articlesofnote

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section III, Ch. 1, Part C "Maintenance and Transformation of Subjective Reality"

I. Analogous to legitimation processes which maintain objective/external reality, subjective/internal reality as apprehended in individual consciousness must also be maintained if a society is to remain viable.

II. The taken-for-granted "inevitable" reality of primary socialization is always threatened, explicitly or implicitly, by "marginal situations of human experience that cannot be completely bracketed in everyday activity." A concrete aberration "…may have to be destroyed in fact before it can be coped with in the mind."

III. Secondary socialization is even more vulnerable, through being less rooted in consciousness, to "everyday reality" shifts.

IV. However, the reality of secondary socialization is usually LESS threatened by marginal situations, through being irrelevant; "it makes sense to die as a man, [less so] to die as an assistant manager in the ladies hosiery department."

V. It is convenient to distinguish between "routine" and "crisis" reality-maintenance, though both entail the same social processes.

VI. Everyday reality is affirmed both through institutional routine as well as ongoing social interaction, both processes being fundamentally similar to those of initial internalization; we take the world as it comes, and then continue to parse it as it is.

VII. Reality-maintenance depends on others, generally with some more - and many less - significant; through an untroubled participation in everyday structures and rituals, these others reaffirm our commitment to the same reality both objectively and subjectively represented. They anchor us in one reality when marginal realities threaten.

VIII. However, significant others are (tautologically) the more important because they ratify (or not!) our identities in an "explicit and emotionally charged" way, i.e., much more intensely and specifically than non-significant others.

IX. "Significant others… are the principal agents for the maintenance of … subjective reality. Less significant others function as a sort of chorus." When conflict arises, a person is generally motivated to try and preserve their identity/subjective reality via some rearrangement of the significance of others in their lives.

X. Significant others interact mutually with less-significant others/"the chorus" in maintaining an identity; thus the maintenance process involves the entirety of the individual's social situation/location/position.

XI. Because of this mutuality, it is possible for identity to be influenced to the same extent by the actions of ANY person or group, though of course actions of significant others have far more potency.

XII. "The most important vehicle of reality-maintenance is conversation" with interpersonal verbal speech in a privileged position. The great bulk of maintenance is IMPLICIT: conversations take place at a level that assumes the reality of a reality in which the conversation makes sense.

XIII. The "massivity" of an internalized subjective reality is maintained by an ongoing equivalent mass of casual conversation that assumes that reality, with the casualness a direct reflection of the familiarity of the reality so discussed.

XIV. Conversation does not cause a monotonic cumulative reinforcing of reality, however. It is a dynamic MODIFYING process, both in what it does include, and what it does not; "… the subjective reality of something that is never talked about comes to be shaky. Conversely, conversation gives contours to items previously apprehended in [an] unclear manner… they are objectified as reality within one's own consciousness."

XV. In effect, conversation is the main process through which language is used, an/or works, to real-ize the world in the immediately apprehensible face-to-face situations of individual social existence.

XVI. "In order to maintain subjective reality effectively, [conversation] must be continual and consistent," with both frequency and intensity playing a role in the maintenance process.

XVII. Subjective reality maintenance is thus dependent on being embedded in a living community or 'plausibility structure' that can reinforce that reality.

XVIII. Through these plausibility structures specific social sanctions (i.e. ridicule) that apply to challenges (doubts) of reality are internalized and sustained.

XIX. In crisis situations, the maintenance procedures become more intense in proportion to the perceived threat to internalized/subjective reality.

XX. The foregoing discussion takes for granted that subjective reality CAN be modified, and to different degrees; as an illuminating case let us consider a "total" transformation, where the individual "switches worlds."

XXI. Such a transformation is typically apprehended as genuinely total, though this is not actually possible since social reality is never totally internalized and thus cannot be totally transformed.

XXII. The limiting case of transformation, hereafter "alternation," essentially approaches a new primary socialization in the degree of affective intensity required, with the added complication of needing to dismantle the prior subjective reality.

XXIII. Drawing this parallel out, we see that there must therefore be a new plausibility structure to internalize, and new significant others to provide the necessary affective charge and mediate the internalization of the structure; ALL significant social interaction must happen within this group for maximal effectiveness.

XXIV. The canonical example of this type of totalizing "alternation" is the religious conversion: "… Saul [became] Paul in the aloneness of religious ecstasy, but he could remain Paul only in the context of the Christian community that recognized him as such…"

XXV. To effectively undergo alternation, the new plausibility structure MUST become the individual's entire world, displacing as many aspects of the previous world as completely as possible.

XXVI. Alternation can thus be viewed as a reorganization of an individual's conversational apparatus, with additional mechanisms for avoiding disruption/"backsliding" when the previous conversational apparatus i.e. previous significant others are re-encountered.

XXVII. For this reorganization to be effective, the entire sequence leading to "final" alternation must be legitimated - that is, all stages: first approach of the new reality, abandonment of previous reality, repudiation of alternative realities, maintenance of the new understanding, etc. - must be justified/appropriate in the eyes of those going through the alternation. Subsequently, the old reality must be reinterpreted in terms of the new reality.

XXVIII. Past events and persons in particular may be radically re-interpreted. Since forgetting completely is extremely difficult, if not impossible, entirely new "memories" may be outright fabricated in order to harmonize "the" (current) truth with the un-purgeable memories of the past reality.

XXIX. This understanding makes it clear that a prescriptive outline can be devised for alternation into ANY conceivable reality: a plausibility structure with socializing and therapeutic personnel must be established; there must be a high degree of affective intensity for interactions in this structure; the structure must be socially isolated to some extent; the structure must present an elaborated self-justifying body of knowledge; the structure must present legitimizing procedures for self-reinforcement, and nihilating procedures for other-degradation; etc.

XXX. Having discussed the limiting case of "total" transformation, we now recall that this is one end of a continuum where there are many examples of partial transformations down to the ongoing minor adjustments of everyday life. However, because partial adjustments do not assume a discontinuity/rupture/break with one's past, they must account for the problem of maintaining that continuity even as unavoidable external/internal change perturbs it. This problem becomes more acute the closer one approaches to outright alternation vs. "normal" secondary socialization, i.e. situations where a "break" and adoption of a new identity/reality may be as practical as attempting to maintain continuity.

XXXI. Maintaining continuity does involve some of the same "historical revisionism" as alternation, but these "revisions" are moderated by ongoing associations with previously-significant persons/groups before whom changes must be justified and who can protest or approve accordingly.

XXXII. Short-term changes (i.e. military draft or acute hospitalization) are similarly moderated by the expectation of a "return" to the previous mode; contrast this with eg. career military service or the socialization of patients with chronic conditions.

XXXIII. "Broadly speaking… in [alternation] the past is reinterpreted to conform to the present… in secondary socialization the present is interpreted… to stand in a continuous relationship with the past."

re: I - invert: a society/culture is a particular constellation of objective material artifacts/rituals and subjective understandings/internalizations of those objects that persists/sustains itself; standing wave again!

re: VII:

Wolf Hall - the king is troubled; the trouble manifests in dreams; Cromwell helped interpret the dreams; something in that?

Democracy vs. monarchy - perhaps a stability advantage for democracies because the ruler isn't driven insane by being forever separated from mainstream culture i.e. forced to have the persona of 'monarch' until they die? A democratic leader is not anointed by God, but by her fellows, and not permanently so - can sustain the isolation more easily knowing it's temporary (ref XXXII as well!)

re: VIII - obviously not the only reason for close relationships!

re: IX:

from "Mr Selfridge" - the "face of Selfridge's" is famous in her own right, and adds lustre to the proceedings… until she gets erratic, and is dropped

from Mad Men - Don as a playboy - part of his identity in the show is "knowing what women want"/how they think, and his ongoing seductions/infidelities are core to maintaining this identity: both he, and we, explore culture through the lenses offered by his affairs i.e. Midge is a lens on the counterculture, Rachel on Judaism, Bobbie on celebrity and the media, and he mines these (and other) relationships for new ways to sell shit.

Identity threat is an easy way to motivate political action, since maintaining the integrity of one's identity is an extremely powerful motivation, but it's also possible motivate through offering an expanded self - calling on the "better angels of our nature"

re: XII - really underselling/eliding the importance of "conversation" in material non-verbal language - commercial, architectural, sartorial, artistic, cinematic, musical, etc.

re: XIII - echoes her of information theory/perceptual compression: familiarity is casualness, loss of casualness indicates novelty (good or bad)

re: XVI - thus the mechanism through which parallel realities threaten: they become the "conversation" that reinforces the non-paramount reality: echo chambers - cults - insanity. from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, to be "outside the mythos" IS insanity, where the "mythos" is analogous to "paramount reality" as described in this book, i.e. you are possessed of and by an incommensurable and incommunicable subjective reality. Communication implies MUTUAL comprehension, both an informed speaker AND an able listener; information theory AGAIN, but in that part that I think is often missing from discussions of info theory i.e. how is there a mutual agreement of 'intelligible' i.e. how do we agree what is signal and what is noise?

re: XXIII - Cults! And note that cults "work best" on folks who were weakly integrated into/had weakly internalized paramount reality to begin with.

re: XXVI - I went farther in my summary of this paragraph than the book does, i.e. the book merely says that alternation "involves" reorganizing communicative apparatus. The book also refers back to the discussion of "therapy" as the source/nature of therapeutic mechanisms.

re: XXVII - scientology as an example of this process overall, military as well, marriage and parenthood potentially also? new realities standing across a rupture with the past - "whole different things"

re: XXIX - recalling Communal Organization and Social Transition here, that books describes some examples of incomplete/partial creations of new social structures and thus incomplete alternations of the people involved in them. Compare with eg. Mormonism in the 1800s, Puritans in the 1600's as successful alternations - sects migrating wholesale to "empty" lands where they could pursue their socializing programs unhindered. Possible future examples when eg. Mars is colonized? Who will want to give up all this and go to Mars? KSR "Mars" trilogy for more speculation on this point, also Seveneves

re: XXXII - accepting a change has occurred: Earth Abides, Ish has to give up on the old world and his dream of "restarting civilization" and chooses to help The Tribe adjust to the new world. The expectation of return is dashed by Joey's death - and he does realize that Joey probably would not have been able to do much anyway

re: XXXIII - extremely interesting end to this chapter - also mentions retrojection and minimization as techniques for accommodation of new realities. What struck me most was the implication that secondary socialization and alternation are opposites, which would cut against the idea that they are somehow on the same spectrum - ultimately they are discontinuous? Refer back to paragraph XXX where secondary socialization can increase in scope and intensity to the point that it approaches alternation. Concepts like phase transition, reaction energy peaks, strain in metallurgic systems, crises in complex systems, nervous breakdown, etc. seem highly related. Also recalling "Theory of Cognitive Dissonance" here - forget exact phrasing but it's along the lines of "aligned" vs. "discrepant" beliefs. High energy states vs. low energy states, the first unfavorable and the second favorable.

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section III, Ch. I, Part B "Secondary Socialization"

I. Outside of a hypothetical case where all social knowledge can be comprehended during primary socialization, secondary socialization will be necessary.

II. Secondary socialization proceeds as the internalization of individual institutional "subworlds" varying in quality and quantity depending on the degree of division of labor in a society.

III. These subworlds are 'worlds unto themselves' with role vocabularies, legitimating apparatus, routines of conduct and interpretation, etc.

IV. The character of this knowledge depends on the status of the subworld that bears it in the overall society; e.g. horsemen handling drayage will have different socialization from cavalry officers.

V. The 'fundamental problem' of secondary socialization is that it must act on an already-formed, primary-socialized character; "whatever new contents are now to be internalized must somehow be superimposed on this already present reality."

VI. In secondary socialization, learning sequences become institutionally defined more completely (as opposed to eg. the biological basis for much of the process of primary socialization); this includes structuring learning based on other than strictly pragmatic/functional lines, for example to support vested interests.

VII. Secondary socialization can proceed without the intense emotional charge of primary socialization; "it is necessary to love one's mother, but not one's teacher."

VIII. In primary socialization, one treats one's socializers as representing THE world; in secondary socialization, the socializers represent A world. A common set of crises after primary socialization comes from recognizing the actual social location of one's primary socializers in the larger world, especially if that location is low-status.

IX. Ultimately, secondary socialization provides knowledge lacking the same sense of inevitability as primary knowledge. Disintegration of primary reality is a massive undertaking; much less so for secondary realities.

X. This means the identities of secondary socialization can be picked up and set down much more readily - personae, not "my self" which was picked up in primary socialization. Secondary identities can allow a "capacity to 'hide'" not present with the primary identity.

XI. Secondary socialization must be reinforced by pedagogic technique - "driven home" or "brought home," where "home" is the original, taken-for-granted world of primary socialization. Pedagogy must find ways to make secondary socialization vivid/relevant/interesting in relation to the primary "home" world in order to make secondary socialization "stick."

XII. The more effectively that pedagogy makes plausible the continuity between primary/secondary socialization, the more readily that secondary socialization takes on the weight of reality of primary socialization.

XIII. The independence of secondary socialization from a high degree of inevitability/emotional identification can be both pragmatically useful and practically limiting. Useful, because secondary socialization can be based on rational control as well as emotional; limiting, because certain bodies of knowledge as institutionalized in a given society may still depend on deep emotional identification and thus require unusual technique to reinforce.

XIV. These unusual techniques "are designed to intensify the affective charge" of the secondary socialization processes; this charge is institutionally defined as necessary in order to foster sufficient commitment to the institutional prerogatives. In this situation, the emotional charge of relationships to secondary socializers is correspondingly intensified.

XV. This need is likely intensified by the degree of competition between the different reality-defining institutions in a given society.

XVI. Similar variations exist within institutions as well, with different roles requiring different intensities of commitment to (possibly uniquely) institutional realities.

XVII. Distribution of socialization tasks is driven by the complexity of the social distribution of knowledge; more complexity means more specialization is needed to "carry" that complexity.

re: V - And so the concept of eg "the military family" or, in my case, "the PMC family" - primary socialization leads to a predilection/priming for certain secondary types. Satirized by Monty Python (among many others) with the "playwright father, miner son" sketch, whatever it was called

re: VI - Paul Graham essay on (or with respect to) socially-cohering knowledge/beliefs - in-group signalling is pragmatically necessary, group identity is important to know. Also, what makes interests "vested" - stable institutional reputation and known goals?

re: X - contra Batman - "not who I am underneath, but what I DO that defines me" - or perhaps this is the dialectic stage of externalization in action?

re: XI - Pedagogy in this light might just BE "the art and practice of relating/expanding secondary knowledge effectively" - which either must be done as extension of primary orientation ("bringing/driving home") or, by inference, somehow co-opting/destroying the primary orientation(s) (eg the Jedi, the Unsullied, what people think Spartans were but weren't) to replace them with secondary orientations. "Your childhood is not what the world is/ the world is something other than what you think" - cult brainwashing as this extreme - but also "hypernormalization" as the other extreme, i.e. the adult world so consistent and totalizing that primary and secondary socialization are essentially a continuum to which most lived experience suggests no alternative.

re: XII -

Possible to posit tertiary socialization - parachute into new culture "totally" divorced from either secondary OR primary socialization, so "tertiary" would be either "finding common ground" (project hail mary?) or destroying/trying to destroy "other"?

Secondary socialization is "cast in the mold" of primary socialization: "mother tongue" -> frame for learning a new language -> know/think in new language without reference to "mother tongue"

re: XIII - example given in this paragraph is of music vs engineering but I think this is not really accurate/useful as an example, even if the principle is correct. IMO military secondary socialization is better example of "unusual" reinforcement technique. WRT musicians specifically, the focus of the analogy is on virtuosos compared to working engineers - our society does "reward"/support more average engineers than average musicians, but I'd guess that there are probably as many average musicians as average engineers, nourished by the love of the craft as opposed to being rewarded financially by the market. implies "market" as "baseline validation" - "at least you can make money doing XYZ"

re: XIV - media examples about: black swan, full metal jacket, whiplash, the master, etc etc - probably anything about a cult or cult-like abuse, really

re: XVI - here they DO reference military (officers vs. draftees) as well as corporations (execs vs clerks) - ref "moral mazes"

re: XVII - I feel there must be some way of abstractly/quantitatively representing complexity growth in institutions… maybe this is a pipe dream? or am I just not there yet? energy - categorization - boundaries - artifice - compression/information - etc. simon again!

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section III, Ch. I, Part A "Primary Socialization"

I. Society in its holarchic structure is best characterized, as previously described, in terms of ongoing dialectical processes of externalization, objectivation, and internalization. An individual, as a holon in this holarchy, is subject to this dialectic: "To be in society is to participate in its dialectic."

II. However, an individual is not born understanding a society as a member. Rather, he becomes a member of that society in a temporal sequence that begins with internalization, i.e. the apprehension of objective events as meaningful (though "true" meaning may not be apprehensible quickly, or even with difficulty).

III. The zenith of this internalization is a "takeover" of the external social world by the individual, wherein "I" understand both the individual subjective processes of others AND the world in which "we" all live: "we participate in each others being."

IV. Only with this degree of internalization is one really a member of a society; this process is called "socialization," with primary (childhood, roughly) and secondary (post-childhood) phases.

V. Primary socialization is, de facto, the most important, as all secondary socialization must reflect the primary structures if it is to be effective. Every individual is born into some kind of objective structure with particular individuals that provide primary socialization; these structures, and the personalities of the socially-presented primary socializers, are a "double selective" filter through which the entirety of the external social world passes before it can be internalized.

VI. It is the case that this primary socialization is not wholly (or perhaps even primarily) cognitive learning; it is the intense emotional charge of the circumstances of primary socialization - the bond with the socializers, positive or negative - that activates the process. This too is a dialectical process: "The individual becomes what he is addressed as by his significant others" while simultaneously requiring that "the individual identifies with his significant others" i.e. "you are what I say you are; I am what you say I am."

VII. What is important about this process is that the individual take a social world along with an identity, defined as a location within that social world. "Every name implies a nomenclature, which in turn implies a designated social location" e.g. to be a "lawyer" implies "the law."

VIII. As primary socialization proceeds, there is progression of abstraction of attitudes: "Mom is mad at me" to "Mom is mad because I spilled the soup" to "Mom is mad at me every time I spill the soup" to "Everyone gets mad when soup is spilled" to "One does not spill soup." That is, the behavior or preference is generalized to all of society in the abstract - a "generalized other."

IX. This is a decisive phase of socialization; the formation of the "generalized other" means the internalization of society as such, along with an identity continuous with that society. This crystallization is concurrent with, and dependent on, the internalization of language(s).

X. With the internalization of the "generalized other," a parallel relationship is established between objective and subjective reality: "What is 'real' outside the individual is 'real' within." These realities cannot be symmetric, however closely they correspond: one never can fully internalize the social world, nor externalize the subjective world. The individual in society must constantly work to maintain a symmetry as both they and society change and develop.

XI. Because a child in primary socialization has no choice of significant socializing others, there is no choice of, and so no "problem" of, identification; the child plays the game, but it is the adults who set the rules, and the child takes what they get. A corollary here is that the child internalizes their world as THE world, which certainty can be eroded but not erased by secondary socialization.

XII. While the specifics vary from society to society, language - and thus the typificatory schemes it carries - is universal; these schemes differentiate identity and provide the legitimating "why" to the child being socialized.

XIII. Thus, the world of childhood remains the 'home' world, however far later experiences may depart from this world.

XIV. Primary socialization proceeds through/depends on 'learning sequences' also socially defined; there are basic biological differences that drive the staging of these sequences, but otherwise the sequences themselves vary enormously from society to society.

XV. "Primary socialization is also affected by the requirements of the stock of knowledge to be transmitted;" e.g. the differing complexity of a justification requires differing linguistic development.

XVI. Primary socialization ends when the "generalized other" has been established in individual consciousness, but the internalization is never "complete" as noted in paragraph I. The next questions that arise are: how is this primary socialization maintained? And how extended?

re: II - The bootstrapping of meaning - how are the seeds of "true" meaning planted? By fiat? The book notes that humans have "a predisposition towards sociality" i.e. "what other humans do is meaningful" is probably a good description of this evolved instinct.

re: III - This paragraph was damn confusing - the use of "takeover" here seems to mean something like "full comprehension" but I am not at all sure. Is this some term of art in the field that I don't know?

re: V - I think the perspective is wrong here as I have written it: - An individual is not necessarily "consciously" socialized by persons in their life; rather, they will absorb ANY lessons their environment has for them, structured or otherwise - The description of the "whole" social world "passing through" a "double filter" seems misleading/incomplete; more like "the pressures and realities of different social groupings transfer where they butt up against each other, transmitting 'reality' like voltage in a wire"

re: VI - Not sure this process IS dialectical, as they describe it - or at least, not in a Hegelian sense, but maybe in a more dialogic sense?

re: VII - Possible to concretize this - the "social graph" on which eg. Facebook is built! Meaning it is also possible to do real time tracking of social group formation… if you have that info.

re: VIII - - And this leads to a failure mode; humans, socially biased, generalize from very few examples i.e. "everyone is out to get me." Internet makes this worse, because it's easy to find a) three people who believe anything and b) won't shut up about it c) to you - and thus it seems that "everybody" thinks "that way" whatever that way is. - This also seems related to role "capture" i.e. "politicians are 'really just' puppets of…" the media, or the banks, or… etc. A nominally "independent" social role is "merely" a manifestation of another institution, serving the purposes of that institution rather than the one they ostensibly represent (ex "They Live!") - Suggests a powerful method of social change: embedded actors. Infiltration can work! re conversation between Beane and Justice in "Moneyball" - "you get what we're trying to do here" - but note this is supporting alignment coming from the top, not trying to change the institution from the bottom.

re: IX - - Suggests one losing this internalization, or not fully possessing it, is 'childish' - dementia is "second childhood" in a sense, a reversal of socialization. Can be treated as such? - Language - here I include visual and material languages as well, advertising being particularly potent in our culture.

re: X - reminds me of "Understand" by Ted Chiang: what if one COULD internalize a total gestalt understanding of society, and precisely influence it? No accident that this story involves creating a language!

re XI, XIII - Every media property where part of the story depends on some kind of reversal of fortune takes advantage of this tension: a childhood is the structure against which the adult pushes or pulls. Spotlight, Ripper St., The Wire, My Fair Lady(?)… how much of Shakespeare??

re: XVI - Interesting that the "generalized other" is definitive, NOT the social location/identity, as these were discussed jointly in paragraph VII where it is said that both of these are part of the same process! important!

[articlesofnote]

Nine days on

At the most basic level I'm still processing feelings about the election. Fear, mostly - a sudden blossoming of uncertainty, a deepening feeling of powerlessness. Wishing that it were not so. Nothing really rational, and so also the INTJ desire to have a rationale for everything I'm feeling, and a model for it all to fit into so that I can feel like I can make predictions again, to have that agency again - to be back on familiar ground.

Knowing that I am who I am because of my world being the way it has been, and so feeling that because the world turns out not to be what I thought it was, that I too will become something different and worse because the world turned out to be different and worse than I understood it to be.

A much more acute feeling of being in the crosshairs - and then the reflexive internal challenge "am I catastrophizing?" Does all my effort to learn something about history and sociology over the last eight years mean I'm better informed now, and have a clear-eyed understanding of what things can now happen, or is it just another bad model I've internalized?

all questions, no answers; feelings rather than certainties - a headspace I am really fuckin poorly equipped to deal with.

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section II, Ch. 2, Part C "Social Organization for Universe Maintenance"

I. Reality is socially defined, and these definitions are always 'embodied', i.e. specific individuals and groups are 'definers' of reality. So, to understand a given social universe or its development, one must understand the organization supporting these 'definers'.

II. Specialization of knowledge (and the associated organization of administration of this knowledge) arises from division of labor, as we have seen; at this 1st stage it is possible to imagine that these "pragmatic" bodies of knowledge do not lead to conflict with one another.

III. As economic surpluses arise and accumulate, experts devote themselves to their expertise, and those experts who maintain meta-knowledge gain prominence, i.e. maintainers of knowledge pertaining to all reality/the "symbolic universe."

IV. There are a number of consequences at this stage, starting with the development of "pure theory" which at least can have the appearance of platonic separation from "lived" reality.

V. A second consequence is a strengthening of the tendency toward institutional inertia - more abstract knowledge -> less likely impacted by pragmatic exigencies -> more likely to persist as-is, even beyond the point of "genuine" pragmatic utility.

VI. Full-time universe maintenance personnel can also become targets/loci of social conflict such as between experts and laymen, originating in a lay resentment of expert perquisites, power, and claims to superior understanding of lay lives. Re: Brahmans vs. Jains/Buddhists

VII. Conflict between coteries of experts is equally likely/possible; some such conflicts are amenable to pragmatic testing/resolution but this is not usually possible. Abstract argumentation or resort to armed violence, is often then required to allow a 'victory'; "in other words, definitions of reality may be enforced by the police" - a form of "pseudo-pragmatism."

VIII. Thus it is possible to infer that there is always a "socio-structural" base for rival definitions of reality, and that the outcome of the rivalry will be at least influenced and possibly determined by this base. Theoretical development may proceed in isolation from the "base," but the eventual primacy of a given viewpoint will be established in a larger social arena, with particular social groupings "carrying" particular theories for reasons which may be totally unrelated to the motivations of the theoreticians themselves.

IX. When groups of experts are engaged in "practical" competition, pragmatic potency is emphasized - that is, what becomes important in a materially-significant conflict is the applicability of a theory to the social interests of a "carrier" group. This leads to patterns of organization among theoreticians, which we will now look at generally.

X. The (possibly canonical) first example is of a single group of experts holding an acknowledged, unchallenged monopoly over definitions of reality in a society; this pattern seems typical of "earlier phases of human history."

XI. In this case, the theoretical administrators are sustained by a unified power structure which is deployed to negate competing theories as they appear - either physically destroying their carriers, or absorbing and integrating them and their theories in various ways.

XII. Medieval Christendom - a very effective symbolic monopoly! - shows examples of many negatory processes: killing heretics, absorbing folk belief, segregating possible competitor structures (Islam, Judaism). The segregation is mutual in practice, and can break down with violent consequences.

XIII. Monopolistic arrangements presuppose\ high social-structural stability/consistency, and are themselves structurally stabilizing and thus inherently conservative (once they have their monopoly!)

XIV. Monopolistic situations may fail to be established, leading to ongoing struggle between competing theoretical constructs and their administrators; "When a particular definition of reality comes to be attached to a concrete power interest, it may be called an ideology." 'Ideology' does not apply to a monopolistic symbolic universe, nor does it apply to a clash between symbolic universes. Rather, it applies when "the same overall symbolic universe is interpreted in different ways, depending on concrete vested interests within that society."

XV. Particular ideologies tend to be adopted when there are theoretical aspects conducive to the material interests of the adopting group, but AN ideology is needed to help generate group solidarity. Once an ideology is adopted, it starts to be modified to better support the group it must now legitimate, but this process is not likely to affect the "whole" ideological apparatus.

XVI. The pluralism of modern societies causes problems for the theoretical practitioners of traditions with monopolistic pretensions, since they have to find ways of legitimating their de-monopolization.

XVII. Pluralism presupposes: urbanization, high division of labor, high social differentiation - and therefore, high economic surplus. Pluralism goes with rapid social change, both as a product and a driver.

XVIII. A historically important type of expert is the "intellectual", "an expert whose expertise is not wanted by society at large." The intellectual works in a relative institutional vacuum, objectivated by few, depending on a degree of pluralism to allow them their niche.

XIX. The intellectual has some options for getting by, such as sectarian withdrawal to protect against the nihilating processes of the larger culture…

XX. … or action to realize their design in the larger society, i.e. revolution. Both options REQUIRE social objectivation, and as they are successful (or not) in their aims, the reality that the intellectual chooses to maintain will be reinforced (or weakened).

XXI. In short, institutions and symbolic universes are maintained by LIVING INDIVIDUALS, who have concrete social locations and material interests. No "history of ideas" is separate from the "blood and sweat" of general history. This relationship is dialectic: theory informs, and is informed by, institutional structure, as institutional structure informs and is informed by theory. "Definitions of reality have a self-fulfilling potency" and are ultimately based in human lives, without which they have no reality. ----

re: I - They use "embodied" here in a much stricter sense than I would - I would take it to mean "reality-definitions are are borne in the members of the society" i.e. ALL, not a select group - but, ultimately, true that some groups/individuals are privileged with more potency in these roles (vis the presidential election in "Succession" where the Roys end up deciding who wins)

re: III - What happens when the surpluses are gone? Or, more precisely, when the accumulated structures outstrip the ability of the geobiosocioenergetic systems of earth to support them? WHAT KNOWLEDGE SURVIVES??

re: VI - Agree that this construction ("lay ressentiment leads to upheaval") makes sense, but stated as a given and it seems worth exploring especially since symbolic universes should be 'liberating' in some (many?) sense(s) - ref. discussion of existential terror from 2.a.XX - so experts should/could be just as likely to be seen as protectors as targets for ire. Where's the rub? (catholic reformation, U.S. as examples - chains of persistent abuses lead to mass desire for institutional renewal?)

re: VII - The rise of the Nazi party is classic example here - need to reread "the nazi seizure of power" but IIRC they coupled "pragmatic" control of messaging ("what gets us most donation money at our meetings") with "create problem, provide solution" dynamic - i.e. picking street fights with the social democrats then claiming only they (the Nazis) can solve the problem once they're given power.

But, thuggish violence is ultimately self-defeating (vis. the fate of the SA, murdered and imprisoned by the SS). Thugs also necessary for refined ideological fascists to come to power (ecological succession - pave the way for large-scale violence and its administrative apparatus)

re: X - Any argument on the basis of what "early" humans did now really has to contend with eg. Graeber/"Dawn of Everything" - but despite my initial reaction, this may not undermine their statement that much; I'm thinking of Jaynes here - what do we actually know about "early" social theorizing/worldbuilding? Pirsig - "Zen" - conflict between Platonist/Sophists - Graves' analysis of Greek myths

re: XII - My understanding of the history of the Jews in medieval Europe particularly suggests lots of examples of partially-successful segregation. Gotta finish reading "The Origins of Totalitarianism"!

re: XIII - Interesting distinction here between SOCIAL stability (limited in medieval era compared to our own!) and SOCIAL-STRUCTURAL stability i.e. persistence of particular social groupings and their relations to one another ("the three estates") which certainly were much more stable

re: XIV - This plucking-out of "ideology" seems very fishy to me - clearly it's an important term/concept with cultural potency for us, but I don't think they're addressing it correctly here. "Ideology is only ever applied to concrete interests within the same symbolic universe" suggests they're using the word differently than I've always understood it.

Which is… what? I guess something like "ideology is what we believe about social reality, guiding our actions, without concrete proof beyond the social system itself" - which sounds an awful lot like the 'symbolic universes' themselves.

re: XV - again this idea of selecting from social structures/justifications that are already "out there" in society. Also, still not seeing how "ideology" in this discussion is different from their previous discussion of eg. "legitimations."

re: XVI - "Canticle" final section - "not asking you, abjuring in the name of christ" - also gotta find that passage re: modern reception of catholicism

re: XVIII, XIX - Discussion of "intellectuals" seems a bridge too far - self indulgent, even? self-lionization in America that has a tradition of celebrating (successful!) heterodoxy?

re: XX - the hated "intelligentsia" in Russia pre WWI

[articlesofnote]

a very me problem

i confused karl popper for karl jaspers in the notes on my previous post (now fixed) and boy is my face red, sorry karl fans i really popped the jasper on this one

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section II, Ch. 2, Part B "Conceptual Machineries of Universe Maintenance"

I. Despite possible appearances to the contrary, a symbolic universe is (must be) a theoretical construct that strengthens social links between institutions. It originates in subjective reflection, which is then socially objectivated, driven by a recognition that a given institutional order is in some way "problematic" or incoherent. However, once established, a symbolic universe may be "naively" inhabited i.e. uncritically taken-for-granted by its participants.

II. A symbolic universe, once established, can become the subject of systematic reflection; the symbolic universe being a "first-order" legitimation, these reflections become "second-order" legitimations.

III. It is useful to try and assess the degree of sophistication of these legitimations similarly to how (and why) we analyzed this previously for institutions themselves because, though difficult, it illuminates the taken-for-grantedness of the symbolic universe.

IV. Legitimation of symbolic universes has similar motives to institutional legitimation, and is undertaken when the symbolic universe has become problematic in some way. It is inherent to the nature of symbolic universes that this is always possible and often actually occurring.

V. One intrinsic problem is with intergenerational transmission of the symbolic universe, which is never completely successful, particularly because the symbolic universe is less apprehensible as a "reality" i.e. it is entirely "theoretical"/abstract.

VI. This problem is self-reinforcing: "deviant"/discrepant "versions" of the symbolic universe can be transmitted/objectivated - heresies, both a theoretical AND a practical threat to "true order."

VII. Heresy is a key impetus to systematic elaboration of a symbolic universe, as practitioners must articulate the "true faith" in order to be able to target the deviations. "The tradition itself is pushed beyond its original form in new conceptualizations" - legitimated, but also modified, such as the introduction of the "Holy Trinity" in early Christian doctrine.

VIII. Another key impetus is the "collision of histories" - societies with different origins interacting for the first time. This can be more severe than heresy due to the potential completeness of the divergence in symbolic universes so colliding.

IX. In particular, the existence of an entirely different tradition demonstrates the contingency of one's own.

X. The "conceptual machineries of universe maintenance" must be understood as part of the society within which they are "operated;" the success of these machineries is related to the power of the operators. "The historical outcome of the clash of the gods was determined by those who wielded the better weapons, rather than those who had the better arguments… He who has a better stick has a better chance of imposing his definitions of reality."

XI. Conceptual machineries of symbolic universe maintenance always entail "the systematization of … legitimations which were already present in a more naive mode."

XII. Historically conspicuous conceptual machineries are mythology, theology, philosophy, and science. Mythology is the most archaic, "a conception of reality that posits the ongoing penetration of the world of everyday experience by sacred forces."

XIII. Mythology is naive to the extent that inconsistent mythological traditions can exist side by side without theoretical integration in many cases.

XIV. Mythology is also naive in that "specialist" knowledge is not far from general experiential knowledge. Specialists may make acquiring this knowledge and "joining the brotherhood" difficult, however.

XV. Theology is born out of a drive to systematize mythologies and identify/articulate a "canonical" mythos. Mythological thought operates in a continuous human/divine world; theological thought takes the human and divine worlds as separate, and bridges/mediates between them. Because of this gap, theological knowledge is intrinsically less apprehensible and therefore more difficult to acquire; this is in turn means a theology among elites/adepts can coexist with a "naive"/common mythology among the masses, with both serving the same symbolic universe.

XVI. Theology is paradigmatic for later philosophic/scientific structures for universe maintenance in this "elite capture"/separation from everyday experience; science is (so far) the ultimate development of this pattern, with a body of knowledge so abstract that many cannot grasp it even in part.

XVII. The structures discussed above appear in many combinations/modes and are likely not exhaustive. Two maintenance activities are worth discussing further: therapy and nihilation.

XVIII. "Therapy [represents] the application of conceptual machinery to ensure that actual or potential deviants stay 'within' the institutional definitions of reality." Because all symbolic universes face the danger of deviance, "therapy" in this sense must be universal, and therefore any symbolic universe must include a body of knowledge that comprehends a theory of deviance, a diagnostic apparatus, and a conceptual system for the "cure of souls."

XIX. [A discussion of a hypothetical example of therapeutic need: a "stubbornly heterosexual" member of an "institutionally homosexual" military.]

XX. The conceptual machinery of therapy depends on the subjective acceptance of its aims by both target/deviant AND the therapeutic practitioner(s). Successful therapy "resocializes the deviant into the objective reality of the symbolic universe of the society."

XXI. As therapy keeps the in-group in, nihilation keeps the outside out. Nihilation is an inverse of legitimation: legitimation says "what's in this symbolic universe is real", nihilation says "what is outside of this symbolic universe does not exist." That on which therapy cannot be practiced is not important.

XXII. Nihilation also involves the attempt to account for all deviant definitions of reality in terms of one's own symbolic universe, the better to liquidate them entirely. There must therefore be a translation from the "outside" conceptualization into familiar language, which in itself is an affirmation of one's own symbolic universe: "They do not understand reality; what they think is reality is not really reality, but it is something else, and we understand this and they do not."

XXIII. Therapy/nihilation are inherent in a symbolic universe and appear as soon as it is crystallized. Nothing can be allowed to remain outside the scope of the symbolic universe.

re: V - Platonic forms, in some sense? The symbolic universe is never directly perceptible, just its here-and-now shadow (the cave!)

re: VII - My concept of "bureacratic accumulation" through "crisis" is a version of this specific to an institution. Also: this is hella dialectical!

re: IX - for which a common response is the attempted annihilation of the competing symbolic universe and the people that maintain it (as I quickly realized was discussed in literally the next paragraph)

re: XI - Big idea here: implication is that response to crises cannot be truly "de novo" but rather must be drawn from some existing tendencies in a society. Thus, crisis response benefits from pluralism; uniformity of thought is an intellectual monoculture subject to the same risks as a biological one, like the Prussian planned forests referenced in "Seeing like a State", or the Cavendish banana

re: XV - see Jaynes' "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" for one argument about what might trigger a transition from mythology to theology. Might also be a connection here to the "axial age" argument from Karl Jaspers in "The Origin and Goal of History."

re: XVI - There are (at least) two interesting phenomena which I think are strongly related to the near-universal incomprehensibility of scientific modes of symbolic universe maintenance:

Scientific "heretics" are very hard to root out: fraudsters and hucksters can be incomprehensible as a camouflage tactic, very difficult for most folks to tell the difference between a true scientific justification and evocatively-worded bullshit

Conspiracy theorists: "since so much technocratic work is both a) mostly out of sight and b) extremely influential in how the world works, what if there were groups that were a) ENTIRELY hidden (except for we brave few who managed to find evidence of their machinations) and b) WHOLLY influential (except for we brave few who have learned their tricks and how to avoid them)?"

re: XIX - Reminded here of the end of Aldermans' "The Power" - an assumed implicit matriarchal frame at end of book

re: XX - Winston Smith loved Big Brother once O'Brien got through with him. Therapeutic success!

re: XXII - Connections here to "Imagined Communities" and "Seeing like a State" again: efface a colonized culture through definitions of what is bureaucratically "legible." Haven't finished "Tools for Conviviality" yet, but strongly feel there's another very important connection between the "language" of material goods and tools that the society makes available to its members and nihilation processes: what is available to you is what you should be consuming, and you should not be consuming what is not made to be easily acquired

[articlesofnote]

you're more than just money, baby

finally watched "Swingers" for the first time today. thoughts: 1) I feel pretty lucky that I didn't see it when I was a teenager; it would have been probably too influential on me, if I'm being honest. there's something about the strain of masculinity presented in the film that clearly seemed to inform the behavior of a lot of guys I know, similar in a lot of ways to "High Fidelity" - particularly that relationships with most women have to be, or are inherently, adversarial, and that as guys you gotta consume and dissect media in order to form a personality. clearly tumblr posts are far superior in this respect.

2) i am tempted to say that it is the movie I have seen that best captures the experience of what "Los Angeles" is like. "Los Angeles" in quotes because the actual experience of the place is not, in fact, like the movie. what Los Angeles, the real city, is like is... just a place, where many people do people things, albeit more often stuck in traffic than the global average.

but "Los Angeles," the hallucinated vision of possible celebrity and tantalizing opportunity, is flawlessly presented. "Swingers" shows what everybody who comes to Los Angeles expecting to find "Los Angeles" actually discovers: yet another place where they are still who they were when they left wherever they came from.

3) one of the main features of "Los Angeles" is that everyone there is trying their luck, taking their chance, shooting their shot; "what i had back home wasn't working for me, but enough people said enough nice things about my talents that maybe i have a chance ..."

with this in mind it seems meaningful, in a way that i'm not sure how to articulate, that the very first act of the movie is the two main characters driving on a whim to Vegas - not to actually gamble (their being in "Los Angeles" at all is the gamble), but to try on different personae

4) one of my favorite blogs has a series of posts about medieval bread production; introduced the first post is the concept of "banqueting your neighbors":

... [F]armers tended to build these reciprocal relationships with each other: I help you when things are bad for you, so you help me when things are bad for me. But those relationships don’t stop merely when there is a disaster, because – for the relationship to work – both parties need to spend the good times signalling their commitment to the relationship, so that they can trust that the social safety net will be there when they need it.

i was reminded of this in the scenes where the main guys go around to a bunch of different parties, clubs, and bars, to see and be seen; social recognition IS wealth in "Los Angeles"; meeting and remembering people and having them remember you, being lots of places and bringing people with you to many different places where they can be seen, by other folks, with you; by being visibly part of this demimonde - you are signalling the same kinds of things. vince vaughn's character, when present in a scene, seems to be the catalyst for food and drink and attention to be shared with the others he's sharing the scene with.

5) the ending is really, really good, which surprised me. i have a longstanding grudge against movies which undercut their own premises in the last few minutes (garden state!); i like thematic and tonal consistency, I guess. "Swingers" fuckin nails it: it's a deeper-than-expected film about shallow people, but it's conscious and consistent about how it portrays that shallowness, up to the very end.

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section II, Ch. 2, Part A "Origins of Symbolic Universes"

I. Legitimation is a "second-order" objectivation of meaning: taking existing meanings and integrating them into more subjectively plausible wholes.

II. "Plausibility" has two levels; first, totality of institutional order should make sense to participants in different institutional processes i.e. a horizontal legitimation/integration

III. Second, the totality of an individual biography as it passes through successive institutional phases must be meaningful i.e. a vertical legitimation integration

IV. Legitimation is not necessary in the first phase of institutionalization, but becomes so when new institutional order must be transmitted to new generation, because the reasons for which the order was created are not going to be self-evident

V. Legitimation both explains and justifies: explanation ascribes cognitive validity to the objectivations of the institution; justification gives normative dignity to the practical imperatives of the institution. Both aspects require knowledge of the institution, which is itself a form of legitimation.

VI. Analytic distinctions can be made between different levels of legitimation. "Incipient" legitimation is basically statements like "this is how it is." This is the foundational level of taken-for-granted, self-evident "fact" on which higher-level legitimations are based, and which legitimations must reach to get incorporated into "tradition."

VII. Second level: Rudimentary propositions; explanatory schemes directly related to concrete actions i.e. "be good or the boogeyman will get you."

VIII. Third level: Explicit theorization; institution legitimated by a differentiated body of knowledge i.e. legitimations are not directly related to concrete actions and are prone to elaboration/proactive integration by theoretical practitioners.

IX. Fourth level: Symbolic universes; bodies of theory that integrate different provinces of meaning into a totality.

X. The symbolic "universe" is such because it is possible to place any/all experience within it; "Its meaning-bestowing capacity far exceeds the domain of social life, so that the individual may 'locate' himself within it even in his most solitary experiences."

XI. Within the universal level, a whole world is created in which all other perspectives are considered limited/situational; the limits of this universe are wholly dependent on the ingenuity and ambition of the legitimators, "the officially accredited definers of reality."

XII. The "crystallization" of symbolic universes follows a process and has a history, despite presenting as a full-blown and inevitable totality.

XIII. Symbolic universes provide a "nomic" (ordering) legitimation to both individual biography and institutional order.

XIV. That is, the symbolic universe dictates how to ascribe meaning to the subjective apprehension of reality i.e. dreams are "not reality", everyday life "is reality." Integration of "marginal" realities is vital, as these are the greatest threat to the fundamental "taken-for-grantedness" of "paramount" reality.

XV. In other words, the symbolic universe "puts everything in its right place."

XVI. The symbolic universe also provides integration of meanings within the paramount reality of everyday life, either with reference to lower-order legitimations ("it's against DMV policy, sir") or more powerfully, with reference to the symbolic universe itself ("it's against the laws of physics"), providing "profound significance" to even mundane activities (again, the horizontal integration)

XVII. The symbolic universe also provides order to an individual biography; one can see their life unfolding in accord with a larger scheme (again, the vertical integration)

XVIII. This legitimation also extends to individual, moment-to-moment subjective identity ("who am I?"), which is highly sensitive to external factors; the symbolic universe anchors "sane"/primary/paramount identities against transformations from other realities (dreams, play, stage, etc.)

XIX. A strategic aspect of a functioning symbolic universe is that it allows the individual to integrate the certainty of death ("the marginal situation par excellence") sufficiently to allow them to get through the day, and perhaps even to face the actual moment of death with equanimity i.e. to "die correctly."

XX. "It is in the legitimation of death that the transcending potency of symbolic universes manifests itself most clearly … on the level of meaning, the institutional order represents a shield against terror … by bestowing ultimate legitimation upon the protective structures of institutional order"

XXI. Symbolic universes also set the boundaries of what is relevant in terms of social interactions i.e. they delimit "social reality," defining in/out groups in various ways.

XXII. Symbolic universes also order history, representing a shared memory of a past and trajectory for a future along which people can locate themselves and events.

XXIII. Symbolic universes provide comprehensive integration of institutional processes, but are always faced with the presence of unintegrated/unintegrable realities, including other incommensurable symbolic universes, and required to keep chaos at bay. "All social reality is precarious. All societies are constructions in the face of chaos." Anomic terror is a constant possibility.

XXIV. Thus the origins of a symbolic universe can be seen in "the constitution of man" - a psychic pearl around the grit of chaotic reality from which we wish to protect ourselves as we are forced to exist within that reality. Symbolic universes push this desire to its farthest possible limit, eventually "[calling] upon the entire cosmos to signify the validity of human existence." ----

re: I - Second or even higher order; legitimations of legitimations of … - Any examples? "Why" questions can reveal, maybe?

re: II - "Make sense" : "subjective recognition of the appropriateness/reasonableness of situationally predominant/institutionally structured actions"

re: IV - Collision of different institutional orders forces some kind of integration - or destruction; might have triggered consciousness itself, see Jaynes "Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" also Popper "Origin and Goal of History"

re: V - Control of what people do and do not know is part of all institutional order? eg. "1984", or "don't provoke those questions" line from "The Illusionist", or my own experience of "professionalism." Also, "1984" underlines complicity of governed in the project of knowing "correctly" - "goodthink"

re: VI - "Emperor's new clothes" - higher order legitimations/structures can in some sense override individual sensory perception: people will see, or believe they see, or pretend they see, what they "should" see, eg. Feynman anecdote about history of electron charge measurements

re: VII, VIII - Bit of a "draw the owl" jump here, IMO - maybe I should elaborate this a bit more? (ha)

re: IX - Implication is that you cannot justify human institutions purely with respect to direct experience

re: X - Jack London? Thoreau?

re: XI - "Replication crisis" serious beyond itself because it de-legitimizes science in two ways: it suggests that this legitimating mechanism is not capable of sustaining a total symbolic universe ("there are some things we just can't know") AND it shows many current practitioners, and thus maybe the practice itself, are flawed.

re: XIII - Hint that institutional order and individual biography might have structural commonality: Ego as institution, institution as ego

re: XIV - Because the "marginal" realities ARE ACTUALLY EXPERIENCED by people generally, they HAVE to be dealt with in legitimating schemes.

re: XVIII - Implication here is that every event you experience leaves SOME trace in identity: "this happened to me" -> "I am the kind of person to whom things like this can happen", and possible next step of internalization, "I am the kind of person to whom things like this SHOULD happen"

re: XIX - But also, offer a prospect of immortality? "You won't actually die, in THIS system" - parable of the dragon king again!

re: XX - A very important section! Ties legitimation to fundamental urge of complex systems to exist: fear of death is fear of not existing

re: XXII - i.e. "Western civilization"/"the Judeo-Christian tradition", etc. Clear in today's society we do NOT have a SINGLE symbolic universe.

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section II, Ch. 1, Part E "Scope and Modes of Institutionalization"

I. So far we have only addressed essential/universal features of institutionalization, and while addressing all variations is impossible, certain important ones bear discussing.

II. For example: within a given society/collectivity, how is the scope of institutionalization defined? How much behavior is defined within institutions, how much outside of institutions?

III. Answer: Scope depends on generality of "relevance structures" i.e. how widely these are shared among social group members

IV. To understand better, think of an extreme case: total institutionalization means ALL problems are common, all solutions already socially objectivated, all social actions institutionalized. No role specificity, all situations equally relevant to any actor. "Institutional order embraces the totality of social life, which resembles the performance of a complex, highly stylized liturgy."

V. The opposite extreme is a social "order" where only one problem is shared; all other concerns are completely individual.

VI. Between these extremes, we can identify conditions that place actual societies along this spectrum. The main distinguishing condition is the degree of specialization of labor, with the associated specialization of institutions. A second distinguishing condition is the availability of economic surplus.

VII. Institutionalization is not irreversible though institutions do have a tendency to persist. Institutional scope may expand or diminish eg. modern "private life" is notionally less governed by institutions that historically; the concept itself may be a modern one.

VIII. Another question: what is the relationship of institutions to each other?

IX. Outside of extreme case (one institution for all, or no institutions at all), the objective issue of inter-institutional meaning integration arises, which is different from the self-integration of a given institutional order.

X. We can't assume that integration WILL happen, but it DOES happen. How?

XI. One way is that a mythos is imagined which encompasses the disparate institutions into a larger frame, then this mythos is spread.

XII. The mythos so derived would itself be reflective of the existing social order; it would need to be, in order to spread. That is, it has to reflect common problems and common understanding, or nobody would give a shit about it.

XIII. This integrative problem will appear whenever there are multiple institutions, but methods for resolving it vary historically.

XIV. Institutional segmentation can also lead to isolated "subuniverses of meaning"/subcultures disjoint from the wider collective, which hold esoteric knowledge (mathematicians? MCU fans?); this phenomenon becomes more common with increasing economic surplus/division of labor

XV. These subcultures must be "carried" by a particular group; these groups may compete, and when they do, it is likely to be about surplus allocation. Advanced industrial societies have huge surpluses, and a corresponding multiplicity of possibly-competing subcultures.

XVI. A multiplicity of subcultures also means a multiplicity of perspectives on the larger society. This makes it more difficult to establish common/unifying perspectives. Subcultural perspectives will be related to but NOT wholly defined by the material interests of the associated subculture.

XVII. Moreover, body of subcultural knowledge can turn around and act on the group that defined/carries it. "The relationship between knowledge and its social base is a dialectical one."

XVIII. Autonomous subcultures have a double problem: outsiders must be kept out AND insiders must be kept in. There are many techniques to solve each problem, which will be explored later.

XIX. Differential rates of institutional change lead to special problems of legitimation eg. astrology vs. church vs. science are changing at different rates, leading to tensions.

XX. A final question of "reification": to what extent is an institutional order treated as an objective, non-human fact?

XXI. "Reification implies that man is capable of forgetting his own authorship of the world."

XXII. Because a shared social world is already objectivated, reification is a likely next step - an extreme of objectivation where the "world" becomes the producer of meaning, rather than humans. "Man is capable … of producing a reality that denies himself …"

XXIII. Reification seems to be a default mode of experiencing social reality, such that recognizing it as a separate phenomenon happens relatively "late" in individual and social development.

XXIV. Any aspect of a social system may be reified. "Through reification, the world of institutions appears to merge with the world of nature. It becomes necessity and fate, and is lived through as such …"

XXV. Roles may be reified in the same manner as institutions: "I have no choice; as an X, I must do Y"

XXVI. Analysis of reification is an important corrective to default reifying tendencies, and also suggests that special attention be paid to social circumstances that favor DEreification: institutional collapse, first contact between previously segregated societies, social marginality, etc. ----

re: II - I think they're being too strict with definition of institution here: all behavior is structured by SOMETHING, why not call that something an institution?

re: IV - The Borg vs. Deadwood vs THX 1138/"The Machine Stops" - order into chaos, chaos into order

re: V - why "one shared problem" as an extreme, rather than NO shared problems? because with no shared problems, there is no need for any institutionalization at all. ex: Deadwood again, or Earth Abides: the first problem that forces collective action is one of defense i.e. maintaining individual integrity through collective action

re: VI - economic "surplus" is rarely left free for very long i.e. it is 'captured' by institutions quickly, right? "extra" wealth does not remain "extra" forever! but on the other hand, "surplus" is only recognized as such in particular social contexts i.e. petroleum in 1850 vs. 1950

re: VII - I disagree here. Modern action might be structured more by eg. consumption than the medieval Catholic church but it's still structured. Although, maybe "less" structured - I don't actually know. How would you define this?

re: XII - ref "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" - to be insane is to be outside of the prevailing mythos. Do you also need to be "outside the mythos" in a way that is seen to damage the mythos? i.e. in "Zen", Phaedrus lost his mind chasing Quality - but what got him put in the insane asylum was ceasing to take care of himself in even the most basic ways

re: XVI - suggests a perspective where corporations/consumerism are stabilizing forces. Corporations both generate AND absorb much "surplus", meaning less surplus available for subcultural multiplication, meaning less work has to go into reconciling perspectives relative to if these surpluses were "free"; consumerism is an excellent example of a unifying mythos ("you need things, you want things, you should have what you want"). any other mythos would have to be AS universal in order to 'outcompete' consumerism. Don't forget Mumford! "the magnificent bribe" is highly relevant. unrelated point: material "needs" are often socially defined, so perspectives of different subcultures often trace back to "how do we get our needs met by interacting with others"

re: XVIII - "The Age of Innocence" is all about "keeping the insiders in" - then the outside world changes and tramples down the boundaries of the subculture that the book reflects, completely obliterating it (off page) before the final section

re: XXVI - dereification example in paper "Moving off the Map: How Knowledge of Organizational Operations Empowers and Alienates" (Huising) - employees engaged in work to accurately map corporate operations discovered institutional reality dramatically differed from their taken-for-granted understanding of how their own companies worked, causing subsequent behavior for many of these folks to dramatically differ from what we might "expect" in a corporate setting. contrast with example of reification in action: "doomsday preppers" are avatars of consumerist consumption; as portrayed in media, they "prep" by hoarding supplies, rather than eg. planning out how to reproduce productive enterprises in what would necessarily be a different social context

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section II, Ch. 1, Part D "Roles"

summary of “The Social Construction of Reality” by Berger and Luckmann

I. As seen previously, institutional order arises out of mutual typifications of action. This implies that certain actions, goals, forms, etc. are shared with others and mutually comprehensible: "as an X, I do Y; if you do Y, you must be an X."

II. To be typified, there must be objectivations; to be objectivated, there must be linguistic structures describing the typifications.

III. These typifications then structure self-experience: "When I am doing Y, I am an X." As people can have many such roles, more and more of self-consciousness is structured in terms of these typifications; the self becomes a social self.

IV. Because these typifications can be assumed and exited, they can be - and are - apprehended AS types, and the acting individuals seen as (potentially) separate from the typifications they enact.

V. "We can properly begin to speak of roles when this kind of typification occurs in the context of an objectified stock of knowledge common to a collectivity of actors. Roles are types of actors (actions?) in such a context."

VI. Standards of role performance are available broadly to members of a culture, more particularly to potential actors of that role. This allows actors to be held accountable for abiding by these standards.

VII. "Roles appear as soon as a common stock of knowledge … is in the process of formation, a process … endemic to social interaction and prior to institutionalization proper."

VIII. Roles represent the institutional order in two ways: performance of the role represents itself, and additionally, an entire institutional nexus of conduct - relations with other roles which represent the institution entire. Enacting roles is what makes institutions real in people's lives.

IX. Other representations - in symbol, in word, etc. - are subordinate to role enactment. The symbol is dead unless it lives in human action.

X. Some roles symbolically represent the institutional order more powerfully than others: the judge compared to the clerk, the president compared to the aide, etc. These roles thus also serve an integrative purpose, holding the institution together.

XI. Roles also serve to integrated/structure much (inward) knowledge of society not immediately relevant to the outward performance of the role.

XII. A society's stock of knowledge is thus distributed among its members according to differing scopes of relevance: more, or less, universal/broad.

XIII. Division of labor means specific roles are created/defined more frequently than general ones, so in turn, role-specific knowledge is accumulated faster than general knowledge in a given society.

XIV. In turn, accumulating role-specific knowledge means a society must be organized to support specialization.

XV. The "typology" of specialists then becomes an important part of the common stock of social knowledge.

XVI. Thus we see two perspectives on roles and knowledge:

Institutional order: roles are institutional building blocks and embody institutionally objectivated bodies of knowledge

Roles: institutions exist only as embodied in actors enacting certain roles associated with those institutions.

XVII. Roles and their definitions thus mediate between the self and society.

----

Notes:

re: IV - total identification with one role - eg. Daniel Day-Lewis as an actor, or fictional characters (magnus in 'the octopus', the judge in Babylon Berlin s4) - what purpose does this exaggeration serve? there is a read where there is no 'you' other than the roles you embody

re: VI - pygmalion/my fair lady - plot is all about the enacting of roles, "if you can do 'it' well enough, then you ARE 'it' whatever 'it' may be" - eliza is trained up to be a lady, and later feels 'ruined' for her previous life. same with her father, tho in a different way. higgins as a social "philosopher's stone" transmuting low to high?

re: XII - the authors say there's a "dichotomization" of knowledge between general and role-specific, but this seems wrong - knowledge inheres to roles, so the ROLES may be more or less specific: "i am an american" vs. "i am an engineer" vs. "i am myself" but the knowledge is ALWAYS "role specific"

re: XIII:

a. this is as close to a concrete mathematical relationship as I've seen expressed thus far

b. knowledge and role genesis concept; refer back to part B "origins of institutionalization" for something similar. TODO: figure out how to recreate the diagram I drew in my paper notes

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section II, Ch. 1, Part C "Sedimentation and Tradition"

summary of “The Social Construction of Reality” by Berger and Luckmann, gotta repost because Tumblr fucked up the article slugs and I couldn’t link to individual posts correctly

I. Only a small part of experience is retained in consciousness, individual or collective. This 'sedimented' experience (internalized, embodied) can be re-exported through a sign system, and thus anonymized and available for future generations.

II. In principle, any sign system would work, but in practice, it's language.

III. Thus, an intense experience affecting few (or one) individual(s) in an isolated time and place can become part of a cultural body of knowledge inspiring those far distant in time, place, or condition from the initial event.

IV. This distancing means that original events are able to be recast/reinterpreted later on without upsetting the institutional order that is legitimized by those events. The meanings so cast are received as part of a whole, without needing to reconstruct the original process of formation.

V. This process underlies all objectivated/sedimented knowledge - not just those typifications that are directly and specifically relevant to given institutions. Because institutional meanings must be transmitted over time to fallible, forgetful humans, they tend to be streamlined and enforced by (often aversive and therefore more memorable) educational processes.

VI. "Knowledge" is thus "the objectivated meanings of social institutions" and since knowledge needs transmitting, there are always social roles and structures for the transmitter(s) and receiver(s) of knowledge.

VII. Additionally, physical objects and typified actions (icons and rituals) serve as 'mnemotechnic aids'. There is no a priori reason why institutional meanings must be consistent at first, but as these meanings butt up against each other there will be more and more pressure on the part of legitimators and socializers to reconcile and integrate the inconsistencies among various institutional meanings.

----

Notes:

re. IV - Mythologizing, in other words. The story of Christ comes to mind.

re. V, VII - These paragraphs really should be reorganized - each contains two concepts which are pretty distinct, and putting them together like this makes them harder to understand.

re. VII - Strongly reminded of Robert Graves' thesis RE. Greek myths ie. many/most refer to forcible cultural integration, stories of conquest highly abstracted from real events but still based in reality.

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section II, Ch. 1, Part B "Origins of Institutionalization"

summary of “The Social Construction of Reality” by Berger and Luckmann, gotta repost because Tumblr fucked up the article slugs and I couldn’t link to individual posts correctly

I. Repeated actions become habitual/patterned, thus reproducible with less effort; NB this isn't a specifically social phenomenon.

II. Habitualization provides psychological relief of choice limitation, and also frees energy for times when innovation/deliberation is required to respond to a situation.

III. Habitualization also means we don't need to define each response on the fly; prediction becomes possible, even precise.

IV. Habitualization precedes institutionalization, and can take place in isolation, but in practice it takes place in the context of an institution or institutions.

V. institutions are formed when there is a reciprocal/multilateral typification of particular types of actions by particular types of actors ("the president shall address the congress")

VI. Inherent in the institution are: historicity and control. Historicity, because institutional patterns aren't formed instantly ("institutions always have a history, of which they are products"); control, because institutional patterns are typified, therefore limited, even regardless of actual enforcement behaviors or patterns as such that are part of the institutional structure.

VII. Institutionalization is incipient in every social interaction continuing in time.

VIII. That is, even two individuals thrown together without a shared social context WILL start to typify each other's behaviors - the initiation of roles, patterns of action, historicity, etc.

IX. The participants in this process benefit from it in that they end up with more ability to predict the other's actions - less astonishment/fear, more familiarity.

X. Any repetition tends to some degree of habitualization; any observation tends to some degree of typification; but in an ongoing bilateral social situation, certain actions are more likely to be habituated/typified. Which ones?

XI. Generally, that which is relevant to both parties (hereafter, A and B). This obviously varies based on material conditions, however, usually communications come first, followed by labor/sexual/territorial relationships, etc. all of which will be inflected by the prior socialization of A and B.

XII. Then, if A and B have a child ("C"), C will experience the parental patterns as objective historical givens, NOT contingent constructs.

XIII. In other words, prior to C, A and B construct a world that is entirely transparent and accessible to them, fluid and mutable. After C, and to C, this world is objective and opaque - and this also affects A and B since they now need to keep things more consistent for C's sake.

XIV. This is the birth of the social world we are familiar with, i.e. an objective fact received from without - the child takes it all for granted, the signifier IS the signified, etc.

XV. This extends to the world of institutions that we live within - objective, external, incomprehensible except via experience.

XVI. Nevertheless, this is still a human-constructed reality - "Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product." - in an ongoing dialectical interaction.

XVII. Institutional reality also requires legitimation - ways in which it can be explained and justified to those who do not have a direct memory of its creation. These legitimations are learned as part of socialization into a given institutional order.

XVIII. As institutions depart form the original social processes that formed them, there is a corresponding increase in the need for more explicit mechanisms of social control - folks must be "taught to behave" then "kept in line."

XIX. In practice, mutual interactions between people or groups lead to multiple tracks of institutionalization which don't necessarily share a functional or logical integration.

XX. Nevertheless, institutions (which persist) do tend to some level of functional/logical coherence, implying some level of common relevance/shared meaning among participants. Note that role performances can (and must?) be functionally segregated, but MEANINGS tend to a consistency of some sort as people try to understand their experiences as occurring within some kind of framework. There may be a physiological cause for this drive*, but it isn't necessary to assume one to appreciate this habit as a real empirical phenomenon.

XXI. "It follows that great care is required in any statement… about the 'logic' of institutions." The 'logic' is not 'within' the institution, but rather is imposed by our reflections about that institution.

XXII. Language provides the fundamental well of logic which can be drown on to explain the institutional world, and all legitimations are expressed in language. This also connects with the social "knowledge" that the world one inhabits is a consistent and logical whole, since from that fact comes efforts to explain experience in terms of the pre-existing internalized social knowledge.

XXIII. So, institutions are integrated, but this is "not a functional imperative of the social processes that produce them;" rather, it is a byproduct of individual need to see their actions as part of a subjectively meaningful whole.

XXIV. Given this, it follows that analyzing social phenomena/institutional order would primarily depend on analyzing the understanding of the social knowledge of the people composing these institutions, of which complex theoretical legitimations are a part but by no means the whole. In fact, "the primary knowledge about the institutional order is knowledge on the pre-theoretical level," the sum total of "what everybody knows" about that order.

XXV. Since this knowledge is socially objectivated AS knowledge, deviations from it ("depravity", "insanity", "ignorance") occupy an inferior cognitive status; because this social knowledge is coextensive with "what is knowable," deviations are seen as deviations from reality itself. "Knowledge in this sense is at the heart of the fundamental dialectic of society… [it is] a 'realization' in the double sense… of apprehending the objectivated social reality, AND in the sense of … producing this reality."

XXVI. For example, in the course of division of labor, an area-specific body of knowledge is developed, crystallized in language, and transmitted to particular actors; the knowledge thus transmitted becomes an objectivation that serves to structure and channel further actions of its type.

XXVII. Then, this body of knowledge is available to the next generation as an objective truth which has the power to shape an individual into an instance of that actor, which definition only has meaning inside the social world that hosts this knowledge. With variation, this same process applies in ANY area of institutionalized conduct.

----

Notes:

re. V - The word "institutionalization" was used in the book where is used "formed"; "institutionalization" is overloaded to also mean "molding a human as an institutional actor" IMO (ref Brooksy from Shawshank Redemption)

re. XII - Unlearning the "objectivity" of parental dictates is probably a universal developmental phase? Or not - but maybe recognizing it is?

re. XVII - I can imagine an institution so totalizing that no legitimation is required - "force of nature" - conflict/discrepancies generate questions that must be answered, but if no discrepancies, no questions? Also implies that such institutions may already exist but we wouldn't know - because we don't question them or they are so universally taken for granted (i.e. the concept of death itself, see The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant)

re. XX -

* I added the caveat about persistence - might be gratuitous, but seems relevant given my interest in institutional life cycles i.e. they CAN die or degrade or change, so how? Dis-integration of belief seems related, but is it symptom or cause? Or both?

** I think Energy Minimization IS this physiological (or even pre-physiological/physical) cause(? need? drive?)

re. XXI - Found this paragraph extremely surprising statement at first, but then less so - interpreted as another instance of "The institution is in our minds" - but might be wrong about this!

re. XXIII - So what happens if folks no longer feel the need or have the ability to do this integration of experience into a "meaningful whole?"

If institutional strength is in the minds of its members, then institutional weakness would result from folks not feeling a need to integrate their experiences into the institutional patterns

"all is vanity" - "integration is pointless" (cynicism?) as a concept is a degenerate simplicity, saving much effort - folks don't have to think hard about things or meaningfully engage with the world they inhabit, because all effort is proactively deemed a waste of time

and in a complex technical society such as ours, which is relatively productive and protective of its members, a given individual member doesn't NEED to engage with many of its structures in order to survive (vs. eg the medieval peasant of my imagining)

leads to a dislocation/disconnection/differentiation between 'social integrators' eg. folks who commit to institutional logics and embody them, pulling together and strengthening them, vs. 'social neutrinos' - folks existing without integrating or participating much ("consumers", maybe!)

hypothesis: industrial productivity gains not put into "shorter workdays" (i.e. fewer hours assigned to materially-productive labor) but rather in giving less of a shit about the world we find ourselves in; anomie/ennui

drivers(?)

existentialism/scientific revolutions driving human "place in universe" farther and farther out of center (Thomas Kuhn, Eric Hobsbawm)

nb existential philosophy seems to develop roughly parallel to industrial revolution, initially dislocated (kierkegaard?) provide language for those who follow

american "rugged individualism"

contra "network", individual DOES matter, but lives in a matrix (hah) of institutions that he believes he cannot influence - which makes it so

institutional immune systems - change-from-within resistance (Le Chatelier's Principle again?)

institutions also try to change their environment to be more hospitable (Legibility)

re. XXV - See also XVI for the cycle being described in more words here

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section II, Ch. 1, Part A "Organism and Activity"

summary of “The Social Construction of Reality” by Berger and Luckmann, gotta repost because Tumblr fucked up the article slugs and I couldn’t link to individual posts correctly

I. Unlike other animals, humans are not as constrained by an instinctual/biological relationship to their environment.

II. Instead, this relationship is characterized by "World-openness" - many possible types of relationship, not just one.

III. Human instinctual drives are relatively under-developed, meaning they can be applied to motivate many (and changing) activities. This is grounded in continuation of human physiological development to a large extent AFTER birth.

IV. "In other words, the process of becoming a man takes place in an interrelationship with an environment" - which is itself largely the product of human activity.

V. While there are physiological limits to human adaptability, which these limits there is not a specific "human nature" as in something separable from human cultural artifacts that produce it; "man constructs his own nature."

VI. Sexuality is a perfect example of this expressive pliability; "… in sexual matters, man is capable of almost anything" though sexual expression is relatively rigidly patterned in any given society.

VII. "Self" is also developed during physiological maturation, also within the socially-constructed environment, so this "self" cannot be comprehended apart from the formative social context.

VIII. "On the one hands, man is a body… on the other hand, man has a body."

IX. "Man produces himself" but not in isolation as a Promethean individual - always socially. Man isolated is an animal; man is only human socially.

X. In what manner does the social order, providing the existing stability/social context that we empirically experience, arise?

XI. Most generally: it exists because we create and maintain it, constantly.

XII. This in turn is motivated by the inherent instability of the human organism, for which a stable environment compensates.

XIII. "To understand the causes, other than those posited by biological constants, for the emergence, maintenance, and transmission of a social order, one must undertake an analysis that eventuates in a theory of institutionalization."

----

Notes:

re. IV - development probably starts earlier than birth, even - epigenetics, hormonal balance in gestation, etc. - and these phenomena are ALSO socially mediated.

re. VI - perhaps holarchic reproduction always results in ritual/expression that is most elaborated - social institutions compete eg. McDonalds rather than the Pentagon beat the Kremlin? on the other hand, maybe it's that the pentagon neutralized the kremlin (+ vice-versa) leaving field open for cultural (i.e. non-military) contest?

re. VII - genetics as a billet of steel, identity as an I-beam or a car frame or a fork or whatever

re. XI - Social order -> standing wave of identity of participants? I contribute to social stability (unthinkingly?) by doing what I have been molded to do by that society/social order, and participating in its rituals

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section I, Ch. 3 "Language and Knowledge in Everyday Life"

summary of "The Social Construction of Reality" by Berger and Luckmann, gotta repost because Tumblr fucked up the article slugs and I couldn't link to individual posts correctly

I. Human expressivity can be concretized/objectified ("objectivation") and therefore the subjective can be made part of a shared objective reality.

II. The reality of everyday life is filled with, and possible because of, these "objectivations."

III. A "sign" is a special case of objectivation, in that it is explicitly intended to serve as an index of subjective meaning.

IV. Signs are clustered in systems, and as objectivations have a property of "detachibility" from the here-and-now; "a dance is less a part of the dancer than a snarl is a part of the snarler."

V. Spoken language i.e. vocal signs is the most important sign system compared to eg. gesture, movement, artifact, etc; it is language because of detachibility

VI. The detachibility of language lies in its ability to communicate meaning beyond the subjective here-and-now.

VII. Languge also possesses a quality of rapid reciprocity in face-to-face interaction; subjectivity can be synchronized. I also hear myself; my subjectivity becomes more accessible to me in conversation. "Men must talk about themselves until they know themselves."

VIII. Language has its origins in, and mainly references, shared objective reality. It is external and coercive; it imposes patterns in order to be successful as communication; it anonymizes as it becomes more broadly applicable.

IX. Language also integrates different aspects of everyday life into a more meaningful whole - "here and now" can also be "this and that," "then and now", etc.

X. Language can integrate non-reality as well, eg describing a dream embeds a disjoint "reality" into everyday reality.

XI. A theme that spans realities in this way can b defined as a "symbol." The linguistic mode that manifests these symbols is "symbolic language," characterized by maximal detachment from everyday reality. Religion, philosophy, art, science are examples of such symbolic languages/symbol systems, and are essential constituents of everyday life.

XII. The structure and usage oflanguge defines (precisely or loosely) "zones of meaning" or "semantic fields" eg the tu/vous dichotomy in French defines zones of social intimacy, or occupational languages (medicine, engineering, etc) define their own zones, etc. Semantic fields represent stocks of social knowledge.

XIII. Semantic fields representing social relational knowledge allow "placement" i.e. social role definition

XIV. Since much of everyday life is dominated by the "pragmatic motive", much of social knowledge consists of "recipes" (procedures, heuristics, algorithms) for resolving or addressing social problems/situations.

XV. Social knowledge is differentiated by degree of familiarity: that which I do more, I understand more fully/embody the semantic field more fully.

XVI. These semantic fields are taken as "valid until further notice" i.e. until they cannot provide a routine to handle a given situation.

XVII. The semantic fields I embody - the fraction of the social stock of knowledge that I possess - is a lucid zone behind which there is a background of darkness, that which I do not and in many cases cannot know.

XVIII. Semantic fields are also structured by relevance; what is and is not relevant for me overlaps, or doesn't, with other folks relevant semantic fields; relevance is also contextual.

XIX. Semantic fields are also unevenly distributed: that which I know, others may not, and vice-versa - thus knowledge of the distribution of knowledge is an important part of social knowledge.

----

Notes:

re: III and XI - discussion of signs/symbols may be borrowing from semiotic theory here, but usage seems different from what I recall of my (limited) reading

re: VII - echoes of Paul Graham on essay-writing - expression is creation/crystallization/objectification

re: IX - language flattens the past and brings it into the present - the "depth" of social reality/semantic fields is always apprehended in the present - holograms on the surface of a black hole, an infinitely small layer of present knowledge that is refreshed by objective artifacts - including people - but has no existence outside of now

re: XII - semantic field has analogy to electrical/magnetic/gravitational fields of physics? it stores… something, it grows and shrinks, it can dissipate, it is carried in a medium, etc…

re: XIV, XV - Herbert Simon - interfaces - abstraction of knowledge: i make a phone call but do not need to know how phone system works - Sherlock Holmes brain-attic analogy

Also re: XV - increasing density of knowledge means more need for abstraction/interfaces that "hide" that complexity - there is only so much a person can know, the more complex the whole the less each person can embody ("the machine stops" as a limiting case)

re: XVI - semantic fields can fail OR be contradictory - cognitive dissonance - pernicious social issues as cultural cognitive dissonance eg abortion, gun control - ripe fields of exploitation for political extremists BECAUSE they are complexities that have not been reduced - energy minimization preferred, "answers" needed - the dialectic, thesis and antithesis without (yet) synthesis

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section I, Ch. 2 "Social Interaction in Everyday Life"

summary of "The Social Construction of Reality" by Berger and Luckmann, gotta repost because Tumblr fucked up the article slugs and I couldn't link to individual posts correctly

I. We can identify several ways in which we interact with others in our everyday lives/paramount realities.

II. Face-to-face interaction is most important; all other forms of interaction are derived from it in some way.

III. In face-to-face interaction, other’s subjectivity is most accessible through “symptoms” (channels) such as posture, gesture, expression, tone, word, idiom, etc. All other types of interaction are more “remote.”

IV. In face-to-face interaction, the other is most “real” and perhaps even moreso than “myself” as the other’s subjectivity is immediately apparent as an ongoing here-and-now experience but “myself” is only accessible through self-awareness/self-reflection (often triggered by other’s response eg “you look mad”)

V. It follows that relations with others face-to-face are highly flexible e.g. most change in understanding is possible, even if not guaranteed

VI. On the other hand, face-to-face interaction is still patterend by “typificatory schemes” which hold as defaults unless enough contradictory evidence accumulates in the interaction

VII. The other also has a type-scheme for me, and the interaction itself is “typed” (“the waitress isn’t flirting with you, man”)

VIII. Typifications become progressively more anonymous the farther they are from face-to-face interaction, and vice-versa

IX. The afore-discussed directness/indirectness is thus a key aspect of experiencing “others…”

X. … but it is not the whole story. There are gradations of indirectness (familiar face, vivid encounter, known by reputation, public figure, etc. etc.)

XI. And degree of anonymity depends on my choices about eg. desired intimacy, or whether a typification is meant to be individualized (“my boss” vs. “the man in the street”)

XII. Social reality is thus apprehended as a series/continuum of typifications, intimate/familar/detailed to anonymous/abstract/limited, and this continuum is an essential element of everyday human life.

XIII. In this chapter, the main discussion has focused on people who are contemporaries of one another (the “now” in “here and now”) but we can apply similar relational concepts to past/future generations ----

Notes:

re: III: The concept of ‘resting bitch face’ is illustrative of what amounts to a purely social expectation; a physiologically neutral/expressionless face is transmuted, through social expectations of how femininity “ought” to be outwardly enacted (“look good, look happy”), into an “active” expression of hostility. the “act” is by definition unconscious (“resting bitch face”) and yet treated as though it is a meaningful display of a character trait

re: VI: can look at this concept from a Bayesian perspective; all interactions should in principle influence “priors”, isomorphic to “typificatory schemes” i.e. stereotypes

re: VII: in an economics context, does it make sense to say that “price is a stereotype of value?” eg. price, as I understand it, is a very simple first approximation of what something is worth, and as a social tool it is good enough for most real-world purposes. however, it is very limited in describing value in the multitude of senses that people use the term; thus you can maybe say that “price is a stereotype of value” in much the same sense you could say that “having no rhythm is a stereotype of white guys”

[articlesofnote]

SCoR - Section I, Ch. 1 "The Reality of Everyday Life"

summary of "The Social Construction of Reality" by Berger and Luckmann, gotta repost because Tumblr fucked up the article slugs and I couldn't link to individual posts correctly I. Our first goal is to construct a theory of reality as it is experienced in everyday life.

II. To proceed, we must first clarify the foundations of knowledge in everyday life: the objectivations of subjective processes and meanings, by which the inter-subjective commonsense world is constructed, i.e. taking what is understood internally by individuals, and externalizing that understanding.

III. We’re taking a basic crack at this effort of theory-building via empirical descriptions aka “phenomenological analysis”.

IV. This analysis refrains from causal explanations, but acknowledges the interpretations that the analytic subject embeds within itself.

V. We assert that consciousness is intentional, i.e always “intending” or “directed”, and we care about this aspect of consciousness in and of itself as opposed to the complexities of experience that result from this aspect.

VI. “I” - standing hereafter for ordinary self-consciousness in everyday life - am conscious of the world as consisting of multiple realities, and experience the transition between them as ‘a kind of shock.’

VII. Of these realities, one is paramount; this is the reality of everyday life, 'impossible to ignore.’

VIII. “I” apprehend this paramount reality as already ordered and objectified; language provides the designations and relationships between objects that “I” encounter in this reality, from “my chess club” to “the United States of America.’

IX. 'The reality of everyday life is organized around the "here” of my body and the “now” of my present.’ However, it also embraces other parts of reality at varying removes.

X. Everyday reality is shared with other people, and “I” understand there are certain aspects of reality we share, and aspects we do not share eg. their “here” is my “there” and so on.

XI. “I” do not doubt the reality of reality, except under extreme circumstances, and generally take for granted its “realness” as “I” continue to exist within it. However, reality is not always easily apprehended in any given aspect.

XII. When problems obtrude into normal “unproblematic”/familiar reality, “I” am able to recognize them as still part of reality even though they may be completely unfamiliar.

XIII. Other realities eg. dreaming, playing, etc. are embedded in the paramount reality, which consciousness can enter and return from 'as from an excursion.’

XIV. Other realities are entered as finite provinces of meaning where paramount reality is still paramount, but cannot provide good, or even adequate, symbolic/linguistic framing for communicating the “alternate” (theoretical, aesthetic, religious, mystical, etc.) experiences.

XV. The world is structured spatially and temporally. Spatial organization doesn’t matter much for this analysis and can be ignored for now.

XVI. Temporal organization of reality is much more important, both internally and inter-subjectively. We have a personal/physiological sense of time, as well as culturally-shared calendars based on 'cosmic time,’ and the interaction between these is complex as fuck.

XVII. “I” encounter time as continuous and finite, and all my existence is ordered by it. 'My own life is an episode in the externally factitious stream of time’ shared with others, and the knowledge that our experience is necessarily finite structures much of our experience. Memento mori.

XVIII. The same temporal structure is additionally coercive in that it imposes an ordering on the events of my life. It also provides the context within which the events of my life are anchored and comprehended; “I” am “a man of my time.”

----

Notes:

re: XIV: 'Play’ can be understood, using this framing, as a special reality that can be fully represented using the symbolic/linguistic architecture of paramount reality, but which ignores or transforms the usual relationships of that architecture. Similar to surrealism in this sense?

re: XVI: cultural calendars and physiological time-sense can be thought of as the same phenomenon at two different scales and with two different systemic bases/substrates. Does this mean that some kind of “meaningfulness of time” is necessarily part of a complex (as opposed to simple or chaotic) system? An internalized time sense is a necessary basis for causal reasoning, this-follows-that, perception-response, etc. so probably yes.