The Social Construction of Reality (Ch. 1–3)

Author: Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann
Year: 1966
Source type: note (Geoffrey's summary of the book's first three chapters)

Summary

Geoffrey's condensed notes on the opening chapters of Berger & Luckmann's classic sociology-of-knowledge text. The book undertakes a sociological analysis of the reality of everyday life — of the knowledge that guides conduct in everyday life — understood not philosophically but as the world "interpreted by men and subjectively meaningful to them." The notes cover the reality of everyday life as "paramount reality" (Ch. 1), social interaction and typification in the face-to-face situation (Ch. 2), and language, objectivation, and the social stock of knowledge (Ch. 3). The text is a foundational phenomenological-sociological account of the everyday that the wiki's everyday-life cluster has not yet directly engaged.

Key Claims

• Paramount reality: among the multiple realities consciousness can inhabit, the reality of everyday life "presents itself as the reality par excellence" — an ordered, objectified world whose phenomena are "prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of our understanding of them and impose themselves upon us." It is taken for granted, "self-evident and compelling facticity," requiring no verification.
• Intersubjectivity: the everyday is an intersubjective world shared with others; ongoing correspondence between individuals forms the "common sense" that everyone shares in the normal, self-evident routines of everyday life.
• Temporal structure: the everyday is structured temporally, with its own standard time (the intersection of cosmic time and the socially established calendar). This structure is coercive — "one cannot reverse at will the sequences imposed by it" — and provides the historicity that determines one's situation; "clock and calendar ensure that one is a man of his time."
• Face-to-face interaction and typification: the face-to-face situation is the prototypical case of social interaction. The everyday carries typificatory schemes that lay down behavioural patterns for dealing with others; typification becomes progressively anonymous as the gap from face-to-face interaction widens (e.g., "Henry" the individual vs. "an Englishman"). The social structure is "a total sum of such typifications."
• Objectivation and language: human expressions can be objectivated into products that serve as indices of subjective processes beyond the face-to-face situation (e.g., anger objectivated in a weapon). Signification — the production of signs — is a key case of objectivation, characterized by "detachability." Language, a system of vocal signs, is the most important sign system: it typifies experience, binds different zones of everyday life into a meaningful whole, and can even transcend the everyday into other spheres of reality (e.g., interpreting a dream).
• The social stock of knowledge: everyday life is dominated by pragmatic motives requiring only "recipe knowledge" (knowing how to use the telephone, not how it works). The stock of knowledge differentiates reality by degrees of familiarity and is structured by relevance, based on immediate pragmatic interests and one's general situation in society.

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Life · Dwelling
Authors: Henri Lefebvre · Michel de Certeau · Rita Felski
Debates: Theories of the Everyday
Related source notes: The Invention of Everyday Life (Felski) · Sociology of Everyday Life (Kalekin-Fishman) · Critique of Everyday Life (Lefebvre)

Direct Quotes

"The reality of everyday life presents itself as the reality par excellence." (Ch. 1)

"The reality of everyday life is taken for granted as the reality it does not require verification. It is just simply there, self-evident and compelling facticity." (Ch. 1)

"Clock and calendar ensure that one is a man of his time." (Ch. 1)

Open Questions

• Berger & Luckmann's "paramount reality" is a neutral, descriptive account of the everyday as taken-for-granted facticity — how does it relate to the wiki's more critical everyday theorists (Lefebvre's alienation, de Certeau's tactics, Felski's affirmation)? Is the taken-for-grantedness they describe the very thing Lefebvre diagnoses as mystified?
• The "social stock of knowledge" and "recipe knowledge" anticipate the habitus (Bourdieu/Upton) — is this the sociological bridge to the wiki's materialist account of the everyday?