Perceptual Construction: Rereading The Social Construction of Reality Through the Sociology of the Senses

Transcription

1 615149CUS / Cultural SociologyFriedman research-article2015 Article Perceptual Construction: Rereading The Social Construction of Reality Through the Sociology of the Senses Cultural Sociology 2016, Vol. 10(1) The Author(s) 2015 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav DOI: / cus.sagepub.com Asia M. Friedman University of Delaware, USA Abstract In this paper, I bring Berger and Luckmann s The Social Construction of Reality into conversation with the relatively new subfield of the sociology of the senses to argue that greater attentiveness to sensory perception can enhance our understanding of the mechanisms of the social construction of reality. When read with this sensitization, one finds implicit references to the senses throughout their discussion, but nowhere is sensory perception explicitly theorized as a part of the social construction process. Drawing specifically on their analysis of primary socialization, face-to-face interaction, language and relevance structures, and the fundamental dialectic of externalization, objectivation, and internalization, I demonstrate that processes of perceptual construction specifically sensory attention and disattention are key mechanism of social construction underlying many of Berger and Luckmann s arguments. A more explicit focus on sensory perception not only clarifies and strengthens many of their observations, but also constitutes a renewal of their important call to examine the processes of social construction. Keywords cognition, senses, sensory, perception, Berger, Luckmann, sociology, construction, sensory studies, sensory perception, social construction Introduction As we mark the 50th anniversary of its publication, Berger and Luckmann s The Social Construction of Reality is firmly established as a modern classic of sociological thinking. Indeed the title, and the concept of social construction which the text defined and popularized, has become so fundamental to the discipline of sociology that it can seem Corresponding author: Asia M. Friedman, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware, 328 Smith Hall, Newark, DE 19716, USA. asiaf@udel.edu

2 78 Cultural Sociology 10(1) axiomatic. It is widely discussed in introductory courses, and forms an a priori operating assumption for most sociologists, although the process of social construction is more often taken for granted than explicitly theorized. Yet at the core of the book are a number of how questions that ask sociologists to think about the mechanisms of the social construction process, most centrally how does subjective reality come to appear to the individual as objective or independent from him or her? To quote from the opening lines of the book: The basic contentions of the argument of this book are that reality is socially constructed and that the sociology of knowledge must analyze the processes in which this occurs (p. 1, emphasis added). When considering the mechanisms of social construction, one of the most notable aspects of Berger and Luckmann s account is how attentive it is to the cognitive underpinnings of the social construction process. As Brekhus et al. (2010: 62) observed, their theory relies heavily on cognitive dimensions such as relevance structures, worldviews, and their role in the sociology of perception and attention. As further illustration, consider the following list of core concepts, all of which are at least in part cognitive processes: internalization, externalization, objectivation, typification, legitimation, reification, sedimentation, and nihilation. Without in any way diminishing the centrality of cognition to the social construction process, my objective in this paper is to demonstrate that sensory perception is another critically important mechanism of social construction that is not fully acknowledged in Berger and Luckmann s text. In fact, one can understand cognition as fundamentally dependent on sensory perception, making an analysis of the senses essential to cognitive sociology: As Zerubavel (1997: 23) put it, A good way to begin exploring the mind would be to examine the actual process by which the world enters it in the first place. The first step toward establishing a comprehensive sociology of the mind, therefore, would be to develop a sociology of perception. At the same time, cognition plays an important role in shaping sensory perception, for example in defining relevance or providing categories. In light of this, I take cognition and perception as enmeshed, interacting processes through which we experience and make meaning of the world. Rather than making a claim about the primacy of perception, I highlight this interplay between cognition and perception and point out the kinds of insights into the social construction process that a focus on sensory perception can offer. To make this argument, I bring The Social Construction of Reality into conversation with the relatively new subfield of the sociology of sensory perception and the broader interdisciplinary field of sensory studies, highlighting textual moments where greater attention to sensory processes can complement, deepen, or challenge our understanding of the social construction process. When read with this sensitization, one finds processes of sensory perception implicit everywhere in Berger and Luckmann s discussion, but nowhere explicitly theorized. The Sociology of Perception The sociology of perception (sometimes called the sociology of the senses, or in the broader interdisciplinary field, sensory studies ) is an emergent area of sociological inquiry broadly focused on examining the sensory dimensions of the social construction

3 Friedman 79 of reality, including processes of sensory socialization and perceptual construction (Friedman, 2011, 2013; Vannini et al., 2011). It broadly encompasses research that illustrates the sociological importance of senses that have been relatively neglected, such as scent (Classen et al., 1993; Waskul and Vannini, 2008), as well as studies that defamiliarize visual realities that are typically taken for granted (e.g. Daipha, 2010; Friedman, 2013; Obasogie, 2010, 2014). The latter are particularly powerful, given the unique role of sight in social interaction and its cultural elevation above the other senses what Jay (1994: 48 49) refers to as our cultural ocularcentrism. 1 Arguably the most fundamental insight of a sociological understanding of sensory perception is that reality is experienced and fundamentally shaped through our senses. It is only via the senses that the world enters our minds and our experience, and sensing the world is a way of building and reshaping the way the world is assembled (Vannini et al., 2011: 168). In their recent introductory text on the sociology of the senses, for example, Vannini et al. (2011: 15) describe the general perspective of the field as follows: [H]umans sense as well as make sense. This process of sense-making entails minded and embodied social and cultural practices that cannot be explained or reduced to physiological processes alone. [ ] In this way, sensing and sense-making are necessarily conjoined, codetermined, and mutually emergent in active and reflexive practices in which we are both the subject and object of the sensations we perceive or, for that matter, fail to recognize. Vannini et al. primarily rely on the ideas of somatic work and the senses as interaction (2011: 10) to capture the idea that sensory objects are never self-evident, and require interpretation and meaning construction by the perceiver, highlighting the interaction of thinking and perceiving. As they point out, this insight has a long history in symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, perhaps most famously illustrated in Howard Becker s study on marijuana use, in which he argues that perceiving the effects of marijuana is far from purely physiological, since socially learned reflexive work is required to understand how the otherwise vague impulses and desires should be experienced and interpreted (Becker, 1953: 242). One can also find further grounding for this perspective in classical sociology, particularly in the work of Simmel, Mead, James, and Dewey (Vannini et al., 2011: 11). Even with the intellectual roots Vannini et al. trace in classical and contemporary sociological theory, processes of sensory perception have received relatively scant attention in studies drawing on the fundamental sociological perspective of the social construction of reality. There is nevertheless much to say about the sensory production of sociological phenomena. As Howes and Classen (2014: 12 13) put it, The ways in which we engage with art, in which we practice medicine, in which we experience our social roles and systems of justice, in which we manufacture and market products, and in which we make sense of the world, all involve particular ways of sensing. Their suggestion is that the sociology of sensory perception is best understood not simply as another subfield of the discipline, but rather as a perspective relevant to all areas of inquiry. One of the key benefits of using this sensory perspective to analyze sociological phenomena of taking a sensory approach to the study of culture (Howes and Classen, 2014: 13) is that it brings explicit focus to the mechanisms of the social construction process.

4 80 Cultural Sociology 10(1) To take an example from my own work on the sensory construction of sexed bodies (Friedman, 2011, 2013), I argue that one of the key perceptual processes underlying our experienced reality is selective sensory perception, which I describe using the metaphor of perceptual filtration. 2 When we see human bodies as male or female, I argue, we are seeing a selective or filtered body; that is, in order to see sex we must selectively attend a small number of sexed features and disattend the physical similarities among human bodies. In my analysis, I demonstrate that one of the key insights of the metaphor of a perceptual filter is that it brings our analytic focus not simply to our experienced perceptual realities, but to those sensory details that must be disattended in order to perceive the world as we do. The passages and blockages of the filter metaphor represent cultural norms of attention and disattention, relevance and irrelevance, highlighting the relationship between social norms and the structuring of attention on a socio-cognitive and perceptual level. Building on this prior work, one thread of my argument in this paper is that culturally organized processes of sensory attention and inattention can be identified in many of Berger and Luckmann s arguments about the social construction of reality, indicating that the same general mechanism of sensory filtration may underlie the social construction process in a wide range of empirical cases and settings. In what follows I analyze the treatment of sensory perception in Berger and Luckmann s theory, highlighting key moments where greater attention to processes of perceptual construction can enhance our understanding or even provide new insights. I specifically focus on the concepts of primary socialization, face-to-face interaction, language and relevance, and the dialectic of externalization, objectivation, and internalization, identifying throughout evidence of sensory attention and disattention as mechanisms of the social construction process. Tracing Sensory Perception in The Social Construction of Reality Direct discussions of sensory perception in The Social Construction of Reality are extremely limited. The most explicit references to the senses are not only very brief, but in some cases treat sensory perception as purely biological, and therefore as either external to, or forming a natural limit for, the social processes that most interest Berger and Luckmann. I begin by outlining these few direct references to the senses, and then in the sections that follow I highlight several additional points where perceptual processes seem to be implicit or absent, but potentially important and productive to explore. A major thread of Berger and Luckmann s argument is that language is the key mechanism of reality maintenance: The common objectivations of everyday life are maintained primarily by linguistic signification. Everyday life is, above all, life with and by means of the language I share with my fellowmen. An understanding of language is thus essential for any understanding of the reality of everyday life. (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 37) Given that hearing is one of the main mechanisms (in addition to sight, in the case of the written word) through which we can experience language, one can logically extrapolate that processes of sensory perception often mediate the influence of language in the social construction

5 Friedman 81 of reality. In a discussion of intersubjectivity, for example, Berger and Luckmann briefly mention how central hearing is to the unique power of language as a sign system: Both of us hear what each says at virtually the same instant, which makes possible a continuous, synchronized, reciprocal access to our two subjectivities, an intersubjective closeness in the face-to-face situation that no other sign system can duplicate. (1966: 37 38) Berger and Luckmann also talk about a zone of lucidity, which is at least implicitly defined by our sensory awareness: The reality of everyday life always appears as a zone of lucidity beyond which there is a background of darkness (p. 44). Similarly, they reflect that there are always some things that go on behind my back (p. 44). Although Berger and Luckmann do not explicitly discuss sensory perception in this passage, both comments seem to suggest that our experienced reality consists in large part of what we can access through the senses. The zone of lucidity, particularly with its reference to clarity and light, certainly seems to imply visual perception. The metaphor of behind my back similarly only makes sense in the context of visual perception, since the point is that we cannot see what goes on behind us. In addition, both statements emphasize the way that our experienced reality is always partial and selective. It does not consist of everything that is empirically there to be experienced. It only consists of what we have access to through the senses, and further within that only those sensory details that are defined by our relevance structures as pertinent to notice. This selectivity of our experienced sensory reality is what I aim to capture with the concepts of sensory attention and inattention and the metaphor of perceptual filtration. The most explicit discussion of sensory perception appears in Berger and Luckmann s argument that there are few biological limits on humans interaction with their environment. Here they directly reference sensory perception as one example of this kind of limit: His species-specific sensory and motor equipment imposes obvious limitations on his range of possibilities (p. 48). What is notable about this, the most direct discussion of sensory perception, is that sensory perception is defined as purely biological. They do not theorize perception as socially significant, nor as a mechanism by which culture shapes our experienced reality. Although Berger and Luckmann s direct discussions of sensory perception are very limited (and more limited still is any theorization of the senses as social or as an important mechanism of the social construction of reality), if one reads The Social Construction of Reality with this sensitization, one can find implicit references to processes of perceptual construction throughout the text. Primary Socialization As a starting point, it is important to recognize that primary socialization always involves sensory socialization. As Vannini et al. argue in their recent introductory text to the field of sensory sociology, A sensory socialization is no different in principle than any other form of socialization, such as a moral socialization, a technical one, an emotional one, and others. But whereas socialization

6 82 Cultural Sociology 10(1) generally refers to a process of sharing values, beliefs, ideals, rules, facts, and emotional norms, the concept of sensory socialization emphasizes the importance of the somatic dimensions of adjusted membership within a society and culture. For instance, most of us are taught to appreciate certain tastes and abhor others. (Vannini et al., 2011: 49) Learning to identify with a social reality includes learning to see, hear, feel, and smell that reality in roughly the same way as the people by which one is normally surrounded. Touch is the first sense to develop and probably the most common and important nonverbal communication channel in our culture (Synnott, 1993: 156). Yet cultures differ considerably in their sensory values. For example, Synnott argues that some cultures (southern Europe, Greece, Latin America) are contact cultures, whereas others are non-contact cultures (Japan, China, North America). These different sensory norms and values are learned via primary socialization (Synnott, 1993: 171). Consider in this context the fact that in some cultures babies are normally swaddled, worn on the body, and sleep with the parents, and in others strollers are common and even young infants are expected to sleep independently, making primary socialization as a sensory experience considerably different in different cultures (Synnott, 1993: ). Ocularcentrism is another example of a cultural sensory value taught beginning in primary socialization, in part through the learning of language. The cultural value of ocularcentrism is embedded in English; for example, the phrase I see means not only that I perceive something visually, but that I understand. Compare in this context the words insight, clarity, enlighten, vision, and show, with their antonyms unclear, dim, obscure, and cloudy (Synnott, 1993: ). Not only does primary socialization include learning broad sensory values such as being an ocularcentric or contact culture, but it also includes learning how to appropriately use and evaluate our sensory input. Synnott observed, for example, that olfactory appreciation is specifically taught by parents and experts: We are socialized into what our culture considers to smell fragrant or foul, and into nasal taste (1991: 441). In the case of touch, we come to discriminate between meaningful and meaningless, and appropriate and inappropriate touches, as well as to properly apply contextual meanings for empirically the same touch sensation (Synnott, 1993: 156). We similarly learn to attach meaning to sounds as we become educated listeners (Howes and Classen, 2014: 3). Further, it is often through sense-based rituals that we align our conduct with the dominant order of society, including rituals such as odorizing and deodorizing (Largey and Watson, 1972; Waskul and Vannini, 2008), and norms of tactful blindness (Goffman, 1955: 219). All this considered, people from different cultures live in different sensory worlds, and this may be more important for cross-cultural communication than language differences (Synnott, 1993: 193). Moving from the broad idea of sensory socialization to analyze the socialization process, one key argument in Berger and Luckmann s discussion of primary socialization is that the process is defined by selectivity: Every individual is born into an objective social structure within which he encounters the significant others who are in charge of his socialization. [ ] The significant others who mediate this world to him modify it in the course of mediating it. They select aspects of it in accordance

7 Friedman 83 with their own location in the social structure, and also by virtue of their individual, biographically rooted idiosyncrasies. The social world is filtered to the individual through this double selectivity. (1966: 131) Note that Berger and Luckmann invoke the metaphor of a filter to capture the selectivity of primary socialization in the same way I have used it to capture selective sensory perception. The fundamental idea is that the world is densely packed with sensory stimuli that we must learn to limit in order to focus or make meaning. In addition to being selective, Berger and Luckmann point out, due to our emotional attachment to our significant others, primary socialization is emotionally charged rather than strictly intellectual, resulting in a deeper sense of identification (p. 131). Both of these points are deepened with a fuller consideration of the role of sensory perception in primary socialization. As Berger and Luckmann explain, part of the power of primary socialization is its underlying emotional intensity. Similarly Collins (2004: 108) highlights the importance of emotional energy in rituals and collective experiences, and in the construction of culture through interaction chains more broadly. Emotions enter into socialization both in the form of social control such as censure and self control through emotions like embarrassment and shame (Shott, 1979: ) and in the form of the magnetic emotional energy that Collins argues draws us together in shared experience (Collins, 2004: 108). In this way, bringing the role of emotion into the idea of sensory socialization, we can think of emotions as shaping sensory perception as mechanisms of control and as motors that propel us toward shared perceptual experience because of the positive or pleasurable emotional energy that results. At the same time, shared sensory perceptions also support and intensify this collective emotional effervescence. Indeed, shared sensory perceptions are essential to the collective expectations and group experiences that create shared emotional energy. If part of the primary socialization process involves learning to perceive the world through the senses as others around us do, along with emotion, a second important mechanism of this sensory alignment is socially learned selective sensory attention and disattention. Building on Berger and Luckmann s argument that primary socialization is selective, then, one can also understand the process of sensory socialization as in essence a process of creating culturally appropriate sensory selectivity. We have to learn which sensory details to attend and which to disattend so that we can share sensory meanings with our significant others. Waskul and Vannini (2008) refer to this as socialization into habits of sensing (p. 59). Quoting Dewey (2002 [1922]: 32), they go on to explain that a sensory habit filters all the material that reaches our perception and thought. As I have highlighted throughout, the concept of filtration is directly evocative of selective attention and inattention, as the generic purpose of any filter is to allow certain components to pass through a set of holes while disallowing others. It is notable that perceptual socialization continues in secondary socialization as well. We learn to use our senses in particular ways through occupational socialization, for instance, which is why Mills (1963: 460) argued that different technical elites possess different perceptual capacities, and Fleck (1981 [1935]: 92) argued that scientific training includes visual socialization through which scientists gain a readiness for directed perception. As an illustration, consider the perceptual expertise of radiologists described by Groopman:

8 84 Cultural Sociology 10(1) The flux of white specks across a black background makes the discrete outlines of organs difficult, if not impossible, for me to make out. Of course, for [ ] radiologists who use this technology daily, the images are as familiar as the palms of their hands, and the contrasts of black, white, and gray full of meaning. (Groopman, 2007: 200) Groopman also points out that although at the beginning of their training there are differences among doctors in their visual spatial abilities, through optical socialization they can all achieve the professional expertise required: this ability can be enhanced to the expert level by repeated practice and regular feedback about success and error in technique (p. 142). 3 Scholars have offered similar observations about the optical socialization involved in pursuing different hobbies. Fine (1998: 102, 113), for instance, found that mushroom hunters perceive amazing amounts of sensory detail invisible to the uninitiated, who lack the relevant template for looking, and Bourdieu (1984: 44) has argued that class position is attended by perceptual schemes which structure aesthetic judgments about art, among other things. While Bourdieu emphasized the perceptual socialization required to appreciate fine art as defined by one s class habitus, and to be able to visually discriminate fine art from bad art, Howes and Classen trace cultural and historical differences in the role of the senses in the construction and appreciation of art. In the modern world, art is overwhelmingly visual. [ ] This is held to be true not only of flat paintings hanging on walls but also of three-dimensional sculptures, and, indeed, of all artifacts considered as aesthetic objects, whether Navajo sand paintings, Japanese tea bowls or Medieval tapestries. As soon as something is classified as art, its non-visual qualities are suppressed, and, as trained spectators, we know that the right thing to do is to stand back and look at it. (Howes and Classen, 2014: 17) As they go on to point out, however, in the early museums of the 17th and 18th centuries, including the British museum in London, a more tactile appreciation of art was the norm. In some cases, it was thought that touch was in fact required to fully appreciate many works of art (Howes and Classen, 2014: 18 19). It was only in the 19th-century museum that the public was confronted with the notion that art existed only to be looked at and not touched. Note also that Howes and Classen not only highlight the role of sensory values and hierarchies in the appreciation of art, they also explicitly identify the role of sensory selectivity when they point out that the suppression of all non-visual qualities is required to define art as only visual. In summary, primary socialization is emotional as well as cognitive, as Berger and Luckmann point out, and as Collins develops even more fully, and both of these facets of socialization are also sensory. The aspect of emotional coordination in primary socialization is parallel to, and in interaction with, a process of sensory coordination. In addition, the selectivity of primary socialization, which Berger and Luckmann also emphasize, often takes the form of learning socially shared norms of sensory selectivity. Sensory socialization is further honed during secondary socialization as occupational and leisure activities provide new opportunities to learn subcultural sensory values and expert forms of sensory selectivity.

9 Friedman 85 Face-to-Face Interaction Berger and Luckmann place great emphasis on the significance of face-to-face interaction in the social construction of reality (1966: 28 34), presenting it as the prototypical form of social interaction. A number of their comments in this discussion invite a stronger consideration of the role of sensory perception, which is, I argue, one key reason that the fact-to-face context is distinct from other forms of interaction. Sensing together as a joint somatic act (Vannini et al., 2011: 56) is key to understanding the power of the face-to-face context. Face-to-face interaction generates an intensity of mutual focus that results in heightened emotional significance. Collins describes the emotional energy of face-to-face contact as follows: Where mutual focus and entrainment become intense, self-reinforcing feedback processes generate moments of compelling emotional experience. These in turn become motivational magnets and moments of cultural significance, experiences where culture is created, denigrated, or reinforced. (Collins, 2004: xii) Although Collins s point is to emphasize the emotional power that can be generated by co-presence, he also hints that the unique sensory aspect of face-to-face interactions is part of what makes them moments of compelling emotional experience when he frames these moments in terms of mutual focus. Simmel wrote that it is through the medium of the senses that we perceive our fellowmen (1921: 356). In addition, in Goffman s work on the presentation of self, appearance and setting are highly visually focused, and successful interaction requires an awareness and visual management of how we appear to others (Goffman, 1959). The language Berger and Luckmann use to illustrate why the face-to-face context is important is also evocative of the senses, specifically visual perception. We see ; we are oriented toward the other; the other is simultaneously available and continuously available ; the other is fully real. They also state that bodily indices, such as gestures and facial expressions, are continuously available to us in the face-to-face situation (p. 34). When we can see the person with whom we are interacting, that is, they are available to us in a way that makes them seem more fully real. However, this suggestion of the role played by visual perception in forming the uniquely powerful reality of face-to-face interaction, as well as the further implication that there are varying levels of realness to our realities that may be tied to their sensory features, is largely implicit and unquestioned in Berger and Luckmann s text. Their treatment of the topic would be greatly enhanced by an exploration of our cultural ocularcentrism the idea that visual information is culturally privileged and carries greater truth value than other sensory information. Given this sensory value, the face-to-face context may derive a significant part of its feeling of being uniquely real from the cultural privileging of visual perception. One important aspect of this cultural elevation of vision is assumptions about the greater objectivity of visual perception, which I discuss further in the section on objectivation below. Berger and Luckmann also emphasize that face-to-face interactions are patterned by typification (pp ). Notably, the examples of types they provide are predominately

10 86 Cultural Sociology 10(1) visual: tall, short, fat, thin, bright, dull (p. 69). Moreover, selective sensory attention and disattention arguably form the very basis of our ability to typify something in the first place; that is, to perceive something as a particular kind of thing. For example, to apprehend the other as a man, a European, a buyer, (p. 31) or any other similar experience of seeing as implies picking out relevant sensory details (whether details of appearance, voice, or otherwise all involve sensory perception) that support the typification, and likely also ignoring any ambiguous or contradictory sensory information. As such, a process of perceptual construction, specifically sensory attention and inattention, undergirds any typification. In my prior work on the visual perception of male and female bodies (Friedman, 2013), for example, I show that in order see a human body as a male or as a female we have to disattend all the physical commonalities all human bodies share. In fact, the proportion of the body that we have to disattend in order to perform this typification is greater than the proportion that is relevant and visually attended. Similar processes of selective sensory attention and disattention arguably underlie our ability to visually categorize people by race. When we see someone as black or Asian, in other words, we selectively perceive phenotypic cues culturally defined as relevant (for example, skin tone) and ignore those that are irrelevant for race attribution (height, weight, ear size, leg length, breast size, etc.). In addition to visual attention and disattention, olfactory cues play a significant role in indicating types of people : Odours define the individual and the group, as do sight, sound and the other senses; and smells, like them, mediate social interaction (Synnott, 1991: 438). Smell not only helps to indicate membership in categories such as gender and class, it plays a role in the moral construction of the individual and group (Synnott, 1991: 438): Odor is a significant component of our moral construction of reality and our construction of moral reality. The fundamental hypothesis is simple: What smells good, is good. Conversely, what smells bad, is bad. By bringing a sensory focus to Berger and Luckmann s discussion of face-to-face interaction, one can clearly see the relationship between broad cultural sensory hierarchies privileging the visual and our experience of the uniquely real reality of the face-to-face context. In addition, such a focus highlights the sensory aspects of typification, which they identify as one key element of reality construction in face-to-face interaction specifically the dynamics of sensory attention and disattention, as well as sensory indications of morality and immorality, that lead us to perceive our fellow interactants as particular types of people. Language and Relevance Structures One of the key insights of Berger and Luckmann s argument throughout the book is that intersubjective reality is contingent on the existence of some guide to relevance and irrelevance. They argue that the social structure of knowledge provides relevance structures (p. 45), and that it is through language that we access this common stock of knowledge (p. 68): Language provides the fundamental superimposition of logic on the

11 Friedman 87 objectivated social world (p. 64). Further emphasizing the importance of language in the social construction process, they also make the claim that conversation is the most important vehicle of reality maintenance (p. 140). A consideration of the role of the senses enhances our understanding of the social structuring of relevance and irrelevance in a number of important ways. First, and most broadly, Berger and Luckmann s treatment of knowledge seems implicitly to assume that knowledge is predominately linguistic. However, sensory perceptions are also forms of knowledge (Dewey, 1934; Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Cognition and verbal information are not the only sources of knowledge. The human body, through its senses and sensations is also a source and object of knowledge. Therefore [ ] it might be useful to think of sensations as comprising a language of their own. (Vannini et al., 2011: 24) Second, the idea that the social stock of knowledge consists largely of relevance structures provided by language raises the question of how by what mechanisms the common stock of knowledge provided by language actually shapes our experienced reality? At the most general level, language, as a system of signs, arguably requires sensory perception to have any effect. Whether through writing, reading, speaking, or listening, language and therefore knowledge and relevance structures normally only becomes available to us through the senses. Finally, one important way that linguistic relevance structures our experience is through organizing sensory perception via attention and disattention. And here again I want to invoke the passages and blockages of a filter as a metaphorical representation of these social norms of relevance and irrelevance. That is to say, what is relevant can also be understood as what we are socially expected to attend perceptually, and what is irrelevant is what we should disattend to participate successfully in a shared social reality. In this way, sensory perception seems to be an important link between language and knowledge as relevance structures and the experiential outcome of the process of social construction: an objectified social reality. Externalization, Objectivation, and Internalization Indeed, one area where Berger and Luckmann particularly emphasize the importance of knowledge and language as relevance systems is in what they refer to as the fundamental dialectic of society externalization, objectivation, and internalization. Knowledge, they argue, mediates the internalization within individual consciousness of the objectivated structures of the social world. Knowledge, in this sense, is at the heart of the fundamental dialectic of society. It programs the channels in which externalization produces an objective world. It objectifies this world through language and the cognitive apparatus based on language, that is, it orders it into objects to be apprehended as reality. It is internalized again as objectively valid truth in the course of socialization. Knowledge about society is thus a realization in the double sense of the word, in the sense of apprehending the objectivated social reality, and in the sense of ongoingly producing this reality. (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 66)

12 88 Cultural Sociology 10(1) Although Berger and Luckmann s emphasis continues to be language and knowledge, the influence of language on our experienced reality is, as I have just suggested, entwined in a number of ways with sensory perception. It therefore seems important specifically to consider the role of the senses in this fundamental dialectic. One of Berger and Luckmann s core ideas is that the objectivity of the social world is always produced by humans, no matter how obdurate or natural it may appear to be (Berger and Luckmann, 1966: 60). We experience the reality of everyday life as external to us and imposed on us from without. In Berger and Luckmann s words, we experience patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them and that impose themselves upon the latter (p. 21). They attribute much of this sense of objectivity to language and vocabulary: language marks the coordinates of my life in society and fills that life with meaningful objects (p. 21). The choice of the word apprehension in the above description, however, serves as a reminder that there is a perceptual process involved in objectivation as well. Indeed, objectivity as a human production is arguably deeply dependent on processes of sensory perception. For one thing, often the externalized world is only known through sensory information, even as processes of perception are also mediated by language. This suggests that the objectivation process is at least in part a perceptual process. More specifically, as I already alluded to above, if the influence of language is to define relevance, we often apply that relevance perceptually as selective attention and inattention, and this sensory selectivity underlies the patterns that seem independent of my apprehension of them. Further, as suggested in Berger and Luckmann s discussion of the unique power of face-to-face interaction in establishing intersubjective reality, and as demonstrated by other research documenting our cultural ocularcentrism, visual information has disproportionately high truth status compared with the other senses, and therefore the visual in particular likely serves to strengthen objectivation. More generally, the point is that sensory perceptions are themselves objectified, which Vannini et al. (2011: 130) capture with the concept of somatic escalation. Somatic escalation is a naturalization of the perceptual process in which the denotations and connotations of sensory experience are blurred into one immediate common sense perception resulting in an illusion that perception is natural and free of interpretive work (Vannini et al., 2011: ). Such objectified sensory perceptions then function as sensory indices which are ideal for naturalizing cultural dynamics (p. 131). In other words, strictly speaking, the objectivation of the social world is often an objectivation of our sensory perceptions. When we experience external realities that are really a human creation as fixed and imposed on us from without, this is in large part due to our belief that what we perceive through the senses is an exact mirror of empirical reality without interpretation or selection. In addition, as we have seen, our belief in the objectivity of the senses is stronger for some senses than others due to our cultural ocularcentrism. In light of this, an analysis of sensory perception, particularly visual perception, is critical to a fuller understanding of objectivation. In fact, one might think of objectivation as in part a process of ignoring or disattending the selectivity of sensory perception. Viewed in this way, by extension one might then argue that a

13 Friedman 89 sensory analysis aims to reverse the process of objectivation, given that it explicitly reveals sensory selectivity. One final observation on the role of the senses in the dialectic of internalization, externalization, and objectivation. One way to understand Berger and Luckmann s discussion of the role of language/knowledge in steering and shaping this dialectic is as an account of how normalizing power and social control operate in daily life. It addresses the question of how human beings come to regulate their own behavior in line with, and therefore reproduce, normative social reality. Viewed in this light, internalization, externalization, and objectivation as discussed by Berger and Luckmann are echoed in Foucault s later work on disciplinary power (Foucault, 1975, 1979 [1976]). However, one element Foucault adds is a recognition that a central aspect of this form of self-regulatory power is visibility. He highlights the way that the understanding that we are visible in our behavior to the omnipresent gaze of society leads to self-surveillance and therefore plays an important role in what Berger and Luckmann refer to as programming the channels through which externalization creates an objective social world. Conclusion Berger and Luckmann s arguments in The Social Construction of Reality place great emphasis on language, knowledge, face-to-face interaction, and objectivation. What I have tried to show in this paper is that our understanding of each of these is enhanced with an analysis of the underlying sensory processes. Exploring this sensory substructure of the social construction process also provides an opportunity to highlight conceptual connections between a number of ideas Berger and Luckmann present as totally distinct. Although these are surely not the only examples, I have highlighted how the same general process of sensory filtration underlies primary socialization, typification, relevance structures, and objectivation. Berger and Luckmann s silence on the sensory aspects of social construction likely in part reflects the foundationalist constructionist perspective they espoused, which, unlike radical or anti-foundationalist types of constructionism, posits an outside to social construction which typically includes the body and the material world more broadly. Although Berger and Luckmann have relatively little to say about the body, when they do discuss it they generally do so in terms of a limit to social constructionism. Similarly, while the senses are discussed mostly in an offhand manner, they implicitly seem to be understood as fully biological. Given the relatively recent proliferation of work on the sociology of the body, as well as the even more recent emergence of the sociology of perception (in many ways an outgrowth of the sociology of the body), there is much more to say sociologically about the body, embodiment, sensation, and perception. The sociology of perception transcends dualist ontologies that separate mind from body, sensation from perception (Vannini et al., 2011: 9). I have argued in prior work, for example, that focusing on selective sensory perception using filter analysis represents a new way to conceptualize the interaction of biology and culture that acknowledges

14 90 Cultural Sociology 10(1) obdurate material reality without simply taking it at face value, treading a path between radical social constructionism and foundationalism (Friedman, 2013). Filter analysis acknowledges material structures that provide the raw sensory data and play some role in perceptually distinguishing socially meaningful entities, locating the social construction process in how we cognitively and perceptually deal with those features through socially organized practices like selective attention. In the most general terms, an account of sensory perception as a core mechanism of social construction can enhance our understanding of many of Berger and Luckmann s original insights, and constitutes a renewal of their very important call to focus on the processes of the social construction of reality. While Berger and Luckmann s general idea of social construction has become taken-for-granted in the discipline, less attention has been paid to the how questions that motivated their work, i.e. how does subjective reality come to appear to the individual as objective or independent from him or her? Here I have argued that one important mechanism of the social construction of reality is selective sensory attention and inattention. Acknowledgements I thank Héctor Vera for inviting me to participate in the Social Construction of Reality at 50 conference at the New School for Social Research and for his editorial suggestions, as well as Eviatar Zerubavel and Tom DeGloma, who both offered useful feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. I am also grateful to David Inglis for his editorial guidance and to Cultural Sociology s anonymous reviewers for their suggestions. Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Notes 1. On cultural sensory hierarchies privileging vision, and, to a lesser extent, hearing, over smell, taste, and touch, see also: Classen (1997), Classen et al. (1993), Howes and Classen (2014), Stoller (1984), Synnott (1993). 2. Vannini et al. similarly refer to sensory habits and sensory rituals as filtering mechanisms (2011: 87), but do not really elaborate on the metaphor. 3. On professional optical socialization in radiology, see also Joyce (2005: ). References Becker H (1953) Becoming a marihuana user. The American Journal of Sociology 59(3): 242. Berger PL and Luckmann T (1966) The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Bourdieu P (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brekhus WH, Brunsma DL, Platts T and Priya D (2010) On the contributions of cognitive sociology to the sociological study of race. Sociology Compass 4(1): Classen C (1997) Engendering perception: Gender ideologies and sensory hierarchies in western history. Body and Society 3: 1 19.

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