Making Sense of Reality

Culture and Perception in Everyday Life

Tia DeNora, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781446202005, 9781446201992
• eBook ISBN: 9781473905511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What is reality and how do we make sense of it in everyday life? Why do some realities seem more real than others, and what of seemingly contradictory and multiple realities? This book considers reality as we represent, perceive and experience it. It suggests that the realities we take as 'real' are the result of real-time, situated practices that draw on and draw together many things - technologies and objects, people, gestures, meanings and media. Examining these practices illuminates reality (or rather our sense of it) as always 'virtually real', that is simplified and artfully produced. This examination also shows us how the sense of reality that we make is nonetheless real in its consequences.

Making Sense of Reality offers students and educators a guide to analysing social life. It develops a performance-based perspective ('doing things with') that highlights the ever-revised dimension of realities and links this perspective to a focus on object-relations and an ecological model of culture-in-action.

Part 1 Philosophically Informed Sociology

1 Introducing Slow Sociology

Thinking about how our senses of reality take shape in daily life involves both general and specific questions. The general questions will be familiar to philosophers. They include matters such as: What is ‘the world’? How solid are realities within the world? What does it take to effect change in the nature of reality? Is reality embedded ‘in’ things, or does it reside ‘in’ the relations between things? To what extent is reality an outcome of cultural practice? How do we come to know realities? What is the relationship between knowing realities and the realities we know?

To pose these questions is in turn to ask about the flexibility of realities, namely: to what extent can reality change its shape as it passes from place to place, time to time, perceiver to perceiver and situation to situation? And what kind of relationship is there between our assumptions about (and practices toward) realities and the forms that those realities appear to take? These are general questions but they can be made more specific through worked examples. For example, we can investigate specific situations where realities come to be taken as real, where they are initially experienced as real, and where, once realised, they have consequences for the making of other realities. In this chapter I describe how a focus on these matters requires a painstakingly close form of attention associated with what I will call ‘Slow Sociology’.

I call this form of sociology ‘slow’ because, metaphorically and sometimes literally, it requires a form of attention to minutiae. This attention is akin to the slow motion, wide-lens, long-take techniques associated with ‘slow cinema’ and with the comparatively time-consuming methods associated with producing and preparing ‘slow food’. These techniques – cognitive and empirical but also aesthetic and sensory – are devoted to the cultivation of intimate forms of knowledge and to the detailed features of what happens locally, here and now; and they have an affinity with ethnographic forms of enquiry (Atkinson et al., 2001), and the focus on embodied craft (Atkinson, 2013) and on the skills involved in living together (Sennett, 2008, 2012). Slow sociology is, in other words, an anti-generic mode of enquiry focused on the particularities of things, rather than the more general and often hypothetical (or indeed metaphysical) there and then. It is perhaps akin to what Goethe knew as ‘gentle empiricism’, ways of being with the world and learning through unobtrusive observation (see Ansdell and Pavlicevic, 2010), beautifully enunciated by Fox Keller, in her study of the Nobel laureate and cytogeneticist, Barbara McClintock:

‘No two plants are exactly alike. They’re all different, and as a consequence, you have to know that difference,’ she [McClintock] explains. ‘I start with the seedling, and I don’t want to leave it. I don’t feel I really know the story if I don’t watch the plant all the way along. So I know every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them.’

This intimate knowledge, made possible by years of close association with the organism she studies, is a prerequisite for her extraordinary perspicacity … Both literally and figuratively, her ‘feeling for the organism’ has extended her vision … (Fox Keller, 1983: 198)

Slow sociology can, I shall suggest, inhibit our sometimes too-hasty assumptions about the realities that we believe ‘must’ exist – in society, nature or ourselves (e.g., ‘It was like that then, there, so it must be like that now, here’). Taking it slow helps us to consider the moments and devices – linguistic but also enacted through materials (documents, objects, technologies) and forms of embodiment – that sever realities from their histories of production (their origins and growth). Understanding the provenance of realities, whether over the long term or short term, is, as I shall describe, a way of preserving the possibility for critique, for challenging assertions about what is real. (As Inglis [2013: 15] observes, ‘[a]s Orwell knew, how we think about ourselves and our future is utterly dependent on how we imagine the past’.)

This historically informed understanding includes an understanding of how our idiomatic styles and languages for thinking about ontology, or the nature of reality, themselves have histories, and of how they have been modified over time. (For example, Pollner [1987] has described how the idea of a ‘real’ and an ‘objective’ world can be traced within the history of philosophy and science.) It also includes, as we shall see, a concern with the provenance of the objects, materials and tools (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999 [1985]; Norman, 2002 [1988]; Bijker et al., 1989), since our material agency takes shape in relation to, and through the media of, these things – as Pickering puts it, a dance or ‘dialectic of resistance and accommodation’ (Pickering, 1995: 21–2, 52). Step by step, this ‘dance’ has consequences, as Molotch explains:

How we desire, produce, and discard the durables of existence helps form who we are, how we connect to one another, and what we do to the earth. In addition to ordering intimacies, these urges and actions influence the way peoples across large stretches of time, cultures, and geographies align, exchange, and conflict. (Molotch, 2005: xi)

Thus slow sociology is a perspective and a set of methods devoted to recovering the present history of how things ‘are’ and how our sense of how things are is made, through practices and in relation to, as Molotch calls them, ‘the durables of existence’. It is an often-painstakingly detailed form of enquiry that seeks to avoid any jumping to conclusions about how reality ‘just is’ or ‘must be’.

Wittgenstein On ‘Must’

As a way into what ‘more slow’ (Marvel, n.d. [c. 1650]) forms of enquiry can offer, consider how we come to use the expression ‘it must be’ and how this expression can lead us to over-assert that which can be known. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is helpful on this point.

As Pleasant puts it (1999: 40, quoting Wittgenstein), ‘“must”’, that means we are going to apply this picture come what may’ (Wittgenstein, 1976: 411, quoted in Pleasants, 1999: 40). By contrast, Wittgenstein advises against situations in which we cleave to ‘preconceived idea[s] to which reality must correspond’ (Wittgenstein, 1968: 131, quoted in Pleasants, 1999: 40). As Pleasants notes, Wittgenstein believes we can do better, that we ‘look and see... don’t think, but look!’ (p. 122), advocating an open-minded attitude toward reality, ‘rather than deciding a priori, on the basis of an ontological picture of how things must, and can only be’ (p. 122). In other words, our theoretical preconceptions about how reality ‘must’ look run the risk of being overly selective and thus can lead us to impose presumptions about reality on the particular instances of what we remember about the past, and what we encounter and perceive in the present. These preconceptions may excise richer and more sensorial, pre-cognitive dimensions of knowing and remembering and the intimate knowledge associated with these dimensions. While I do not mean to imply that there is a ‘purer’ or ‘better’ way of knowing the world that can be achieved if only we overthrow the ‘blinders’ of conventional categories of perception (‘presumptions’ versus ‘perceptions’), I do mean to suggest that each and every set of preconceptions about reality enacts selective processes of knowing and remembering. The question then is what, as a result of preconceptions, is gained, and what is lost. What, in other words, is retained as the memory (or relatively fixed idea) of what is, and is not, real?

On memory, the cognitive sociologist Aaron Cicourel (1974) has described how the human mind can only process so much ‘on line’, as Saferstein puts it (Saferstein, 2010: 115), in any given moment. Our remembrance of things is, Cicourel suggests, dependent upon things external to the mind, such as objects, tools and aesthetic media which frame and elicit selective memories (e.g., when I smell that perfume I remember my mother; when I hear this song I am transported ‘back then’). (In this respect Cicourel’s work presaged the extended mind perspective in philosophy [Clark and Chalmers, 1998] and the focus on distributed cognition in anthropology [Hutchins, 1995]. It also complements and has informed work on memory artefacts, for example in relation to the representational politics of collective memory [Tota, 2004, 2005] and to self-remembrance [DeNora, 2000].)

On encountering and perceiving aspects of the world, our belief or pre-commitments to what we expect to encounter may excise, or filter out, those things that we do not expect to encounter or which ‘really should not be there’. These, at times, incorrigible beliefs may lead us to witness things that were not actually there, and not to witness things that are there. Psychologists speak of this filtering as ‘inattentional blindness’ (Mack and Rock, 1998; Simons and Chabris, 1999). This form of ‘blindness’ occurs when our expectations of what we should or must see actually prevent us from noticing things that do not square with our presumptions of what must or must not be, to return to Wittgenstein’s words, in ‘this picture’.

The most famous example used to illustrate inattentional blindness involves an experiment where subjects were asked to view a basketball game in which team members were dressed, contrastingly, in black and white shirts (Simons and Chabris, 1999). The experimental subjects were asked to count how many times the basketball was passed between white-shirted players. During the game, a gorilla-suited figure walked through the court, pausing briefly (see Figure 1.1). Most subjects never noticed the gorilla because they were so intent upon the assigned perceptual task. They were not, in other words, looking for a gorilla and they therefore did not, on the whole, notice a gorilla. The example highlights how at times matters that are literally, in this case, in centre court, can pass unnoticed because of the ways in which attention is selectively devoted to its object. Equally importantly, this experiment showed how attention can be directed and framed (in this case the task and instructions of how to watch), a topic to which we will return in Chapter 8.

Figure 1.1 Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events (Simons and Chabris, 1999). Figure provided by Daniel Simons. See also: http://www.dansimons.com

While the matter of seeing a gorilla-suited figure in a contrived experiment may seem trivial, other matters of perception and what perception does and does not permit us to sense and know may be more serious, as we shall explore momentarily and throughout this book. For now, the example of inattentional blindness helps to highlight why Wittgenstein advised us to ‘look and see … don’t think but look!’ The trouble with this advice is that looking and thinking are not ultimately separate activities. (As I will discuss much later in Chapter 8, looking and thinking are interrelated and mutually constituting and they are always social activities.) To the contrary: careful, inclusive looking is aided by forms of thinking, or, more broadly, representing, forms that can widen – or narrow – the lens, sensitising us to what is ‘in the frame’ (what there is to know, experience, do). In so doing, they widen the window or span of conscious attention, quantitatively, in terms of the time held in short-term memory, and qualitatively, in terms of what is noticed. Jumping to conclusions (‘it must be so’), along with over-socialised, over-intent or narrow-focus forms of perception (versus the so-called ‘soft eyes’ or wider-angle focus that looks but does not stare), can deflect attention from more nuanced appreciation of what there is to know (‘what else could this be?’).

More insidiously, this kind of haste may push us into forms of categorical, generic thinking that lead to cognitive violence (not doing justice to the phenomena) and which at times may in turn lead on to forms of physical violence and oppression. On this point it is time to introduce a second key thinker who, while not fully aligned with the perspectives I will be developing, nonetheless helps to establish the project of ‘slow’ sociology. I refer to the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno.

Adorno on Form and Content, Oppression and Critique

Adorno’s work was devoted to illuminating how we fail to notice that which contradicts our (often implicit) assumptions about reality. Adorno was concerned to show how reality is not reducible to or identical with the concepts by which we seek to know it. Conceptualisation, classification and categorisation, therefore, left what Adorno called ‘a remainder’ (Adorno, 2005: 5) – aspects or parts of phenomena that do not fit into the shape and terms of the common denominator, or descriptor. For Adorno, the challenge of social life was to achieve a (temporary and always shifting) balance between subject and object, particular and general, so as to minimise the violence (both symbolic and real) of remaindering. This task, Adorno believed, required nuanced attention to detail and a feeling for multiplicity and equivocality.

In Adorno’s understanding, one of the most dangerous features of thought was its tendency to be overly generic. As a half-Jewish philosopher working during the early part of his career in Germany during National Socialism, Adorno witnessed first hand the consequences of categorical thinking: the dangers of believing that the contents of the social world were ‘really’ aligned with the forms that we use to describe and know that world. This is to say that Adorno considered that totalitarian regimes of all kinds buttressed forms of persecution with notions that people could be easily classified into types. Under National Socialism, these ‘types’ were in turn ranked such that Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, women [sic – I use the regime’s categorical descriptions] were deemed inferior and/or unworthy of full human rights. These malicious, hasty understandings laid the cognitive foundation, Adorno considered, for behavioural cruelty.

By contrast, Adorno valued modes of understanding that facilitated the perception of difference. The recognition of difference, which is to say the recognition of the ‘non-identity’ between an assumption of what a category ‘must’ contain and what is actually encountered in specific instances (e.g., ‘My goodness but aren’t you strong/intelligent for a woman/child/old person/blond-haired person!’), was a way of accommodating a richer and more nuanced, variegated, complicated and surprising reality. That accommodation was one concerned with formal innovation, with finding formal containers that could ‘hold’ more of reality’s contradictions and so stretch the span of what could be held within consciousness (as discussed above in relation to thinking and looking). That kind of cognitive capaciousness was, Adorno considered, also the basis for tolerance.

To return to the parallel with the ‘slow’ movements and further illustrate the point that categories selectively represent reality and may structure perception and evaluation, let’s now consider a different example (albeit one that is as simple as it is less urgent). Consider the case of a category of fruit – the tomato, for example. At different times in the history of food in Europe, the tomato was (a) unknown, (b) considered potentially poisonous and thus not a food source, and (c) a staple salad or sauce ingredient. In recent times, the slow food and organic food movements have sought to remind us that not all tomatoes are round and red, or how, in some cases, a tomato might be more like a physalis or even a grape. Now think of all the tomatoes that would be ‘remaindered’ (and thus wasted) if we used the image of the red, round one as the common denominator of ‘tomato-ness’. So ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Illustration List
• About the Author
• Preface and Acknowledgements, or Music, Mucus and ‘California Sociology’
• Introduction: Reality in everyday life
• Part 1 Philosophically Informed Sociology
• 1 Introducing Slow Sociology
• 2 Conventional and Unconventional Realities: The Case of Sexual Difference
• Part 2 Cultural Sociology
• 3 Culturally Figured Reality
• 4 Once More, With Feeling: Beyond Performance
• 5 Variations in Space and Time
• 6 Reflexivity: Enacting Cultural Categories Along With Their Instances
• 7 Multiple Realities and Their Maintenance
• Part 3 Artful Practices and Making Sense
• 8 Making Sense of Reality: Perception as Action
• 9 The Sense of Reality: Here, Now, Artfully, Pragmatically and with Consequences
• References
• Index