The Practical Uses of Less Reality: Taking Berger and Luckmann into the Wild

• In Event: 122 - Regular Session. Ethnomethodology

Abstract

The sociology of knowledge that followed Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman’s programmatic treatise, The Social Construction of Reality, revealed much of the subtle work necessary to construct a sense of shared reality in everyday situations. The sociology of knowledge thus shifted away from the history of rarified ideas and toward an ethnomethodological orientation to practical activity. Similarly, recent research in science and technology studies has emphasized how multiple realities are made to cohere through practical “ontic work.” Considerably less attention, however, has looked to the opposite side of this similar analytic intervention – how groups construct a sense of shared unreality in everyday encounters. That is, there are a whole range of shared activities that explicitly relax the sense of a singular reality by calling attention to the ephemeral in events and artifacts. The payoff for investigating such activities can be made most clearly with empirical examples, of which I offer three types. First, I discuss the practical uses of less reality when skilled practitioners, like airline pilots, safety engineers, and even athletes, use simulation to prepare for events that are construed to be highly uncertain, risky, or of high consequence. Next, I discuss how less reality is mobilized epistemologically, with experimentation in science the quintessential example but also in the experimentalism highlighted by unrealized or “unbuilt” projects in art and architecture. Finally, I discuss transcendent and/or autotelic social experience, primarily through play, fantasy, and other technological mediations like augmented reality.

Author

• Steve G. Hoffman, State University of New York-Buffalo