocabulary of my society; I live within a web of human relationships, from my chess club to the United States of America, which are also ordered by means of vocabulary. In this manner language marks the co-ordinates of my life in society and fills that life with meaningful objects.

The reality of everyday life is organized around the “here” of my body and the “now” of my present. This “here and now” is the focus of my attention to the reality of everyday life. What is “here and now” presented to me in everyday life is the realissimum of my consciousness. The reality of everyday life is not, however, exhausted by these immediate presences, but embraces phenomena that are not present “here and now.” This means that I experience everyday life in terms of differing degrees of closeness and remoteness both spatially and temporally. Closest to me is the zone of everyday life that is directly accessible to my bodily manipulation. This zone contains the world within my reach, the world in which I act so as to modify its reality, or the world in which I work. In this world of working my consciousness is dominated by the pragmatic motive, that is, my attention to this world is mainly determined by what I am doing, have done or plan to do in it. In this way it is my world par excellence. I know, of course, that the reality of everyday life contains zones that are not accessible to me in this manner. But either I have no pragmatic interest in these zones or my interest in them is indirect insofar as they may be, potentially, manipulative zones for me. Typically, my interest in the far zones is less intense and certainly less urgent. I am intensely interested in the cluster of objects involved in my daily occupation—say, the world of the garage, if I am a mechanic. I am interested, though less directly, in what goes on in the testing laboratories of the automobile industry in Detroit—I am unlikely ever to be in one of these laboratories, but the work done there will eventually affect my everyday life. I may also be interested in what goes on at Cape Kennedy or in outer space, but this interest is a matter of private, “leisure-time” choice rather than an urgent necessity of my everyday life.

The reality of everyday life further presents itself to me as an intersubjective world, a world that I share with others. This intersubjectivity sharply differentiates everyday life from other realities of which I am conscious. I am alone in the world of my dreams, but I know that the world of everyday life is as real to others as it is to myself. Indeed, I cannot exist in everyday life without continually interacting and communicating with others. I know that my natural attitude to this world corresponds to the natural attitude of others, that they also comprehend the objectifications by which this world is ordered, that they also organize this world around the “here and now” of their being in it and have projects for working in it. I also know, of course, that the others have a perspective on this common world that is not identical with mine. My “here” is their “there.” My “now” does not fully overlap with theirs. My projects differ from and may even conflict with theirs. All the same, I know that I live with them in a common world. Most importantly, I know that there is an ongoing correspondence between my meanings and their meanings in this world, that we share a common sense about its reality. The natural attitude is the attitude of commonsense consciousness precisely because it refers to a world that is common to many men. Commonsense knowledge is the knowledge I share with others in the normal, self-evident routines of everyday life.

The reality of everyday life is taken for granted as reality. It does not require additional verification over and beyond its simple presence. It is simply there, as self-evident and compelling facticity. I know that it is real. While I am capable of engaging in doubt about its reality, I am obliged to suspend such doubt as I routinely exist in everyday life. This suspension of doubt is so firm that to abandon it, as I might want to do, say, in theoretical or religious contemplation, I have to make an extreme transition. The world of everyday life proclaims itself and, when I want to challenge the proclamation, I must engage in a deliberate, by no means easy effort. The transition from the natural attitude to the theoretical attitude of the philosopher or scientist illustrates this point. But not all aspects of this reality are equally unproblematic. Everyday life is divided into sectors that are apprehended routinely, and others that present me with problems of one kind or another. Suppose that I am an automobile mechanic who is highly knowledgeable about all American-made cars. Everything that pertains to the latter is a routine, unproblematic facet of my everyday life. But one day someone appears in the garage and asks me to repair his Volkswagen. I am now compelled to enter the problematic world of foreign-made cars. I may do so reluctantly or with professional curiosity, but in either case I am now faced with problems that I have not yet routinized. At the same time, of course, I do not leave the reality of everyday life. Indeed, the latter becomes enriched as I begin to incorporate into it the knowledge and skills required for the repair of foreign-made cars. The reality of everyday life encompasses both kinds of sectors, as long as what appears as a problem does not pertain to a different reality altogether (say, the reality of theoretical physics, or of nightmares). As long as the routines of everyday life continue without interruption they are apprehended as unproblematic.

(Longhofer 110-112)

Longhofer, Wesley. Social Theory Re-Wired, 2nd Edition. Routledge, 20160331. VitalBook file.

The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use.

New reading starts below

Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door-Closer*

Bruno Latour1

THE MOST LIBERAL SOCIOLOGIST often discriminates against nonhumans. Ready to study the most bizarre, exotic, or convoluted social behavior, he or she balks at studying nuclear plants, robots, or pills. Although sociology is expert at dealing with human groupings, when it comes to nonhumans, it is less sure of itself. The temptation is to leave the nonhuman to the care of technologists or to study the impact of black-boxed techniques upon the evolution of social groups. In spite of the works of Marx or Lewis Mumford and the more recent development of a sociology of techniques (MacKenzie and Wacjman, 1985; Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, 1986; Winner, 1986; Latour, 1987), sociologists still feel estranged when they fall upon the bizarre associations of humans with nonhumans. Part of their uneasiness has to do with the technicalities of complex objects and with the absence of a convenient vocabulary allowing them to move freely from studying associations of human to associations of nonhumans. In this paper I want to contribute to the reinsertion of nonhumans into the mainstream of American sociology by examining an extremely simple technique and offering a coherent vocabulary that could be applied to more complex imbroglios of humans and nonhumans.

REINVENTING THE DOOR

On a freezing day in February, posted on the door of the Sociology Department at Walla Walla University, Washington, could be seen a small hand-written notice: “The door-closer is on strike, for God’s sake, keep the door closed.” This fusion of labor relations, religion, advertisement, semiotics, and technique in one single insignificant fact is exactly the sort of thing I want to help describe. As a technologist teaching in an engineering school in Columbus, Ohio, I want to challenge some of the assumptions sociologists often hold about the “social context” of machines.

Walls are a nice invention, but if there were no holes in them, there would be no way to get in or out; they would be mausoleums or tombs. The problem is that, if you make holes in the walls, anything and anyone can get in and out (bears, visitors, dust, rats, noise). So architects invented this hybrid: a hole-wall, often called a door, which, although common enough, has always struck me as a miracle of technology. The cleverness of the invention hinges upon the hinge-pin: instead of driving a hole through walls with a sledge hammer or a pick, you simply gently push the door (I am supposing here that the lock has not been invented; this would over-complicate the already highly complex story of this door). Furthermore, and here is the real trick, once you have passed through the door, you do not have to find trowel and cement to rebuild the wall you have just destroyed; you simply push the door gently back (I ignore for now the added complication of the “pull” and “push” signs).

So, to size up the work done by hinges, you simply have to imagine that every time you want to get in or out of the building you have to do the same work as a prisoner trying to escape or a gangster trying to rob a bank, plus the work of those who rebuild either the prison’s or the bank’s walls.

If you do not want to imagine people destroying walls and rebuilding them every time they wish to leave or enter a building, then imagine the work that would have to be done in order to keep inside or to keep outside all the things and people that, left to themselves, would go the wrong way. As Maxwell could have said, imagine his demon working without a door. Anything could escape from or penetrate into the department, and there would soon be complete equilibrium between the depressing and noisy surrounding area and the inside of the building. Techniques are always involved when asymmetry or irreversibility is the goal; it might appear that doors are a striking counter example since they maintain the hole-wall in a reversible state, but the allusion to Maxwell’s demon clearly shows that such is not the case. The reversible door is the only way to irreversibly trap inside a differential accumulation of warm sociologists, knowledge, papers, and also, alas, paperwork; the hinged door allows a selection of what gets in and what gets out so as to locally increase order or information. If you let the drafts get inside, the drafts will never get outside to the publishers.

Now, draw two columns (if I am not allowed to give orders to the reader of Social Problems then take it as a piece of strongly worded advice). In the right column, list the work people would have to do if they had no door; in the left column write down the gentle pushing (or pulling) they have to do in order to fulfill the same tasks. Compare the two columns; the enormous effort on the right is balanced by the little one on the left, and this thanks to hinges. I will define this transformation of a major effort into a minor one by the word translation or delegation; I will say that we have delegated (or translated or displaced or shifted out) to the hinge the work of reversibly solving the hole-wall dilemma. Calling on a sociologist friend, I do not have to do this work nor even to think about it; it was delegated by the carpenter to a character, the hinge, that I will call a nonhuman (notice that I did not say “inhuman”). I simply enter the department of sociology. As a more general descriptive rule, every time you want to know what a nonhuman does, simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this character not present. This imaginary substitution exactly sizes up the role, or function, of this little figure.

Before going on, let me cash out one of the side benefits of this table: in effect, we have drawn a scale balance where tiny efforts balance out mighty weights. The scale we drew (at least the one that you drew if you have obeyed my orders—I mean, followed my advice) reproduces the very leverage allowed by hinges. That the small be made stronger than the large is a very moral story indeed (think of David and Goliath). By the same token, this is also, since at least Archimedes’ days, a very good definition of a lever and of power: the minimum you need to hold and deploy astutely in order to produce the maximum effect. Am I alluding to machines or to Syracuse’s King? I don’t know, and it does not matter since the King and Archimedes fused the two “minimaxes” into one single story told by Plutarch: the defense of Syracuse. I contend that this reversal of forces is what sociologists should look at in order to understand the “social construction” of techniques and not at a hypothetical social context they are not equipped to grasp. This little point having been made, let me go on with the story (we will understand later why I do not really need your permission to go on and why, nevertheless, you are free not to go on, although only relatively so).

DELEGATING TO HUMANS

There is a problem with doors. Visitors push them to get in or pull on them to get out (or vice versa), but then the door remains open. That is, instead of the door you have a gaping hole in the wall through which, for instance, cold rushes in and heat rushes out. Of course, you could imagine that people living in the building or visiting the department of sociology would be a well disciplined lot (after all, sociologists are meticulous people). They will learn to close the door behind them and retransform the momentary hole into a well-sealed wall. The problem is that discipline is not the main characteristic of people. Are they going to be so well-behaved? Closing a door would appear to be a simple enough piece of know-how once hinges have been invented; but, considering the amount of work, innovations, sign-posts, recriminations that go on endlessly everywhere to keep them closed (at least in Northern regions), it seems to be rather poorly disseminated.

This is where the age-old choice, so well analyzed by Mumford (1966), is offered to you: either to discipline the people or to substitute for the unreliable people another delegated human character whose only function is to open and close the door. This is called a groom or a porter (from the French word for door) or a gatekeeper, or a janitor, or a concierge, or a turnkey, or a gaoler. The advantage is that you now have to discipline only one human and may safely leave the others to their erratic behavior. No matter who these others are and where they come from, the groom will always take care of the door. A nonhuman (the hinges) plus a human (the groom) have solved the hole-wall dilemma.

Solved? Not quite. First of all, if the department pays for a porter, they will have no money left to buy coffee or books or to invite eminent foreigners to give lectures. If they give the poor little boy other duties besides that of porter, then he will not be present most of the time, and the damned door will stay open. Even if they had money to keep him there, we are now faced with a problem that two hundred years of capitalism has not completely solved: how to discipline a youngster to reliably fulfill a boring and underpaid duty. Although there is now only one human to be disciplined instead of hundreds (in practice only dozens because Walla Walla is rather difficult to locate), the weak point of the tactic is now revealed: if this one lad is unreliable then the whole chain breaks down. If he falls asleep on the job or goes walkabout, there will be no appeal; the damned door will stay open (remember that locking it is no solution since this would turn it into a wall, and then providing every visitor with the right key is an impossible task). Of course, the little rat may be punished or even flogged. But imagine the headlines: “Sociologists of science flog porter from poor working class background.” And what if he is black, which might very well be the case, given the low pay? No, disciplining a groom is an enormous and costly task that only Hilton Hotels can tackle, and that for other reasons that have nothing to do with keeping the door properly closed.

If we compare the work of disciplining the groom with the work he substitutes for, according to the list defined above, we see that this delegated character has the opposite effect to that of the hinge. A simple task, forcing people to close the door, is now performed at an incredible cost; the minimum effect is obtained with maximum spending and spanking. We also notice, when drawing the two lists, an interesting difference. In the first relationship (hinges vis-à-vis work of many people), you not only had a reversal of forces (the lever allows gentle manipulations to heavy weights) but also a reversal of time. Once the hinges are in place, nothing more has to be done apart from maintenance (oiling them from time to time). In the second set of relations (groom’s work versus many people’s work), not only do you fail to reverse the forces, but you also fail to modify the time schedule. Nothing can be done to prevent the groom who has been reliable for two months from failing on the sixty-second day; at this point it is not maintenance work that has to be done, but the same work as on the first day—apart from the few habits that you might have been able to incorporate into his body. Although they appear to be two similar delegations, the first one is concentrated in time, whereas the other is continuous; more exactly, the first one creates a clear-cut distinction between production and maintenance, whereas in the other the distinction between training and keeping in operation is either fuzzy or nil. The first one evokes the past perfect (“once hinges had been installed”); the second the present tense (“when the groom is at his post”). There is a built-in inertia in the first that is largely lacking in the second. A profound temporal shift takes place when nonhumans are appealed to: time is folded.

(Longhofer 96-98)

Longhofer, Wesley. Social Theory Re-Wired, 2nd Edition. Routledge, 20160331. VitalBook file.

The citation provided is a guideline. Please check each citation for accuracy before use.