reaction part 2 to Peter L. Berger
ends up being very anti-clerical
This follows on from reaction 1 to Peter L. Berger : meaning is a lazy ritual. There's no introduction here and ends up way more anti-clerical than I had imagined. We start from about page 35 of:
Cultural Analysis : the work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986) which is co-written by Robert Wuthnow, James Davison Hunter, Albert Bergesen and Edith Kurzweil.This is written a year after I was born, from a book that came out when I was 21, and the gap between that publication and my current age approaching sixty is 38 years.
What was I conscious of? In that time? The first twenty-one years feel like a century passed compared to the last four decades, both psychologically and sociologically.
The fabric of culture then is the intersubjective meanings individuals hold concerning the world in which they live. Culture exists 'only as people are consciousness of it' (1966:78). page 35
So to work: for Culture exists 'only as people are consciousness of it — my notes read — and they may not think of it as 'culture' or 'meaning' at all…
I've inherited this use of intersubjective though. Some people may confuse it with relativism, peeps as atomic POVs, I see it as more negotiated-ly structural, a process Empires try to capture and turn into an ordered singularity with one POV, usually that of some sicko narcissist. Some will say that vision and objectivity are one imperial project, and then argue for some partial localised narcissism in tribe, creed, or sport.
Worth noting here that Berger uses ‘dialectic’ to describe this intersubjectivity. In the sense of multiple conversations, not just two sides of a debate, this is not the Hegelian or Marxist dialectic of thesis, antithesis in some aufhebung or upwelling towards some Valhalla of daily synthesis. Recently I have been using Petter's noyaux to describe this intersubjective worlding. The link here is that this is French for nucleus, and some atomic nuclei are unstable, but that instability hints at the energy of the situation, and it's 'cultural' output.
Phenomenological sociology, as has often been repeated, focuses on meanings that people share intersubjectively, but that are also objectivated in a variety of cultural artifacts. page 37
This is an error. Not that it is wrong, this is not a moral claim, but I think we can do better, but yes, language, intersubjectively, yes we argue and chat our way around.
Language is best thought of as self-bedding, or self-layering, a self-fossilising process in which the taphonomy of usage which gets caught up on originary meanings or contemporary or individual identities miss the process for a point in time. Either now or a long time ago. Of course this error, or errors, apply as much to our sciences as our self-fossilising intersubjectivities into which our sciences now enter and mix for good or ill. (See eugenics and racial theories.)
I think studying ‘meaning’ is a type of handwaving, and that symbols are the echos of the builders swearing about hitting their thumbs in our dead ancestors' tombs. And to think monarchs want to be buried in such places.
Intersubjectivity reaches into the past in its Janus dance. As such the world is a fossil of itself. The world is a fossilising process. (Not just Christianity, but all outcomes of worlding are their own gravediggers to paraphrase Berger).
And why not use metaphors of time to describe time.
The ways these are attained are highly variable — the body does not tell a person where to seek sexual release or what to eat. page 38
Ooh, some prior art for my 'hunger does not tell you how to bake a cake.' We even get a moral connection:
The channeling of these organismic drives is determined by socio-cultural factors. Thus the individual 'knows' that ther eis a 'right and wrong' way to achieve sexual release […] that there are 'right and wrong' foods to eat. page 38
In Berger's non-binary dialectic he still has a three-phase structure, structuralistic as in simultaneous: externalisation, objectivation and internalisation. Sounds like a Janus dance to me. More prior art too I guess. More proof nobody invents stuff when following up on the implications of a thought or two.
However:
Because there is no biological grounded structure of instincts which can channel thought and behaviour, [emphasis mine] people are constrained to construct human structures which will perform the same functions. People's world-building activity is rooted in their biological necessity to externalize. page 39
"People's world-building activity is rooted in their biological necessity to externalize." This is basically what I am saying in why we should.
I differ on the "people are constrained to construct" point thought. It is no "substitute" (page 40) for embodied instincts denied us —by what??? culture??? god/s? (blame/credit nexus raises it ugly head again).
Worlding is an instinct itself, as much as bodying is, it is just done socially and so is con-foundedly forged.
It is no substitute because it is the other way around. People world because evolution selects those Homo sp individuals who world better among and with others (who world).
Everything else is an outcome. People will read ""people are constrained to construct" and will be tempted to see in this some structure/structuralism substitute where there is none, admittedly. ironically, this mistake is part of what Berger calls 'objectivation' or Max Stirner calls wheels in the mind. So basically what Berger comes up with is also the result of the worlding process. He nails it, and then nails himself to the cross with it.
Nice try though. I suspect it will help us more to not nail this worlding down into a meaning, as that is 'objectivation' and then reification is thus impossible to avoid. Sure the dialectic and noyaux depend on it happening for the worlding to work, but that doesn't mean it is real. That is, if we survive because of fictions (like meaning or culture or religion or the instances of those abstractions like tribal identity, sophistication of economies or imperial cults) then we survive, it does not mean there is a need for meaning, art or faith.
'Meaning' is not a blurry enough word to do the job, if only because it implicates definition. 'Worlding' is blurry enough and ancient enough (self-fossilised with taphonomical 'purpose and design') to work well. Again this is not a relativism, but takes on board that relativism sometimes is an objectively better way to study stuff, if not Janus dance the 'dialectic' of our dreams.
Pages 40 and following, is about institutions and their social construction, as this is about the doing of the dancing there is little to add or deduct besides pointing out the usual errors of frame as to what is an outcome of worlding rather than an object to be study for it causal originaries.
I will add that socialisation (as of roles) is a subset of worlding, or at least an outcome of worlding, by this I wish to emphasise that worlding is more than socialising, consider the hermit who worlds by excluding the world as society (non-verbal or otherwise). Or the schizoid. Or the narcissist who worlds by arrogating the world to the self, and see that that it is good.
Page 47 we return to the world again, this time by way of worldview, which is a process of integration as well as a POV (or POVs depending on the number of roles you play in society). Then we get more doing.
Page 48 and religion
Berger defines religion as a humanly constructed universe of meaning whereby a sacred cosmos is projected.
Besides being a bad framework because it pivots on 'meaning' (bad dancing is still often dancing, bad art is often still art), we see that Berger was colonised by the empire, in particular the empire for which the St Augustine's wrote the City of God. Here Berger calls this 'cityspace' sacred unaware of the history of the Roman Imperial cult which created the framework Berger uses. Unaware? Really?
The number of peoples around the world who in no way separate the sacred out (into a supernatural realm or otherwise), and world with it on a daily basis is quite large. They just world. You need administrators to separate it out, clerics, literate shamans who labour obediently for the emperor.
Such that the following:
"For Berger, the supernatural is a finite province of meaning set against the paramount reality of everyday life"
means we end up with, or rather from,
'Religion is the audacious attempt to conceive of the entire universe as being humanly significant' (1967:28).
Sounds like a monarchical audacity to turn their person into a sun-god, bearing all legitimacy.
Not everybody does this at all times, only certain types do this, the rest of us just get on with it. It would be more audacious to recognise this and not give unto Caesar what is not Caesar's. And preferably nothing at all the narcissistic fuck.
Yeah, so now the essay moves on to legitimation an dcosmic significance, as this is in Berger a derivative of 'meaning' it confangles the errors almost logorithmically. I guess he is playing to the crowd.
"Nihilation' is a negative legitimation process... I suspect a good current example of this would be the incel-chad man-o-sphere. Misogyny and misandry both are types of nihilation. See, the trouble with not recognising culture & meaning as outcomes of worlding is the culture wars. This is a bad noyau, a bad dialectic, a bad dance.Page 60 ‘the special case of religion’.
Above I have already indicate I think he had been colonised by some zombie version of St Augustine's City of God . My pencil notes here say "the special case of religion may only relate to the 'fact' that it is considered by some to be a special case (objectivication?) And that is as far as it goes." If you don't consider it a special case then it isn't. A worlding framework can include both positions quite easily, no special cases need pleading.
It is interesting that Berger as a protestant theologian is ignorant of empire, Constantinople in particular. This is why he thinks the need or experiences that urge us towards theodicies is a good thing and a plurality which dilutes that possibility is worrisome. Without being aware that theodicy issues are one outcome among many, and framing it as theodicy is using a frame used and captured by empire. I guess Protestantism is a broad church, and it does include the High Church (but really neo-Orthodoxy) of Henry VIII.
Page 64, here we work through meaning-based identities -- people who criticise identity politics should be aware that Berger is lumped by wikipedians as a conservative BTW.
These identities circle like vultures around stable tropes or roles. It is the usual bias of the hoofless tribes and their 'nihilation' of the rootless herds. This is why 'meaning' is pivoted on so much. Meaning = definition = stability = small c conservatism and why modernity which eats this away like acid on metal is a problem.
It would be a better 'theodicy' to incorporate styles of movement into a study of our worlding, rather then to curse the darkness.
Here movement, is regarded in and of itself as rootless, it is deprecated (nihilated). And ‘place’ is put on a plinth, and thus in terms of identity-based meaning-making it is put up as the be-all and end-allof intersubjective dialectics, as if we were not animals but angels of stability, where our wings only allows us to fly up to the enter the stables of god. But we are animals who move, regardless of the Augean stable of shit Berger calls home.
Crossposted from whyweshould.loofs-samorzewski.com
References:
Peter L. Berger cited in Cultural Analysis : the work of Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986) which is co-written by Robert Wuthnow, James Davison Hunter, Albert Bergesen and Edith Kurzweil.
(1965) 'Reification and the sociological critique of consciouness' (with Stanley Pullberg), History and Theory, 4: 198 ff.
(1967) The sacred canopy, Garden City : Doubleday
(1966) The social construction of reality (with Thomas Luckman) Garden City : Doubleday.