Making the Familiar Strange: Sociology Contra Reification [1 ed.] 0367894424, 9780367894429

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
1 What is sociology’s epoché?
2 Modes of reification
3 Familiarity and/as strangeness
4 Modes of social defamiliarization
5 The anti-consolation of sociology
References
Index

Citation preview

‘Ryan Gunderson’s fusion of critical theory and phenomenology and incisive exploration of reification and defamiliarization provide analytical tools to unmask the neoliberal ideology that ‘there is no alternative,’ come to terms with the grim social realities exposed by the COVIDpandemic, and imagine a future that averts plutocracy and ecological catastrophe.’ — Robert J. Antonio, University of Kansas, USA

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‘Through a systematic exploration of the topic of “defamiliarization” in sociology, critical theory and phenomenology are once again brought together. The result is a powerful endorsement of active estrangement that fully brings home Brecht’s alienation effect to social theory. By showing us how to think about the world in a different way, Ryan Gunderson opens the way to social change, at least in theory.’ — Frédéric Vandenberghe, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ‘Gunderson’s intellectually stimulating study joins the ranks of many important theoretical approaches dedicated to visualizing problematic dimensions of social life that have been normalized via everyday life, and constitutes a most welcome effort to spell out efforts to systematize strategies to counteract mediating processes like alienation and reification, which are detrimental to human agency.’ — Harry F. Dahms, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, USA

Making the Familiar Strange

This book examines the meaning and implications of the sociological maxim, ‘make the familiar strange.’ Addressing the methodological questions of why and how sociologists should make the familiar strange, what it means to ‘make the familiar strange,’ and how this approach benefits sociological research and theory, it draws on four central concepts: reification, familiarity, strangeness, and defamiliarization. Through a typology of the notoriously ambiguous concept of reification, the author argues that the primary barrier to sociological knowledge is our experience of the social world as fixed and unchangeable. Thus emerges the importance of constituting the familiar as the strange through a process of social defamiliarization as well as making this process more methodical by reflecting on heuristics and patterns of thinking that render society strange. The first concerted effort to examine an important feature of the sociological imagination, this volume will appeal to sociologists of any specialty and theoretical persuasion. Ryan Gunderson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Gerontology at Miami University, USA, and a co-author of Climate Change Solutions: Beyond the Capital-Climate Contradiction.

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory

Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it. The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts. Series Editor Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA Titles in this series Making the Familiar Strange Sociology Contra Reification Ryan Gunderson Happiness, Flourishing and the Good Life A Transformative Vision for Human Well-Being Garrett Thomson and Scherto Gill with Ivor Goodson Towards a General Theory of Boredom A Case Study of Anglo and Russian Society Elina Tochilnikova For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/sociology/series/ASHSER1383

Making the Familiar Strange Sociology contra reification

Ryan Gunderson

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Ryan Gunderson The right of Ryan Gunderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-89442-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01919-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

For AJ. Life is a journey of calm and stormy seas. When the tides are too rough, remember, “This too shall pass.” You’re the best part of my life, my anchor. If you want to learn the art of embracing every wave, ask the captain, your mom.

Contents

Acknowledgements 1 What is sociology’s epoché?

x 1

2 Modes of reification

17

3 Familiarity and/as strangeness

43

4 Modes of social defamiliarization

69

5 The anti-consolation of sociology

99

References Index

111 129

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the many discussions I’ve had with David Ashley and Claiton Fyock concerning themes underpinning this book, especially those examined in Chapter 2. I also thank my Miami University colleagues C. Lee Harrington and Stephen Lippmann for conversations related to Chapter 4, and William Flint for conversations related to Chapter 2, as well as our former Miami colleague Glenn W. Muschert for recommending Davis (1971), Nisbet (1976), and, especially, Brown (1977). All mistakes are my own. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published in: Gunderson R (2020) Things are the way they are: A typology of reification. Sociological Perspectives. DOI: 10.1177/0731121420921891.

1

What is sociology’s epoché?

“Most people never see what they see. … This is notoriously true of social relations.” - Albion W. Small (1897: 149)

The sociological imagination in three acts While the radical C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (1959) was a classical sociology-inspired all-out assault on mid-twentieth century sociology (Chasin 1990; Brewer 2004; Aronowitz 2012), and perhaps even Mills’ “parting shot” for an unredeemable discipline (McQuarie 1989), it is not an overstatement to claim that the work is considered a “by mainstream practitioners as a universal statement of the distinctiveness of sociology” (Brewer 2004: 319). While more famous for its description of what Mills (1959: 7) thought to be the proper subject matter of sociology—“intersections of biography and history within society”—, another reason for the continuing appeal of Mills’ celebrated chapter “The promise” is his understanding of sociology as a form of consciousness or “quality of mind” that one inhabits. The sociological imagination is a mental “operation,” or series of operations, through which the sociologist relates to the “seamless web of social reality” where “he performs a creative act as he develops concepts, classifications, tests, comparisons, and conclusions for them” (Rose 1969: 623). Which mental operations characterize sociology as a form of consciousness? There are at least three candidates that, together, make the sociological imagination a distinctive form of consciousness: 1 Structural analysis: Examining social structures—“patterns discernible in social life, the regularities observed, and configurations detected” (Blau 1975: 3)—through formalized, aggregative, and relational models. 2 Interpretive understanding (Verstehen): Grasping the meanings and motives of the social actions of others through the direct observation of action and other means, and embedding action in “an intelligible and more inclusive context” (Weber 1978: 8).

2  What is sociology’s epoché? 3 Social defamiliarization: An inquisitive stance toward one’s own takenfor-granted social world, a goal sometimes described as “making the familiar strange.” Over a century’s worth of literature has been devoted to the first two central operations of the sociological imagination—structural analysis and Verstehen—, far more than can be cited let alone reviewed here. In comparison, sociology’s axiomatic directive to “make the familiar strange,” which this book calls “social defamiliarization,” has received far less sustained attention. Within sociology, the phrase, coined by German Romantic poet Novalis (Beiser 1998: 294), is often attributed to Mills, despite the slogan never appearing in his work, to my knowledge. I assume that the maxim emerged as an abridgment of Mills’ (1959: 7–8) explanation of what the sociological imagination does to self-consciousness: [t]he sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of self-­ consciousness. By its use, men whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar. … Their capacity for astonishment is made lively again. They acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a transvaluation of values: in a word, by their reflection and by their sensibility, they realize the cultural meaning of the social sciences. As reviewed in the proceeding section, others have described the basis and fruits of sociological thinking in similar ways. Sociological discovery presupposes a form of consciousness that approaches the unproblematic and familiar social world it inhabits as problematic and strange, as a world that requires explanation and understanding rather than one that can be taken for granted. The cumbersome term “social defamiliarization” to describe modes of sociological thinking that make the familiar strange comes from two sources within sociology, discussed later in this chapter, and one from literary theory, where “defamiliarization” (ostranenie)1 was coined by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky (1991) in a discussion of what makes poetic-artistic language different from prosaic-practical language. Describing how perception and experience become habitual and automatic over time—for example, holding a pen or speaking a new language—, Shklovsky (1991: 5, 6) argues that we no longer “see” objects; we, instead, “grasp” or “recognize” them “in a blink of an eye”: “[a]n object appears before us. We know it’s there but we do not see it, and, for that reason, we can say nothing about it.” By defamiliarizing objects, the function of art is to “lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition [via automatic ‘grasping’].” Modes of literary defamiliarization include allegory and striving to describe things as they present themselves for the first time, as opposed to naming them.

What is sociology’s epoché? 3 The German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s “the alienation effect” or “distanciation” is similar to, and may have been inspired by (Zerubavel 2019: 574), Shklovsky’s account of defamiliarization, which consists in turning the object of which one is to be made aware, to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unexpected. What is obvious is in a certain sense made incomprehensible, but this is only in order that it may then be made all the easier to comprehend. (Brecht 1964: 143–144) The “A-effect” is achieved in everyday life when one directs another’s attention to what was considered superfluous or unimportant. For example, beginning a business discussion with, “‘Have you ever thought what happens to the waste from your factory which is pumped into the river twenty-four hours a day?’” or asking a friend, “‘Have you ever really looked carefully at your watch?’” In this latter case, [t]he questioner knows that I’ve looked at it often enough, and now his question deprives me of the sight which I’ve grown used to and which accordingly has nothing more to say to me. I used to look at it to see the time, and now when he asks me in this importunate ways, I realize that I have given up seeing the watch itself with an astonished eye; and it is in many ways an astonishing piece of machinery. (Brecht 1964: 144) Brecht adopted the A-effect as a theatrical tool to draw the audience’s attention to the strangeness of the familiar, to encourage them to think about the events on stage with an “astonished eye” instead of passively gazing, identifying, or consuming these events. This is the principal reward of making the familiar strange in sociology too. With an astonished eye, great sociology asks questions about, and draws attention to, the most familiar yet most mysterious of all objects: society. Yet, with exceptions, sociology has devoted little extended attention to how to cultivate an astonished eye. That is the goal of this project. This book should be read as a contribution to sociological methodology. More specifically, it is a contribution to what Abbott (2004) calls the “creative” aspects of methodology, or, modes of thinking that help sociologists “find ideas” and new ways to illuminate social reality. By a creative side of methodology, I take Abbott to mean making sociological thinking conscious of itself in order to provide tools to illuminate, discover, elucidate, or disclose new features of social reality, or at least how to ask better questions about social phenomena (e.g., Mills 1959; Berger 1963; Blumer 1969: ch. 1; Nisbet 1976; Brown 1977; Becker 1998; Martin 2017; for a similar distinction between sociological “logic of inquiry” and “technique,” see Brown 1977: 122). The focus is on sociological thinking in research, as distinct from technical methods used to collect or analyze data, to further insight into

4  What is sociology’s epoché? sociology’s “spirit of discovery and creation,” too often ignored in sterile methodological discussions (Nisbet 1976: 4). Although examples of social defamiliarization are drawn from all corners of sociology, especially classical sociology, the methodological case for social defamiliarization is built in large part through conversations with critical social theory and social phenomenology. Both lines of thought exerted considerable influence on young sociologists in the late 1960s and 1970s (Smart 1976; for helpful reviews of this period, see Bottomore 1978; Wolff 1978).2 Their dual though divergent starting assumption that society is a human artifact appealed to those who hoped to comprehend social changes occurring throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Phenomenology and Marxism offered frameworks for reformulating sociological methodology and theory, previously dominated by structural functionalism, to account for these changes. Not least due to a new wave of rapid social changes, contemporary sociology can learn a great deal from revisiting this unique period of its intellectual development, together with the tradition it was in conversation with: classical sociology. By “critical social theory” I primarily mean the “Western” Marxist tradition, especially the ideas associated with the Frankfurt School, a group of German intellectuals who revised Marxist theory to account for the failure of revolution to materialize in the West and the rise of fascism and monopoly-consumer capitalism (for histories, see Jay 1973; Wiggershaus 1994).3 In these conditions, questions concerning ideology and social reproduction became paramount. An oft-misunderstood approach in sociology, critical theory, in a nutshell, is “ideology critique,” which involves appraising and examining society from the perspective of its own values and categories (“immanent critique”), analyzing social contradictions, searching for more rational alternatives to the status quo within existing society, and historicizing reified (seemingly fixed and immutable) social conditions (Antonio 1981; Benhabib 1986; Ng 2015). This book draws on and contributes to the latter line of analysis: the problem of reification and its implications for social-scientific methodology. This book also draws heavily from the phenomenological tradition. Within sociology, phenomenology holds that social life, from everyday gestures to macro-level social systems, are real only in the sense that they are intersubjectively shared as real (Orleans 1992; Overgaard and Zahavi 2009). Alfred Schutz develops a phenomenological account of the “natural attitude”—the taken-for-granted belief in the world and its objects, or, an all-around suspension of doubt (Schutz 1967d, 1967f)—in order to describe “the invariant, unique, a priori structures of the mind, in particular of a society composed of living minds” (Schutz 1967e: 44; for excellent reconstruction, see Barber 1988). His monumental goal was to conceptualize the fundamental structures of the experienced mundane world of everyday life (the “lifeworld”). The attempt to develop a phenomenological sociology peaked in the 1970s following the success of a well-known treatise written by Schutz’s students: The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Although

What is sociology’s epoché? 5 sociology’s historical focus on the particular, socially contingent nature of experience contrasts with phenomenology’s goal of describing the universal, noncontingent foundations of experience—seeking “an enduring foundation for all of consciousness” (Bershady 1992: 10)—, the phenomenological attitude is still akin to the sociological imagination because, through both, experience and consciousness, including the experience and consciousness of sociologists, is to be analyzed, not taken for granted, and, importantly for this book, both strive to defamiliarize their objects of study (e.g., Berger 1963; Brown 1977: 51–52). This book is phenomenological in spirit, though not in method for reasons explained in the following section. Indeed, the book is a preliminary attempt to sketch for sociology an alternative to the phenomenological method for making the familiar strange. In what follows, I first explain why sociologists and others have been suspicious of phenomenology’s route to making the familiar strange: the epoché or “bracketing” previous experiences with the same or familiar objects with the goal of seeing them as if for the first time, as they really are given in consciousness. Then I summarize past attempts by sociologists to describe sociological approaches to making the familiar strange. Finally, I provide an outline of the book.

The epoché will not do: “Immediate” experience is always socialized experience The phenomenological reduction is a method of inquiry developed by the mathematician-turned-philosopher Edmund Husserl, though never to his satisfaction (Spiegelberg 1971: 690), which refers to an attitudinal change—from the “natural” to the “phenomenological” attitude—in order to problematize the obvious or to reflect on, rather than just observe the obvious (for review, see Plotka 2018). The epoché is an essential feature of the phenomenological reduction, where one brackets or suspends past “knowledge of objects of a similar kind, of their general characteristics, [and] of their ontological status” (Wagner 1983: 42). As described by Spiegelberg (1971: 691): we are to detach the phenomena of our everyday experience from the context of our naïve or natural living, while preserving their content as fully and as purely as possible. The actual procedure of this detachment consists in suspending judgment as to the existence or non-existence of this content. “Suspending judgment about the existence or non-existence of this content” does not mean that one denies or doubts the realness of the world. It means abandoning preexisting beliefs, biases, and prejudices about existence (“existential belief”) (Gurwitsch 1964: 164ff). This requires a suspension of the natural attitude (see above). By putting the natural attitude “out of action” (Husserl 1962: 99), the resulting phenomenological attitude supposedly

6  What is sociology’s epoché? allows the thinker to describe, without presuppositions and biases, the acts of consciousness (“noeses”) and objects as they appear (“noemata”) in their immediacy. The goal of the reduction is a “stepping back from immersion in the object given to consciousness in order that the intentionality through which that object is given might come to awareness also” (Barber 1988: 28). The alleged benefits of the reduction are manifold, from an ability to “intuit essences,” or see the universal, non-accidental “aspects or qualities that make a phenomenon what it is and without which the phenomenon could not be what it is” (van Manen 1990: 107), to systematically examining the “constitution” of the world by consciousness, or, describing “the act by which an object is built up in consciousness” (Spiegelberg 1971: 713). The epoché is relevant to sociology’s quest to make the familiar strange because it is the only method outside of aesthetics whose explicit goal is to make the familiar strange (Natanson 1978; Harman 2008; Sheets-Johnstone 2014, 2017; Aldea and Allen 2016: 8). “Phenomenology begins with the strangeness of experience,” as Schutz’s student Maurice Natanson puts it (1978: 182). Because phenomenology endeavors to explore the structure and nature of intentional experiences while withholding judgments about the world (Schutz 1967f), this allegedly allows for the “translation of familiarity itself into a fundamental strangeness” (Natanson 1978: 184). Husserl’s assistant Eugen Fink (1972: 9) captures the idea of phenomenological defamiliarization in describing the epoché as “the stepping-forth from out of that familiarity with entities which always provides us with security” (see also Merleau-Ponty 1962: xiii). Harman (2008) goes so far as to compare Husserl and the horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft due to their shared aptitude for making the familiar weird. In a formulation of the phenomenological method akin to Shklovsky’s (1991) conception of ostranenie through poetic language, Sheets-Johnstone (2014, 2017) describes phenomenological methodology as habituation in reverse. If habits make the strange familiar by “bringing what was out of reach and/or beyond understanding effectively and efficiently into the realm of the familiar,” then bracketing is a “disenfranchising our habits” (SheetsJohnstone 2014: 98, 97) in order to retrospectively grasp a phenomenon before our understanding, sight, and use of it became habitual and familiar (Sheets-Johnstone 2017: 10). By making the familiar strange, “[o]ne learns not just that one has taken this or that for granted or that this or that definition or descriptive characterization is questionable or downright deflective; one learns how much one does not know about the phenomenon in question” (Sheets-Johnstone 2017: 11). Grasping familiar phenomena as strange through the phenomenological reduction is supposedly a way to “[start] from scratch” (Sheets-Johnstone 2017: 12), i.e., achieve Husserl’s aim of describing primordial and immediate experience and intuiting essences. I am suspicious of making the familiar strange through a presuppositionless starting point due to the problems of historical change and social contingency, barriers to immediacy that

What is sociology’s epoché? 7 became clearer in Husserl’s (1970) later work, where he is cognizant of the social dimensions of the mundane world as experienced in everyday life (the lifeworld) (Gurwitsch 1974: 17ff) and tries to balance his past commitment to uncovering invariant structures of consciousness with a new commitment to tracing the origins of ideations in the lived world of mundane experiences (see Aldea and Allen 2016). The mature Husserl’s program and its contradictions set the stage for the biggest names in phenomenology and existentialism in the mid-twentieth century, including Maurice MerleauPonty. Further, the problem of the “contamination” of the transcendental by the “worldly” (Derrida 2005) is the sand on which two massively popular French anti-systems of thought are built: deconstructionism (Marrati 2005) and post-structuralism (compare Thompson 2008; Koopman 2010). The implications of the problem of history and social contingency for making the familiar strange in sociology in particular is clearest in Schutz’s and the Frankfurt School’s assessment of Husserl. Social actors, including phenomenologists inhabiting the phenomenological attitude, are not monads; they are already steeped in society. Schutz explains the methodological importance of this sociological starting point in his essays on the rootedness of social science in society, as well as his examination of Husserl’s notion of essence (see Schutz 1966b; 1967b; Pritchard 1984; Barber 1988: ch. 5). In the closing of his essay “Type and eidos in Husserl’s late philosophy,” Schutz (1966b: 114f) questions Husserl’s belief that essence can be contemplated outside preestablished, socially-created generalizations, or what he calls “typifications” or “types.” (The notion of typification is discussed in more depth in Chapters 2 and 3.) One cannot intuit an asocial or transhistorical “essence” of an object because the aspects of an object that make it what it is can only be understood within already established typifications (see also Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 119). For example, in Schutz, it would be impossible to arrive at the essence of objects,4 even objects as clearly universal, unconditioned, and general as geometric concepts like “straight line” or “angle” (Husserl 162: 52) without linguistic systems, not to mention the “norms governing type usage,” patterns of thinking that are given by society, not transcendental consciousness (Barber 1988: 83). For this reason, among others,5 Schutz (1967e: 44) adopts a more limited phenomenological method than Husserl’s. Schutz’s cautious revisions and critiques of Husserl resonate with the Frankfurt School’s more hard-hitting criticisms, a group suspicious of classical phenomenology’s claims to presuppositionlessness and against its mostly ahistorical, idealistic, and uncritical point of view (Marcuse 1968; Adorno 1982; Habermas 1988; for summary, see Wolff 1978: 506–509, 522; Schnell 1997). Adorno (1982) delivers a sociologically sophisticated, if unnecessarily unforgiving, critique of Husserl. Of importance here is his sociological account of Husserl’s ahistorical method and notion of essence, an account like Schutz’s, though with political implications. Because experience is always necessarily socially mediated, Husserl’s essentializing and

8  What is sociology’s epoché? “infinitizing” of experience is said to be a passive acceptance of the status quo and thus, ideological. The tendency to infinitize the ‘givens’ encountered in consciousness as both unquestionably the property of the philosopher and as essential helps to justify the estate. … [P]henomenological concepts have to pay for the illusion of their construction-free proximity to things and concreteness. … The more concrete phenomenology becomes, the readier it is to proclaim the conditioned as unconditioned. … However harmless and formal it [Husserl’s theory, especially his theory of essence] may appear, it can never sustain the claim of an unvarying ‘structure of pure consciousness’. Since it arises out of psychological observation in specific persons in specific situations, it refers back to them. The ‘non-currency’ of men depends on the reification of the world in which they live. They congeal in the congealed, and if congelation is their own product, they are ultimately reproduced by it. (Adorno 1982: 220–221) Husserl’s essences merely reproduce so-called “immediate” experience, at a “higher level.” Like Schutz, Adorno believes this is methodologically untenable. “Intuiting essences” from a pseudo-direct experience of objects merely re-reifies experience because seemingly primordial or “pre-given” experience is social experience: shared, learned, and rooted in preexisting structures. But Adorno (1982: 222) also levels a political critique of Husserl’s essentialization of existing social conditions, even accusing Husserl of “a sort of transcendental xenophobia” for passages like the following: “[h]ere I and my culture are primordial over against every alien culture” (Husserl 1960: 134). If phenomenology “appeals to our immediate common experience in order to conduct a structural analysis of what is most common, most familiar, most self-evident to us” (van Manen 1990: 19), critical theory warns that what is most “obvious” and familiar to us is the social formation that we happen to inhabit, whose supraindividual forces should be explained (see Benzer 2011: ch. 1). One cannot examine the experiential and cognitive dimensions of social life without historical and social-structural analysis for what “grounds” our experience changes with social conditions. But because Husserlian phenomenology relegates thinking to description, as opposed to explanation and critique, “[i]n the presence of reified products of thought, Husserl’s thought deprives itself of the right to thought” (Adorno 1982: 194). While more sociological and less naïve, Schutz’s limited employment of the phenomenological method also misses this dimension: it does not explain how social structures influence the object of investigation (see Habermas 1987: 126ff, 1988: 106ff), a limitation condensed in Bauman’s (1973: 13) complaint of Schutz that the “question of where the ‘common-sense constructs’ [of actors] came from in the first place has not been asked.”

What is sociology’s epoché? 9 To summarize, defamiliarizing experience by “re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: vii) is a lost cause because this supposedly “direct and primitive contact” is still and necessarily socially mediated. Classical phenomenological methodology delivers a socially mediated consciousness that dupes itself into believing itself “direct and primitive.” We are always preacquainted with the world through socially-given meanings (Schutz 1967c: 279). A social-structural backdrop that is taken-for-granted in everyday life (e.g., the class system) continues to be taken-for-granted in the phenomenological reduction, a backdrop that phenomenology, when left to its own concepts and method, cannot explain (Adorno 1982). “Seeing things as if for the first time” is to still see them within a particular society’s total meaning system conditioned by social structures. Even ahistorical constants (e.g., atoms) that are real independent of human perception are only describable, let alone explainable, after acquiring the most social of all artifacts: language. Despite phenomenological methodology’s flaws, sociologists can learn from its resolute attention to the methodological problems posed by being familiar with the world that one is attempting to grasp. However, the problem of the social for phenomenological methodology has not been resolved, to my knowledge, and it is unlikely that it can be solved within the foundational assumptions and goals of phenomenology. Here, I think sociology has a good deal to offer. One argument of this book is that making the familiar strange is a common methodological technique in great sociology. However, unlike phenomenology’s painstaking discussion about how to make the familiar strange, a painstakingness sociology should heed, sociology asks its practitioners to “make the familiar strange” as if it were merely a knack or a talent one picks up with time. It is rare to find more than passing reference to the maxim, let alone the methodological hows and whys implied in the phrase, with some exceptions.

Past attempts to describe social defamiliarization as a sociological method Along with Mills’ (1959: 7) description of the sociological imagination as being “suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar,” other sociologists have highlighted the significance of social defamiliarization in sociological thinking. This section restricts itself to reviewing attempts to explicitly describe this act of sociological consciousness. The narrow focus of this section excludes the many avenues for making the familiar strange implicit in sociology, which are teased out in Chapter 4. Further, it does not attempt to review all instances of the term’s use in the social sciences, where it is commonly used without being conceptually explained. However, I do peak outside sociology, including discussions from educational research and anthropology that overtly explore what it means to make the familiar strange.

10  What is sociology’s epoché? The term “social defamliarization” as it is used in this book is an extension of Bauman’s (1990: 14–15) characterization of sociology as the antithesis of received common sense. Along with pointing to figurations and aggregates as causes of states of affairs, sociological consciousness is distinct from common sense experience for a few reasons, including the “size of the field” of experiences one tries to inhabit and the attempt to “defamiliarize the familiar” by asking questions about the taken-for-granted. In an encounter with that familiar world ruled by habits and reciprocally reasserting beliefs, sociology acts as a meddlesome and often irritating stranger. It disturbs the comfortingly quiet ways of life by asking questions no one among the ‘locals’ remembers being asked, let alone answered. Such questions make evident things into puzzles: they defamiliarize the familiar. Suddenly, the daily way of life must come under scrutiny. It now appears to be just one of the possible ways, not the one and only, not the ‘natural’, way of life. (Bauman 1990: 15) Brown (1977: 51) too uses the term “defamiliarization” as a synonym for creating “distance” in sociological consciousness, where the goal of the latter is to “refashion original objects out of mundane ones” through an aesthetic “point of view.” The sociologist, like the artist, should strive to develop a “two-dimensional mode of perception, an ontological standing apart from conventional categories, and an ontological standing near to the phenomena as given” (Brown 1977: 52). Similarly, Berger (1963: 22, 21) famously describes the “experience of sociological discovery” as “‘culture shock’ minus geographical displacement” and the sociological perspective is portrayed as one that “makes us see in a new light the very world in which we have lived all our lives.” This “transformation of consciousness” entails four “motifs” (Berger 1963: ch. 2), all of which get at aspects of social defamiliarization: (1) a “debunking” motif that mistrusts surface, taken-for-granted norms and “looks behind” the “façade of structure”; (2) an “unrespectability” motif that gives voice to deviant and non-middle class and -elite points of view; (3) a “relativizing” motif that fully takes on, presupposes, and studies the fact that meaning and worldview are socially formulated and contingent; and (4) a foundational “cosmopolitan” motif, a requirement to be a good sociologist, one “with a taste for other lands, inwardly open to the measureless richness of human possibilities, eager for new horizons and new worlds of human meaning” (Berger 1963: 53). Along with Bauman, Brown, and Berger, Abbott’s (2004: 123–126) notion of “problematizing the obvious” also partially depicts social defamiliarization. By questioning truisms (e.g., deviations from equality are something to be explained, higher education exists for learning), one can ask better questions and find new ideas (e.g., inequality is the norm, higher education

What is sociology’s epoché? 11 functions for other ends). Earlier, Smith (1987: 91) uses the term “problematic” to describe “a method of guiding and focusing inquiry” or “direct[ing] attention to a possible set of questions that may not have been posed or a set of puzzles that do not yet exist in the form of puzzles but are ‘latent’ in the actualities of the experienced world.” Both formulations capture a central scientific benefit of social defamiliarization discussed in Chapter 3: the ability to ask new questions. Further, Smith’s advice to view the world from a new social perspective (specifically the perspective of women) resonates with the mode of “sympathetic defamiliarization” described in Chapter 4. While social defamiliarization is broader than problematizing the obvious or constituting a problematic, social defamiliarization can be thought of as a starting point of doing the latter, or, exploring social defamiliarization helps explain how to “[interest] ourselves” in the opacity of everyday life (Smith 1987: 110).6 Reflections in cognitive sociology recommend ways to attend to the taken-for-granted (for summary, see Friedman 2019: 475ff). If the taken-forgranted is conceived of as the unmarked, or ignored social elements that are taken as “epistemologically unproblematic” (Brekhus 1998; Zerubavel 2018), or cultural blind spots (Friedman 2019: 471ff), then the sociologist should cultivate ways to attend to what they were formerly unable to see and mark (actively attend to) the unmarked. These strategies can broadly be termed “attentional shifts” or “semiotic subversions” (Zerubavel 2018). Most central is the act of “reverse marking” or “foregrounding the background”: shifting attention to the “unmarked” information left in the “background” of perception (Brekhus 1998; Zerubavel 2018: ch. 5, 2019). This means examining aspects of social life typically considered mundane, morally unimportant, normal, and politically insignificant in order to “abnormalize” the normal (Zerubavel 2019). In a wide net, Zerubavel (2018: ch. 5) shows how foregrounding is not only a pastime of academics, but also is essential to art and comedy. Another strategy, taking a “nomadic perspective” (Brekhus 1998: 47f), to examine social phenomenon from multiple perspectives, resonates with both “sympathetic defamiliarization” and “comparative-­ historical defamiliarization” discussed in Chapter 4. The foremost lesson sociological thinking can learn from cognitive sociology is that attentional systems themselves are socially formed and normalized (Zerubavel 2015), attentional systems that, if we are going to make the familiar strange, should also be made strange. Zerubavel (2015: ch. 4) calls this breaking of “norms of attention” attentional deviance. In Chapter 3, I argue that defamiliarizing interpretive and attentional systems is one route to making the familiar absurd. Timmermans and Tavory (2012: 177) use the term defamiliarization in the context of sociological methodology, specifically grounded theory. They argue that, through the “act of inscription throughout the methodological sequence functions,” grounded theory defamiliarizes society by creating and analyzing an artificial (inscriptive) “semantic distance” from reality. In

12  What is sociology’s epoché? other words, Timmermans and Tavory (2012) show that making the familiar strange is not only a feat of “creative” methodological thinking and heuristics, as stressed in this book, but also of technical methods (cf. the use of visual methods in psychology in Mannay 2010; the use of mobile interviewing in communications research in Wiederhold 2015). Michel Foucault’s method, especially his late “genealogy,” is sometimes said to involve defamiliarization, a perspective that even defamiliarizes the self (Deacon 2000: 128; see also Racevskis 2012; Knauft 2017). For example, in his most popular work Discipline and Punish, the point of comparing past and modern forms of punishment, as a “history of the present” (Foucault 1977: 31), is to use “the strangeness of past practices to call into question the supposed rationality and legitimacy of the present” (Carrabine 2007: 84). Foucault’s approach to defamiliarization is labeled “historical defamiliarization” in Chapter 4. Another commentator uses this very term to describe a technique of his genealogy (Hook, 2007: 172). Along with describing Foucault’s work as “defamiliarizing,” it is worth further drifting outside sociology, where the terms “making the familiar strange” and “defamiliarization” are commonly used in anthropological, organizational, and educational ethnography (e.g., Erickson 1984; Delamont and Atkinson 1995; Ybema and Kamsteeg 2009; Delamont, Atkinson, Pugsley 2010; de Jong, Kamsteeg, Ybema 2013). Indeed, in ethnography, making the familiar strange has “almost the status of a mantra” (Sikes 2006: 538). In anthropological ethnography, de Jong et al. (2013) describe the difficulty in striking a balance between a “closeness” and “distance” from the new culture and recommend theoretical and methodological tools for accomplishing this task: look for surprises and mysteries; seek to discover strange and irrational behavior among research subjects; apply social-scientific theory (i.e., by using foreign concepts, theorizing itself is a defamiliarizing technique); break off and reestablish friendly relations; gain a back-stage perspective through “extreme immersion” to learn when the front-stage appearance is “bullshit”; and cautiously establish joking relations with participants (see also Ybema and Kamsteeg 2009). Erickson (1984: 62) too recommends that ethnographers, specifically when studying educational institutions in one’s own culture, adopt the “critical stance of the philosopher, continually questioning the grounds of the conventional, examining the obvious, that is so taken-for-granted by cultural insiders that it becomes invisible to them.” To make the familiar strange or “[unearth] the obvious” is to ask the question, “Why is this ______the way it is and not different?” (Erickson 1984: 63, emphasis added). Delamont et al. (2010; cf. Delamont and Atkinson 1995: 7ff) develop strategies to ask this question and “fight familiarity” in educational ethnography: (1) revisit past exceptional educational ethnographies; (2) study educational systems from different cultures (see “historical-comparative defamiliarization” in Chapter 4); (3) examine the educational process from diverse standpoints (see “sympathetic defamiliarization” in Chapter 4); (4) study atypical educational

What is sociology’s epoché? 13 institutions or programs; and (5) examine non-formal social arenas of learning. Also within the context of education, Kaomea (2003) develops a critical pedagogical take on defamiliarization as a tool for educators to make the familiar strange by “peeling” away popular conceptions of what is in favor of silenced and oppressed accounts, a hybrid of sympathetic and critical modes of social defamiliarization detailed in Chapter 4. Like phenomenology’s reflections on making the familiar strange, sociologists seeking to make the familiar strange can learn from ethnographic methods in other fields. A final account of social defamiliarization is implicit in a foundational goal of ethnomethodology and phenomenological sociology: to describe the “tacit knowledge” and taken-for-granted meaning structures underlying what is most routine (for especially relevant formulations, see Sacks 1963; Silverman 1972; Walsh 1972; Gurevitch 1988; Morriss 2016). Keenly aware of the reality that the sociologist lives in the same or adjoining unproblematic world as the actors in question, Garfinkel (1967: 9) declares that to successfully study the meanings (“rational properties”) of another’s actions (“practical activities”), one must treat them as “anthropologically strange” (for a famous satire of cultural anthropology following a similar premise, see Miner 1956). The question pursued here, however, is not how social actors (re)create unnoticed “background relevances,” but, instead, how sociological consciousness can attain the distance necessary to bring these and related concerns under consideration in the first place or foster “its capacity to produce a deep wonder about what is often regarded as obvious, given or natural” (Pollner 1987: ix, emphasis added).7 In other words, the goal of this book is to describe how sociological consciousness renders society strange. Gurevitch (1988: 1194ff) calls this a “contemplative making strange.” In the intellectual world, phenomenology believes itself the lighthouse for this task, but, for reasons explained above, travelers may be led astray. Regardless, the effort to illuminate modes of contemplative making strange is distinct from ethnomethodological methods used to manipulate reality to bring society’s strangeness to light (e.g., Garfinkel 1967: ch. 2). Yet ethnomethodology provides an appropriate context to frame the purpose of social defamiliarization: elucidating how one goes about approaching one’s own social world as “anthropologically strange.”

Book outline Chapter 2 examines the problem of reification. The goal of social defamiliarizaiton is to disrupt reified experience, which takes the social world for granted. To better understand what must be disrupted, Chapter 2 offers a clarification and integrative interpretation of this notoriously ambiguous concept with a typology of modes of experience that grasp the social world as fixed and unchangeable. The social and experiential dimensions of “familiar” and “strange” in the dictum “make the familiar strange” are the topics of Chapter 3. Following

14  What is sociology’s epoché? a deeper understanding of the provinces of the familiar and the strange, it offers a preliminary interpretation of, and methodological justification for, social defamiliarization. It concludes with a discussion of the sociological dimensions of social defamiliarization and the methodological significance of social changes that objectively defamiliarize social experience. Chapter 4 addresses the “how” of social defamiliarization. Rather than a formal methodological procedure akin to the phenomenological epoché, sociology defamiliarizes the world through a collection of heuristics and attitudinal changes, or, modes of social defamiliarization. They are distinct from phenomenological methodology because all are comparative and do not assume direct epistemological access to social phenomena. Seven modes of defamiliarization essential to the history and practice of sociology are identified and described: (1) comparative-historical, (2) scopical, (3) metaphorical, (4) suspicional, (5) sympathetic, (6) critical, and (7) nonhuman. Chapter 5 concludes the book with a summary of major concepts developed in each chapter and a discussion of the book’s limitations. Following, I examine the practical dimension of social defamiliarization. I argue that a defamiliarizing consciousness has a net negative impact on individuals by amplifying feelings of estrangement and absurdity. Hence the allusion to an inverted Boethius in the chapter title, “The anti-consolation of sociology.” Social defamiliarization is only justifiable if its discontents increase the probability of an unlikely outcome: social transformation.

Notes





1. Ostranenie is also translated as “deautomatization,” “making strange,” and “estranging” (Bogdanov 2005). 2. Although critical theory and phenomenology have had a relatively unhappy relationship, a number of thinkers have sought positive and integrative discussions between phenomenology and Marxism, including the early Herbert Marcuse, Tran Duc Thao, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karel Kosík, and Paul Piccone (for overview, see Piccone 1971), from critical theorists poaching the phenomenological tradition for helpful concepts (Chua 1977; Habermas 1987; Gunderson, Stuart, Houser 2020) to alleging fundamental affinities between Marx’s and phenomenological thinking (Paci 1972). 3. “Western” or “critical” Marxism, which, when compared to Soviet or “scientific” Marxism, is usually more attentive to subjectivity, the process of social reproduction, ideology, and culture, more open to “bourgeois” thought (e.g., Nietzsche, Freud, Weber, Schopenhauer), more pessimistic, more Hegelian, more philosophical, and less deterministic (Jay 1984). The term “critical theory” is a broad brush that does not always refer to neo-Marxist approaches. For example, the classic work of David Riesman, a student of the Western Marxist Erich Fromm, The Lonely Crowd (Riesman et al. 1953) is arguably a work of critical theory that defamiliarizes the crowd without much help from Marx. 4. Phenomenologists often use the term “objects,” “data,” “items,” etc. broadly to refer to not only material objects but also a wide range of social, ideal, and other immaterial phenomena.

What is sociology’s epoché? 15



5. Husserl’s (1960: 89-150) “transcendental” reduction requires that one brackets other social actors and then account for the constitution of the other by the ego, rather than describing intersubjectivity proper as experienced in everyday life in the natural attitude, which is one of Schutz’s (1966a) central aims. 6. An overlapping Foucauldian term, “problematization” is not reviewed here because, in Foucault, the concept is almost always used to refer to an object of analysis, not a method (Warner 2002: 154f). See Chapter 3. 7. Chapter 5 touches on the difference between a capacity to wonder and defamiliarization.

2

Modes of reification

“[I]s it not rash to account for this dislike [of reasoning and reflection] by their exclusive attachment to the objects of sense, since the missionaries show us that, in other respects, primitives are the most fervent believers one can find? We cannot rid their minds of the belief that an infinite number of invisible beings and actions are actually real.” - Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1923: 31)

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to describe the modes of experience that make a collectively shared human-artifact world (i.e., the social world) seem as if it is fixed and unchangeable to its authors. With the help of past work on reification, especially from critical theory and phenomenology, I develop a typology of reification in order to clarify why sociologists should engage in social defamiliarization. Even in their academic role and with a sufficiently scientific attitude, sociologists will understand the social world with a “reified mind” (Lukács 1971: 93) if they do not consciously question their common-sense understandings of society as well as explain the origins of their taken-for-granted assumptions. One goal of this chapter and the following chapter is to encourage “reflexivity,” which means recognizing that the social world sociologists inhabit condition their understanding of social reality, including in the world of academic research (e.g., Gouldner 1970; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). Rather than descriptive and prescriptive justifications for what is, ideology today typically “[proclaims] this present condition as its own norm” and “hardly says more than things are the way they are” (The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research 1972: 199, 202). Bewes (2002: 4) describes this just-the-waythings-are interpretation of the social world à la reification as follows: “the process in which ‘thing-hood’ becomes the standard of objective reality; the ‘given world’, in other words, is taken to be the truth of the world.” This comment may strike readers as odd because truth, as it is usually understood today, is this: a depiction of the given, objective world. The peculiar Marxist argument that reality is “inverted,” which is the basis of an inverted consciousness,

18  Modes of reification is inherited from the Hegelian assumption that reality itself can be true or “untrue”: because “reality has been constructed by means of practice, it can be criticised and changed. Truth therefore cannot be exhausted in the intellectual adequacy to what exists as long as what exists is contradictory and does not seem right” (Larrain 1983: 215). Reification paradoxically masks the true nature of social reality by presenting reality as it is, though in a way that renders reality fixed (termed “constitutional ossification”) and inalterable (termed “possibility blindness”). By examining the interplay of subjective and objective moments of reification, another goal of this chapter is to clarify the seemingly illogical Marxist argument that accurate depictions of reality can also be myths or “socially necessary illusions,” as Adorno (1973) calls them. In what follows, I first review literature on the concept of reification and draw attention to two key interrelated moments of subjective reification: the appearance of the social world as fixed and inalterable. Then four sections detail reificatory modes of experience and their rootedness in objective social conditions: doxa, identification, enframing, and detachment. I conclude by detailing why reification is the chief barrier of, and justification for, making the familiar strange.

The concept of reification Reification (Verdinglichung) is an imprecise concept, with over 20 definitions (Pitkin 1987: 293n). One reason for its convolution is the demand the concept makes on its user: “without its perpetual self-interrogation, the concept itself is reified” (Bewes 2002: 98). Disinterest in the concept of reification in academia, especially the period following Habermas’ (1984) critique of Lukács up to Honneth’s (2008) reformulation, should not be interpreted as proof of the concept’s irrelevance. The opposite is more probable. As Dahms (1998) suggests, contemporary inattention to the concept of reification seems to coincide with the tighter grip of objective processes of reification. Total reification will conquer consciousness when consciousness can no longer elucidate the problem of reification. This section focuses on the critical sociological use of the term, where reification has both objective and subjective dimensions, as conceptualized by major theorists in the critical tradition, especially Marx, Lukács, Adorno, and Honneth, as well as the phenomenological tradition via Berger, Luckmann, and Pullberg. Before entering the “swamp” of “reification theory” (Pitkin 1987), it is helpful to point out a unifying theme of the concept: humans are dominated by their own material and immaterial artifacts (objective reification) yet these artifacts appear as fixed and unchangeable rather than human creations that can be changed (subjective reification). Despite being an essential component of Marxist theory, Marx himself only uses the term reification in the third volume of Capital (1981: 969) when he is criticizing economists for methodologically reifying social relations. Earlier in the Grundrisse, he uses the term “crude materialism” instead of reification

Modes of reification 19 to describe the mental operation of economists “who regard as the natural properties of things what are social relations of production among people” (Marx 1973: 687). Economists are in error when they treat human-created categories as if they had a real, natural existence. However, Marx’s conception is more complex than a methodological critique. He describes an objective component of reification, arguing that the real “reification of the relations of production and the autonomy they acquire vis-á-vis the agents of production” also “appear to them as overwhelming natural laws, governing them irrespective of their will” (Marx 1981: 969, emphasis added). Similarly, in his famous passages on commodity fetishism in the first volume of Capital, Marx (1976: 163f) speaks of the reality and appearance of relations between people taking the form of relations between things (reification) and things taking the form of persons (fetishization) (for clear reconstruction, see May 2006: 39ff). Marx is often misread as arguing that ideology is merely distorted consciousness. In Marxist theory, the structure of experience is related to the structure of society in that reified social conditions, in which humans really do become thing-like and are dominated by their own artifacts, are grasped as natural (reification) and/or right (legitimation). Consciousness which sticks to external, seemingly immediate appearances, to “the religion of everyday life,” is deceptive because we live in an “upside-down world,” where the “personification of things” (fetishism) coincides as the fitting unified opposite of the “reification of the relations of production” (Marx 1981: 969).1 For Marx, an essential component of the scientific study of society was the denaturalization of the objective, “authorless” world of phenomenal forms through a critique of reified categories (Mepham and Ruben, 1979; Bhaskar, 2015, 67ff). In his famous chapter “Reification and the consciousness of the proletariat” in History and Class Consciousness (1971), Lukács continues Marx’s argument that reification has objective and subjective aspects. Objectively, reification spreads with the universalization of the “commodity form,” or, “the form of equivalence between qualitatively unequal things, established by their exchange at the market” (Kavoulakos 2017: 68). Whereas pre-capitalist power relations were direct and “visible” and justified by religion, capitalist power relations are indirect via market pressures, self-justified by the apparent naturalness of the current order, a belief elevated to a mysticism in the science of economics (Kavoulakos 2017: 69). While becoming an objective appendage of a semi-autonomous machine in the production process, one’s “stance” toward the world turns “contemplative,”2 including the “basic categories” of our “immediate attitude to the world” (Lukács 1971: 89). Subjectively, reification means an understanding of the self and others as things to be exchanged in the marketplace. This has an objective foundation: necessary participation in everyday reproductive practices, namely wage labor or profit-making. We internalize the practices and instrumental attitude necessary to survive and succeed (Jütten 2010: 236f, 249) and grasp society as a composite of “natural laws.” This logic and reality extend into other social domains, including the state and law.

20  Modes of reification The Frankfurt School continues Lukács’ formulation of reification, though subjects it to criticisms and revisions—especially notable is the argument that Lukács’ formulation is idealist (e.g., Adorno 1973: 189ff; for reviews, see Kavoulakos 2017: 71ff; Hall 2011). In Negative Dialectics (1973), Adorno argues that identity thinking—“the subsuming of single events or objects under general concepts” (Brunkhorst 1999: 1)—bolstered by the universalization of the commodity form, capitalism’s “exchange principle,” are the bases of reification. Adorno takes up and expands upon Lukács’ (1971: 86) understanding of capitalism as a “second nature” governed by the principles of formal rationalization in the service of profit: “whatever is made by human beings, their institutions in the broadest sense, evolve independently of their creators and become second nature” (Adorno 1998: 155; see Adorno 2006: 119ff). The human origins of the objective, reified world become subjectively reified when it is perceived as law-like and natural, as “the myth of things as they really are” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969: x). The meaning of the latter distrust in the seeming immediacy of experience is clarified when Horkheimer and Adorno (1969: 230) say that historical forgetfulness is a unifying cause of subjective reification: “[a]ll objectification [reification] is a forgetting” (see also Adorno in Adorno and Benjamin 1999: 321).3 Honneth (2008; cf. interview with Suther 2013) takes up Horkheimer and Adorno’s claim that “reification is forgetting” in his reformulation of the concept through a critique of Lukács (for overviews and critiques, see Jütten 2010; Morgan 2014; Kavoulakos 2017: 78ff; Feenberg 2011). Honneth argues that the Lukács’ account is flawed for its idealism (assuming that the world itself is constituted by subjects), political ineptness (assigning the proletariat a “mystical” role in de-reifying reality), inability to theorize reified forms not produced by the commodity form, and inability to engage in normative evaluation. Following Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1969: 230) notion of forgetfulness, Honneth (2008: 53) proposes a new theory of reification: “forgetfulness of recognition” (for comparison, see Morgan 2014). “Recognition” is Honneth’s master concept that refers to a pre-cognitive and empathic relation with others that is necessary for healthy identity development and social life. Reification occurs when this primary relation is pushed into the background and we conceive of another human as a thing. Reification is “a cognitive occurrence in which something that doesn’t possess thing-like characteristics in itself (e.g., something human) comes to be regarded as a thing” (Honneth 2008: 21). Second only to the Marxist tradition in theorizing reification is social phenomenology. Like the critical theorists, Berger and Luckmann (1966: 89) use the language of forgetting to describe the process of reification. The objectivated world becomes a reified world when one forgets that “the social world was made by men—and, therefore, can be remade by them” (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 89). In an earlier work, Berger and Pullberg (1965: 200, emphasis removed) define reification as the point when material and immaterial human products become so alienated that “the characteristic of thing-hood becomes the standard of objective reality.” Institutions are

Modes of reification 21 reified whenever they are understood as “supra-human facticities analogous to the facticities of nature” (Berger and Pullberg 1965: 200). For example, when the family is grasped, either pre-theoretically or reflectively, as an outcome of human nature or the will of a supernatural power instead of the human product that it really is. Key moments of subjective reification: Constitutional ossification and possibility blindness There are unifying features connecting discussions of reification: (1) a concern that an inhuman social world (objective reification) (2a) appears fixed, rather than constantly recreated, and, thus, (2b) inalterable, rather than changeable (subjective reification). This chapter is primarily concerned with the structure of subjective reification, but places consciousness and experience in the context of objective reification. Regarding subjective reification, I call the “fixed” moment constitutional ossification4 and the “inalterable” moment possibility blindness. These two moments are clearly related. They are analytically separated because constitutional ossification concerns “immediate” experience of the social world as a fixed, rigid entity whereas possibility blindness concerns narrowed anticipations and expectations for the future that result from the belief that the social world is inalterable. As I emphasize below, subjective reification is not merely a free-floating illusion. Capitalism really does ossify or concretize abstract social relations and roles through social-reproductive strategies and has closed off most avenues for qualitative social change. Constitutional ossification and possibility blindness occur when actors forget that these conditions were historically formed. Constitutional ossification is usually described as mistakenly viewing the social world as natural. For example, “[t]hrough reification, the world of institutions appears to merge with that world of nature” (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 90). This description is imprecise and confusing because humans have long altered the natural world (Pitkin 1987: 280ff). But it is a defensible account of reification when one is implying that the social world, which really is law-like (objective reification), appears to be composed of unchangeable natural laws (subjective reification). For example, the economic process “appear[s] to them as overwhelming natural laws, governing them irrespective of their will” (Marx 1981: 969), or, “a man’s activity becomes estranged from himself, it turns into a commodity which, subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article” (Lukács 1971: 87). Along with experiencing human artifacts as “natural,” constitutional ossification has also been described as mistakenly understanding the social world as “essential” (Jütten 2010: 237), a “phantom objectivity” (Lukács 1971: 83), and composed of “stable things” (Feenberg 2017: 118). Constitutional ossification is also expressed in temporal terms, which demonstrates its relation to possibility blindness: to see “eternity” in existing social relations

22  Modes of reification (Marx 1973: 85) or to “infinitize the ‘givens’ encountered in consciousness” (Adorno 1982: 220) are reifications because historically contingent conditions and patterns of thinking are projected into the past and future. We are blind to alternative social futures (possibility) when social structures, because they appear fixed, also appear unchangeable or inalterable (Lukács 1971: 192). This blindness to possibility is fundamental to the notion of reification, famously described by Marcuse (1964) as “one-dimensional thinking” (see below), a form of consciousness that has peaked in “capitalist realism”: society’s inability to imagine an alternative to capitalism (Fisher 2009). The implication of possibility blindness is this: “[r]eificaiton effectively prevents questioning and changing established social relations in modern societies” (Kavoulakos 2017: 69). While the terms “natural,” “eternal,” “essential,” etc. overlap, there is much concealed in their use as synonyms. One goal of this chapter is to strengthen our understanding of reification, especially subjective reification, with more analytical precision, which is needed if the concept is to be salvaged (Pitkin 1987). Objective reification as social context To review, a unifying aspect of the concept of reification is an attempt to theorize the way in which society, a human artifact, appears as if it were fixed and inalterable. Along with detailing the different modes through which a human world appears natural, I discuss the objective social contexts that condition each reificatory mode. I treat context here as the social-structural conditions in which one experiences the objectively reified world. I explain the objective, though historical, context of each reificatory modality, demonstrating their social and historically contingent validity. By “historical,” “relative,” or “social” validity, I refer to how the validity of social knowledge changes with objective social conditions. For example, “[d]ifferences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class” due to industrial development (Marx and Engels 1964: 15). Reificatory modes of experience are not merely subjective illusions detached from reality. They are “socially necessary” (see above). The following four sections detail four reificatory experiential modes and the contexts that birthed and sustains them: doxa; identification; enframing; and detachment. While the word used to signify each experiential mode is borrowed from a key theorist (“doxa” from Bourdieu, “identification” from Adorno, “enframing” from Heidegger, and “detachment” from Honneth), I draw from numerous thinkers to describe the dimensions of the given mode, even if these diverse thinkers use different concepts to characterize that mode. For example, Adorno’s notion of “coldness” is a valuable portrayal of “detachment” and, as explained in the proceeding section, Schutz’s account of the “natural attitude” is a helpful description of “doxa.”

Modes of reification 23

Doxa “Doxa” refers to a mode of experience in which the social causes of events are forgotten and left out-of-experience and, thus, their effects are taken as “the way things are” and immune from evaluation and reflection. The term as it is used here is a direct reference to Bourdieu’s (1977: 164ff) reformulation of Husserl’s (1970: 12f) use of the Greek word doxa as everyday knowledge, the experience of the self-evidence or obviousness of the world, or the takenfor-granted or “undiscussed” world (see Waldenfels 1982; Myles 2004). The term denotes disattention to the origins of social life, an experiential mode which forgets the genesis of the meanings, practices, institutions, and artifacts that make up the social world, thereby interpreting the social world as fixed and only alterable to the point of achieving predefined goals within predefined rules. This section briefly explains the origins of the social world that are forgotten in doxic experience, how this forgetfulness constitutes the social world as fixed and inalterable—while identifying second-order doxic experiences, such as essentialism—, and explains the social foundations of doxa. The phenomenological notion of “sedimentation” is a helpful account of the formation of the common-sense world of everyday life: a piling up of meaning and patterns of behavior that are, later, taken for granted. While this forgetfulness of origin of scientific “idealities” (roughly, generalized conceptual constructions) (Woelert 2011: 119) is a second order aspect of doxa,5 I use the term sedimentation more broadly, to describe how the human origins of the social world, including meanings, practices, institutions, and artifacts, are forgotten and are then taken for granted, i.e., become common-sensical. Applied only to knowledge, this is the process so artfully described by Schutz, who adopts the concept to describe knowledge acquisition in everyday life as the “sedimentation of experiences” into the “stock of knowledge at hand,” often in the form of language (Schutz 1967a: 9f; Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 120; cf. Berger and Luckmann 1966: 67ff). Our stock of knowledge at hand is made up of “typifications” which constitute experience: “the outer world is not experienced as an arrangement of individual unique objects, dispersed in space and time, but as ‘mountains,’ ‘trees,’ ‘animals,’ ‘fellow-men’” (Schutz 1967a: 7–8). Although the social world is created by humans and is experienced within socially formed types—“[n]o object is perceived as an insulated object; it is from the outset perceived as … a horizon of typical familiarity and preacquaintanceship”—(Schutz 1967c: 279)—we experience it as an institution, a facticity external to us, in part due to the sedimentation of experience into typifications (Berger and Luckmann 1966). If Henri Bergson (2004: 24) is right that “there is no perception which is not full of memories,” then doxa is the paradox that this remains true despite our forgetting of these memories. This forgetting is understandable considering that most of the forgotten perception-structuring memories were fashioned by others before our birth and passed down in the form of

24  Modes of reification roles, words, norms, etc. In short, doxic experience refers to experience of social life after its human origins are forgotten. Doxa ossifies the social world as typical and its typicality is passively grasped as obvious or common-sensical. This experiential mode is the backdrop of all “common sense,” understood in Gramsci’s sense of “uncritical and largely unconscious way of perceiving and understanding the world that has become ‘common’ in any given epoch” (Hoare and Smith 1971: 322). The conditions that largely determine one’s ideas, life chances, goals, health, etc. take on the kind of inexplicable naturalness that is implied in many accounts of reification, the naturalness of the taken-for-granted. To return to Bourdieu (1977: 164): “[e]very established order tends to produce … the naturalization of its own arbitrariness” and doxa is “the world of tradition experienced as a ‘natural world’ and taken for granted.” It is the mode of experience of what phenomenologists call the “natural attitude,” where “we accept everything that occurs to us as being natural: that is, the way things are” (Wagner 1983: 105). Indeed, there is no better brief summary of subjective reification than Schutz and Luckmann’s (1973: 36) description of the characteristic epoché of the natural attitude: “doubt concerning the existence of the outer world and its Objects is suspended. The possibility that the world could be otherwise than as it appears to me in everyday experience is bracketed.” It is through this acceptance of the way things are that doxa ossifies a socially created and historically contingent world. Because taking the social world for granted only occurs when its origins are forgotten, doxa also describes what I think Horkheimer and Adorno (1969: 230) mean by the claim that “[a]ll objectification [reification] is a forgetting.” Because doxa ossifies the social world as taken-for-granted by forgetting the origins of social constructions, the interpretation of the social world is always susceptible to many mystifications, as common in the immediate consciousness of everyday life as they are in the theoretical consciousness of the social sciences (Berger and Pullberg 1965: 207). The seeming naturalness of the taken-for-granted is often further reified by grasping seemingly fixed social contingency as: (1) an outcome of biophysical forces, (2) essential, or (3) necessary. I will discuss each “secondary” doxic experience in turn. First, doxa can deliver a secondary mode whereby the taken-for-granted is literally naturalized by substituting social with biophysical explanations. The most common form of naturalization is the intuition that a determined and relatively inalterable human nature caused a social event, usually upon hearing of some atrocity or wrongdoing: “People are just wired that way.” These intuitions are elevated into theoretical consciousness and further reified into theory (York and Mancus 2009).6 Another secondary doxic experience is the essentialization of social constructs—or misconstruing typifications as essences intrinsic to, and definitive of, social phenomena (Schutz 1966b), which are then explicitly or implicitly projected into the past and future. Lukács’ (1971: 237) notion of a “reification of consciousness” is just this: “the susceptibility to identify immediate appearances of our social

Modes of reification 25 relations with their essence” (Jütten 2010: 237). Although from different perspectives, this is the basis of both Schutz’s and Adorno’s critiques of Husserl (see Chapter 1). A third secondary doxic experience is grasping the takenfor-granted as necessary. The interpretation of doxa as necessary is the modern form of a belief in fate. Although this author believes social-structural forces really do condition most human action and social contingency is not merely arbitrary (see Marks 2009), Unger (1987) goes to great lengths in questioning necessitarian explanations in their theoretical form in the social sciences. Along with constitutional ossification through the seeming naturalness of the taken-for-granted, doxa is blind to possibility because typifications, which always carry the past, even though we have forgotten their origins, are projected into the future. Indeed, “typicality consists first of all in a set of expectations concerning the recurrence of typically same or similar experiences” (Schutz 1970: 58). In other words, typifications are expectations of a familiar future—we expect “recurrent typical experiences” (Schutz 1970: 58) and “spontaneously” project our anticipation into the future (“protention”). We only revise our pre-existing typified expectations if the object presents itself in a way that problematizes our “purpose at hand.” The process of fixing the flux of life in place by projecting the past, collected in the social stock of typifications, into the future is a social process: my stock of knowledge at hand does not consist exclusively of experiences lived through directly and originarily by me. The greater portion of it is rather socially derived … I take it for granted in the practice of everyday life … that other people’s knowledge at hand is to some extent congruent with mine … This congruency enables me, especially as regards the social world, to anticipate future events in such a reliable way that I am inclined to state that I “know” what will happen. I “know” that tomorrow will be Friday, that people in the United States will file their income-tax returns on or before April 15 [, etc.] … Closer analysis shows that the validity of anticipations of this kind is founded on the assumption that some or all of my fellow-men will find in their stock of knowledge at hand typically similar elements, and that these will determine the motives of their action. (Schutz 1964c: 282) This type of thinking even influences the social sciences, supposedly more attuned to history and change, where some practitioners reify the present into the future as “scientific” projections without accounting for the possibility of social change (York and Clark 2007).7 There is a dialectic, present in both lay and scientific consciousness, whereby we are blind to future possibility because we forget the social origins of past constructions. We are blind to alternative futures because we are blind to the “history locked in the object” and “process stored in the object” (Adorno 1973: 163). When

26  Modes of reification we forget that our social world has a social origin, we close off avenues for change. Doxa’s objective context: Standardization of life As explained in above, reification is not merely a subjective illusion. Subjective reification is consciousness’s immediate grasping of objectively reified conditions. What is the objective context of doxa? Although one must be careful of falling into the “secondary” doxic modes described above when explaining the origins of doxa, forgetfulness of social history is in part due to the cognitive limits of human beings, even in groups. Hence, the need for social learning. “Monothetic acquisition”—a Husserlian term that refers to the ability to understand sedimented meanings via language “without reconstructing their original process of formation” (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 69)—may be anthropologically necessary because no individual or group has the time or intelligence to dig beneath every layer of sedimented meaning. Taken-for-grantedness will arise whenever there is a long enough history and/or space between the social origins of ritual, concept, technology, practice, etc., and its current impact on everyday life. Monothetic acquisition, however, is a necessary but insufficient cause of the doxic experience as a specifically reificatory process. While the process of forgetting the concrete historical origins of specific meanings, practices, institutions, and artifacts is likely transhistorical, doxa, as the word is used here, is experience after one forgets that the social world has human origins at all: “[t]he decisive question is whether he still retains the awareness that, however objectivated, the social world was made by men—and, therefore, can be remade by them” (Berger and Luckmann 1966: 89). There are historical, political-economic reasons for this overall forgetting that the taken-forgranted is a human artifact, which are missing from the phenomenological account above.8 A key political-economic context for doxa, or why the takenfor-granted is so rarely brought into question, is the real standardization and automatization of human life, which is a byproduct of the commodity form and abstract labor (see below). If doxa organizes the experience of daily life as a continual repetition of the same with minor detours this is only because the reality of daily life for the typical person on a typical day is a continual repetition of the same with minor detours. For the typical person, most of life is spent either working monotonous jobs performing repetitive tasks and consuming standardized commodities and identities whose differences are actually “a constant reproduction of the same thing” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969: 134). Detours from this reality, such as vacations, are already prescribed. The culture industry sees change as a risk and manufactures and disseminates typifications: “[t]here is nothing left for the consumer to classify. Producers have done it for him” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969: 125). The vast majority of waking life for normal adults consists in performing and reperforming prescribed productive and consumptive practices whose

Modes of reification 27 basic forms existed before they were born and will likely exist after they die. In such objectively reified conditions, grasping the familiar as the way things are is a historically valid interpretation. Further, participation in socially prescribed standardized practices is not a choice if one is to survive. One’s choices are constrained by powerful social-structural forces over which one has little or no control. In this sense, grasping doxa as necessary is not merely an illusion: it is a “socially necessary illusion” (Adorno 1973) and, thus, is relatively valid (see Marks 2009). To summarize, doxa refers to the experience of the taken-for-granted as natural due to forgetfulness of the fact that society is a sedimentation of meanings and practices via the typification process (i.e., a social construction). The doxic experience is blind to possibility because it projects the past, collected in the social stock of knowledge, into the future, a form of thinking that reproduces, and is built upon, the real standardization of social life.

Identification Identification refers to the interpretation of the social and natural worlds in exclusively formal (decontextualized, abstract) and often quantified modalities. It is the conceptual abstraction of qualitatively distinct phenomena from their unique features and context and experiencing objects as instances of these abstractions. This process was described above as typification. In fact, identification is inseparable from doxa. They are analytically separated here as doxa refers to the experiential mode that takes the social world for granted whereas identification refers to the experiential mode in which decontextualized generalizations are experienced as realer than concrete particularities. Grasping objects via identification means to decontextualize and deindividualize them. The term is taken from Adorno (1973), who uses the term identification (or “identity thinking”) to refer to the subsumption of particular concrete objects under generalizing concepts. The seemingly odd term “identity” to describe this form of thinking and its fundamental limitation are clarified by Stone (2008: 54): “one ‘identifies’ things with the universal kinds under which one takes them to fall” and this “gives me no knowledge about what is unique in a thing, for example, about what is special about this dog as distinct from all other dogs.” Identification is inherently reificatory because it takes “categories produced by humans in society as describing intrinsic, natural properties of objects” (Benzer 2011: 18). In other words, when concrete objects are understood as instances of an abstraction through identification, one does not see the concrete particularity of the object. Identification often involves the formalization and quantification of social and natural objects. Indeed, Cooley’s (1962: 343) poetic description of “formalism” parallels Adorno’s definition of identification: the separation of symbol systems from the human spirit, where the symbol becomes

28  Modes of reification an “empty shell” that “supplants rather than conveys the reality.” For this reason, we “see the form and not the substance” (Cooley 1962: 376). Weber’s (1978: 85) definition of formally rational economic action is indicative of the close bind between formalization and quantification: “the extent of quantitative calculation or accounting which is technically possible and which is actually applied.” Identification interprets quantifiable features of the world as the only relevant or significant features. Stated negatively, identification is dismissive or distrustful of qualitative experience. The most developed instance of identification is the belief that what is quantifiable is the realest dimension of reality (a paramount reality), a belief shared by some of the most influential modern minds: “Galileo, Descartes, and Kant are united in the idea that only what is produced mathematically is recognizable” (Bloch 1986: 667). The logical conclusion of this belief is positivism. As Horkheimer and Adorno (1969: 7) put it, “[t]o the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion; modern positivism writes it off as literature.” Belief in the reality of formal abstractions is astonishing because abstractions are, of course, immaterial. For example, despite the fact that “[t]he ground and the earth have nothing to do with ground-rent” and “machines have nothing to do with profit,” they mean only these things to those who own machines and the earth (Marx quoted in Lukács 1971: 92; cf. Bloch 1986: 667). Yet living “among our concepts as though they were the things of the real world” has real consequences (Jameson 1990: 21). One consequence is constitutional ossification. Identification ossifies the world precisely because it interprets “concepts as though they were the things of the real world” (Jameson 1990: 21). When consciousness is convinced that abstractions like Mr. Capital (Marx 1981: 969) or race (Omi and Winant 1994) are real like cows or rocks, then it is bewitched to believe in “the myth of things as they actually are” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969: x). It is on this basis that reification is a charge leveled against others in methodological and epistemological disputes for allegedly “transform[ing] an abstraction … into material reality, a concrete object that exists ‘out there’” (Vandenberghe 2009: 10; e.g., the critique of the “reification of intelligence” in Gould 1996). However, as explained below, identification is historically valid to the extent that individuals really are “ruled by abstractions” (Marx 1973: 164). Along with concretizing abstractions, identification extinguishes the knowledge of possibility by ignoring the concrete particularities of objects. This is Adorno’s primary objection to “identity thinking.” It is only through attention to the “nonidentical” that possibility can be known. Nonidentity is the “anarchistic movement and impulse that always withdraws from integration,” from “the individual who recoils from being subsumed under universal concepts and norms” to the qualitative particularities of concrete objects that do not fit under general abstractions (Brunkhorst 1999: 15, 58). The nonidentity of objects “resists” the pressure of the totalizing

Modes of reification 29 claims of identity thinking and points to the possibility of a different form of life (Adorno 1973: 163). For individual consciousness, resistance to identification means struggling to think outside it with an “unbending focus on the particular” (Benzer 2011: 218), an attempt to locate “the last trace of a world of perception not yet confiscated by commerce” (Adorno 1992: 55). Identification is blind to possibility because it systematically excludes thought about qualitative particularities. This is paralleled by the doxic mode, which is blind to alternative futures because it is blind to history (see above). But identification’s suppression of the nonidentical is not merely only a perceptive blindness. It is an experience rooted in necessarily formalized objective conditions through the social processes of commodification and formal rationalization. Identification’s objective context: Commodification and formal rationalization Like doxa, identification likely has both a transhistorical-anthropological basis and also historical-sociological causes. One transhistorical aspect of formal thought is the ability to recognize similarities or uniform characteristics across objects in order to master reality. Adorno (1973: 150) calls identity thinking “the pragmatist, nature-controlling element” of thinking, which is natural in the sense that controlling nature for species survival characterizes all human societies. Recognizing similarities across objects, a prerequisite to the development of forms, aids species survival because it allows us to anticipate the future. Further, “distancing” a given symbol from the referent it first named, and the context in which it was first named (“decontextualization”), is a prerequisite for the use of complex language (Werner and Kaplan 1963). Although there may be a natural and developmental basis for abstracting from concrete objects in order to control the world for species survival, this is a necessary but insufficient cause of the reificatory properties of identification. Identification reifies by grasping, and living through, abstract concepts as if they are real. Its prevalence has an interrelated twofold social context: near universal commodification and formal rationalization. In the Marxist account, formalization is inherent in the spread of the logic of the “commodity form” or “exchange principle”: capitalism demands a leveling of qualitative differences between objects, including humans, into commensurable equivalents for the market due to the domination of exchange value. Identification is an experiential and cognitive extension of the exchange value-relation to all objects, including humans (Fromm 1955: 106ff). Underlying this social process is the form of abstract labor. Organizing human labor power for commodity production requires that humans become the replaceable and exchangeable “organs” in the “productive mechanism” (Marx 1976: 457), a byproduct of the abstract labor form, which, at bottom, is the subordination of humans to socially necessary

30  Modes of reification labor time: “[t]ime is everything, man is nothing; he is no more than the carcase of time. There is no more question of quality. Quantity alone decides everything, hour for hour, day for day” (Marx 2008: 57; see Lukács 1971: 89ff; Debord 1983: ch. 6). Abstract labor rendered time, which, in concrete life, is a qualitative experience, into a quantified, abstract force that dominates the worker’s life. The logic of the commodity form is not restricted to the economy. The reified objective context of identification is the transformation of humans into replaceable automatons who must conform to numerous formal-rational systems or face punishment or poverty. In his integration of Weber and Marx, Lukács (1971: 95ff) shows how this logic extends to other institutions like law, where a judge becomes akin to a machine engineered to dispense predictable judgements, provided the necessary inputs (and fees) are inserted. Or, take the criminal justice system. Punishment becomes measured primarily in fines (for minor offenses) or in jail time for more major ones. … These formally rational systems conceal a deep irrationalism: the suffering of a worker on a production line or the bureaucratic inhumanity faced by an inmate in a modern prison. (Lopez 2019) This process of formal rationalization, or the spread of the commodity form’s logic, is linked to the quantification of persons in general. As Berger and Pullberg (1965: 208) put it, “reification converts quality into quantity. … [T]hese conversions are functional for the effective operation of an institutional system. The functionality is perhaps seen most clearly in the highly bureaucratized institutional system.” The relation between identification and the commodity form is also clear in the organizing force and absolute power of money as an end and means in capitalist societies. In Simmel (1978: 174f), money is theorized as the reification of the function of exchange as an independent form. As an “indifferent means for concrete and infinitely varied purposes,” money is not desired for its qualitative dimensions, as we usually desire objects, but for its quantity: “[w]ith regard to money, we do not ask what and how, but how much” (Simmel 1978: 259). [M]oney is the example, expression or symbol of the modern emphasis on the quantitative moment. The fact that more and more things are available for money and, bound up with this, the fact that money becomes the central and absolute value, results in objects being valued only to the extent to which they cost money and the quality of value with which we perceive them appearing only as a function of their money price. (Simmel 1978: 279).

Modes of reification 31 All of this depends on decontextualization and quantification: “[b]ourgeois thinking as a whole has distanced itself from the materials with which it deals. … Corresponding to this [commodification under capitalism] is a calculation alienated not only from the human beings but also from things, one indifferent to their content” (Bloch 1986: 666). The latter form of thinking, which Bloch calls “commodity-thinking,” is identification par excellence. To summarize, identification refers the experience of abstractions as real, and more significant and real than the concrete objects to which they refer. It ossifies the world through the very act of accepting concepts as real and is blind to possibility because it overlooks the particularities of objects. Identification is historically valid because it is birthed from and reinforces a social world in which individuals are “ruled by abstractions” (Marx 1973: 164) through the processes of commodification and formal rationalization.

Enframing Enframing refers to the grasping of objects as means to an end, usually socially determined ends, and social phenomena or socially produced events as purely technical and, thus, neutral and immune from evaluation. The paradox of enframing is that technology and economic production are elevated to ends and humans and their needs, desires, and preferences are demoted to means. The term is borrowed from Heidegger and is akin to the Frankfurt School’s description of “instrumental” or “technological” rationality (see below). Along with summarizing the latter concepts and explaining enframing’s inversion of means-ends rationality, this section explains how the reificatory mode ossifies the contingent world by disclosing instruments as neutral and blinds us to possibility through “one-dimensional” thinking. The following subsection explains the objective reified context of enframing: the real enslavement of humans to semi-autonomous technological systems and the economy. In Heidegger (1977), the essence of modern technology does not refer to instruments and machines but to a particular mode of “revealing” that “challenges” and “orders” nature: it “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such” (Heidegger 1977: 296). In contrast to the “old windmill,” which did not “unlock” energy, modern technology in the form of extraction and mechanized agriculture, for example, “challenges” the land, a field that now “appears different from how it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and maintain” (Heidegger 1977: 296). Modern technology inherently strives toward “maximum yield at the minimum expense” and enframing reveals all objects as a standing-reserve: “[e]verywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (Heidegger 1977: 297, 298). The instrumentalization of the world’s objects includes humans, who are at risk of a “precipitous fall” because they may be revealed as a standing-reserve too, which will conceal

32  Modes of reification other forms of revealing: enframing “threatens to sweep man into ordering as the supposed single way of revealing” (Heidegger 1977: 314). Horkheimer describes enframing as “subjective reason” in Eclipse of Reason (1947). In contrast to “objective reason”—where the merit of the actions and thoughts of human beings could only be judged by “its harmony with this totality”—subjective reason refers to the ability “to calculate probabilities and thereby to co-ordinate the right means with a given end” (Horkheimer 1947: 4, 5). However, subjective reason is unable to evaluate the goodness of ends and pursues survival “for its own sake” (Horkheimer 1947: 94). Everything is reduced to its usefulness for socially determined ends. Subjective reason is the norm today, where “the average man will say that reasonable things are things that are obviously useful, and that every reasonable man is supposed to be able to decide what is useful to him” (Horkheimer 1947: 3). The contradiction of instrumental reason is that, as first detailed in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969), the “progress of this rationality in its unreflective form is at bottom nothing other than the exploitation of nature transferred to men and continuing to work in them” (Adorno 2006: 16). That is, enframing transforms reason into an instrument for aims that can no longer be set by reason. While the differences between Heidegger’s romanticism and the Frankfurt School’s defense of reason against pure instrumental reason cannot be investigated here, what the Frankfurt School and Heidegger bring to attention is the modern disclosing of humans and the self as means, rather than ends. This is a paradox because, according to its own inner logic, enframing instrumentalizes the world for human aims. Ironically, humans themselves become instruments in the process. The related paradox of enframing is that means, especially technological development and economic production, are elevated to ends. This inversion of means and ends has been described by others, including Husserl, Scheler, Simmel, and Weber. To take one example, Simmel (1991: 25) argues that, due to the “colonization of ends by means,” we are unable to locate our “enslavement” to means because we mistakenly value the whole of technology due to the occasionally beneficial features of its parts (i.e., individual technological devices) and the development of technical instruments (e.g., the lightbulb) instead of the ultimate aim (e.g., “what becomes more fully visible”) (Simmel 1978: 481–482; see Gunderson 2017a). Feenberg (2010) characterizes the elevation of technology to an end as “the paradox of the means.” This paradox also exists in enframing’s understanding of the economic process, where economic “aims,” such as growth and profit-making, are constituted as ends. In short, enframing is at play whenever consciousness grasps humans as instruments of the economy or turn to human livelihood as afterthought in discussions of technological change. To be sure, as explained below, this inversion of means and ends is not an illusion or subjective error. Enframing ossifies the social world due to the seeming (false) neutrality of the “purely technical” or “purely utilitarian.” Goffman (1974: 24) gets

Modes of reification 33 at the constitutional ossification of enframing in the following seemingly mundane observation: there are guided doings such as fixing a sink or clearing a sidewalk in which sustained, conscious effort is given to manipulating the physical world, the doing itself taking on the identity of an “instrumental procedure,” a task, a “purely utilitarian” activity—a doing the purpose of which cannot be easily separated from the physical means employed to accomplish it. That is, when a social event is conceived of as purely technical it is perceived of as “natural” in the sense of neutral. Enframing grasps historically and socially formed practices and technologies as neutral, unaligned with vested interests, part of the natural course, an efficient means to an end, just the way things are, etc. In short, enframing is subjective reification through the illusion of neutrality. The seeming neutrality of the “purely technical” is misleading, as explained below. Enframing blinds consciousness to possibility by identifying the current social order with reason itself. This is captured by Marcuse’s (1964) argument that “technological rationality” is “one-dimensional” thinking. Because technological rationality cannot formulate substantive ends, it conditions “a system of thought and behaviour which represses any values, aspirations, or ideas not in conformity with the dominant rationality” (Marcuse 1989: 119). People are complicit with the current system and unable to ask critical and evaluative questions, unless these questions are in line with technical interests and the rules guiding the current order. Onedimensional thought sticks to the actual (the “hard facts”) and overlooks the possible, a “matter of factness” attitude that inhibits forms of thinking and acting that could create a qualitatively different social formation (Marcuse 1978: 143). This compliance impedes ideas and actions that could locate, let alone usher in, alternative social futures. Asking and answering substantive questions about the goodness of ends requires non-instrumental criteria (Weber 1978: 85). Yet, partly because enframing purges moral and aesthetic reflection from reason, aims are administered by social institutions that are rarely formed in line with reason. Enframing’s objective context: Techno-economic domination Marx’s (1981: 969) “upside-down world” is not just inverted in consciousness, it is inverted in reality (Paci 1972). Ends (humans, life) become means and means (economic production, technology) become ends. Enframing as a mode of experience is pervasive in capitalist societies because humans must be reduced to a mere means for “the insatiable and destructive expansive principle of the exchange society” (Adorno 1993: 29). After summarizing the socialist case that underemployment, low wages, and other issues are

34  Modes of reification caused by the capitalist system, rather than any one person, Weber (1967: 20, emphasis added) says, “what socialism interprets as ‘the power of things over people’” is “the means over the end.” This “real inversion” is the foundation of subjective enframing. For example, the utilitarian reduction of the value of all human relations to their usefulness to the subject is historically valid in that, in capitalist societies, relations between people are valued only if they are exploitable (Marx and Engels 1977: 109f). As Feenberg (2011) stresses, technology in Lukács and the Frankfurt School is a cause and outcome of reification. It is an outcome of reified social conditions because technology design is linked to social interests. Because we can no longer rationally formulate ends due to the instrumentalization of reason, the ends of technology are formed “in line with the prevalent interests in the respective society” (Marcuse 2001: 44). More specifically, in capitalist societies, technology development is hooked to the interests of capital: “design embodies only a subset of the values circulating in society at any given time” and capitalism is unique in that the range of possible value-mediations of technology are reduced due to “conflict[s] with a narrow pecuniary interest” (Feenberg 2005: 105). This brings about a techno-economic world that appears neutral in the false immediacy of everyday life but is actually value-laden (Feenberg 1999) in that it subjects humans and the environment to the aims of capital (Marcuse 1964, 1972). Modern technology is also a source of reification because modern techno-economic systems such as the assembly line are not only objective reification par excellence—an inhuman system that humans must subordinate themselves to—, but also because it shapes how consciousness frames the world as fixed and inalterable. Enzo Paci (1972: 405) calls the reversal of the “subject into the object” through the very technical artifacts created by humans technistic alienation. The industrial process in capitalist societies promotes technistic alienation, where humans “must subordinate their impulses and natural rhythms and become themselves machine-like” (Pitkin 1987: 272) conditioning the “contemplative stance” discussed above (Lukács 1971: 88f). This is strikingly captured in Marx’s (1976: 503) famous descriptions of “the mechanical monster” of the industrial factory system. To summarize, enframing constitutes everything as useful or potentially useful resources—a “standing-reserve” (Heidegger 1977)—to achieve unreflective ends, unreflective because the experiential mode’s instrumentality cannot rationally formulate ends. It ossifies social reality by constituting techno-economic systems as neutral and blinds us to possibility through “one-dimensional” thinking: ignoring what is possible by “sticking to the facts” (Marcuse 1964). It paradoxically grasps means as ends and ends as means, not only due to its inability to formulate ends in line with reason, but due to the “real inversion” means and ends in reality. Enframing is a historically valid interpretation of a world in which “things are in the saddle and ride mankind,” a phrase Bottomore (1982: x), quoting Emerson, uses

Modes of reification 35 to characterize objective reification. The interaction of enframing and the real reversal of subject and object is described well by Adorno (1998: 200), a fitting closing to this section: there is something exaggerated, irrational, pathogenic in the present-day relationship to technology. This is connected with the “veil of technology.” People are inclined to take technology to be the thing itself, as an end in itself, a force of its own, and they forget that it is an extension of human dexterity. The means—and technology is the epitome of the means of self-preservation—are fetishized, because the ends—a life of human dignity—are concealed and removed from the consciousness of people.

Detachment Detachment refers to an unemotional and disinterested understanding of living beings, their wellbeing, and their world. It is an experiential mode that follows the suspension of emotional engagement due to a forced inattention to the particular individual or group in harm’s way. Detachment is akin to Honneth’s understanding of reification as well as Adorno’s analysis of “bourgeois coldness.” After summarizing the latter two theories and explaining detachment’s modes of constitutional ossification and possibility blindness, I then connect detachment to its objective context: a market economy of contracts and an unbearable scale and depth of suffering. Honneth’s (2008: 52ff) conception of reification as “forgetfulness of recognition” can also be read as a theory of detachment. Drawing form Dewey, Heidegger, developmental psychology, and other lines of thought, Honneth argues that emotive-empathic engagement and recognitional relations with others are causally prior to detached cognitive understanding. Reification occurs when “we lose our attentiveness to the fact that this cognition owes its existence to an antecedent act of recognition,” and, consequently, “it is impossible for us to perceive other people as ‘persons’ once we have forgotten our antecedent recognition of them” (Honneth 2008: 59, 64). Honneth (2008: 25) argues reification is an emotional detachment from the world and people, observing it all in cold “contemplation and observation.” Detachment dehumanizes the other by literally conceiving of the other as a thing, which requires emotional indifference. Along with reifying the other, “self-reification” is detachment’s cold gaze directed inward, when “we experience our feelings and desires as thinglike entities” (Honneth 2008: 73). Adorno’s notion of “bourgeois coldness” too shines light on detachment (see Mussell 2013). Although he did not live to write a planned volume on moral theory entitled Coldness (Mussell 2013: 57), Adorno’s (1998: 201) attention to “the inability to identify with others” is a fairly consistent theme in his work because this coldness is a precondition of large-scale

36  Modes of reification violence and terror. Coldness is the “basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity” and, without it, “there could have been no Auschwitz” (Adorno 1973: 363). Even when dressed up as morality, like in Kant’s formal moral system, coldness can paradoxically destroy the subject “on whom this moral demand is imposed” (Adorno 2001: 58, cf. 158). Although Honneth (2008: 64) argues we cannot speak of the reification of nature in a “direct sense,” the first-generation Frankfurt School provides numerous examples of how modern consciousness is indifferent and emotionally disengaged from the “unrelenting exploitation of the animal kingdom in our days” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969: 246; see Gunderson 2014). Our indifference to the massive levels of suffering experienced by animals is a quintessential example of what detachment describes: emotional detachment from, and “indifference to[,] the fate of others” (Adorno 1998: 201). Describing unusually cold individuals as having a “frozen” personality is a fitting metaphor for depicting the ossifying constitution of detachment: it “freezes” the world in place. Detachment’s mode of constitutional ossification typically arises as an implicit justification for unjustifiable and irrational suffering, unjustifiable and irrational because the means to address the basic needs of life for all are already available. When the latter fact somehow enters the purview of detached experience—for example, when abject poverty is witnessed amid affluence—, detachment’s potency lies in its indifference to the contrast. Detachment is the clearest illustration of the fact that all subjective reification is an implicit legitimation of the social order, captured in Benjamin’s (1999: 400) observation: “[a]s long as there is still one beggar around, there will be myth” (see also Adorno 1973: 203). Although there are sophisticated mythologies built on detachment’s implicit justification for objectively unnecessary suffering, from the Hegelian theodicy of history to mainstream economics, the power of detachment’s ossifying mythology of suffering is pretheoretical and even physical: muttering, unbelievingly, “That’s just the way things are” after lowering one’s face away from another’s pain. Detachment is blind to possibility because it snuffs out the basis of solidarity: compassion. The early Horkheimer (1993: 34) makes the case that compassion is an appropriate moral sentiment today that arises “out of the privation of the present,” which can help bring about a free and just society. Compassion has emancipatory aspects because the sentiment points to “a future happy life for all” (Horkheimer 1993: 34) through a “solidarity with suffering men” (Horkheimer 1972a: 44) and animals (Horkheimer 1993: 36). Detachment is negatively characterized by an inability to feel for others’ suffering and an indifference to their fate, thereby undermining solidarity, which is a prerequisite to building alternative social futures. Detachment permits pseudo-compassionate acts, usually taking the form of charitable campaigns that ignore and reproduce the social-structural basis of widespread suffering (Mussell 2013: 62). This maintains rather than challenges

Modes of reification 37 detachment’s objective context: egoistic contractual relations and being a witness of an unbearable scale and depth of suffering. Detachment’s objective context: Contracts and beholding unbearable suffering Detachment is to some extent necessary because modern social systems cannot carry on, and we cannot survive in them, without “adopt[ing] a ‘contemplative’ attitude and seek[ing] personal advantage in these systems” (Feenberg 2011: 107). Adorno sees coldness as a sociological fact, not only a form of subjectivity (Mussell 2013: 58). Capitalist societies are defined by contracts that require indifference to others and their fate: “[s]ociety in its present form … is based [on] … the pursuit of one’s own interests against the interests of everyone else” (Adorno 1998: 201). Survival depends on internalizing this relation as an “isolated competitor.” One must capture the world in a detached stance because one must “look out for number one.” Adorno goes so far to argue that if one does not “chill himself,” one will “feel condemned” (Adorno 1973: 347) and “without such coldness one could not live” (Adorno 1998: 274). Contractual relations are often formed around profit-making and exploitation. The connection of emotional detachment to capitalism is clear in Lukács, where emotionless calculation is rooted in profit-making (Honneth 2008: 24f). Simmel (1978: 440ff) too emphasizes the way that the abstract character of money “supports” modern egoism, cold calculation, and indifference. In addition to a historically specific form of self-preservation through contracts, a second meaning can be gleaned from Adorno’s claim that coldness is socially necessary: the unbearability of the scale and depth of suffering. Detachment may form in response to one’s objective helplessness to mitigate widespread suffering. One reason the vestiges of compassion today materialize as charitable campaigns (termed “pseudo-compassion” above) is the objective inability of individuals to mitigate suffering, a task that can only be accomplished by the species (Adorno 1973: 203). The reader may have a friend or acquaintance who has not hardened her heart to suffering and is simultaneously aware that individual charitable acts are ineffective and usually ideological. This compassionate soul is likely a broken soul. Being “well-adjusted” is difficult for those attentive to current horrors and the unjustifiable catastrophe of human history. One either develops strategies to suspend emotional engagement or is crushed by the weight of the world’s boundless suffering. In summary, detachment refers to an experiential mode that is indifferent to those in harm’s way, that suspends emotional engagement in the problems of the world in favor of disinterested understanding. Because the social world is organized around Gesellschaft-like contractual relations, which require cold calculation and egoism, and packed full of suffering, which

38  Modes of reification corrodes sustained emotional and caring attention, detachment is socially determined.

Conclusion One goal of this chapter is to clarify the experiential modes through which the social world appears fixed and inalterable. How is experience organized in the “reified structure of consciousness” (Lukács 1971: 99)? The following four experiential modes are subjective modes of reification, or experiential modes that mask social reality by experiencing reality as fixed (constitutional ossification) and inalterable (possibility blindness). •

•

•

•

Doxa: Taking the social world’s meanings and practices for granted, rather than as historically formed artifacts, which then appear fixed, because their typicality is interpreted as common-sensical and obvious, and inalterable, because these typifications are projected into the future as anticipations. This form of subjective reification is akin to phenomenology’s notion of the “natural attitude” and sits in the background of Gramsci’s “common sense.” Identification: The experience of abstractions as realer than the concrete objects to which abstractions subsume. Identification ossifies the world through the very act of accepting abstractions as real and promotes possibility blindness by ignoring the “non-identical.” This form of subjective reification is akin to Adorno’s “identity thinking.” Enframing: An experiential mode that elevates means (technology and economic production) to ends and demotes ends (humanity and life) to means (instruments). Enframing ossifies what is by constituting techno-economic systems as neutral and ignores what is possible by “sticking to the facts.” This form of subjective reification is akin to the Frankfurt School’s “instrumental” or “technological” rationality. Detachment: Experience after suspending genuine emotional engagement. Detachment ossifies the social world via an implicit justification for unjustifiable suffering and undermines alternative social futures by silencing the basis for solidarity (compassion). This form of subjective reification is akin to Adorno’s notion of “bourgeois coldness” and Honneth’s theory of reification as the “forgetting of recognition.”

Reificatory experiential modes are not the foundations of reification, however. While the point of this chapter is to clarify how the social world is experienced as fixed and inalterable, I agree with Adorno (1973: 189ff) that reified social conditions are the primary question, while reified consciousness is secondary in practical importance (see Bewes 2002: 97f). Thus, I relate subjective experience to objective reification. Doxa developed in part from the standardization of life; identification is rooted in commodification and formal rationalization; enframing is birthed from the “real inversion”

Modes of reification 39 of means and ends in the domination of individuals by semi-autonomous techno-economic systems; and detachment is the subjective correlate to contractual relations that require egoism and emotional disengagement as well as a response to the unbearable scale and depth of the world’s suffering. Due to the nature of typologies, the divisions between reificatory modes of experience are analytical. In reality, doxa, identification, enframing, and detachment are interrelated. One reason the concept has been marked by persistent ambiguity stems from these interrelations. As mentioned above, doxa and identification are inseparable: doxa refers to a moment in the typification process when social history is forgotten and “immediate” experience is taken for granted, and identification refers to the grasping of types or forms as realer than the concrete particulars that they subsume. Further, identification’s reification of abstractions is a vehicle for the domination associated with enframing. Finally, the “cold calculation” of detachment presupposes formalization and formalization is always detached (Simmel 1978: 444f). There is a reason why “impersonal” often follows the word “formal” (e.g., Weber 1978: 225). Although the work perhaps erroneously suggests that reification is inalterable (Lukács 1971: 95f), the final chapter of Simmel’s (1978) masterpiece The Philosophy of Money entitled “The style of life” is one of the most beautiful and dialectical accounts of these interrelations, where immaterial and material artifacts dominate their authors, who adopt a one-sided calculating relation to the world that quantifies, formalizes, and detaches the intellect from life. Subjective reification is foundational to the modern experience because the social conditions which underpin it (standardization, commodification, formal rationalization, techno-economic domination, contractual relations, and unbearable suffering) are always present and constantly validate reificatory experiential modes. The attention to both subjective and objective dimensions of reification has methodological implications. If sociologists believe that they can commence a study of social reality without constantly questioning and reflecting on common-sensical categories that seem natural, yet are always socially formed, and examining the social foundations of their own consciousness, they are bound to think within reificatory modes. This is the well-known fundamental deficit of naïve empiricism and positivism. On the other hand, explaining each experiential mode’s social context evades the misinterpretation that reification is only a subjective mystification of reality. Thus, the “solution” to reification is not the phenomenological rejoinder: to denounce discussions of “society,” “the economy,” “social structure,” etc. as reifications and then call for attention to the “immediate” or the “concrete.” Because subjective reification has an objective basis in reified social forms—or “real abstractions,” to use the peculiar Marxist phrase (Toscano 2008)—it is as mystifying to believe that one can get a direct grasp on “the things themselves” in “immediate” experience and/or that one should start with the lived experiences of subjects while disregarding social structural forces as mere reifications (e.g., Adorno 1976: 244; see Chapter 1). So long

40  Modes of reification as “things are in the saddle and ride mankind” (Bottomore 1982: x), the “greatest of separations is also the most concrete” (Virno 2001: 168). For example, Adorno, whose approach to critical theory “abstracts from sensuous individuals in the name of undermining systemic domination” (Mussell 2013: 59), argues that it was impossible to live without coldness (detachment) but maintained that coldness has critical moments and is much better than a cheap humanitarianism (described as “pseudo-compassion” above). The difficult path remains theorizing society as a totality without losing sight of its human formation with due attention to the everyday actors who reproduce and, every so often, challenge this totality. Most fundamentally, the discussion of reification sheds light on why sociologists must strive to “defamiliarize” the social world. Thinking within reificatory modes of experience is to some extent unavoidable due to reified social context. Defamiliarization cannot remove one from the society that forms reified consciousness. What defamiliarization can do, however, is help the sociologist reflect on the mystifications of reification, and their social foundations, by jarring reified experience, which, for this author, is the meaning of “making the familiar strange.” Before explaining how to shake modes of reification, especially doxa, through “modes of defamiliarization,” we must first get a better handle on the relationship between familiarity or everydayness and the process of reificatory experience.

Notes





1. Vandenberghe (2009: 9) helpfully describes the relation between fetishism and reification, seemingly opposite terms: “[r]eification, in Marx’s sense, can also be seen as personification: social or pseudo-natural forces are perceived and understood as quasi-human forces that rule the world.” The objective side of commodity fetishism is that these “quasi-human forces,” like Monsieur le Capital (Marx 1981: 969), a blind subject without an ego (Postone 1993: 77), really do rule the world. 2. A misleading term that means powerless as opposed to active (Lopez 2019; see also Feenberg 2011: 105). 3. Marx (1973: 85) too uses the term “forgetting” to describe the process of reification: “[t]he whole profundity of those modern economists who demonstrate the eternity and harmoniousness of the existing social relations lies in this forgetting” of historically distinct productive relations. 4. A brief defense of the ugly concept “constitutional ossification” is in order. “Constitution” is a phenomenological term, meaning “the act by which an object is built up in consciousness” (Spiegelberg 1971: 713). “Ossification” refers to the formation of bones, an analogy meant to highlight the way that subjective reification hardens and fixes the social world in consciousness. The term is a bit misleading, however, because the “ossification” implies that it is only consciousness which ossifies rather than the consciousness in particular objective social conditions. The term is fitting when used in Postone’s (1993: 218) description of Marx’s theory as “a theory of the ways in which humans constitute structures of social mediation which, in turn, constitute forms of social practice.”

Modes of reification 41







5. Husserl (1970: 363ff) originally employs the concept to describe the way in which science forgets the “relationship between its ever more abstract constructions and the real world in which we live” (Russell 2006: 187). Although scientific theory arises out of the world of lived experience (the “lifeworld”), this foundation is forgotten in future scientific work, thereby “technicizing” science into a mere technique (Husserl 1970: 46ff). Through this process, the “sedimentation of meaning” in language, the human origins of concepts in experience are masked or concealed (Woelert 2011: 119f). 6. The rub here is the degree to which genetics and other natural forces really do influence human behavior. Sociology tends to ignore the implications of the fact that humans are apes with biological bodies who depend on ecosystems for energy and material, a “human exemptionalism” that is just as mystifying as biological reductionism (Catton and Dunlap 1980). It is beyond the scope of this paper to explain the co-evolution of human culture and nature, the degree to which human life is shaped by natural forces and vice versa, etc. (see Dietz et al. 1990; Richersen and Boyd 2005; York and Mancus 2009). 7. This also occurs in a more fundamental way in all science. As Merleau-Ponty put it in the context of Husserl’s (1970: 353ff) analysis of the genesis of geometry: “[t]he main effect of every ideation, which is dated and signed, is to make its literal repetition superfluous, to launch culture toward a future, to achieve forgetfulness” (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 6) Although this makes possible future scientific work without having to “reactivate” the experiential origins of meaning, it also means that geometry, for example, according to Husserl, “accepts things, objects, and categories as they are and therefore gets imprisoned in a narrow perspective. The crisis of the sciences (and of European humanity as a whole),” according to Husserl, “is thus not only a crisis of meaning, but also a crisis of an ever shrinking field of possibilities, that is, a crisis of action” (Dorfman 2009: 295). 8. Two related questions are not investigated here. First, there is the “problem of relevance,” or why certain aspects of the totality of experience are given attention while others are not (Schutz 1970; for a political-economic approach, see Gunderson et al. 2020). Second is the question of the power over the process of sedimentation and transmission of types. There is great power afforded by control over of the content and dissemination of historical education and the media, for example.

3

Familiarity and/as strangeness

“When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of selfdeception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account.” - Georg W. F. Hegel (1967: 92)

Introduction Chapter 2 examines reification in depth because reified experience is an obstacle to obtaining sociological knowledge. As will become clear below, “the familiar” is reified experience, particularly the subjective aspect described as “doxa” in the previous chapter: the experience of the world as taken-for-granted and common-sensical. Social defamiliarization is a prerequisite for sociological knowledge because it throws a taken-for-granted and seemingly fixed world into question. Before explaining how one throws reified experience into question, the topic of Chapter 4, let us first examine the familiarity or strangeness of the world as an experiential aspect of everyday life that is socially created, even if one does not inhabit the role of the sociologist. As in Chapter 2, a goal here is to urge reflexivity among sociologists. In what follows, I first typologize some experiential and social dimensions of the familiar and the strange. Then I provide a preliminary account of, and justification for, social defamiliarization as a method. The chapter concludes by examining social determinants of social defamiliarization.

The familiar There are objective and subjective meanings of the familiar (Schutz 1970: 27). Objective familiarity refers to the nature of objects being the same or similar to other previously experienced objects. Because this project is concerned with the ways in which sociologists can voluntarily call into question the influence of subjective reification, rather than wait for objectively reified forms to show their contingency via rapid social change (see below), I focus

44  Familiarity and/as strangeness on the nature of the subjective meaning of familiarity, one aspect of which involves “the demarcation line which the subject draws between that segment of the world which needs and that which does not need further investigation” (Schutz 1970: 27). This section is indebted to Schutz’s theory of familiarity, as developed in Reflections on the Problem of Relevance (Schutz 1970) and later in The Structures of the Life-World (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 137ff).1 After detailing levels of familiarity, I make Schutz’s account more attentive to social-structural conditioning with the help of Karel Kosík’s Dialectics of the Concrete (1976). Typifying the same and the similar Schutz and Luckmann (1973: 229) distinguish between two kinds of familiarity: the same and the similar. In terms of subjective familiarity, the same refers to objects experienced as the same or the same-with-modifications through typifications (see below). The similar can be further broken down into subcategories that vary in their level of familiarity. First, one recognizes objects and events as similar to those one has met in previous experiences. Second, one grasps objects and events as similar in essential characteristics to those experienced earlier. Third, they can only be similar to previously experienced objects and events in some of their characteristics; in other respects they are dissimilar. Finally, there are objects and events which appear in the set of types stored in the stock of knowledge. (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 140) Knowledge of objects, which “are more or less familiar according to whether they more or less agree with previous experiences” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 140), may become a “habitual possession” (Schutz 1970: 55) of the stock of knowledge at hand if this knowledge of objects is taken for granted and “beyond question” (Da Costa 2014).2 Within this context, Schutz (1970: 58–59, emphasis removed) defines familiarity as “the likelihood of referring new experiences, in respect to their types, to the habitual stock of already acquired knowledge.” For example, if in past experience, or, more often, via information from others, I learn that some snakes are dangerous and dangerous snakes have certain characteristics, this knowledge remains dormant until a situation or object arises in which this previously dormant knowledge is actualized. Even if one is visiting a new country and sees a type of snake that one has never seen before, one will still be aware that it is a snake which may be dangerous, even if it is of different size, color, etc. than snakes I have seen in my own country (Schutz 1970: 55). Although one is not familiar with that snake, one is sufficiently familiar with the typification “snake.” Two points should be made about “sufficiency” in familiarity and the role of typifications in delineating the familiar from the unfamiliar. First, the typification process is central to establishing familiarity (Schutz and Luckmann

Familiarity and/as strangeness 45 1973:142ff). Recalling the discussion of doxa in Chapter 2, the sedimentation of previous experiences or learned experiences of others form a “stock of knowledge at hand.” This is composed of typifications or generalized types through which we are preacquainted with concrete objects and events (see also “preperception” in James 1918: ch. 11). Objects and events are familiar to me so long as they are explicable by typifications stored in my stock of knowledge at hand. The object now experienced proves to be the “same,” or the “same but modified,” or a “like” or a “similar” object, as an object which I previously experienced, possibly many times. But this “sameness,” “likeness,” or “similarity” refers only to typical properties which the new object has in common with those I have previously experienced. (Schutz 1970: 59) Familiarity does not require repeated exposure to particular, discrete objects. New objects can be familiar to us via similarity with a type. One only needs to possess a typification of an object to be subjectively familiar with similar objects. Typifying similar yet unlike objects necessarily blinds us to differences (Friedman 2019: 473f). Even the same is experienced as “the same” via typifications. For example, one develops typifications of the characters of family members and friends, those closest to us. Yet, the very act of typifying the same masks over the shifting particularities or atypicalities of the same, the kinds of particularities captured by Monet in his series of paintings of the Rouen Cathedral (Schutz 1970: 59f). These subtleties are irrelevant in everyday life, where the same is experienced as the same unless it deviates from its typification in ways that grab our attention or problematize our purpose at hand. A second point about the meaning of “sufficiently familiar” is that familiarity is relative to the subject’s “purpose at hand” (Schutz 1970: 142f; Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 143f). For example, what counts as a sufficient degree of familiarity with snakes differs for the herpetologist and the father walking his children to the park. Both have different projects, which determine their interest (“motivational relevance”) and attention (“topical relevance”). In everyday life, we typically only thematize objects that require “further investigation” and only notice the atypical aspects of objects if they are sufficiently unusual to draw attention (see below) or if we take the time and care to shift our attention to these features. For example, for the typical father walking his children to the park, the snake-like object is thematized and requires further investigation to ensure safety. The particular and unique features of that snake may be irrelevant to his purpose at hand, unless the father has sufficient knowledge about which snakes are dangerous and which are not. In contrast, the herpetologist may thematize a snake in order to explore that species’ particularities due to a theoretical purpose at hand. To use another human-animal interaction example, the anonymous type “dog” is sufficient for familiarizing myself with a chained dog in a yard on my way to work because the dog is irrelevant to my purpose at hand (going to work).

46  Familiarity and/as strangeness But the anonymous type dog is insufficient for establishing familiarity for a mailperson, who must also typify dogs based on criteria such as “biter/nonbiter” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 144ff). Although some sociological dimensions of typification and attentional processes are underdeveloped in Schutz, he makes sure to note that what we attend to, and how we interpret it through type selection, are influenced by socialization and social context. For example, typifications we employ are socially given through established linguistic systems (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 233ff, 247ff), “status and role within the social system” is part of our “biographically determined situation,” which is the basis for selecting a “purpose at hand” (Schutz 1967a: 9), and a given system of attention, interpretation, and motivation (a system of “relevance”) may “[prevail] in a given social group” (Schutz 1964a: 248). In this connection, Zerubavel (1997: ch. 2; 2015: ch. 4) discusses “norms of attention,” or the social norms that condition what is worth noticing and what should be ignored. Take Goffman’s (1961b: 19ff) notion of “rules of irrelevance,” where, for example, a shared attentional norm during a board game is the irrelevancy of the materials used to make the checker pieces. Attentional norms are also moral, delineating who or what is considered morally relevant, and mnemonic, what is marked as historically significant or insignificant (e.g., Zerubavel 1998). There are also differences in attentional norms between groups within a wider culture (“attentional subcultures”) (Zerubavel 2015: 53). For example, one’s profession can influence what one sees and does not see (e.g., Goodwin 1994). In addition to culture-dependent attentional norms, attention is also sociological in that social changes can bring formally ignored objects into attention (e.g., cigarette smoking went from a taken-for-granted activity to a “highly marked” activity), expand or contract moral attention (e.g., expansion of voting rights), and even change what is considered topically relevant to scientists (see Zerubavel 2015: 58f). I argue elsewhere with colleagues that attention and interpretation are influenced by political-economic structure (Gunderson et al. 2020), a line of thought abridged below through a discussion of Kosík (1976). Familiarity as the same and the similar, then, is that which does not require further investigation due to sufficient typification, which is a social process. Wagner (1983: 52–53) provides a helpful summary of Schutz’s argument: sensory images spontaneously invoke memories.3 Unique sensory images appearing at the present Now are spontaneously checked against memory images that have been stored away in an individual’s “stock of knowledge” … [A] perceived object, which is unique, and which has never been seen before, is directly identified, for instance, as an object like certain other objects encountered (some time, or many times) before. The newly experienced object is familiar; it is known from past experiences with similar objects. The parallels with doxa discussed in Chapter 2 are clear: “the expectation of recurrent typical experiences is required for the full meaning of familiarity of my knowledge” (Schutz 1970: 58, emphasis removed).

Familiarity and/as strangeness 47 The existent and the routine Some elements of knowledge are not merely familiar experiences that we store to solve problems, they are of “permanent possession,” which Schutz (1970: 143) calls “existential knowledge,” or, later, “fundamental elements” of the stock of knowledge (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 99ff). Existential knowledge is always in hand, rather than at hand, even if marginal in consciousness, because “no state of mind could be imagined in which these experiences are not present” (Schutz 1970: 143). Examples include knowledge that our bodies exist and knowledge that the world exists (Schutz 1970: ch. 7; see also Gurwitsch 1964: 414ff). Important for this project, knowledge that we live among fellow humans and social institutions is existential knowledge. That means that at least a vague awareness of society is a constantly present yet typically marginal feature of consciousness. Along with existential knowledge, “routine knowledge” is another form of knowledge always in hand—or, rather, always in and at hand (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 105ff)—yet usually unthematized (compare with readiness-to-hand in Heidegger 1962: 95ff). In Structures of the Life-World, Schutz and Luckmann (1973: 105ff) distinguish between three forms of routine knowledge: knowledge of skills, useful knowledge, and knowledge of recipes. Knowledge of skills is knowledge of the functioning of the body and the spatial and temporal structuring around the body. While some skill knowledge is learned (e.g., walking), no clear line demarcates fundamental levels of skill knowledge from existential knowledge (e.g., swallowing). Skill knowledge is built upon existential knowledge. Useful knowledge refers to instrumental knowledge of means to an end in which knowledge about means is “definitely solved” (e.g., shaving), although these can be made problematic in rare occurrences in which the means fail to bring about expected ends. Finally, knowledge of recipes is routine knowledge about “how to bring forth in typical situations typical results by typical means” (Schutz 1964d: 122). Although the distinction is not clear in Schutz, knowledge of recipes seems to be distinct from useful knowledge because they involve longer and more complex chains of means (e.g., track reading by a hunter) (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 107), even if the recipes “are not clearly understood” and are followed in a ritual-like way (Schutz 1964d: 122). What all forms of routine knowledge—skill knowledge, useful knowledge, and recipes— have in common is automaticity and standardization. In a fittingly reified description, Schutz (1970: 143, emphasis added) describes routine knowledge as the knowledge necessary for the “business of living”: knowledge underlying daily functional and instrumental acts are the tools for brings about specific ends, acts that become automatic and standardized. The knowledge required for carrying out the repetitive practices and the tools of daily life reaches the “highest degree of familiarity” and are always present yet rarely thematized. Calling routine and existential knowledge “familiar” in the everyday sense of the term is misleading (Schutz and

48  Familiarity and/as strangeness Luckmann 1973: 136). For example, one may have degrees of familiarity with non-native languages, but does it make sense to say that one is “familiar” with one’s native language or even a second language that one speaks daily “without thinking” or “automatically”? No one says that they are “familiar” with walking. The use of the term familiar to describe existential skill knowledge is even more questionable. Excluding those with dysphagia and similar disorders who had to (re)learn to swallow, “I am familiar with swallowing” is a comical claim. Yet the use of the term is helpful at these deepest levels of familiarity precisely because it encourages reflection on the degree to which routine knowledge and some forms of existential knowledge are also learned and vary culturally. For example, even walking is still a learned behavior and styles of walking vary across groups and societies (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 110), not to mention the fact that entire social groups are organized around an inability to walk. For this reason, “familiarity” is also used in this project to describe existential and routine knowledge, knowledge always in hand, but this level of familiarity is essentially different than the stock of knowledge at hand (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 135). The familiar world as the reified world Schutz’s account of the familiar is critical in the sense that it reveals society as a humanly formed artifact-world that actors then accept as real and natural. But it is uncritical in the sense that it does not explain the connection between familiarity and larger political-economic structures (Habermas 1988; Bourdieu 1989). To correct this limitation, we briefly turn to Kosík, a Czech theorist whose Dialectics of the Concrete reads like a Marxist Schutz (see also Lefebvre 2014). Like Schutz, Kosík (1976: 42ff) characterizes mundane daily life as a world of routine utilitarian practices in which we have some level of control over—that we can move, manipulate, and calculate with varying levels of success—and a familiar world in which we experience everyday objects and events not as they are in their particularity, but, instead, “they simply are there, and are accepted as inventory, as components of a known world” (Kosík 1976: 43). Further, like Schutz, Kosík characterizes our knowledge of the social world in everyday life as one of mere acquaintance, not deep or analytical knowledge. For example, [p]eople use money and carry out the most complicated transactions with it without ever knowing, or having to know, what money is. Immediate utilitarian praxis and corresponding routine thinking thus allow people to find their way about in the world, to feel familiar with things and manipulate them, but it does not provide them with a comprehension of things and of reality. (Kosík 1976: 1–2; cf. Schutz 1970: 147)

Familiarity and/as strangeness 49 Because society is accepted uncritically, as if it were natural, he characterizes it as “religion of the workaday” (Kosík 1976: 45) or “the pseudoconcrete.” The pseudoconcrete refers to (Kosík 1976: 2ff): 1 The world of external phenomena, or the “surface” world of everyday life experienced in its false immediacy, what Marx calls “phenomenal forms” (see Chapter 2). The subjective aspect of this “world of appearances” is akin to Schutz’s notion of typification. 2 The world of procuring and manipulation, or the utilitarian tasks of everyday life, our “fetishized praxis,” fetishized in the sense that everyday practices must be performed due to historically formed social conditions yet are grasped as natural. 3 The world of routine ideas, or the subjective outcome of fetishized practices in which “covers both familiarity with things and with their superficial appearance, and the technique of handling things in practice” (Kosík 1976: 5). This is comparable to Schutz’s notion of “routine knowledge.” 4 The world of fixed objects, or socially formed artifacts that appear natural. A central point made by Kosík is that the familiar world is the reified world, especially the dimension described as doxic experience built on the standardization of life in Chapter 2. Everyday familiarity is the organization of time, life, and rhythm into replicable life functions, an organization that is experienced in a “natural atmosphere,” as immutable and natural even though it is historical and socially formed. We only grasp the “surface” world of phenomena because “everyday utilitarian praxis” is only interested in manipulating society in its reified, “ready-made” form, not in how this world came to be, the more essential processes underlying it, or in how it could be. The word “surface” does not mean this world does not exist or that it is a world closer to the surface that hides a mystical, metaphysical world, but that it is the “one-sided,” historically formed world we accept as natural due to fetishized practices. Our partial understanding of the world does, however, conceal the deeper structures and human processes that formed the everyday and our experience of it. One way to access this concealed realm is by making the familiar strange (Kosík 1976: 48), which begs the question: What is the strange?

The strange The previous section explores the subjective meaning of the familiar through the provinces of the same, the similar, the existent, and the routine and how the familiar is established in everyday life. The concluding subsection makes the case that the familiar is the reified world. As in the discussion of the familiar, the aim of this section on the strange is to typologize subjective

50  Familiarity and/as strangeness experiences of the strange in social context. I focus attention to provinces of the strange that are useful for explicating the implied meaning of “strange” in “making the familiar strange” within sociology, especially the unfamiliar and the absurd. There are more unnerving and even terrifying provinces of the strange that are not explored here because they are not implied in the task of making the familiar strange in social science, including the eerie, the creepy, the grotesque, the nauseating, in Sartre’s (1956: 444) ultra-naturalistic sense of “pure apprehension of the self as a factual existence,” and the weird, in the sense of a “strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis” (Lovecraft 1933; e.g., see Fisher 2016). Although not essential to making the familiar strange in sociology, I close with a short discussion of the uncanny due to the interplay of familiarity and unfamiliarity in the experience of uncanniness. Aside from some sociological treatments of the absurd (Lyman and Scott 1970; Shoham 2006) and Schutz’s notion of the unfamiliar (see below), there is a lack of sociological accounts of the strange in the literature, a domain dominated by literary, psychological, and philosophical exploration, especially existentialist accounts from the mid-twentieth century. Future sociological research should take up these old questions to correct common ahistorical and methodologically individualistic tendencies in this literature. I touch on some of the social causes of the experience of the strange and return to these questions in more depth in the concluding section on the sociological dimensions of defamiliarization. The unfamiliar In Schutz, the unfamiliar is the strange. There are at least three reasons for experiencing the unfamiliar in everyday life (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 141f; compare with DiMaggio 1997: 271f). First, one experiences the unfamiliar when items or situations are incongruent with past experiences, or, knowledge was inadequate for successful explication of a familiar object. In these cases, objects are made problematic, or become topically relevant (Schutz 1970: 26ff). The unfamiliar imposes itself on consciousness by drawing “attention to itself within the surroundings of the familiar” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 187). Gurevitch (1988: 1186, 1185) calls the emergence of the unfamiliar in everyday life a “presence” that was formerly “veiled by a web of taken-for-granted meanings” that appears, for example, when a child first sees his father at work: “the child’s relation with his father now has to accommodate a new, inexplicable perception of the father as a strange man, an inhabitant of a strange world called work.” The unfamiliar that imposes itself on consciousness is often either the new or the unusual. The new refers to phenomena that strike us as novel,

Familiarity and/as strangeness 51 never-seen, fresh, or unique. Bloch (1986: 41, 42) speculates that the new draws our attention because it always drives us out of what we are used to. Something new must come to take us with it. Most are attracted merely by the empty difference from what has previously been, by freshness, regardless for the moment what its contents are. Here it already brings enjoyment that something is happening … The New is greeted as a brother who has travelled from the region where the sun rises. The unusual or the abnormal refer to events or objects that seem odd, notquite-right, peculiar, or deviant. For example, if one is walking along a city street and notices a crowd surrounding a man face down on a gutter, reaching into the sewer, one will find it unusual and likely seek to interpret the experience, asking the crowd what has happened (Natanson 1978: 182f). Or, in Schutz’s focal example in Reflections on the Problem of Relevance (1970) adopted from the Greek skeptic Carneades, if one notices an unfamiliar coiled lump of rope- or snake-like material on the floor of one’s otherwise familiar room, the object is thematized and explicated. As discussed in Chapter 5, fear is one psychological pull of the unusual. Although the same unfamiliar phenomenon may impose itself as the freshly new to one group or individual and the oddly unusual to another for biographical and sociological reasons, both provinces of the unfamiliar often draw our attention due to a mix of fear and, as the Bloch quote above suggests, anticipation and excitement. A more fundamental sociological dimension of the unusual is crucial here. Whether a phenomenon is interpreted as unfamiliar or familiar is in large part socially determined. Zerubavel (2018: 35ff) discusses this unfamiliar/familiar contrast in terms of the classic sociological distinction between the deviant and the normal. Deviance and normality are social categories that rarely graft cleanly onto a normal distribution table. For example, what is socially deviant (unusual) behavior can be statistically normal, as Alfred Kinsey et al.’s (1948; see Zerubavel 2018: 36f) famous studies on American sexual behavior in mid-century show, where for example, the majority of male subjects had visited prostitutes. For this reason, making the familiar strange sometimes involves “abnormalizing” the normal (Zerubavel 2018, 2019; see Chapter 4). As explained below, defamiliarizing the interpretive and attentional systems that draw distinctions between the familiar and unfamiliar is to make the familiar absurd. A second common source of unfamiliarity results from past failures to sufficiently explicate a similar object, event, or situation. That is, one must continue explicating an object because a past attempt to sufficiently explicate an object was interrupted. Interruptions occur when another object, event, or situation of higher value intrudes on the process of interpretation.

52  Familiarity and/as strangeness For example, if one hears one’s child crying while categorizing causes of unfamiliarity at one’s computer and realizes that the other parent is attending to the other child, the process of explicating unfamiliarity may be interrupted, depending on one’s value hierarchy and other variables. In this case, the question of unfamiliarity will remain unfamiliar until later taken up as a theme again. A third cause of unfamiliarity in everyday life is the lifeworld’s “fundamental opacity” or “intransparency” (Schutz 1970: 148f; Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 141, 169ff). This means that the experienced world can never be fully known. No matter how familiar we are with a typical object, event, or experience, “there is always something unfamiliar sketched behind the familiar” (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 169). Indeed, Schutz (1970: 59) makes the case that one is never completely familiar with any one object because “every familiar object necessarily carries along with it an open horizon of hitherto unknown or strange (unfamiliar) implications and aspects that can be disclosed only in the further course of experience.” Oceans of unfamiliarity surround islands of familiarity, and the islands themselves remain unfamiliar with even the slightest changes in attention or attitude. This issue also strikes thoughtful researchers as a problem, which Sacks (1963: 10) calls the etcetera problem: “how is the scientific requirement of literal description to be achieved in the face of the fact … that a description even of a particular ‘concrete object’ can never be complete?” In everyday life, one makes the unfamiliar familiar when one solves the problematic event or object, i.e., sufficiently explicates the problem. Strangeness and familiarity are not limited to the social field but are general categories of our interpretation of the world. If we encounter in our experience something previously unknown and which therefore stands out of the ordinary order of our knowledge, we begin a process of inquiry. We first define the new fact; we try to catch its meaning; we then transform step by step our general scheme of interpretation of the world in such a way that the strange fact and its meaning become compatible and consistent with all the other facts of our experience and their meanings. If we succeed in this endeavor, then that which formerly was a strange fact and a puzzling problem to our mind is transformed into an additional element of our warranted knowledge. (Schutz 1964b: 105) Not only are oceans of unfamiliarity still familiar in the sense that their contents are taken as objects, “unknowns capable of being taken notice of and made known,” within a familiar “world as a whole” that is “always already pregiven in passive certitude” (Husserl 1973: 39, 31), but further familiar because we will solve the unfamiliar object with preestablished frameworks, by, to quote Schutz (1964b: 105) again, “transform[ing] step by step our general scheme of interpretation of the world in such a way that the strange fact

Familiarity and/as strangeness 53 and its meaning become compatible and consistent with all the other facts of our experience and their meanings” (cf. Husserl 1973: 38f). For example, [a]n unfamiliar building appears not only as a material thing, but as a building, as made by man and as serving human purposes. It is perceived as a building of a certain type, a factory, or a residential building, hence, as meant for specific human purposes. If, for instance, the house presents itself as a residential building, its perceptual appearance implies references to a certain architectural organization of its interior. That organization, however, is determined merely concerning its most schematic type and general pattern, not any details. In this respect the difference between perceptions of familiar and unfamiliar objects proves rather gradual. (Gurwitsch 1964: 239–240) For this reason, Husserl (1973: 37) memorably remarks that “unfamiliarity is at the same time always a mode of familiarity.” This is one boundary of consciously making the familiar “merely” unfamiliar: one will solve the puzzle with familiar types furnished by the society the sociologist seeks to make strange. To plunge further into the depths of the strange, including defamiliarizing taken-for-granted types and the interpretive process itself, one must make the familiar absurd. The absurd Camus (1955) famously characterizes the absurd as the contradiction between the human desire for order and “the absolute” (unity) in a chaotic and meaningless universe. Related experiences include the sense of futility and insignificance in comparison to cosmic time and the “sidereal distances” of an ineffably colossal and constantly expanding universe (Cioran 1990: 43). Yet there are also more mundane experiences of the absurd in everyday life (Lyman and Scott 1970; Shoham 2006). In Shoham’s (2006: 82) social-psychological approach, the absurd is “a breakdown of value-involvement” resulting from a failure to “bridge” a “normative disjuncture” from eroded old internalized norms and a new normative system. Our desire for congruity or unity, “that appetite for the absolute” and “an insistence upon familiarity” (Camus 1955: 13, emphasis added), underlies our supposed proclivity to conform to norms (Shoham 2006: 24ff). The absurd is the experience of a Homo Conveniens, “the harmony-seeker,” who fails to attach the self to new norms when, for example, there is incongruity between one’s social identity and personal identity. There are a few cracks through which one may glimpse the absurd in social life. These are social experiences that give one the sense that the world is essentially meaningless (Lyman and Scott 1970: 1), i.e., the sense that meaning is not inherent in (essential to) objects, but, instead, created by the

54  Familiarity and/as strangeness observer and that observer’s society. I examine three provinces of the social absurd here: the arbitrary, the inauthentic, and the ludicrous. One face of the absurd is the arbitrariness of many social phenomena (Lyman and Scott 1970: 1). Claiming that many social phenomena are arbitrary does not imply the following hard claims: cultural universals are fictional, human beings do not share universal propensities, and all social phenomena are arbitrary. For example, the functionalists were right that every society faces specific dilemmas that must be addressed through organized social action. Yet the historical forms through which society performs these functions are arbitrary, as are other social actions and forms. Arbitrariness does not imply that social arrangements are never in place for a reason (e.g., to serve power), but, instead, that they are contingent and, often, that the reasons for their existence have lost their historical validity, are nonreasonable, or are even irrational. A common route to the experience of arbitrariness is an event that discloses the contingency and historicity of social meaning systems, customs, roles, norms, etc. For example, upon learning about other world religions, a young person in a religious household may not only attempt to evaluate and compare the validity, coherence, meanings, and origins of religious systems, but also reflect on the arbitrariness of being born into one among many religions. A simple question such as “Would I not likely be a Hindu if I were born in India rather than the United States?” can lead to deeper questions, and, if resolutely pursued, will inevitably disclose the arbitrary nature of the highest forms of meaning, or at least the arbitrariness of their expression. Even if one then clings to their old religion—modified with a more liberal or more dogmatic interpretation to address the problem of contingency—, adopts a new one, or creates a theoretical explanation for religion (e.g., that religion is built upon some anthropological need or serves a social function), a glimpse into the radical contingency of social phenomena is unshakable. These experiences are also the mundane basis of the sociological technique of “comparative-historical defamiliarization” (see Chapter 4). A second face of the absurd in everyday life is the inauthentic, or the realization that most people, including one’s self, are “living a lie” (Shoham 2006). The taken-for-granted social world is brimming with “comforting mystifications,” an “okay world” that “provides routines and rituals through which these terrors [like death and freedom] are organized in such a way that we can face them with a measure of calm” (Berger 1963: 149, 147). Living inauthentically and experiencing the inauthentic are social acts because it is through social roles and norms that lies are lived. Berger’s (1963: ch. 6) sociologization of existentialist themes in his classic Invitation to Sociology is instructive. He makes much use of Sartre’s (1956: 86ff) concept of “bad faith”—pretending voluntary acts are necessary acts—to elucidate the ethical outcome of the reification of social roles into one’s identity. For example, [i]t is true that in some cases a judge has “no choice” but to sentence a man to death, but in doing so he chooses to remain a judge, an

Familiarity and/as strangeness 55 occupation chosen by him in the knowledge that it might lead to this, and he chooses not to resign instead when faced with the prospect of this duty. (Berger 1963: 144) One gets a taste of the absurd upon realizing that society “provides for the individual a gigantic mechanism by which he can hide from himself his own freedom,” and, more specifically, the roles we play are “an immense apparatus of ‘bad faith’” (Berger 1963: 145, 143). From this point of view, society is grasped as artificial mythology we use to shield ourselves from making semi-autonomous meaning in an absurd world. A third daily face of the absurd is the ludicrous, or when the regular-yet-random nature of social phenomena are experienced as comical and, often, also pitiful. The ludicrous in social life stems from at least three roots—awareness of futility, tragedy, and automatism—, all of which are jested at by reflective comedians, including sociology’s greatest comedians Erving Goffman and Jean Baudrillard. First is an awareness of the relative futility and triviality of most or all human action. It is notable that pessimists like Pascal, Schopenhauer, and Cioran are all experts in the art of social defamiliarization. One reason for pessimism’s mastery in making the familiar strange is a constant if sometimes implicit juxtaposition of familiar human strivings with the “vanity of existence,” including the likelihood of failure, or, at least, a guaranteed death following “success,” and the folly and inconsequentiality of all action in comparison to the vastness of the universe or cosmic time. A more mundane insight relevant to sociology is their cynical undermining of the seriousness of human action, an awareness captured by Cioran (1973: 11): [w]hile we are performing an action, we have a goal; performed, the action has no more reality for us than the goal we were seeking. Nothing of much consequence here—no more than a game. But some of us are conscious of this game in the course of the action: we experience the conclusion in the premises, the achieved in the virtual—we undermine “seriousness” by the very fact that we exist.4 In other words, any extended and unyielding reflection on social action, because it momentarily stands outside it, should undermine the ostensible seriousness of social action. Reason mocks action. Some manifestations of mundane vanity or futility include the insight that an individual adhering to the logical rules, common-sensical norms, and sane interpretations of a given society could just as easily be illogical, foolish, or even insane if performed in a society with even a marginally different meaning system; the sense that normal events are their own satire; repeated communicative misunderstandings despite commonly held pragmatic norms; and witnessing or facing daily disappointments while striving for socially prescribed goals.5

56  Familiarity and/as strangeness A second root of the ludicrous is nourished by attention to the minor misfortunes and small tragedies of everyday life. In the same way that reading Beckett, Kafka, or Chekov can inspire both laughter and sympathy, daily ludicrousness can be witnessed in mishaps, embarrassments, and mistakes. These events are tragic because the authors of social life are also its victims (Simmel 1968) and they are comedic for reasons vividly described by Schopenhauer (1969: 322): [t]he life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. For the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the hours, are all brought about by chance that is always bent on some mischievous trick; they are nothing but scenes from a comedy. The never-fulfilled wishes, the frustrated efforts, the hopes mercilessly blighted by fate, the unfortunate mistakes of the whole life, with increasing suffering and death at the end, always give us a tragedy. But when the tragic overshadows the comedic, seeing the ludicrous mutates into what William James (1961) calls the “morbid-minded” way of experiencing the world, epitomized in Tolstoy’s (1987) existential crisis preceding his religious conversion. Something akin to this perspective in social theory, though a historical version that keeps open the potential for a better world, can be found in the work of the first-generation Frankfurt School written during and after the Second World War (e.g., Adorno 1978). Their writings should caution readers that making the familiar strange may lead one to conclude that “blood and misery stick to the triumphs of society” and “[t]he rest is ideology” (Horkheimer 1974: 66) (see “critical defamiliarization” in Chapter 4). The third root of the socially ludicrous is catching dashes of automatism in what are generally considered intentional actions. Moments when, for example, decorum slips from the formal to the robotic or when human bodies in a workplace look as mechanical, unthinking, and repetitive as the future machines that will replace them. Bergson (1956: 81) claims that traces of automatism in living beings “is the very essence of the ludicrous.” Automaton-like human behavior is where the absurd meets the uncanny (see below). If one pays close attention to the futility, tragedy, and automatism of social life, one may reach the conclusion that modern society is something of an insane asylum of delusion masquerading as common sense and scripting masquerading as thoughtful conversation. No one has surpassed Pascal’s Pensées (1995: 9, 112) in conjuring this impression of society, where humans are cast as “so necessarily mad that it would be another twist of madness not to be mad,” even claiming that ancient political philosophies were written “as if to provide rules for a madhouse.”

Familiarity and/as strangeness 57 Experiencing the absurd is easy enough. Kosík (1976: 48) states that the “feeling of absurdity is evoked not by reflection about the automatism of the everyday. Rather, reflection about the everyday is a consequence of the absurdity that historical reality has forced upon the individual.” Sustaining and attending to the experience of absurdity, however, is difficult. Social reproduction depends on hiding from it (Berger 1963: ch. 6). What all experiences of the social absurd have in common, and why they should be treated as methodologically significant, is jarring the seeming stability and naturalness of everyday myths and rituals. Absurd experiences can be unnerving because they are personal, often obliging one to face their own inauthentic and inconsequential life (see also Chapter 5). Unlike the unfamiliar, which makes an object or an event a problem to solve with new or revised typifications, the absurd forces consciousness to reflect on and question the contingency and arbitrariness of social phenomena, including interpretive systems. The uncanny The uncanny is “a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar” (Royle 2005: 1). For example, the uncanny arises “[w]hen something familiar happens in an unfamiliar context” and “when something strange happens in a familiar context” (Sandor 2015: 5). Common examples of the uncanny include the feeling that a seemingly animated/organic thing is actually dead/inorganic, that a seemingly dead/inorganic thing is actually animated/organic, ambiguous figures that could be either automatons and/ or humans (e.g., Mori 1970), and witnessing human behavior (e.g., insanity, a seizure) that gives the impression that there are mechanical operations below the seemingly animate (Freud 1958; Jentsch 1997; Royle 2005).6 The strange-familiarity of the uncanny is explored in Freud’s (1958: 123–124, 153, emphases added) famous account, where he gives the uncanny fittingly paradoxical definitions: “that class of terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” and “a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it.”7 These definitions are paradoxical because the German word for uncanny, unheimlich, is the opposite of the German word for familiar or home-like, heimlich. In his etymology of heimlich, Freud finds that one meaning of the latter is identical with unheimlich. For this reason, he is adamant that the uncanny is not synonymous with the merely unfamiliar because the uncanny arises in the familiar, with the addition of “something” (in Freud, repression). The uncanny as a province of the strange is relevant to the overall motif of “making the familiar strange.” Indeed, novelists who capture the uncanny in their work, including Lovecraft, Kafka, and Chekov, do so through defamiliarization (Sandor 2015: 8). But what relevance could the uncanny have for sociology? Although the uncanny is not a central theme of this project, sociologists can help locate the “something” in the common definition of

58  Familiarity and/as strangeness uncanny—“the strange in the familiar” with “something” added. For example, neo-Marxist accounts of “late” capitalism have successfully rendered society uncanny by theorizing consumer society’s members as automaton-like. Most notable is Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1983). One jarring dimension of the poetic masterpiece is the description of modern human behavior—“a parcellization of gestures” dominated by machines, advertising, and the blind drive to accumulate capital—as robotic, following scripts provided by the culture industry at the expense of autonomous and spontaneous action (Debord 1983: Thesis 25). The “non-living” and mechanical image—the spectacle—controls the movements and thoughts of animate beings, a reality clearest if one stops and observes social action at a shopping mall with ethological precision or in the guilt and unease after hearing one’s child repeat what she heard in a commercial in a tone and style too similar to the advertisement. Discovery of the uncanny in social life also serves as a warning of the discontents caused by social defamiliarization (see Chapter 5).

A preliminary account of, and methodological justification for, social defamiliarization With a deeper understanding of the social and experiential nature of familiarity and strangeness, it is now possible to develop a preliminary account of, and justification for, making the familiar strange as a methodological tool for sociology. When sociology invites consciousness to make the familiar strange, this means voluntarily constituting familiar social phenomena (the same, the similar, the existent, and the routine) as unfamiliar, absurd, or, sometimes, uncanny. This section explains the scientific and practical benefits of doing so. (The modes through which sociology can “voluntarily constitute” the familiar as the strange is the topic of Chapter 4.) The scientific benefits of social defamiliarization The first scientific benefit of making the familiar strange is the ability to ask new questions about social phenomena. Because it is “beyond question,” the familiar is typically taken-for-granted, “that particular level of experience which presents itself as not in need of further analysis” (Schutz 1967e: 74). Wittgenstein (1951: §129) beautifully captures the difficulty, a problem also abridged in this chapter’s epigraph: [t]he aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something— because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. And this means: we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful.

Familiarity and/as strangeness 59 Sociology examines these “unquestioned” regions of the lifeworld (Schutz 1970: 149) that others are indifferent to. When the familiar is made strange, a formerly taken-for-granted object is thematized, made problematic, made into a puzzle, an object of investigation, etc. (in Schutz, voluntarily altering “topical relevances”). This is a two-step process: attention and questioning. There are a number of external determinants of attention, or “impressions that we cannot help attending to, that take consciousness by storm,” including intense impressions like loud sounds, specific qualities that vary culturally and individually (e.g., bitter tastes), sudden and/or repetitive stimuli, movement (e.g., when an insect crawls on a motionless blade of grass), facts that are relevant to a theme one is thinking about, and most relevant here, novel stimuli (Titchener 1916: 268–269). Social defamiliarization is first and foremost voluntarily making the familiar novel, a foundational feature of both the unfamiliar and the absurd, in order to attend to it (see “the new” above). After establishing deliberate attention, the defamiliarizing sociologist asks new questions. Like the stranger (see Chapter 4), sociologists, through social defamiliarization, ask questions about the seemingly unproblematic. To see the strange in the familiar is to wonder and ask questions about its unfamiliarity.8 This first and most important benefit of social defamiliarization, noticing and asking new questions about the familiar social world, takes us back to the premise of this book. Increasing the capacity to notice and ask questions about the familiar is especially important for sociologists because their objects—social norms, institutions, common-sensical assumptions, roles, habitual practices, etc.—are part of the very intersubjective world they were born into. These aspects of life are so deeply familiar to us that it is difficult to see them at all. Indeed, they are the processes in which we think; hence, the need for awareness of the ways through which familiar social conditions influence consciousness (see Chapter 2), including modes of attention and interpretation (see above). Social defamiliarization’s central benefit is thematizing the invisible social, including the social bases of thematization. A second scientific benefit of making the familiar strange is the ability to gain more extensive and precise knowledge about social phenomena. James’ (1918: 221ff) distinction between knowledge of acquaintance (or just “acquaintance with”) and knowledge-about casts light on this benefit. Acquaintance with a phenomenon means to have it “only present to our minds” whereas knowledge-about a phenomenon means to analyze it, to “think over its relations, to subject it to a sort of treatment and to operate upon it with our thought” (James 1918: 222). For example, Schutz (1970: 145ff) argues that routine knowledge is usually acquaintance-type familiarity. We have acquaintance with many routine activities in the sense that we are familiar with how to bring about various ends through means. However, we may have little if any knowledge-about the hows and whys of meansends chains. This includes a lack of knowledge-about the operation of social institutions. For example,

60  Familiarity and/as strangeness [i]f I put my letter into a mailbox, I am perfectly familiar with the fact that there is a very good chance that after a certain lapse of time my message will reach the address. Of course, I know also the existence of post offices, and that the mail is carried by railroad, airplanes, or vessels from one place to another. But I am not acquainted, nay I am even not eager to become acquainted, with how this whole organization works. (Schutz 1970: 147) One of sociology’s goals is to gain knowledge-about social phenomena—e.g., the inner workings of social institutions, the formation and internationalization of norms and roles, the structure and interaction of social systems, the development of self-identity through group membership, etc.—distinct from, though rooted in, the acquaintance-type knowledge of these phenomena that characterizes everyday life (e.g., Small and Vincent 1894: 16). The sociologist’s job is to modify and extend attention to see what was formerly too familiar to see (i.e., limited to acquaintance-type familiarity) in order to gain knowledge-about the familiar. To do this, the familiar must first be made strange. The scientific aim is to gain deeper analytical knowledge of what everyone knows of but does not know about. A third scientific benefit of making the familiar strange is the ability to develop better interpretations of social phenomena. In the act of shifting attention and choosing to explore the formerly taken-for-granted topic more deeply, the newly discovered data may force the sociologist to alter their former limited interpretations of the given object. The primary way social defamiliarization delivers better interpretations is discovery. Social defamiliarization helps sociologists “find ideas” through an elevated capacity to inform the research process, especially cultivating the capacity to see the social world anew and find what is novel and analytically interesting about social life (Abbott 2004). While much of sociology seeks to record the prevalence, interaction, and distribution of familiar social phenomena, rather than bringing the familiar itself into question, Abbott’s (2004) notion of “methods of discovery” is a fitting description because social defamiliarization is an important aspect of sociology that discovers new insights or illuminates what was already present but too familiar to see, or, rather, see anew. Paraphrasing Schopenhauer’s (1974: 113) critique of mechanistic reductionism and thoughtless experimentation, the botanist J. W. Moll (1934: 14) states that “the problem is not so much, to see what nobody has seen, but rather to think concerning that which everybody sees, what nobody has yet thought.” To summarize, social defamiliarization is scientifically defensible because it helps sociologists ask new questions, gain more extensive and precise knowledge, and form better interpretations. The benefits of social defamiliarization are embodied in Plessner’s (1978: 30) contention that, “[t]rue awareness is wakened in us only by what is unfamiliar. To be able to look at

Familiarity and/as strangeness 61 something, we need distance” (see also Ricoeur 1973). The meaning of this spatial analogy was put well by Brown in A Poetic for Sociology (1977: 52): distance here means psychical rather than physical distance. It refers to di-stance, a two-dimensional mode of perception, an ontological standing apart from conventional categories, and an ontological standing near to the phenomena as given. … The closeness lends perspicuity and “presence,” the remoteness permits synoptic and reflective awareness. New dimensions of one’s society remain hidden until viewed from a “distance,” thereby transformed into social phenomena that require more extended study and new interpretations. The incomplete practical benefits of social defamiliarization By jarring reified experience, social defamiliarization also has potential practical benefits. Because reification naturalizes society, it is a key component of social reproduction in everyday life and hindrance of conscious interventions to create positive social change. Kosík (1976: 48) declares that estrangement, a synonym for defamiliarization in this context, is one route to “destroy” the reified familiarity of everyday life. The world of everyday familiarity is not a known and a recognized one. In order to present it in its reality, it has to be ripped out of fetishized intimacy and exposed in alienated brutality. … To behold the truth of the alienated everyday, one has to maintain a certain distance from it. To do away with its familiarity, one has to ‘force’ it. (Kosík 1976: 48, 49) This is precisely the aim of social defamiliarization: to “force” the familiar into view by making it strange in its “alienated brutality.” Because passive acceptance of the familiar is ubiquitous, merely holding it back to think about it, rather than only live in it, seems imposed and unnatural. Brecht’s notion of the “alienation effect” (see Chapter 1) portrays the practical impact of social defamiliarization well. The point of making the play’s characters and events “appear strange to the public” is to heighten consciousness. Rather than passively identifying with the play’s characters, the alienation effect forces the audience to participate and think, where the “[a] cceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience’s subconscious” (Brecht 1964: 91). Forcing consciousness to reflect on the familiar by rendering it strange has two practical outcomes. First, social defamiliarization heightens awareness of the contingency of most social arrangements. To make the familiar absurd means to shake the seeming firmness and naturalness of social

62  Familiarity and/as strangeness institutions, norms, roles, and by rendering them contingent. That is, social defamiliarization undermines constitutional ossification, or the naïve belief that society is fixed and natural (see Chapter 2). Second, precisely by rendering the social world arbitrary, social defamiliarization heightens awareness of the changeability of all social arrangements. Thus, social defamiliarization is also a foe of possibility blindness. I refer to these forms of knowledge in Chapter 5 as “knowledge of social contingency” and “knowledge of social changeability,” respectively. Social defamiliarization’s practical benefits are “partial” because the method can only shake or disrupt subjective reification. It does nothing to alter the objective foundations of reified experience. This is why I use the term “defamiliarization” rather than “dereificaiton”: showing the familiar reified world as the strange is insufficient because it “is not enough for the truth of reality to be presented to man; man has to perform this truth” (Kosík 1976: 49). Dereificaiton would entail social-economic transformation. It is outside the confines of the goals of this book to provide prescriptive political guidance for dismantling objective reified structures. However, Chapter 5 examines the related questions concerning the ethics of social defamiliarization.

Conclusions: Sociological dimensions of social defamiliarization This chapter examines the experiential and social dimensions of the familiar and the strange and provides a preliminary account of, and justification for, social defamiliarization as a methodologically relevant act for sociological research. As mentioned in the introduction, one purpose of this chapter was to encourage reflexivity when making the familiar strange, hence the attention to the mundane experiences of familiarity and strangeness as a basis for understanding the meaning and significance of social defamiliarization. There is another dimension of the social and experiential origins of social defamiliarization relevant to a reflexive understanding: objective social change may impose strangeness on what was formerly familiar. Because social defamiliarization as a method always takes place in social context, examining imposed defamiliarization is a fitting conclusion to this chapter and transition to the next, which examines how sociologists voluntarily make the familiar strange. As long emphasized by sociologists, objective-external physical and social changes influence our experience of, ideas about, and knowledge of reality (Curtis and Petras 1970). For example, geographic movement into new cultural orbits as well as dramatic changes in one’s own society act as empirical foundations for questioning taken-for-granted assumptions and finding what was once familiar to be strange (e.g., Plessner 1978; Berger and Pullberg 1965: 209f; Bourdieu 1977: 168f). Capital’s constant revolutionizing of the forces of production, leveling of all qualitative difference under

Familiarity and/as strangeness 63 the commodify form, and adaptations to its own internal contradictions remains the underlying driver of social change today. To paraphrase Marx, all that is familiar descends into strangeness. Kosík (1976) captures the relation between objective social changes and defamiliarization in everyday life, even arguing that the distinction between the everyday and History with a capital “H”—the social structures that form and move “behind our backs”—are made conscious through the experience of these disruptions. Beyond the limits of this world of confidence, familiarity, immediate experience and replicability which the individual can count on and control, there begins another world, the very opposite to the everyday. The collision of these two worlds reveals the truth of each of them. The everyday becomes problematic and reveals itself as the everyday when it is disrupted. … Inasmuch as the everyday represents the organizing of millions of people’s lives into a regular and replicable rhythm of work, action and life, it is disrupted only when millions of people are jolted out of this rhythm. (Kosík 1976: 43) The Romanian-born French sociologist Lucien Goldmann (1964: 48) put it this way: all forms of consciousness express a provisional and mobile balance between the individual and his social environment; when this balance can be fairly easily established and is relatively stable, or when it can pass fairly easily from one form to another, men tend not to think about the problems raised by their relationship to the external world. On a social as well as on an individual plane, it is the sick organ which creates awareness, and it is in periods of social and political crisis that men are most aware of the enigma of their presence in the world. Foucault (1984: 389) also captures the objective foundations of social defamiliarization in his notion of “problematization,” a concept that describes the social process behind the “development of a given into a question,” or, more specifically, the social “transformation of a group of obstacles and difficulties into problems to which the diverse solutions will attempt to produce a response” (e.g., Foucault 1985: Part 1). Similarly, in his reconstruction of Lacan, Žižek (1989: 55ff) argues that a “symptom” arises during historical ruptures in the symbolic order that was inherited from the past, traces of which, although at first meaningless, are made meaningful in the future, where we bestow meaning on the disrupted period from a new perspective. To connect this discussion to the underlying problem of reification, Berger and Pullberg (1965: 209f, emphasis added) describe these processes of social change as “socio-historical constellations that … are conducive to

64  Familiarity and/as strangeness de-reification.” This means that in periods of social change, seemingly fixed and natural social structures may reveal themselves as the humanly built artifacts that they are. The fact that social change influences cognition and experience also holds for natural- and social-scientific cognition and experience (e.g., Dewey 1938: ch. 24; Kuhn 1970: 152f; Curtis and Petras 1970: Part Four; Merton 1975).9 As Weber (1949b: 112) comments near the poetic closing of his most famous methodological work, “there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes. The significance of the unreflectively utilized viewpoints becomes uncertain and the road is lost in the twilight. The light of the great cultural problems moves on.” This means that culture imposes values on the social scientist and these “background” values “are the source of the changing light that presents the great cultural problems to us” (Turner 2000: 15). More specifically, Weber was speaking of moments of sociocultural rupture, which undermined the efficacy and legitimacy of established ways of doing and knowing. At these times … the background understandings of everyday practice and established institutions, including science, become visible and contestable; the tacit “value-ideas” that define certain types of knowledge as “worth knowing” and, thereby, shape science’s directions shed their taken-for-grantedness and are subject to reflection, criticism, and debate. (Antonio 2000: 41) Social changes act as an experiential basis for social defamiliarization by throwing new themes into view, altering what we consider (ir)relevant, and how we experience objects (Zerubavel 2015: 57ff). For example, just as “the mental chaos and dissolution” of ancient skepticism was a “counterpart” of the disintegration of the Roman Empire (Baillie 1967: 241), so too postmodernism was the mental chaos whipped up in the rapid “space-time compression” during the transition of Fordist to post-Fordist capitalism made possible by advances in information technologies (Harvey 1989). If adopting the sociological imagination allows one to “[awaken] in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar” (Mills 1959: 8), it is also true that a formerly familiar house can become unfamiliar to consciousness after being toppled by a tornado. Indeed, sociological consciousness has been described as a radical heightening of the distinctly modern awareness of the accidentalness and arbitrariness of being socialized into a particular and contingent total system of meanings and traditions (Mills 1959; Berger 1963). There may be something about the modern experience—whether due to wage labor (Marx 1964), urbanism (Simmel 1950b), a lack of moral regulation (Durkheim 1951), or disenchantment via rationalization (Weber 1946)—, that renders one’s social world strange,

Familiarity and/as strangeness 65 uncanny, problematic, and alien, and sociology elevates and reflects on this modern experience. That sociological consciousness is conditioned by society has a few implications for exploring the methodological dimensions of social defamiliarization: (1) periods of rapid social change may foster intellectual periods in which social defamiliarization is amplified or even normative; (2) some sociologists may already have a “strange” perspective of society because they occupy unique social locations; and (3) social defamiliarization, because it brings the taken-for-granted into question, can cause tension and conflict. I will discuss each issue in turn. First, because social change can alter the taken-for-granted directions and assumptions of sociology, there are periods in sociology’s history in which social defamiliarization is heightened. Classical sociology is case in point. As is well-known, sociology was partially born out of the response to the tripartite Enlightenment-French Revolution-Industrial Revolution, among other major social changes and ideological movements (e.g., Nisbet 1966). One reason Chapter 4 often draws illustrations and examples of social defamiliarization from classical sociology is the latter’s attention to the unfamiliar out of necessity, i.e., to fathom rapid and extensive objective social changes. This is also likely a reason for the predominance of work discussed from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The excitement, brilliance, and profundity of sociological work during this period—its deep questioning and reformulation of sociology’s taken-for-granted assumptions, often by revisiting sociological classics—was a discipline-wide and sometimes combative undertaking inexorably bound up with the social changes and political radicalism characteristic of this era (Gouldner 1970; Smart 1976; Chapter 1). In short, social change, because it objectively defamiliarizes the taken-for-granted, influences what sociology deems worthy of study. Although the question cannot be addressed within the confines of this work, one wonders why contemporary immense and rapid social changes have not inspired another discipline-wide reawakening. This is not a brief announcement of yet another crisis in sociology, a discipline in a continual chronic crisis since its inception due to chronic social crises (Merton 1975). Instead, what is notable today is the absence of a crisis in sociology despite a social crisis. Here, I only mention two likely culprits for sociology’s general unresponsiveness to the social body’s spasms. First, sociology today is not so much a discipline that studies social structure and change from diverse though interrelated theories—interrelated by a sociological imagination— than it is a group of individuals with a shattered assortment of interests related to social life who happen to be housed in sociology departments. A “discipline-wide reawakening” presupposes a discipline to be reawakened (see also Chapter 5). A second probable reason that sociology is not going through a new reawakening in response to rapid social change is the university system itself is so tightly bound up with these changes—often termed the “neoliberalization of the university”—that it may undermine

66  Familiarity and/as strangeness the sociologist’s ability to step back and think from a distance. How can one produce a work that explains the alienation, anxiety, anomie, precariousness, and confusion of the contemporary human experience caused by the acceleration of hyper-competition, privatization, productivity, flexible labor markets, digitalization, etc. when the university is subjected to these same processes with a breakneck tempo antithetical to the comparatively glacial speed of reflection? The title of a recent philosophy dissertation summarizes the problem: Academics no longer think: How the neoliberalization of academia leads to thoughtlessness (Pack 2015). Stopping to observe, think about, and explain global changes that impact every feature of social life takes time and, when the only “targets” that matter—widgets (articles) per year, rankings, and grants—are temporally structured, sociological thinking, which is sluggish and uncooperative, must renounce itself to keep pace. A second implication of the objective-sociological dimension of social defamiliarization is that the methodological heuristics for making the familiar strange developed in Chapter 4 are perhaps only supplemental for some sociologists (e.g., immigrants) as the society in which they live is always already strange, conditioning a distinctive perspective of social reality (e.g., Coser 1965; Smith 1987). For example, it is often said that only a French aristocrat could pen Democracy in America. It is not a coincidence that Smith’s (1987) notion of everyday life as “problematic,” which resonates with the concept of social defamiliarization, was developed as part of a “sociology for women” (see also Zerubavel 2018: 69f). I return to this issue in the discussion of “sympathetic defamiliarization” in Chapter 4. Third, because social defamiliarization is conditioned by society, it is a social act that can cause tension and conflict, both within and beyond the academy. Bourdieu (1977: 168–169) describes how social changes which “[break] the immediate fit between the subjective structures and the objective structures” can lead to “the question[ing] of the natural or conventional character … of social facts.” However, this questioning of the taken-forgranted world (doxa) (see Chapter 2), or the “bring[ing] the undiscussed into discussion,” is conflict-ridden in class societies because the dominant class has an interest in “defending the integrity of doxa” whereas the “dominated classes have an interest in pushing back the limits of doxa” (Bourdieu 1977: 168, 169). One reason for the sometimes-oppositional character of sociological thinking is due to its tendency to make the familiar strange, or, as Bourdieu 1977: 169) put it, “exposing the arbitrariness of the taken for granted.” From mere heuristic devices that help raise questions about received common sense to politically-motivated efforts to undermine the social order by heightening class consciousness, social defamiliarization itself is a social process that often challenges the status quo, or at least irritates those who would rather not ask questions about the status quo (Bauman 1990). For this reason, social defamiliarization can be tension-filled and conflict-ridden. I describe cases of tension and conflict in each mode of defamiliarization analyzed in the following chapter.

Familiarity and/as strangeness 67

Notes













1. Schutz’s theory is indebted to Husserl’s Experience and Judgement (1973). Heidegger develops a theory of familiarity that overlaps with Schutz’s (for summary, see Van de Walle 2003: 464f). Schutz’s account is superior to both due to his comparatively sociological thrust. 2. Later, Schutz and Luckmann (1973: 107ff) seem to reserve the word “habitual” to describe knowledge in hand instead of knowledge at hand. 3. I think this is an aspect of what Israel Rosenfield (1992: 34) means when he says that “[a]ll thoughts, all conscious images, are a mixing of the old and the new, creations that are neither one or the other.” While Schutz does a fair job of describing the relational nature of consciousness and the biographical factors in the formation of types, an issue that still remains undertheorized in his work is the degree to which this intermixing of memory and perception is contingent on a temporally structured sense of self and our body, the “most basic frame of reference” (Rosenfield 1992: 45). Based on clinical evidence of brain-damaged patients who lose a sense of their body, Rosenfield (1992: 41) makes the case that “there are no memories without a sense of self.” If this is true, and if the symbolic interactionists are right that there is no sense of self without social interaction, then there is much left unexamined here at the interface of self, society, and memory in the establishment of the familiar in perception. 4. Without reference to Cioran in particular, Gurevitch (1988) notes that beliefs like Cioran’s can have pathological consequences or be associated with a mental disorder called “depersonalization,” which is characterized by “a feeling of being split. He [the patient] feels as if he were two selves at the same time. One self appears to be standing off at a distance in a detached and relatively objective manner observing another representation of the self in action. To the observing self the latter appears separate and estranged” (Arlow 1966: 456-457). 5. Yet those amused by pointing out the obvious futility of human action should heed Hegel’s (1967: 547) contention that consciousness of the vanity of all things is paradoxically its own form of vanity, a vanity that needs the vanity of all things “in order to get from them consciousness of itself.” 6. Note here the continuing relevance of Goffman’s (1974) argument that “natural” and “social” frameworks are foundational to all interpretation, at least in the Western mind (cf. Husserl 1989: 183ff). 7. Because the uncanny is not a central theme of this book, I refer the reader to Royle’s The Uncanny (2005), a more systematic study of the uncanny’s many manifestations and explications of chief theorists of the uncanny, such as Heidegger’s ontological account (Withy 2015). I am unaware of any sociological theories of the uncanny. 8. One of the links between great sociology and philosophy is the capacity to make problems of philosophical significance that demand, in response, the formation of concepts. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1994), this process is the very essence of philosophy. 9. I would like to thank Shane Soboroff for recommending Merton (1975) and Zachary Piso for conversations about, and recommended readings on, Dewey’s sociology of science.

4

Modes of social defamiliarization

“Damn me, but all things are queer, come to think of ‘em.” - Ahab, Moby-Dick (Melville 1964: 174)

Introduction Chapter 1 reviewed past efforts to describe social defamiliarization as a method, Chapter 2 clarified the problem of reification as an obstacle to sociological knowledge, and Chapter 3 provided a preliminary account of social defamiliarization as a method, as well as its advantages, after outlining the experiential and sociological meanings of the familiar and the strange. This chapter describes how sociologists can voluntarily and methodologically transform previously irrelevant and familiar social phenomena into sociologically relevant and strange phenomena. Rather than formulating a process that sociologists can follow to reach a transcendental attitude as phenomenology does (see Chapter 1), a more modest route is taken here. I develop a typology of modes of social defamiliarization, or, ways of thinking sociologists have and can use to make the familiar strange. In comparison to the phenomenological epoché, modes of defamiliarization do not claim to provide access to primordial experience, an unfeasible goal for reasons explained in Chapter 1. Instead, through comparative, reflexive, and critical forms of thinking, modes of social defamiliarization can be thought of as “tricks,” to borrow Becker’s (1998) term for creative aspects of methodology, to help partially solve the particular problem of living in the same taken-for-granted social reality that one studies in order to see anew or think about what “everybody sees.” By looking at what sociologists subconsciously look through, the analysis of modes of social defamiliarization gets at what is involved in establishing distance from, in order to get closer to, social phenomena. The aim of the septempartite typology—(1) comparative-historical, (2) scopical, (3) metaphorical, (4) suspicional, (5) sympathetic, (6) critical, and (7) nonhuman—is to integrate, systematize, and significantly expand upon past attempts to describe social defamiliarization as well as illustrate, as a social

70  Modes of social defamiliarization act, some of the tensions involved in doing so. Tensions related to social defamiliarization include challenging the legitimacy of social institutions, recommending prescriptive or political action, and causing intellectual disputes. While the typology is not meant to be exhaustive—indeed, one goal is to open a more explicit conversation about modes of social defamiliarization—, I do strive to capture those forms of defamiliarization that are historically central to sociology as a form of consciousness.1 Hence the heavy reliance on examples from classical sociology. I also often draw upon classical sociology for examples and illustrations because I think most readers will be familiar with this frame of reference and, as mentioned in Chapter 3, social defamiliarization is built into classical sociology for social reasons. In what follows, I describe, and give examples of, seven modes of social defamiliarization: (1) comparative-historical, (2) scopical, (3) metaphorical, (4) suspicional, (5) sympathetic, (6) critical, and (7) nonhuman. I conclude with a discussion of how social defamiliarization informs the research process, and briefly explore overlapping modes of social defamiliarization.

Comparative-Historical defamiliarization: Contrast now and then, here and there Comparative-historical defamiliarization refers to relativizing familiar social phenomena by comparing them to distinct yet related social phenomena from other, sometimes no longer existing, societies. Often with guidance from John Stuart Mill’s methods and inspiration from the historical-comparative research of Marx and Weber, a great deal has been written about the uses of history and comparison in social research (e.g., Andreski 1964; Erikson 1970; Lijphart 1975; Skocpol and Somers 1980; Skocpol 1984; Tilly 1984; Sztompka 1986; Ragin 1987; Burawoy 1989; Abbott 1991; Kiser and Hechter 1991; Griffin 1995; Calhoun 1996; Emigh 1997; Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003; Adams et al. 2005; Clemens 2007). The benefit of the various forms of comparative-historical sociologies for this project is not their ability to contribute to generalizable theory or even illuminate social structures and processes invisible to non-historical research (see Calhoun 1996: 313–314), but, instead, the way in which comparative-historical thinking denaturalizes—historicizes and relativizes—one’s own society.2 In other words, comparative-historical thinking makes the familiar strange by comparing familiar social phenomena with previously unfamiliar social phenomena. This section explains how defamiliarization is achieved through comparative thinking and attention to history, outlines three new forms of awareness gained through comparative-historical defamiliarization, and provides a historical example of tension created by comparative-historical defamiliarization. All modes of social defamiliarization involve comparison-making. Each modality invites the sociologist to split attentional experience into two dimensions, directing one level of attention to what one is studying and the other from a new perspective, which sheds light on the first dimension. For

Modes of social defamiliarization 71 example, social metaphors (see below) share the same logic as comparative analysis (Brown 1977: 120ff). Indeed, it is likely impossible to know about a thing without knowing about another similar yet distinct thing (Emigh 1997) and all social research is comparative (Ragin 1987). Comparative-historical defamiliarization is a distinctive form of comparison in which one makes one’s own society strange by comparing it with a different society, institution, or case, often a past society, institution, or case (hence the conflated modality) (see also Skocpol and Somers 1980). Consciously historicizing social existence, or the methodical concentration on the contingency of one’s society, is made possible by attending to and reflecting upon social history, generating an awareness described well by Mills (1959: 150): “there is, I believe, no [law] stated by any social scientist that is transhistorical, that must not be understood as having to do with the specific structure of some period.” Distinct socially defamiliarized points of view are made possible through comparative and historical thinking: (1a) the awareness that one’s society has attributes another society does not; (1b) the awareness that one’s society does not have the attributes of another society; and (2) the awareness that one’s society has unexpected similar attributes as another society. (1a) and (1b) are usually linked and akin to Tilly’s (1984: 82) strategy of “individualizing comparison,” or, “contrast[ing] specific instances of a given phenomenon as a means of grasping the peculiarities of each case.” In the same way that negative cases can contribute to theory by attending to the gap between the negative case and inaccurate theoretical expectation (Emigh 1997), comparative-historical defamiliarization illuminates what social phenomena are not present in one’s own society or another society. Attention to historical difference is partly responsible for classical sociology’s brilliance (cf. Skocpol 1984; Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003): Gesellschaft, organic solidarity, capitalism, and rational authority gain their meaning through comparison with their historical and often antipodal counterparts. As a common form of social defamiliarization in sociological analysis, there are too many exemplars of comparative-historical defamiliarization to review here. Foucault’s work in particular is marked by this tactic of highlighting historical difference and discontinuity to defamiliarize the present (see Chapter 1), a tactic that even proceeds his genealogical method. For example, he opens The Order of Things (1970: xv) with a passage from a Chinese encyclopedia, where animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies. What this passage immediately communicates to us in the “exotic charm of another system of thought” is “the limitation of our own”: “the stark impossibility of thinking that” (Foucault 1970: xv). A few more examples

72  Modes of social defamiliarization may be helpful: the full genius of Weber’s analysis of the modern West is clearer after taking seriously his effort to contrast the “historically well-nigh monstrous uniqueness of this civilization” with cross-civilizational cases (Luethy 1970: 126; see Tenbruck 1980); the distinctive features of industrial society become visible only by holding, and comparing, multiple past societies in consciousness (Lenski 1970); and, to return to Foucault (1970), even the uniqueness of the “profound historicity” of the modern “episteme” itself, of which comparative-historical defamiliarization is one instance, can only be made an object of investigation and brought to life if compared to past paradigmatic discourses. In short, sociological consciousness is encouraged to step back and see society from a new point of view when it highlights differences between historical and current social phenomena. Another view made possible by comparative-historical defamiliarization is less obvious: one’s society is made strange when it is shown to be similar to another society that one expected to be different. Showing that a social phenomenon is an “instance” of a more general phenomenon that follows similar rules is not only a path to theory construction (Skocpol and Somers 1980; Tilly 1984: ch. 6), but also to social defamiliarization. For example, modern society is made new by: comparing the modern mind’s essential structural similarities with the premodern mind (Lévi-Strauss 1966); comparing the American South’s mid-twentieth-century racial structure to the traditional Indian caste system (Berreman 1960; Berger 1963: 22–23); comparing contemporary U.S. politics and society to Weimar Germany, even if a limited comparison (Bessner and Sparke 2017); and comparing the business class’s accumulation of goods through predation, as opposed to industry, to the leisure classes of barbarian warrior cultures (Veblen 1953), not to mention other continuations of barbarism in the alleged era of unlimited “progress” (Meštrović 1993). In short, highlighting similarities between the there and past, on the one hand, and the here and now, on the other, transforms the latter’s familiarity into the former’s strangeness. As noted above, each section on modes of defamiliarization will touch on tensions or conflicts that arise from making the familiar strange, tensions that range from academic clashes to undermining institutional legitimacy. Like other modalities, comparative-historical defamiliarization is tension-laden because it challenges taken-for-granted assumptions. In particular, comparative-historical thinking defies national, historical, and disciplinary prejudices (the familiar). A historical and academic example is fitting. The goals and divisions between the social sciences were challenged following the Second World War—as the U.S. became the undisputed global hegemon, the Third World “asserted” itself in geopolitics (e.g., “communist” China), and the university system spread globally—, and the U.S. needed non-idiographic (i.e., non-anthropological) studies of the newly-deemed “developing world” by sociologists, economists, and political scientists (Wallerstein 2004: ch. 1). This led to a proliferation of modernization theory, which assumed, teleologically, that societies developed in a

Modes of social defamiliarization 73 way that would trace the steps of the U.S., or, in the Soviet rendition, societies would necessarily pass through a series of social formations toward communism. However, due to the real “reverberations of political conflicts inside the United States and across the globe” from the 1950s through the 1980s, young sociologists reacted against “the implicit world views embodied in both static and developmentalist versions of structural functionalism” (Skocpol 1984: 3; see also Calhoun 1996). This reaction not only led to classic and sometimes radical works in comparative-historical analysis, such as Barrington Moore Jr.’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) and Immanuel Wallerstein’s first volume of The Modern World System (1974) (for review of this period, see Lange 2013: 28ff), but also caused massive intellectual debates and conflicts that ultimately destabilized U.S.-centric modernization theory and structural functionalism. These academic disputes riding on the back of historical global changes, which permanently transformed the discipline, bring us back to Mills (1959), whose most famous work harbingered sociology’s rejuvenation in comparative-historical thinking. It is only by attending to the historical self-formation of societies that the sociological imagination allows one to make the familiar strange. Contemporary sociology in the U.S., where “grand theory” is all but dead yet “abstracted empiricism” is normative, can still learn much from Mills’ (1959: 215) seemingly simple assertion that “[y]ou would never think of describing an institution in twentieth-century America without trying to bear in mind similar institutions in other types of structures and periods.” Consciously historicizing and relativizing the present through historical comparison draws attention to what does exist or does not exist, phenomena missed in the “automatic” grasping of the taken-for-granted. Comparative-historical defamiliarization constitutes one’s own society as a unique case. As the society one is born into appears to common sense as natural and timeless (Lukács 1971), historical comparison allows one to gain experiential distance through the awareness that all social structures impact social action in time and all social action takes place through time (Griffin 1995). By denaturalizing one’s own society, comparative-historical defamiliarization is a principal tool for making the familiar strange.

Scopical defamiliarization: Zoom in or zoom out to an unconventional level Scopical defamiliarization refers to the examination of social phenomena at a different level of analysis than the level of analysis suggested by sociological tradition or lay convention to see the social phenomena with other eyes. The history of social thought can be read as a discussion about the relative merits and limitations of individualistic-microscopical and holistic-macroscopical approaches to understanding society (Alexander and Giesen 1987).3 This discussion climaxed in the 1980s centering on a search for linkages between analytically distinct levels of analysis, or, in contrast, passionate cases for the

74  Modes of social defamiliarization superiority of one level of analysis over others (e.g., Collins 1981; Ritzer 1981; Coleman 1986; Alexander et al. 1987; Wiley 1988; Fararo 1989; Hillbert 1990; Liska 1990). In comparison, the goal of this section is seemingly unremarkable—as the micro-macro debate has since become latent content in sociology’s unconscious—and more modest in comparison: to describe how social phenomena are made strange by looking at them from different levels of analysis. I distinguish between three forms of scopical defamiliarization (microscopical, mesoscopical, and macroscopical) and provide examples of each. Additionally, I highlight conflicts that stem from scopical defamiliarization in the classroom. Microscopical defamiliarization refers to the insight gained by taking a microscopic perspective to study social phenomena typically studied at the macro-level. Even if one rejects the argument that all macro-level social phenomena can be reduced to, and explained by, micro-level social interactions and events (Collins 1981), taking a micro-level perspective elucidates what is usually considered macro-level phenomena by reorienting questions and drawing attention to overlooked actions, emotions, rituals, exchanges, values, processes, and the like. Examining social stratification and mobility— macro-level social phenomena par excellence—from a micro-level reorients the kinds of questions asked (e.g., How are stratification systems reproduced?), illuminates new phenomena (e.g., boundary maintenance in everyday life), and, of course, the technical methods adopted (e.g., ethnography) (Schwalbe et al. 2000). As an attempt to “to construct a new storey beneath historical materialism” (Simmel 1978: 56), i.e., to locate Marx’s framework “in the very structure of the life-world of human beings” (Salomon. 1965: 135), Simmel’s Philosophy of Money (1978) is an exemplar of microscopical defamiliarization. Instead of focusing on the macro-level structures and movements of capital, Simmel’s treatise zooms in to explore the creation, recreation, and impact of the money economy at the level of personality and interaction in terms of meaning-making and social psychology. By seeing modern capitalism from the inside at a micro-level, Simmel defamiliarizes an institution usually regarded as something “outside” the individual by showing how, on the one hand, the money economy has furthered the freedom of individuals from moral and group restraints and increased options for self-expression, yet, on the other hand, it has increased the prevalence of impersonal relations. In short, one can get a fresh perspective on social phenomena by zooming in when macroscopic perspectives are the norm. Macroscopical defamiliarization refers to the illumination gained by zooming out when convention recommends micro-level analysis. Excluding some microsociological traditions that consciously and sometimes polemically abstain (e.g., Homans 1961), one of sociology’s distinctive features is the tendency to take a macroscopic view of whatever subject matter is at hand. Despite diverse lines of argumentation, motives, and aims, all of the following projects partly treat a macroscopic perspective as central to sociological consciousness: Mills’s (1959) case for drawing lines between private troubles as public issues, Merton’s (1968) defense of the merits of a more modest

Modes of social defamiliarization 75 functionalism, Wallerstein’s (2004) view that a global perspective is indispensable for understanding any major change since the long sixteenth century, and Durkheim’s (1938) very notion of a “social fact.” As every student of sociology knows, Durkheim (1951: 46) selected the topic of suicide to further establish the discipline of sociology due to the common-sensical and reasonable belief that suicide is a purely individual act and, thus, only demanding of psychological study. His reasoning against this assumption is worth quoting in full as it encapsulates the act of macroscopical defamiliarization: [s]ince suicide is an individual action affecting the individual only, it must seemingly depend exclusively on individual factors, thus belonging to psychology alone. Is not the suicide’s resolve usually explained by his temperament, character, antecedents, and private history? The degree and conditions under which suicides may be legitimately studied in this way need not now be considered, but that they may be viewed in an entirely different light is certain. If, instead of seeing in them only separate occurrences, unrelated and to be separately studied, the suicides committed in a given society during a given period of time are taken as a whole, it appears that this total is not simply a sum of independent units, a collective total, but is itself a new fact sui generis, with its own unity, individuality and consequently its own nature—a nature, furthermore, dominantly social. (Durkheim 1951: 46) This “entirely different light” is the beam of macroscopical defamiliarization, a staple of sociological thinking. Mesoscopical defamiliarization refers to the illumination gained by taking a group- (Fine 2012) or organizational-level (Hage 1980) perspective when sociological tradition or lay convention calls for examining the given social phenomena at the micro- or macro-level. One route to mesoscopical defamiliarization is examining social phenomena at a meso-level when individualistic explanation and description is common. For example, sociologists have long challenged the widespread belief in the West that the self (only) comes “from within or from beyond,” arguing, instead, that the self develops out of “comparison with groups of meaningful others” (Fine 2012; e.g., Mead 1934; Shibutani 1955). A second route to mesoscopical defamiliarization is examining social phenomena at a group- or organizational-level usually examined at a macro-level. For example, rather than zooming out to the state or masses, typical units of analysis in political sociology, zooming in on “tiny publics” (Fine and Harrington 2004) in small settings illuminates a world of civic engagement or non-engagement (Eliasoph 1998) that creates and recreates civil society (for review, see Fine 2012: 170–172). Taking a meso-level perspective almost always makes the familiar strange because sociological consciousness is so accustomed to adopting either micro- or macro-levels of analysis.

76  Modes of social defamiliarization The sociologist’s classroom is one social arena where scopical defamiliarization causes conflict, specifically the oft-noted tension between the sociological perspective and the individualistic assumptions of students in the U.S. (e.g., Davis 1992; Eckstein et al. 1995; Kleinman and Copp 2009; Garoutte and Bobbitt-Zeher 2011; Whitaker 2017). An especially acute conflictual step in the student’s process of making a “sociological shift”—or moving “away from an individualistic way of viewing social relations toward one that recognizes patterned relationships embedded in power relations” (Whitaker 2017: 14)—is considering social stratification and inequality as an outcome of “rigged” macro-systems (Kleinman and Copp 2009; see also Davis 1992; Garoutte and Bobbitt-Zeher 2011). A structural take on inequality causes conflict—indeed, “resistance, paralysis, and rage” (Davis 1992)—because it defamiliarizes and, thus, challenges the student’s individualistic “preconceived notions” (Garoutte and Bobbitt-Zeher 2011), “preunderstandings” (Whitaker 2017), or “folk beliefs” (Kleinman and Copp 2009). Although conflict is magnified when the student belongs to a dominant groups (see also Bohmer and Briggs 1991), “most students resist acknowledging the harms brought about by unequal social arrangements” (Kleinman and Copp 2009: 283). This is not to imply that macro-level analysis of social stratification is the correct sociological level of analysis. As explained above, one way to defamiliarize stratification within sociology is through micro-level analysis because macroscopical understandings are normative within the discipline. However, within the U.S. classroom, a macroscopical perspective defamiliarizes social stratification and causes conflict because individualism is normative within U.S. society. To summarize, levels of analysis are not only analytical distinctions useful for sociological analysis (Alexander and Giesen 1987) and “paradigm spaces” relevant to the actor (Wiley 1988), they are also tools for social defamiliarization. When one level of analysis predominates over others, in sociological or lay consciousness, adopting a different level of analysis casts a new light on the taken-for-granted. Three modes of scopical defamiliarization are illustrated: (1) taking a micro-level perspective when convention suggests a macro-level perspective (microscopical defamiliarization); (2) taking a macro-level perspective when convention suggests a micro-level perspective (macroscopical defamiliarization); and (3) taking a meso-level perspective when convention suggests micro- or macro-levels of analysis (mesoscopical defamiliarization). Shifting to a level of analysis that challenges taken-for-granted assumptions can cause conflict, e.g., when students with individualistic assumptions are presented with macro-level analyses of social stratification and inequality.

Metaphorical defamiliarization: Use language from a different experiential domain If metaphor is “a mode of thought wherein we interpret one domain of experience through the language of another” (Rigney 2001: 3) then metaphorical defamiliarization refers to how the language from the formally distant

Modes of social defamiliarization 77 domain of experience estranges the taken-for-granted and casts a new light on society. When done well, metaphors simultaneously provide distance from, and illuminate, the social world (Nisbet 1976: 32–34; Brown 1977: ch. 4; Becker 1998: 35–44; Abbott 2004: 113–118; Rigney 2001). This section explains the usefulness of metaphor for social defamiliarization, how sociology’s common root metaphors—the foundational assumptions by which metaphorical illustration and models are derived (Brown 1977)—bring new aspects of social reality to light through social defamiliarization, uses Goffman’s work as an example of tensions created by metaphorical defamiliarization, and closes with some best practices for metaphorical defamiliarization in sociology. “Metaphorical analysis” (Rigney 2001) or building tension through an “indefinite intensification” of elaboration between two meaning systems (Brown 1977) defamiliarizes the taken-for-granted by (1) drawing our attention to aspects of social experience that would not be described or identified without the language carried over from a different domain of experience or (2) the “frame” or “principal subject” (in this case, a given social phenomenon) is “seen through” the metaphor, developing a new meaning (Black 1962). Abbott’s (2004: 113) discussion of analogy-making as a “search heuristic” is helpful here, where, through analogy, one gets “new ideas from elsewhere” (see also Nisbet 1976: 32–34). Either the concepts from the new frame of reference direct attention to new things (in the formerly takenfor-granted frame of reference) or the objects under question are explained by analogy. For example, Becker (1998: 43) defends the society-as-organism metaphorical imagery (see below) because it directs our attention to features of social reality that may have otherwise been missed: “all the things connected to what you’re interested in” (cf. Small and Vincent 1894: 90, 92). This is why Brown (1977: 80, 81, 102, 98) describes metaphorical thinking as a “logic of discovery,” a tension-filled “two-way street,” a means to “see freshly,” a “new way of understanding that which we already know” by constituting “new domains of perception and new languages of thought.” The literal absurdity of metaphor “makes us stop in our tracks and examine it. It offers a new awareness” (Brown 1977: 81). It is the distance between the two levels or categories of meanings that create a defamiliarized understanding. Metaphors create a two-dimensional constitution of a social object that once seemed familiar and natural. Many sociological models and theoretical frameworks are built on five (Brown 1977) to eight (Rigney 2001) root metaphors: society as (1) organism/living system, (2) machine, (3) language/discourse, (4) drama/theatre, (5) game, (6) war, (7) legal order, and (8) marketplace. I would add here Simmel’s underexploited metaphor: (9) society as a work of art (Davis 1973; Frisby 1991; de la Fuente 2008; see also Nisbet 1976). Again, the utility of metaphorical thinking for sociology is the capacity to cast a new light on the familiar and directing our attention to features of society we may have missed, or, rather, were formally indescribable without the metaphor.

78  Modes of social defamiliarization Through these root metaphors, one can see society, or facets of society, as an interconnected, relational, and evolving system (e.g., Luhmann 1995); a system of mechanical, impersonal forces (e.g., Weber 1978: 217–226); an artificial yet impactful text constructed through symbolic interaction (e.g., Ricoeur 1971); a stage composed of actors playing roles for an audience (e.g., Goffman 1959); a competitive and lively game of tricks, tactics, and rules for prizes (e.g., Gamson 1961); an endless conflict between adversaries (e.g., Dahrendorf 1959); a collection of normative rules and laws (e.g., Durkheim 1974); an assortment of transactions between mostly rational and self-interested atoms (e.g., Homans 1961); and/or coherence-giving “forms” that can be abstracted from a transitory and fluid concrete “content” (Simmel 1950a: 40ff). These features of social life are difficult to see without metaphors precisely because of their familiarity. Metaphor distances us from the familiar, creating space for new questions, insights, and connections. Part of what makes “the familiar” familiar is the intersubjectively shared understanding of the uniqueness of various social spheres and institutions, which are assumed to be, and often are, governed by different rules and norms and distinct appropriate attitudes and roles. Akin to the form of comparative-historical defamiliarization that highlights similarities between social phenomena (see above), metaphorical defamiliarization creates tension by challenging or even undermining the assumed uniqueness of different social phenomena. Here, Goffman’s work is still unsurpassed in its ability to defy the reader’s pre-defined understandings of familiar institutions by metaphorically chipping away at ossified distinctions between institutions. In Asylums (Goffman 1961a), for example, the mental institution is not only shown to share structural similarities with seemingly qualitatively different “total institutions”—such as the prison, the merchant ship, and the logging camp4 —, Goffman further defamiliarizes officially “altruistic” total institutions, like the mental hospital, through humorous metaphorical comparisons with storage dumps and a Potemkin village (Fine and Martin 1990: 99–100). This has the effect of defamiliarizing taken-for-granted assumptions: “[t]he ‘hospital’ is not what it alleges; its pretense is negated through rhetoric” (Fine and Martin 1990: 100). In his well-known dramaturgical model, the familiar practices of everyday life, which are assumed to be sincere, are made strange through comparison with the artificial performances of actors: “impression managers” prepare for their “roles” in a “back stage” before “staging” instrumental “performances” for “audiences” (Goffman 1959). Prior to adopting the theatre as a root metaphor, Goffman (1952) compares social interaction in various institutional settings to a confidence game (a “con”), where an “operator” (con man) defrauds a “mark” (the defrauded victim). In a racket or “play,” a member of the operator’s “team” may stay behind to “cool-out” the mark, that is, soothe the defrauded victim of the disappointment caused by losing his self-image of a “shrewd man” after

Modes of social defamiliarization 79 being exposed as “another easy mark” (Goffman 1952: 452). Goffman metaphorically compares the con man’s ability to cool-out the frustrations and anger of the mark, who is managing the loss of a role and status, to the hostesses’ pacification of the angry restaurant goer, the complaint department’s quieting of the frustrated department store customer, and the psychotherapist’s relation to the patient, where the psychotherapist’s “job is to send the patient back to an old world or a new one, and to send him back in a condition in which he can no longer cause trouble to others or can no longer make a fuss” (Goffman 1952: 461). The defamiliarizing metaphor is that, like a racket, “[a]n institution … cannot take it on the lam; it must pacify its marks” (Goffman 1952: 455). Goffman also serves as an example of why sociologists ought to be reflexive about the social determinants of social defamiliarization (see Chapter 3). Gouldner (1970: 381ff) persuasively argues that dramaturgical metaphors unknowingly reflect a shift to a marketing-oriented monopoly capitalism. In other words, Goffman’s cynical anthropology may have more to do with consumer society than it does with human nature. But even if historicized, or, rather, especially when historicized (Young and Massey 1978; Langman 1991), Goffman’s metaphors are still perceptive and sharp examples of social defamiliarization. This author knows of no better metaphor than theatrical racket to defamiliarize and, thus, illuminate many facets of our spectacular consumer society, from online dating to the self-marketing of corporations as “socially responsible.” In short, much of Goffman’s brilliance stems from his knack for defamiliarizing social institutions through metaphor. It is naïve to reject metaphors as decorative yet unscientific techniques, if only because positivists rely on their own metaphors (e.g., growth, mechanism) (Nisbet 1976: 33; Rigney 2001: 49ff) and it may be impossible to not think metaphorically about society (Rigney 2001; see also Brown 1977: 91ff), or even to conceptualize anything at all (Nietzsche 1982). However, metaphorical defamiliarization should follow a set of best practices, including: a cultivated yet restrained willingness to make “rash connections” (Abbott 2004: 117–118); a conscious “as if” approach (i.e., pretending the metaphor is not literally absurd in order to convey what was formally impossible to convey); the use of economical, consistent, and elegant metaphors; metaphors should be transferable to more than one realm of social life; correspondence between the two meaning systems should be selective, not absolute (Brown 1977; see also Rigney 2001: 204ff); and awareness of the social determinants of metaphoric thinking (Rigney 2001; e.g., see above). If used skillfully and knowingly, the language adopted from and carried over from a different experiential domain makes one’s own social world look alien and new, which can cause tension by challenging institutional uniqueness. To quote Brown (1977: 88) again: “[m]etaphor concentrates our attention on what is patently not there in the language, but which emerges in the interplay of juxtaposed associations.”

80  Modes of social defamiliarization

Suspicional defamiliarization: Look behind appearances Suspicional defamiliarization refers to the mental act of looking “underneath” or “behind” immediate “appearances”—usually the typical meanings people assign to action and common-sensical accounts of social institutions—for more essential, unintended, and/or more impactful facets of society, thereby making the familiar strange, secondary, or even illusionary. “Suspicional” alludes to Ricoeur’s (1970: 27, 30) “hermeneutics of suspicion,” where the interpreter’s aim is not to understand or explicate a text through a “willingness to listen,” but, instead, “a tearing off of masks” and “reduc[ing] disguises” through a “willingness to suspect.” When human action is metaphorically taken as a “textual” affair (Ricoeur 1971) (see above), Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are the famous tripartite “masters of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970: 33). For example, each held that the “deeper” meaning of religion—roughly, consolation (Marx), weakness (Nietzsche), and illusion (Freud)—is different and more essential than its “apparent” meaning, or, the meaning held by believers (Stewart 1989). In debunking or “unmasking” (Baehr 2019), sociological consciousness defamiliarizes the social world by “looking for levels of reality other than those given in the official interpretations of society” through a Nietzschean “art of mistrust” (Berger 1963: 38, 30). This section discusses the importance of the sociological distinction between subjective intention and objective outcome for suspicional defamiliarization, the inherently conflictual nature of suspicional defamiliarization, and touches on some of the intellectual and practical outcomes of this modality. In sociology, being suspicious of outer “appearances” in order to find “underlying” processes and structures neither entails conspiratorial nor metaphysical thinking. The goal of looking behind mere appearances has been central to the sociological endeavor. For example, in an early American sociology textbook, Small and Vincent (1894: 305) make clear that the “student of society … must penetrate outward manifestations, and seek to learn the nature of the influences which lie back of them.” To make the familiar strange through a willingness to suspect, sociological consciousness must, like the classical sociologists, make a distinction between the “self-declared motivations” of actions and common-sensical interpretation of society, on the one hand, and the social-structural conditioning of action and unintended objective outcomes of action on the other (Merton 1968: 114ff; Ashley and Orenstein 2001: 466f). While self-declared motivations and common-sensical understandings are not necessarily illusions or distortions of reality, they can be blind to deeper layers of social reality and unintended outcomes of action. This distinction is key to any analysis rooted in Marx’s thinking (see “critical defamiliarization” below) but is also common in other schools of sociological thought. For example, Weber is perhaps the sociologist of suspicion in the sense of suspecting unintended objective outcomes of social action despite, or even antithetical to, the actor’s intentions,

Modes of social defamiliarization 81 where, for example, the other-worldly value-rationality of Calvinism helped bring about a worldly, instrumentally-rational economic system (Weber 1958; see Dawe 1978). Despite the empirical and conceptual flaws of the protestant ethic thesis (e.g., see Luethy 1970), it is only one component of Weber’s analysis of the contradiction at the heart of the modern condition. In the process of rationalization, “that which was originally merely a means (to an otherwise valuable end) becomes an end or an end-in-itself, actions intended as a means become independent rather than goal-oriented and precisely thereby lose their original ‘meaning’ or end, i.e., their goal-oriented rationality based on man and his needs” (Loewith 1970: 114; see the discussion of “enframing” in Chapter 2). This consistent strand of Weber’s corpus is not only an empirical and evaluative argument, it is also a tale of unintended consequences that diverge from official narratives—an act of suspicional defamiliarization. As Marianne Weber (1975: 337) said of her husband, “[he was] moved, above all, by the fact that on its early course an idea always and everywhere operates in opposition to its original meaning and thereby destroys itself.” The concept of “latent function” is a fruitful example of suspicional defamiliarization at work (Merton 1968). By assuming that there is a gap between conscious motivations for action that lead to recognized and intended systematic adaptations (manifest function), on the one hand, and unintended and unrecognized systemic outcomes (latent function), on the other, the sociologist is able to defamiliarize society to show how “social life is not as simple as it seems” (Merton 1968: 122), which is the “first wisdom of sociology” (Berger 1963: 23). The concept of latent function is latent in many social scientific classics, all of which equally serve as examples of suspicional defamiliarization (see Merton 1968: 114ff, 123f). For example, the purpose of buying expensive goods is to increase social status through waste (latent function), not only to acquire superior goods (manifest function) (Veblen 1953). While Merton makes clear that sociological consciousness rarely denies the reality of subjective motivation and intended consequences of action, there is tendency for suspicional defamiliarization to find the hidden, the unintended, and the unrecognized, to be more essential. Suspicional defamiliarization necessarily causes tension, whether internal and/or social. Internally, looking behind appearances is to distrust common sense and undermine self-assurance. As a social process, it can entail disclosing, to others, unintended and sometimes tragic outcomes of their behavior or accusing others of distortions in thought and self-deception, even if the accusation is polished or merely implied. Beyond healthy skepticism, most sociologists have likely encountered annoyance and even mild anger within and outside the classroom when discussing, for example, “what is really going on” in a social institution or how everyday practices reproduce a larger social system. Negative reactions to sociological insights emerge from multiple sources, many of which are related to suspicional

82  Modes of social defamiliarization defamiliarization’s irritating knack for peering behind the taken-forgranted: the feeling of culpability in social outcomes that are generally considered unjust, distrust of an “expert” refuting common sense, the feeling of having less control over one’s future than assumed, etc. It is for this reason that suspicional defamiliarization should be pursued with care, theoretical foundations, and, most importantly, self-critique. Otherwise, “unmasking” will slip, or already has slipped, into irrational dogmatism and contempt (Baehr 2019). Ricoeur’s (1970: 33) “masters of suspicion,” Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, still serve as exemplars of suspicional defamiliarization’s conflictual core, where the modality entails accusing others and one’s self of ideological trappings (Marx), weakness and ressentiment (Nietzsche), and/or being motivated first by arational drives and that seemingly rational beliefs and actions are sometimes pathological methods for resolving inner frustration, conflict, and anxiety (Freud). Further, the three classic hammers of suspicion entail a sometimes painful confrontation with the world and the self: political engagement to change the social conditions that spawns ideology (Marx) (see the section on “critical defamiliarization”), overcoming weakness and ressentiment by embracing suffering as a necessary and even desirable aspect of life (Nietzsche), or becoming conscious of the roots of one’s pathologies, sometimes through structured dialogue with others (Freud). In short, the familiar is a distorted or one-sided depiction of reality (e.g., ideology, ressentiment, unreflected unconscious motives) and lifting the veil requires an arduous confrontation with the comforts and certainties of the self and others. By departing from common-sensical understandings of the social world, suspicional defamiliarization defies the taken-for-granted and opens the possibility for paradoxical and counterintuitive results. Indeed, defying common sense is the hallmark of most interesting sociological theories (Davis 1971; see also Brown 1977: ch. 5). Such theories, however, can only defamiliarize society by first suspecting that there is a distinction between “seeming” and being, or, the subjective motives and common-sensical interpretation of society, on the one hand, and the social-structural conditioning of action and unintended objective outcomes of action on the other. In addition to bearing intellectual fruits, there is also a practical dimension of suspicional defamiliarization. Because “the processes giving rise to aggregated social complaints are not necessarily known to those expressing them” (Merton 1975: 25), or, humans “do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction” (Mills 1959: 3), it is the sociologist’s task to help identify the underlying sources of these complaints and troubles. In other words, much of the practical contribution sociology can make to society is by assisting people in better understanding some of the underlying and usually unnoticed causes for their own condition.

Modes of social defamiliarization 83

Sympathetic defamiliarization: Take the view of a different social position Sympathetic defamiliarization refers to the process of making the familiar strange by viewing one’s social world from the perspective of others, especially deviants and those in different social positions. If suspicional defamiliarization estranges the social world by looking behind the backs of social actors, then sympathetic defamiliarization estranges the social world by looking through the eyes of social actors. Like the form of comparative-historical defamiliarization that makes contemporary society strange by discovering similarities with past societies, sympathetic defamiliarization makes the familiar (one’s society) strange by making the strange (a different view of one’s society) familiar. This section should not be read as a counterpoint or antipode to methodological approaches emphasizing the epistemological importance of closeness and familiarity (e.g., autoethnography). Instead, it is a supplemental argument that familiarity and closeness can paradoxically act as means to defamiliarize and gain distance. Sympathetic defamiliarization is a qualitatively distinct modality because it is uniquely placed to combat the form of subjective reification that results from emotional detachment from others (see “detachment” in Chapter 2). This section briefly discusses the elemental acts underlying sympathetic defamiliarization via Weber, Cooley, and Mead, the methodological significance of taking the perspective of “strangers,” and draws from Katz (1997) to highlight the tensions of sympathetic defamiliarization via ethnography. Taking the perspective of others as a methodological tool of the social sciences, an act which “assume[s] the position of the other and apprehend[s] his life world” (Kultgen 1975: 377), has been discussed ad infinitum. The root of this approach in sociology is Weber’s (1949a: 41; 1978: 5) Verstehen, where, in the context of explaining action, one employs the means of, “on the one hand, the conventional habits of the investigator and teacher in thinking in a particular way, and on the other, as the situation requires, his capacity to ‘feel himself’ empathically into a mode of thought which deviates from his own.” To enter the lifeworld of the other, one can (1) evoke one’s own experiences and meanings from everyday life and (2) form “We-relationships” with the actors in question (Wagner 1983: 122). Both are assumed in Cooley’s notion of “sympathetic introspection,” where the “sympathetic” in “sympathetic defamiliarization” comes from. By “putting himself into intimate contact with various sorts of persons and allowing them to awake in himself a life similar to their own, which he afterwards, to the best of his ability, recalls and describes,” Cooley (1962: 7) states that the social psychologist, “is more or less able to understand—always by introspection—children, idiots, criminals, rich and poor, conservative and radical—any phase of human nature not wholly alien to his own.”

84  Modes of social defamiliarization In an extension and modification of Cooley’s “sympathetic introspection” (Miller 1973: xx), Mead (1934: 366ff) shows that, to share a perspective, which is also to share an attitude, we must “take the role of the other.” Indeed, to take the role of the other is to “[imagine] the world from the perspective of another” (Charon 1998: 110, emphasis removed). We cannot understand others without role taking and role taking “can lead us to understand that perspective of someone different from us” (Charon 1998: 116, emphasis added). In a striking discussion of obstacles to the development of an ideal, democratic society, which requires an expansion of role taking, Mead (1934: 328) argues that taking the perspectives and attitudes of “those whom we affect” depends on the “development of communication.” Although Mead does not relate this insight to sociological methodology, sympathetic defamiliarization can be described as deepening communication with others whose perspectives were formerly interpreted as opaque, alien, or even hostile. This social act accesses a new and now shared world: a formerly familiar world that is made strange by making the strange (the other’s perspective) familiar. In talking to and interacting with others, by directing attention to their lived experiences, the introspective element of sympathetic introspection, or the self-reflective aspect of role taking, asks that we draw on relatively congruent thoughts, reactions, rules, sentiments, etc. as those we seek to understand. However, this demand is difficult because of cultural, social, and/or biographical “distance” between the sociologist and the actors in question due to immigration status, language, religion, class, race, ethnicity, etc., i.e., when the sociologist becomes conscious that their “standpoint” and “system of relevances” are not, or not entirely, “interchangeable” and “congruent” with the other’s standpoint and system of relevances (Schutz 1967a: 11f). While the lay person is aware that there are other perspectives and biographies—though a “public” lifeworld is still assumed (Gurwitsch 1962; Wagner 1983: 110–111)—, the sociologist purposefully and methodically attempts to take on the perspective of the other when differences in perspective, relevance systems, and worldviews reveal themselves. From this new perspective, one gains a new “distance” from, and view of, formerly familiar social phenomena. To successfully gain a new perspective through this process, the sociologist must consciously avoid projecting their own familiar taken-for-granted meanings on the others perspective. The other must be made or remain strange as well (Gurevitch 1988). The distance from, and new perspective of, formerly familiar social phenomena is clearest when sociological investigation is in line with an “unrespectability” motif, i.e., giving voice to working-class, poor, marginalized, and deviant points of view (Berger 1963: ch. 2; e.g., Becker 1966, 1967). Brown (1977: 57) briefly touches on the latter as a means to achieve aesthetical-sociological distanciation, by “taking the point of view of strangers, by studying persons who themselves are ‘within’ but not ‘of’ their situations.” For example, by studying children of biracial marriages, criminals,

Modes of social defamiliarization 85 or black intellectuals, one gets a new take on institutions, identity creation and management, and rule-following and -breaking. Many contemporary classic (Humphreys 1970; Willis 1977; Burawoy 1979) and more recent yet already-classic (e.g., Duneier 1999; Wacquant 2008; Bourgois and Schonberg. 2009) sociological ethnographies, for example, follow this general form: a researcher enters a culturally distant, deviant, marginalized, and/or lower-class group or subculture, forms we-relationships with the other, and retrieves a new and unfamiliar perspective about society. This motif has a long history in American sociology, where Chicago School dissertation-books defamiliarized the metropolis and other social phenomena by taking on the perspectives of hobos (Anderson 1923), gang members (Thrasher 1927), and Jewish ghetto dwellers (Wirth 1928) (see Abbott 1997: 1154f). The point of view gained allows the sociologist to think in novel ways about formerly well-known social institutions and objects. As Simmel (1950c: 404) put it, the stranger offers an objective attitude because of her “particular structure composed of distance and nearness, indifference and involvement” (see also Schutz 1964b). The benefits of taking the perspective of a stranger can be discussed in terms of “marking” the “unmarked” (Brekhus 1998). As mentioned in Chapter 1, social markedness refers to “the ways social actors actively perceive one side of a contrast [the marked] while ignoring the other side [the unmarked] as epistemologically unproblematic” (Brekhus 1998: 35). The marked (e.g., the hearing impaired) is often designated as abnormal whereas the unmarked (e.g., the hearing unimpaired) is often designated as normal, even if the unmarked is not the statistical norm (Brekhus 1998: 37; see also Zerubavel 2018: 73f). Seeing the typically unmarked (e.g., the structure of an ordinary school building) from the perspective of those who are typically marked (e.g., wheelchair users) is a certified route for making the familiar strange and can have political implications (see Zerubavel 2018, 2019). As stated in Chapter 3, there are cases in which the sociologist herself is a stranger in her own society, which affords a unique lens through which to see the world (e.g., Coser 1965; Smith 1987).5 For example, Du Bois (1903: 47) famously says that Black Americans have a “double-consciousness,” or two points of view by which to view American society and the self: “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” The case for sympathetic defamiliarization, however, is not an endorsement of “standpoint epistemology” (e.g., Collins 2000), at least when this term implies the belief that marginalized views ought to be privileged in research because the everyday experiences of marginalized groups allegedly “places them in a privileged position from which to generate knowledge about the world” (Brooks 2007: 66). On the one hand, standpoint theorists are right—following, Marx, sociologists of knowledge, phenomenologists, etc.—that social structure conditions knowledge. Further, I agree that

86  Modes of social defamiliarization researchers should actively seek views from multiple perspectives, especially from “strangers,” for the reasons explained above. In other words, when a “privileged position” means a unique perspective, I agree. On the other hand, the notion of sympathetic defamiliarization is softer than a standpoint epistemology where “privileged position” means a necessarily more valid perspective. The experiences of marginalized groups do not necessarily translate into a more accurate or valid understanding of social institutions of domination. In fact, as emphasized by Western Marxists, people often create or adopt ideologies to make sense of their marginalized situation while remaining blind to the underlying processes that shape their life (cf. “suspicional defamiliarization” above). Another difference between the insights gained through sympathetic defamiliarization and hard standpoint epistemology is practical. As mentioned in the Chapter 5, social defamiliarization produces universalistic-humanist awareness. The normative result is not a desire for justice “for one’s own group and/or for that of other groups” (Collins 2004: 350), but, instead, for humanity. Katz (1997) captures the tensions of sympathetic defamiliarization when discussing justifications or warrants for sociological ethnography. Tensions arise in sociological ethnography due to the social distance between the ethnographer’s research subjects, usually either deviants or groups admired for their prestige or moral respectability, and the ethnographer’s audience, “an audience that can be presumed to be largely middle class, university educated, and, if not wholly conventional in lifestyle, then still of no uniformly extraordinary moral stripe” (Katz 1997: 393). In the language of this project, taking the view of different social position and perspective defamiliarizes society because the social position and perspective of the sociological ethnographer, the primary operative of sympathetic defamiliarization, and the audience are often middle class and relatively conventional. Tensions stem from the sociological ethnographer’s normative and methodological decisions about how to properly bridge the social distance between subjects and audience. In the case of studying deviants, sociological ethnographers often deal with this distance by either showing how deviants are actually rather conventional (a “normalizing” portrait) or are “even more deviant than conventional opinion had imagined” (a “bohemian” portrait) (Katz 1997: 395). Even when driven by data, both portraits are prone to methodological errors (e.g., “exoticizing” the bohemian deviant), and normative and potentially political tensions. Drawing from Becker (1967), Katz (1997) agrees that one moral thrust of what I call sympathetic defamiliarization is to correct the too often inaccurate conventional views of deviants by “taking the side” of deviants. However, when deviance is politicized, especially in the age of identity politics, it is possible for the “specialized agents” of marginalized groups to put forth a one-sided and rosy portrait through public relations campaigns. The conflict the sociological ethnographer faces today when making the familiar strange by making the strange familiar is twofold: to evade both the official portraits of stigmatized

Modes of social defamiliarization 87 groups, on the one hand, and “putting oneself effectively in the employ of repressive outside forces,” on the other (Katz 1997: 399). Social, cultural, and biographical differences between research subjects and the researcher are usually taken as methodological and epistemological problems to be solved so the researcher can more accurately understand the lived experiences of research subjects (Gunderson 2017b). This section argues that striving to become familiar with the standpoint of the other is simultaneously a path for defamiliarizing taken-for-granted views about society. The latter point, too often forgotten, is stressed by symbolic interactionism and related schools: “the scholar who lacks that firsthand familiarity is highly unlikely to recognize that he is missing anything” (Blumer 1969: 37). The what-is-missing is the unfamiliar that is sometimes only accessible by making oneself familiar with the lifeworld of the person or group in question, a conflictual social act with potentially political impacts.

Critical defamiliarization: Juxtapose actuality with ideology and potentiality An organizing goal of critical social theory is to preserve a “two-dimensional” or dialectical form of thinking in a “one-dimensional” and “totally-administered” society (e.g., Horkheimer 1972b; Marcuse 1964; Benhabib 1986). If social defamiliarization is the attempt to make the familiar strange in order to ask more penetrating analytical and normative questions about society, most critical theoretical methods are also defamiliarizing techniques. Indeed, one of the only cases the author could find of the use of the term “defamiliarization” outside of literary theory is in in the critical pedagogy literature (Kaomea 2003; see Chapter 1). Key forms of critical defamiliarization include juxtaposing reality and ideology (immanent critique) and making counterfactual comparisons of what is possible with what exists (potential-actual comparison). Because this modality results from the thinker’s unwillingness to separate the scientific and practical gains of social defamiliarization (see Chapter 3), I also clarify why critical defamiliarization fashions a perspective that is necessarily opposed to the status quo. The first form of critical social defamiliarization is immanent critique, or the process of appraising and examining social reality from the perspective of the historically contingent ideology that justifies or explains that reality (see Antonio 1981; Ng 2015). Immanent critique can take two forms: categorial and normative (Benhabib 1986). Categorial immanent critique refers to the breaking down or inversion of established descriptive and explanatory concepts when confronted with reality. The concepts, derived from everyday life or theoretical systems, are shown to be self-contradictory in the sense that they cannot explain their object of analysis. This strategy is engrained in Marx’s critique of political economy, where he juxtaposes the reified concepts employed by the political economists with a contradictory

88  Modes of social defamiliarization and historically contingent social formation. Normative immanent critique “appraises society by the light of the very ideas that it recognizes as its highest values” with an awareness “that these ideas reflect the taints of reality” (Horkheimer 1947: 173). For instance, commodity exchange is the “very Eden of the innate rights of man. It is the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (Marx 1976: 280). But if one digs deeper to productive relations, freedom becomes the necessity to sell one’s laborpower, equality is merely formal equality to be exploited, etc. The point of both forms of immanent critique, and why immanent critique should be considered a mode of social defamiliarization, is to show the discrepancy between established categories of thought and the contradictions that they smooth over, thereby providing a basis for deeper analysis of the object in question. Always assuming the Hegelian dictum that the present is pregnant with the future, or rather, many possible futures, the second form of critical defamiliarization is counterfactual comparisons of what is possible or potential (potentiality) with what is (actuality). I refer to this two-dimensional form of thinking as “potential-actual comparison.” The assumption underlying dialectical thinking is that, “what is is fraught with tension between its empirical reality and its potentialities” (Feenberg 2005: 87). Potential-actual comparison makes the familiar strange in the sense that the familiar is recast as both mutable and, in critical theory, undesirable when compared to what is possible. Critical theorists have long looked for footholds for “intramundane transcendence,” or, the “pretheoretical resource in which its own critical viewpoint is anchored extratheoretically as an empirical interest or moral experience” (Honneth 1994: 255). For example, a thread underlying Habermas’ (e.g., 1987) oeuvre is comparing the rational potential of communicative action immanent in the interactions of speaking and acting subjects to distorted forms of communication via the system’s “colonization” of the lifeworld. The point is to bring new empirical and normative questions to consciousness by playing off what is possible with what is, which is, indirectly, playing off alternative possible futures with the present. Potential-actual comparison strives to see the current era in light of a better possible, though unguaranteed and perhaps unlikely, future. The most well-known form of potential-actual comparison is Marx’s (1970: 21) “conflict” or “contradiction” between the forces and relations of production, where “the forces of production enter into the basic contradiction only as they are developed or limited by the capitalist production relations” (Young 1976: 201). Comparing the actual and the potential in Marx’s fundamental contradiction defamiliarizes and illuminates society in two ways. The first is analytical: one is asked to imagine technological use in different social conditions and compare this imagined state to current social conditions, which forces one to reflect on common-sensical understanding of technology. The second is normative, even if the question is never made

Modes of social defamiliarization 89 explicit by Marx: one is invited to evaluate whether it is more rational and desirable to use technology for meeting social needs or for profit-maximization. Taken together, Marx’s comparison of the potential and the actual allows sociological consciousness to gain a new point of view for looking at what was formerly unproblematic (in this case, the development, ownership, and use of productive technology). The practical purpose of both immanent critique and potential-actual comparison is to search for emancipatory alternatives within already existing oppositional ideas and social movements as well as technological potential. One makes the familiar strange by playing off alternative social futures immanent in the present with the present. This practical dimension is the basis for the conflictual aspects of critical defamiliarization, a modality that helps shape a perspective that is unavoidably and openly oppositional to the current social order. As explained in Chapter 2, Marx depicts a world in which humans are dominated by their own artifacts and ideology, which is often no more than a passive acceptance of this reality (Marcuse 1964). Thus, overcoming the familiar—the acceptance of an “upside-down world”—is not merely a change in consciousness, but further requires a change in the social conditions that produce ideological forms (Lukács 1971). Therefore, a critical perspective searches for emancipatory alternatives in present conditions (Bloch 1986). Even when the search for emancipatory alternatives comes back empty, the critical theorist is still encouraged to make the familiar strange with nearly absolute and almost theological negative perspectives, “that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light” (Adorno 1978: 247).6 One can only keep “fragmented hope” alive by creating a negative distance between one’s consciousness and what is, to reveal the “chasm” splitting utopia from what is (Adorno 1967). Although “dialectics” is an elusive term whose use too often, ironically, does more to conceal than reveal, this section suggests that critical defamiliarization is a form of dialectical thinking, when the latter is understood as a form of thought that presupposes that the world is alienated, internally contradictory, and pregnant with various futures (e.g., Marcuse 1978) and attempts to show how “the inhuman relations inside which we live our lives disguise themselves as ‘natural’” and, more importantly, “how we locked ourselves in [prison] and thus how to get out, that is, to live as humans” (Smith 1994: 73). Two methods historically central to dialectics, immanent critique and potential-actual comparison, make the familiar strange by contrasting what society claims to be or value, or what it could be and value, with what it really is.7 By making society “condemn itself out of its own mouth” (McCarney 1990: 20) and illuminating latent possibilities in the present, critical defamiliarization is negative in the sense that it is oppositional to the existing state of affairs and, thus, searches for emancipatory alternatives to transcend the status quo.

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Nonhuman defamiliarization: Bring in the environment, animals, and technology Nonhuman defamiliarization refers to decentering the taken-for-granted understanding of society as a purely human affair by making natural and/ or artificial nonhumans relevant to sociological consciousness. Natural subjects and objects include animals and biophysical things and processes such as energy flows, greenhouse gas emissions, and mountains. Artificial nonhumans include human artifacts, some of which have a semi-autonomous impact on action, such as phones, automobiles, and architecture. While one can illuminate what exists in new ways by making new, or rejecting other, foundational assumptions in sociology (see Abbott 2004: 131–134), I highlight a rejection of anthropocentrism as a route to social defamiliarization because there are few assumptions in sociology more common yet logically and empirically flawed (Catton and Dunlap 1980). Due to anthropocentrism’s commonness, making nonhumans relevant to sociological consciousness will almost always make the familiar strange. While there are several ways to adopt a nonhuman “perspective”—for example, the Chicago School’s attention to the built environment (Abbott 1997)—this section explores the process of nonhuman defamiliarization by making the biophysical environment, animals, and technology sociologically relevant. Due to sociology’s historically restrictive focus on humans, studying human beings as if the biophysical environment was unaffected by human behavior or vice versa, Catton and Dunlap (1980) argue that the discipline was unprepared to investigate new environmental concerns. Sociology is blinded by unquestioned assumptions and widely held conceptual framework in which humans are viewed as exempt from the global ecosystem (“Human Exemptionalism Paradigm”) (HEP), which should be replaced by a “New Ecological Paradigm” (NEP) that recognizes natural limits and treats biophysical and social processes as co-constitutive. There has been an explosion environmental sociological research on “societal-environmental interactions,” which this short section cannot do justice to, including the social dimensions of climate change (Dunlap and Brulle 2015), the unequal distribution of environmental harms (Mohai et al. 2009), and the social determinants of environmental impacts (York et al. 2003). There is a shared commitment to defamiliarizing social institutions, laws, actions, norms, values, etc. from a new point of view in which human life influences biophysical factors and vice versa. Making animals relevant to sociological consciousness is an adjoining route to nonhuman defamiliarization. With some exceptions, and akin to the biophysical world, sociology has historically failed to examine the lives of animals in human society and how animals have impacted human society (Nibert 2003; Irvine 2008; York and Mancus 2013). Taking the perspective of animals makes the familiar strange by illuminating facets and dimensions of society that would have been missed otherwise. Social forms, such as play

Modes of social defamiliarization 91 (Jerolmack 2009) and violence (Fitzgerald et al. 2009), institutions, such as the economy (Dietz and York 2015) and science (Arluke 1988), and the very development and history of societies (Kalof 2007; York and Mancus 2013) all take on strange, new, and sometimes horrific dimensions when animals become relevant to sociological consciousness. What environmental sociological and sociological animal studies research have in common are presuppositions that defamiliarize society by simply widening what is relevant to sociological analysis. One can make the familiar strange by reminding oneself, with the NEP, that humans are one animal among many and that the environment imposes limits on this particular animal’s goals (Catton and Dunlap 1980: 34). New research questions, topics, techniques, and concepts come to light with this simple change in outlook. Along with making animals and the environment relevant to sociological thinking, drawing attention to the social dimensions of technology and technological dimensions of society is a third path to nonhuman defamiliarization. While technology has long been a relevant subject matter to sociology (Gunderson 2016), there has been resurgence of interest since the late 1980s (e.g., Woolgar 1991), especially from those influenced by actor-network theory (ANT). More a methodology than a theory (Latour 1999a), ANT arose out of the sociological study of scientists and the creation of scientific knowledge (Latour 1999b: 3f) and is an attempt to study the origins of organizations and “mechanics of power” by first examining a single interaction and working one’s way out to explain how the growing network of interactions reproduce themselves, order themselves, “consolidate,” and generate social effects (Law 1992: 38; Latour 2005: 8). Although this author is skeptical of ANT and other “posthuman” and “new materialist” approaches for reasons described by others (see Hornborg 2017), ANT is a clear if excessive example of nonhuman defamiliarization because it analytically claims that “there is no fundamental difference between people and objects” (Law 1992: 383; see also Latour 1999b). What differentiates ANT from other microsociological and interactionist perspectives, and certainly its most controversial claim, is that all objects and material forms, human and nonhuman, are agents (“actants”) that participate in a given “heterogeneous network” (see Latour 2005: 10–11; Law 1992: 380–381). As Becker (1998: 46–51) puts it, Latour’s imagery is a good trick for thinking about nonhumans as “congealed social arrangements.” W. Fred Cottrell’s Energy and Society (1955) is an exemplar of nonhuman defamiliarization. From the seemingly simple premise that any study of social change must assume that available energy limits what can be achieved by individuals and societies, Cottrell defamiliarizes society and its development, allowing for a fresh perspective. The features associated with the premodern world (e.g., “embedded” economies, commonness of extended family forms) are seen afresh when cast as energy-saving norms and structures limited by the amount of sunlight that can be converted into plant energy sources and the amount of plant energy that can be converted

92  Modes of social defamiliarization into muscle energy via consumption. Further, the transition from “community” to “society”—the end of the village the cultural unit, the explosion of city population, the disembedding of markets from other institutions, a more complex and specialized division of labor, the values of efficiency over tradition, etc.—becomes a transition from “low-energy” societies to “high-energy” societies, from societies limited by plants and plant-tomuscle energy conversion to societies limited by fossil fuels and fossil fuel converters. The entirety of Cottrell’s empirical, conceptual, and theoretical insights depends on making nonhumans, from energy conversion technology to plants, relevant to sociological consciousness, not only as variables, but also as a means to see society anew. Like other modes of social defamiliarization, nonhuman defamiliarization is a social process that is tension-ridden. The tensions of nonhuman defamiliarization are clear in the impassioned and sometimes fraught methodological and theoretical discussions among those who have made the environment, animals, and technology sociologically relevant, including foundational questions like the degree to which human behavior and social development can be explained by ecological variables (e.g., Freudenburg et al. 1995; McLaughlin and Dietz 2008; York and Mancus 2009) and the distinction between humans and nonhumans, the natural and the artificial (e.g., Latour 2005; Hornborg 2017; Malm 2018). The difficulties inherent in these questions extend back into sociology’s history, including Robert E. Park’s diverse renditions of ecological and social orders (see Turner 1967: xxvff) and Theodor W. Adorno’s (2006) lectures on the epistemological naturalization of society and social mediation of nature. Such theoretical discussions are inextricably linked to contentious political discussions about how to achieve an ecological society (e.g., Mol 2003; Foster et al. 2010). To bring sociological insight to bear on these issues, however, the first step is surmounting the barriers posed both by sociology’s HEP (see above) and modern society’s “Dominant Western Worldview” (DWW), or, the anthropocentric assumptions of Western culture, including the beliefs that humans are essentially different from all other animals, “over which they have dominion,” and that unconstrained “progress” is possible and desirable (Catton and Dunlap 1980: 17, 18). Catton and Dunlap’s (1980) foundational article on the HEP/NEP distinction details the difficulties and intellectual frictions that arise when, due to widespread social concern with environmental problems, sociology is pushed to take account of ecology. Due to the DWW and sociology’s HEP, nonhuman defamiliarization requires critical reflection on entrenched anthropocentric “domain assumptions” (Gouldner 1970). This is a demanding path. That every human society is an ecosystem-dependent shrewdness of apes is clear to any rational person, yet this obviousness is foggy: humanity’s self-understanding in Western history is “expressed in the way in which he is distinguished from the animal” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1969: 245), and human dependence on ecosystems

Modes of social defamiliarization 93 can be veiled by the Global North’s relevance system (Ollinaho 2016) and technological systems not one person fully understands (Hornborg 2001). There are two other unique features of nonhuman defamiliarization worth noting. First, because nonhuman defamiliarization directs attention to the things of social life, which, if described in detail rather than naming the given institution, norm, stratification system, etc., gives the impression of a naïve ethological observation written by an alien scientist for a zoology department on another planet. This is the effect produced by cartoonist Nathan W. Pyle in “Strange Planet,” where modern social norms (e.g., cleaning house before the arrival of guests) are performed by aliens who discuss these norms in naturalistic terms (e.g., “Friends arriving soon/Let us store irregular shapes inside shapes with flat surfaces”).8 These accounts are funny, according to Bergson (1956: 92ff), because the comic emerges in daily human life when our attention is drawn to the physical rather than the immaterial, vital, and moral. Take Tilly’s (1984: 1–2) playful description of contemporary schooling, where we are said to still behave as though the effective way to prepare young intellects for the fight ahead were to divide all youngsters of a certain age into groups of twenty or thirty, place each group in a closed room with a somewhat older person, seat the youngsters in rows of small desks, arrange for the older person to talk to them for hours each day, have them write various sorts of exercises for the older person to evaluate, and require them to speak periodically in class … (Young people who survive a dozen years or so of that treatment often move on to the even stranger system of the lecture; there the older person gets to talk at them without interruption for fifty minutes at a time. …) Note that the primary means by which he defamiliarizes the educational institution—importantly, an institution that remains unnamed—is attention to physical and material phenomena. Indeed, against phenomenology, it is through a materialist perspective, though one that does not naturalize the taken-for-granted (see Chapter 2) or assume direct epistemological access to reality (see Chapter 1), that one can suspend belief in the pseudo-natural reality of the social.9 A second notable unique feature, or byproduct, of nonhuman defamiliarization is that it is the only mode of social defamiliarization that enters deeper provinces of the strange left undiscussed in Chapter 3, such as the cosmically absurd and the nauseating. Nonhuman defamiliarization makes cosmic absurdity methodologically relevant because it requires that we think of humans as one species among many existing on one planet among many in one solar system among many. Further, because nonhuman defamiliarization forces attention to the material reality of human bodies, it makes relevant Sartrean nausea, or the “the apprehension of the pure

94  Modes of social defamiliarization existingness of things, their resistance to being swallowed into human value and significance” and “the persistent, vague but still unmistakable apprehension of the contingency, the thisness of my body” (Connor 2009: 62). Yet it is important for sociologists to avoid asociological and ahistorical accounts of being natural in existentialism and phenomenology. For example, it is unlikely that one will encounter Sartrean nausea or a sense of cosmic absurdity in societies that have a strong sense of kinship with nature. This is far from a romantic fantasy (e.g., Philippe and Pálsson 1996). The “just” in “we’re just apes in space”—an example of a mundane statement that is meant to produce a sense of cosmic absurdity—carries a message of futility or encourages the other to “get perspective” only due to the prior socially conditioned beliefs that transcendence from natural bonds is possible and desirable, that we are not “just” another animal on Earth, that the flesh is lower than the spirit, etc. In other words, the feeling of one’s cosmic insignificance only has jarring effects in societies that socialize members to believe themselves to be not-of-this-world. Elementary yet daunting questions related to human society’s impact on nonhuman variables and vice versa must be taken up again due to numerous recent findings and issues, including the awareness that there is not a single “pristine” ecosystem (i.e. unaffected by humans) (Gallagher and Carpenter 1997), the theory that human society has become a global geophysical force (“Anthropocene”) (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), and research that documents the increasing intensity and reach of interactions between human and natural systems (Liu et al. 2007; Stuart 2016). The assumption that social life is not mediated by the environment, animals, and technology is so entrenched in sociology that calling the assumption into question will surely deliver a novel perspective. Although nonhuman defamiliarization is tension-laden, making nonhumans sociologically relevant is a matter of urgency. In the age of global climate change, factory farming, and nanotechnology, including nonhumans in sociological consciousness seems imperative. This move also defamiliarizes society, too often erroneously assumed to be exclusively human.

Conclusions When interpreted as “tricks” (Becker 1998) one can use when stuck in the research process due to the specific problem of familiarity, the modes of social defamiliarization can be summarized as follows: (1) compare social phenomena across different societies in order to relativize these items (comparative-historical defamiliarization); (2) analyze social phenomena from an unconventional level of analysis (scopical defamiliarization); (3) describe social phenomena with language from a different experiential domain (metaphorical defamiliarization); (4) draw attention to unintended outcomes of action and identify deeper levels of society that influence behavior, often without actors’ knowledge (suspicional defamiliarization); (5) analyze social

Modes of social defamiliarization 95 phenomena from the perspective of people in a different social positions (sympathetic defamiliarization); (6) contrast a society’s self-justifications and potentialities with its actuality (critical defamiliarization); and (7) examine society with natural and/or artificial nonhumans in sight (nonhuman defamiliarization). I suspect that making the familiar strange through one or more of these modes of social defamiliarization is second nature to some sociologists. These forms of thinking operate in the background when formulating interesting sociological questions and executing the research process. The contribution of this chapter is to make sociological consciousness more conscious of these modes of thinking, including the social tensions and conflicts caused by making the familiar strange. As emphasized in each section, social defamiliarization causes tension largely because it challenges takenfor-granted assumptions, which “expos[es] the arbitrariness of the taken for granted” (Bourdieu 1977: 169). Because the typology is not meant be exhaustive, future reflections on social defamiliarization should explore the use of two or more modalities as well as other distinct modalities. Accomplishing this task means that sociology must be more attentive to the creative and artistic aspects of its methodology (Nisbet 1976; Abbott 2004). Regarding the employment of multiple modes of social defamiliarization, I summarize a few examples here: •

•

Suspicional-scopical defamiliarization: By taking a macro- instead of micro-level perspective, and looking behind psychological motivation and common-sensical understandings of institutions for more essential features of society, Durkheim (1938: 67; 1933) famously argues that crime is not (only) a pathological-psychological phenomenon, but (also) a sociological “factor in public health” that functions to increase social solidarity and reinforce norms. Critical-metaphorical defamiliarization: Horkheimer (1972b: 180f) develops a prison metaphor to shed light on the Marxist contention that private property is an underlying cause of the restriction of rationality to cold instrumentality. If the prison (capitalist society) has a lack of food and shelter (resources and the means of production owned and controlled by capital) relative to the number of prisoners (workers), one should expect the following to be normal: factions, fighting, cunning, shrewdness, calculation, submission, and domination. The metaphor implies that scarcity is largely artificial and socially determined and there is a potential for different forms of thought and behavior if prisoners (workers) were to break free.

In addition to overlapping modes of social defamiliarization, future reflections should identify and describe other modes of social defamiliarization. For example, while theorizing is distinct from defamiliarizing, sometimes theorizing is a form of defamiliarization, as de Jong et al. suggest (2013).

96  Modes of social defamiliarization What can be termed “conceptual defamiliarization” shines light on the taken-for-granted by applying new concepts or giving a new meaning to old ones. Cool-headed empiricists sometimes protest that many conceptual schemes that pass as theory simply explain the obvious in torturous jargon. However, the novel concepts are necessary precisely because they illuminate what we live in rather than think about: the overly familiar social world. For those suspicious of using hazy concepts to clear the thicker haze of common sense, the power of theory to make the familiar strange is put well by an unforgiving enemy of jargon, Stanislav Andreski (1964: 16), focusing on the defamiliarizing function of hypotheses: “only a mind well furnished with a stock of hypotheses (in their majority inevitably conceived by others) can see from a novel point of view a situation well known to others.” Sociological theory is a form of defamiliarization if it succeeds in forcing consciousness to notice and reflect on the taken-for-granted. Like sociological concepts and theory, modes of social defamiliarization help the sociologist cast a new light on society. Yet social defamiliarization is distinct from, and contributes to, conceptualization and theorizing. For example, metaphorical defamiliarization underlies various sociological models and theories (e.g., dramaturgy, systems theory), but is not a theory itself, and suspicional defamiliarization is presupposed in a number of sociological concepts (e.g., ideology, latent function), but is not a concept employed to describe social existence. Distinct from conceptualization and theorizing proper, social defamiliarization is a mental act and creative method that informs different stages of the research process: question formulation, conceptualization, data selection and analysis, and theory formation. The scientific benefits afforded by social defamiliarization are outlined in Chapter 3. The primary benefit of clarifying modes of social defamiliarization is a greater capacity to illuminate the empirical and axiological dimensions of one’s own society that were once too familiar to appreciate. The phenomenological concept of “self-displacement” helps summarize these benefits afforded by modes of social defamiliarization, all of which rely on comparative thinking rather than assuming unmediated and direct epistemological access to the world (see Chapter 1). In self-displacement, “I here and now can imagine myself or remember myself or anticipate myself into a situation somewhere and sometime else, thus allow[ing] us to live in the future and the past, as well as in no-man’s-land of free imagination” (Sokolowski 2000: 74; cf. Sokolowski 1990). By experiencing this “doubled awareness” or a “doubled I” (i.e., a memorically, anticipated, or imagined “reproduced” I and a “real” I), one constitutes objects at a new level of awareness (Sokolowski 1990: 178–179; Husserl 2006). In a comparable way, in social defamiliarization, sociological consciousness grasps society and social phenomena by displacing social experience. Social defamiliarization

Modes of social defamiliarization 97 always occurs in at least “two parallel tracks,” one in the familiar world and one in imagination, memory, phantasy, etc. (e.g., via metaphor, a past society, potentiality, a different level of analysis). The latter track “modifies” our perceptions of the familiar, or, they are “always being played off against one another” (Sokolowski 2000: 73–74). It is this latter tension that makes the familiar strange, revealing unexplored and unnoticed threads, weaves, tears, and ties in the social fabric.

Notes









1. There is one partial exception: it is difficult to argue that nonhuman defamiliarization—making human society strange by making the environment, animals, and technology sociologically relevant—is “historically central” to sociology. I justify this mode’s inclusion by using it as an example of making the familiar strange by questioning foundational assumptions, a move that characterizes sociology at large (see Abbott 2004: 131-134). 2. The reason I use the term “comparative-historical defamiliarization” instead of “comparative-historical analysis” is the latter usually implies macro-level comparisons using various technical methods (e.g., Ragin 1987; Mahoney and Rueschemeyer 2003). In contrast, comparative-historical defamiliarization accompanies comparisons at any level of analysis and is meant to describe how comparative and historical thinking illuminates society in new ways (see distinction between creative and technical methods in Chapter 1). 3. There is, of course, an overlapping, yet distinct (Ritzer 1996: 420-422), discussion concerning structure and agency (for review, see Elder-Vass 2010: ch. 1). 4. Because the concept of “total institution” is not merely metaphorical, Asylums should also be understood as a form of historical-comparative defamiliarization. Further, because Goffman (1961a: x) strives to depict the mental hospital from the perspective of the patient, it is also a work of sympathetic defamiliarization. 5. This is distinct from arguing that different social positions provide ontologically distinct “standpoints” and that marginalized standpoints ought to be “privileged” in research. 6. It is notable that Kaufmann (2000: 74) compares the perspective Adorno calls for here to the alienation effect (see Chapter 1). 7. The relation between dialectics and defamiliarization cannot be explored here. In addition to critical defamiliarization (immanent critique and potential-actual comparison), both historical and suspicional modes of defamiliarization are commonplace in Marx’s method. Insofar as dialectics aims to bring the familiar and “appearances” into question, social defamiliarization is a friend of, or moment of, dialectical thinking. Relatedly, although this book begins with a critique of the phenomenological epoché for being insufficiently sociological, Enzo Paci’s (1972) twist on the epoché as saying “no” to “the way in which I would live spontaneously, naturally” (Sacconaghi 2013: 169) resonates with social defamiliarization because, as a Marxist, he explicitly theorizes the seemingly “spontaneous” and “natural” ways of living as social and historical. 8. See Nathan W. Pyle, “Strange Planet.” Available from: https://www.nathanwpyle.art/strangeplanet.

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9. Though perhaps phenomenology has a covert materialist bent or even, counterintuitively, elements of naïve behaviorism. Take Gurevitch’s (1988: 1196) description of phenomenological analysis when “pushed to extremes,” where “it proceeds in the direction of seeing persons from the outside, in their plain gestures, either of body or speech, that is, as mere creatures, about whom as little knowledge as possible is presupposed.” When I told my colleague William Flint about the topic of this book, he described making the familiar strange as a disbelief in the realness of society’s “software” (immaterial social phenomena).

5

The anti-consolation of sociology

“[The stranger’s] position as a full-fledged member [of the group] involves both being outside and confronting it.” - Georg Simmel (1950c: 402–3)

A conceptual summary The sociological maxim “make the familiar strange” is as important to the sociological imagination as structural analysis and interpretive understanding yet has not received nearly as much sustained attention. Chapter 1 opens with a discussion of a historically prominent method for making the familiar strange: the phenomenological epoché, which refers to “bracketing” naïve belief in existence in order to see the obvious and familiar with fresh eyes. Drawing on sociological critiques of Husserl to illustrate how the assumed primordial access to the world delivered by the epoché necessarily remains socially conditioned experience, I argue phenomenological methodology is not a viable starting point for social defamiliarization, the term adopted to describe making the familiar strange as a social-methodological tool. I set out to answer the following questions: Why should we make the familiar strange, or, why should sociologists reflect on or even distrust their common-sensical experience (Chapter 2)? What does “make the familiar strange” mean and how does it benefit sociological methodology and research (Chapter 3)? How do sociologists make the familiar strange (Chapter 4)? To explain why sociologists should make the familiar strange, Chapter 2 develops a typology of the problem of reification. It identifies four “reificatory modes of experience” that make the social world and human artifacts appear fixed (constitutional ossification) and unchangeable (possibility blindness). 1 Doxa: Experience that leaves the social causes of social phenomena outof-frame through historical forgetfulness, thereby grasping human artifacts as “just the way things are.” 2 Identification: Experience that constitutes the abstract as realer than the concrete.

100  The anti-consolation of sociology 3 Enframing: Experience that inverts means-ends relations by evaluating technology and economic production as ends and demoting humanity and life to instruments. 4 Detachment: Experience that is indifferent to the wellbeing of living beings by suspending emotional engagement and compassion. Sociologists are not immune from these modes of experience. If sociologists do not defamiliarize social life, they will unreflectively think within reificatory modes, which is antithetical to delivering sociological explanations and descriptions. While social defamiliarization can at least bring the problem of reification into question, it cannot overcome reified experience because subjective reification has objective foundations. Reality itself is reified through the interrelated processes of the standardization, commodification, formal rationalization, semi-autonomous techno-economic systems, and contractual relations. To examine what the familiar and the strange mean, and why constituting the former as the latter is beneficial for sociology, Chapter 3 explores different provinces of the familiar and the strange, justifies social defamiliarization on methodological and practical grounds, as well as outlines some sociological dimensions of social defamiliarization. The familiar is analyzed in terms of the same, the similar, the existent and the routine, a mundane world which is shown to be the reified world. Along with a short description of the uncanny, the strange is analyzed as the unfamiliar—unusual or new phenomena that are thematized due to failed or limited explication— and the absurd, experiences that reveal that meaning is humanly produced rather than inherent in the world. Social defamiliarization is methodologically defensible and scientifically beneficial because rendering the familiar strange encourages the asking of new questions about social phenomena that were previously too obvious to be “seen” (i.e., reflected upon); deepens the capacity to gain more extensive and precise knowledge about social phenomena; and fosters better interpretations of social phenomena. Social defamiliarization is practically beneficial because it draws attention to the contingency and changeability of all social arrangements. However, these practical benefits are limited and may be a net harm given current social conditions, a problem taken up below. Chapter 4 describes seven modes of social defamiliarization commonly employed by sociologists: 1 Comparative-historical defamiliarization: Relativize the given society or social phenomenon by comparing it with different past societies or social phenomena. 2 Scopical defamiliarization: Adopt a different level of analysis than the one suggested by sociological tradition and/or lay convention. 3 Metaphorical defamiliarization: Use the language from a different experiential domain to describe the given society or social phenomenon.

The anti-consolation of sociology 101 4 Suspicional defamiliarization: Look underneath the typical meanings people assign to social action for unintended outcomes or more essential social dimensions. 5 Sympathetic defamiliarization: Examine the given society or social phenomenon from the perspective of a different social location. 6 Critical defamiliarization: Compare what the given society claims to be—and what it could or should be—with what it is. 7 Nonhuman defamiliarization: Make the environment, animals, and/or technology sociologically relevant. In comparison to the phenomenological path to making the familiar strange (the epoché), sociological modes of social defamiliarization are comparative because they do not assume, due to the social origins of cognition and experiences themselves, the possibility of direct and immediate access to the world.

Limitations Chapters 2–4 address limitations specific to the chapters. This section discusses general limitations of the book, two of which are most notable: (1) ignoring how motivation and interest influence the process of social defamiliarization and (2) a lack of deep engagement with contemporary sociological research. The first general limitation of the book is inadequate attention to how motivations for doing sociology and having an untypical interest in social phenomena influence social defamiliarization. Sociology requires an abnormal curiosity about society. For example, the sociologist who studies the food system has a different interest in it than the typical person, a difference that is methodologically relevant. In addition to social determinants of interest—institutional pressures, taken-for-granted norms, social roles, the goals of different projects, etc.—there are also characterological and biographical determinants. For example, I imagine that the kinds of people who become sociologists are sometimes considered “strange” themselves in the sense that social defamiliarization is, perhaps unintentionally, part of their everyday outlook; those who sympathize with Goffman’s (1974: 2) sentiment that social life is “dubious” and “ludicrous.” There is a good chance that the person who thinks common sense is worthy of analysis does not fully possess the object of study. Although it is outside the goals of this project to examine how the motivations of sociologists influence attention and interpretation, not to mention the social origins of these motivations, the questions are important for sociological methodology. Copernicus’ discovery would likely have been impossible if he were a farmer because, for the latter, it matters little if a seasonal cycle is caused by a god or Earth’s movement around the Sun (Schutz 1970: 171). In contrast, for Copernicus, the question of cause is of central interest. Take the emotion or attitude of wonder as an example of why motivation is methodologically relevant. In Chapter 1, I mention that the goal of social

102  The anti-consolation of sociology defamiliarization underlies ethnomethodology, citing Garfinkel’s (1967: 9) call to make the everyday methods that hold up common sense and practical projects “anthropologically strange” and Pollner’s (1987: ix, emphasis added) description of ethnomethodology’s contribution as a “capacity to produce a deep wonder about what is often regarded as obvious, given or natural.” Yet an attitude of wonder is not synonymous with social defamiliarization. On the one hand, making the familiar strange can produce wonder in the sense of perplexity in the face of puzzles or problems (see Chapter 3). In fact, being perplexed over puzzles is akin to what the ancients meant by wonder being the starting point of philosophical thought (e.g., Aristotle 1952: 982b; see Nightingale 2001: 43). While making the familiar strange can foster perplexity and helps one “[think] himself ignorant” (Aristotle 1952: 982b), social defamiliarization is not the same thing as one’s urge to wonder at social phenomena. Wonder is a capacity or attitude which likely precedes or even guides modes of social defamiliarization, with concrete puzzles being derivative of this process. As Ernst Bloch (1970: 7) put it, “all specific, particular and empirical questions are modifications of the unique impact of the basic wonder-arousing question.” Hence, the importance of the question of motivation in methodological reflections. A second overall limitation of the book stems from a lack of sustained engagement with a wider range of contemporary sociology, which, for reasons speculated on in Chapter 3, is static in comparison to the rapid changes experienced by its object of analysis. For this reason, many of the book’s in-depth conversations are with classical sociologists, sociological innovators during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, the first-generation Frankfurt School, and select phenomenologists. Thus, the description of sociological consciousness may sound dated, a past rendition of sociology that lurks as a shadow in the margins of contemporary sociology. In addition to the reasons explained in Chapters 1, 2, and 4, I draw from these periods and traditions of sociology because I think contemporary sociology can learn from them. Yet the chasm between the aims and scope of past great eras of sociology and the current era is so wide that making a case that the past can inform contemporary mainstream sociology seems as futile as making the case that Dostoevsky or Proust can inform contemporary popular literature. Of course, great sociology still exists, especially among veterans of the turbulent 1960s and 1970s. Three masters recently passed: Zygmunt Bauman, Peter Berger, and Immanuel Wallerstein. There are also innovative and skilled younger sociologists, too many to mention here. However, with plenty of individual exceptions, social defamiliarization is largely absent from a good deal of contemporary sociology, or at least the discipline’s two major camps: “quantoids” and group-identity “scholar-activists” (Ashley 1997: 47f; Berger 2002). To paint with a polemically large brush, quantoids analyze increasingly bigger data sets with increasingly sophisticated statistical software “to study increasingly trivial topics” (Berger 2002), and with less sophisticated attention to the social origins of the examined variables,

The anti-consolation of sociology 103 while group-identity scholar-activists claim to speak on behalf of socially formed yet taken-for-granted—that is, reified—identities, which are increasingly fractured and tribalistic for political-economic reasons that take place behind their backs. Before I am accused of being both anti-scientific and conservative, please heed the following qualifiers. First, quantitative methodology is indispensable, depending on one’s research question, and is not inherently antithetical to social defamiliarization. In fact, a form of social defamiliarization is built into all historical and comparative quantitative analyses, especially those that include in-depth case studies along with statistical analyses (e.g., much of world-systems research). However, quantitative methodology encourages the re-reification of too-familiar categories if, for example, the sociological reasons why survey classifications make intuitive sense to both the respondent and the researcher remain unexamined (Adorno 1976). Second, there is also nothing inherently reificatory about sociological research done in service of emancipatory aims. Indeed, the best practical defense of social defamiliarization is that it may increase the probability of conscious interventions to improve society (see below). However, the liberatory implications of social defamiliarization are universalistic, not tribalistic, because making the familiar strange reveals an unsettling reality: the social is just us and our real fictions formed in the process of adapting to and shaping material conditions.

Is social defamiliarization a net harm? I abruptly halt discussion of the practical benefits of social defamiliarization in Chapter 3 after making the case that social defamiliarization has potential practical implications because it (1) uncovers society as a human artifact, as opposed to a fixed, natural thing, and, thus, (2) reveals society as something that could be, and has been, qualitatively different. That is, social defamiliarization weakens the dual core features of subjective reification: the belief that society is fixed (constitutional ossification) and unchangeable (possibility blindness). I mentioned that these insights, revealed by making the familiar strange, are of limited practical benefit because they merely “jar” reified consciousness via reflection, but do not change the social conditions (“objective reification”) that birthed reified consciousness. This final concluding section returns to this question, arguing that social defamiliarization may decrease one’s comfort in current social conditions, conditions in which it is unlikely—but possible—that reified social structures will change in ways that are conducive to human flourishing. Gurevitch (1988: 1188) mentions the “anxiety” that can emerge when making another actor strange, by, for example, experiencing oneself as an observer of one’s own interactions with others. Just as we experience cosmic absurdity when watching the night sky and realizing that “the observer himself is situated on an insignificant blot of a globe hovering arbitrarily in space,” this

104  The anti-consolation of sociology decentering of “our world” also defamiliarizes the self: “one’s sense of the centrality of the world is lost and with it the taken-for-granted meaning of all that this centrality entailed.” The focus here is not on the decentering of the self, but on social defamiliarization’s corrosion of familiarity’s security and the consolation of reified consciousness. Sociology is training to be a stranger in one’s home. The thesis below is that coming “to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar” is terribly discomforting (Mills 1959: 8). The practical use of the epoché among the ancient skeptics was to attain inner peace and imperturbability (ataraxia) (Windelband 1958: 167), a state of being the sociological alternative to the epoché cannot deliver, and may even undercut, at least in current social conditions. Before continuing, it is worth mentioning that pursuing individualist “solutions” to (escapes from) defamiliarizing consciousness are dead ends. A commonly proposed pseudo-solution is “authenticity.” But subjective, authentic spontaneity is incapable of “defeating the omnipotence of society,” as “[s]uch hopes are entertained simply and solely because at the moment there is no basis for hope in the objective historical trend” (Adorno 2006: 160–61). All individualist escapes from defamiliarizing consciousness are necessarily inauthentic in objectively reified social conditions, including the most common pseudo-solutions taken up by sociologists: (1) a retreat into subjective reification (renditions of, “I know that this is not just the way things are, but this is just the way things are”); (2) the insistence that it is not in one’s job description to alter the social conditions that one examines (conventional conformism); (3) a cynical detachment from one’s actions (“enlightened” conformism) (Žižek 1989: 29ff); or (4) participating in purely expressive and ineffective “political” activism, what Adorno (1998: 291–292) calls “pseudo-activity.” If one is aware that these four responses are illusionary escapes rather than real solutions, social defamiliarization may have a net negative impact on one’s wellbeing as well as the wellbeing of anyone who is infected by its form of thinking, especially students who take sociology courses or read sociological material. Thus, one should ask if social defamiliarization is ethically defensible. In what follows, I first argue that subjective reification is consoling because it reconciles the individual to society. Social defamiliarization undermines this consolation by increasing disenchantment without offering new strategies for feeling at-home in world. The thesis is not so much that “ignorance is bliss,” but that “reified familiarity is reconciliatory.” For the individual, defamiliarizing consciousness is regrettable. I then cautiously defend social defamiliarization on consequentialist grounds: if social defamiliarization—by sustaining attention to the contingency and changeability of social conditions—increases the possibility that future generations will suffer less under objectively reified social conditions, then reductions in comfort brought about by social defamiliarization are justifiable.

The anti-consolation of sociology 105 Undermining familiarity’s comfort and reification’s consolation The familiar is comforting. Psychological research shows that there is increased preference for the familiar when under pressure and when stressed (Kruglanski et al. 1996; Litt et al. 2011) as well as when we desire safety (Bornstein 1989). The appeal of the familiar is clearest in the “mere exposure effect,” the positive association between liking and familiarity (Harrison 1977), or, more often, an inverted U-shaped relationship, whereby repeated exposure increases liking due to habituation but also decreases liking due to tediousness (Lee 2001). In its first formulation, Zajonc (1968) argues that we have a natural fear response to novel stimuli as a survival mechanism, a negative response which, if there are no negative outcomes with the given novel stimulus, decreases through multiple exposures. Earlier, in Edward B. Titchener’s (1916: 179) A Beginner’s Psychology, he speculates that “the feeling of familiarity is a weakened survival of the emotion of relief, of fear unfulfilled” because, for the defenseless “primitive man,” the “strange must always have been cause for anxiety.” One of the likely mechanisms behind the mere exposure effect is that familiarity reduces uncertainty about the given stimulus (Lee 2001). In psychological terms, then, the aim of social defamiliarization is to challenge consciousness to artificially undue stimulus habituation by methodically increasing uncertainty in order to ask new questions about the given object that was formerly too familiar to see. However, if Titchener, Zajonc, and others are right, social defamiliarization may also artificially increase negative emotions toward stimuli which, prior to making the familiar strange, we found comforting, pleasing, etc. Social defamiliarization’s chipping away at comfort is graver when discussed in terms of subjective reification. Constitutional ossification is consoling because it offers the most comforting justification available for perennial social problems, including: Why are there wars? Why are nearly 800 million people malnourished? Why are some people poor and other people rich? Why is modern society degrading the environment to a point that may undermine future species survival? Constitutional ossification delivers a most wonderfully reassuring theodicy: bad things happen because things are the way they are. This theodicy is reassuring not only due to its substantive content, but also its consistency and simplicity. Its simplicity remains even when everyday constitutional ossification is dressed up in a pseudo-scientific naturalization of social relations. For example, malnourishment is often interpreted as a byproduct of population growth even though global agriculture, combined with dietary and other behavioral changes, has the technical capacity to feed nearly 10 billion people (BernersLee 2018), and, assuming the need to reduce energy flows, there are multiple mechanisms to curb population growth and decrease total population (Engelman 2016). The causes of climate change and society’s reckless inaction in mitigating climate change are blamed on human nature even though there are specific historical and social actors who are primarily responsible

106  The anti-consolation of sociology for, and benefit from, climate change and who have the power and interest to successfully oppose climate change action (Klein 2018). Social stratification in class societies is often explained as a result of merit even though the actual impacts of merit are overestimated and life chances are profoundly impacted by ascriptive, non-merit factors (McNamee and Miller 2007). The consolation of constitutional ossification is the capacity to omit or ignore the qualifying “even thoughs” in the previous examples. The consolation of possibility blindness stems from its ticket to resign oneself to seemingly inevitable futures.1 The belief that the future must be essentially like the present, or that the present must give rise to particular social futures, and the inability to see alternative social futures in the present, reconciles one to social reality because it allows consciousness to escape from the nagging truth that “things could be different.” The highest solace is afforded to those who accept the future as inalterable—whether in the premodern modes of fate or predestination, or in the modern mode of determinism—because if the future cannot be changed, then there is nothing to be done to address the inevitable. To quote Kavoulakos (2017: 69) again, “[r]eificaiton effectively prevents questioning and changing established social relations in modern societies.” Possibility blindness is the calming pacification of the desire for qualitative change, quieting the hope for the elusive transcendent to be realized in this world. Before explaining how social defamiliarization undermines the consolation of subjective reification, it is crucial to remind readers that there is some historical validity to subjective reification due to objectively reified social conditions (see Chapter 2). The solace offered by constitutional ossification and possibility blindness is historically valid in the sense that society really is largely fixed and inalterable for atomized actors. There is truth in the sigh of an isolated, market-dependent individual: “What can I do? Things are the way they are.” Further, even organized social actors who are aware that the present is a human product and can be changed will be confronted by reified social forms, including resistance from institutions dominated by elites who benefit from the way things are and unshakable bureaucratic structures. Finally, there is transhistorical validity in some instances of possibility blindness. For example, death and entropy are inevitable. Yet, even here, social choice matters. Conditioned by the ownership and governance of resources, for example, people can die from starvation and treatable diseases, or, alternatively, after living a flourishing and healthy life. Further, based on the ownership of energy resources and infrastructure, human societies can increase or decrease the rate of entropy. In brief, the consolation of subjective reification is partially imposed by objective social conditions. Social defamiliarization undermines the consolations offered by constitutional ossification and possibility blindness by heightening awareness about social contingency and social changeability. Heightened awareness of social contingency deepens the experience of disenchantment. By a deepening the “experience of disenchantment,” I mean that the knowledge of social

The anti-consolation of sociology 107 contingency, by undermining constitutional ossification, is connected to the awareness that meaning is not inherent in objects and events (see Chapter 3). Or, stated positively, knowledge of social contingency is an awareness that reveals meaning as a human product, not a “thing” intrinsic to the cosmos. Akin to Weber’s notion of disenchantment, existentialists use the term “abandonment” to refer to “bear[ing] the full consequences” of the death of god, namely that “it is we, ourselves, who decide who we are to be” (Sartre 2007: 27, 34).2 Social defamiliarization produces or heightens this experience of abandonment. By revealing systems of meaning that were held to be stable and fixed—in a word, secure—as historical and variable—in a word, insecure—, social defamiliarization magnifies the “crisis of meaning” basic to the experience of modernity. This knowledge is discontenting for the individual because it fractures what may be an anthropological or even “metaphysical need for a meaningful cosmos” (Weber 1946: 281). It is for this reason that the defamiliarizing mind often envies, without contempt, conformists and fundamentalists. To be clear, the worn-out existentialist theme that self-consciousness itself is a tragic or even unfortunate gift may only be historically valid in a society that encourages primarily pathological ways of meeting existential needs, like the needs for belonging and meaning (Fromm 1955). The awareness that meaning is humanly constituted could be liberating in different social conditions.3 Similarly, heightened awareness of social changeability disrupts the consolation of possibility blindness by haunting consciousness with the knowledge that society can be radically different. This knowledge is “haunting” rather than liberating for the individual in current social conditions because it becomes impossible to justify past, present, and future injustice and suffering based on the false claim of inevitability. Cioran (1992: 81) once protested against prophets like the Buddha, not for the content of their thought, but against their willingness to interfere with the wellbeing others by spreading their bleak worldviews: “I witness pain, old age, death, and I know that they cannot be overcome; but why should I spoil another’s enjoyment with my knowledge? … [N]othing would induce me … to condemn another’s joy.” Sociologists should ask themselves the same question, but due to the antipodal implication: Should you condemn another’s joy with knowledge of how much suffering can be overcome by changing existing social conditions? If one oversaw a library for prisoners on death row, would one fill the shelves with the Stoics or readings in critical criminology? Those who are resigned to their “fate” and the “fate” of the world as unchangeable are surely happier than the defamiliarizing mind in objectively reified social conditions. This reflection does not mean that the sociological imagination slays positive emotions or is incapable pleasure, joy, and happiness. In fact, social defamiliarization amplifies the capacity for wonder in experiencing or witnessing human tenderness, love, and kindness. More importantly, if social contradictions show signs of bringing about a better society, social defamiliarization is emancipatory (see below). However, in our current situation

108  The anti-consolation of sociology in which another social “miscarriage” (Adorno 1973) is most probable, heightened knowledge of social contingency and social changeability robs consciousness of the following comforts: taking solace in secure meaning systems, naturalizing injustice and immeasurable harm, and projecting the present, with or without slight modifications, into the future as inevitable. A cautious defense of the potential practical benefits of social defamiliarization There are a few lines of defense of social defamiliarization despite its tendency to increase feelings of insecurity and abandonment. The first defense is that enlightenment is more valuable than comfort, that one should embrace a life lived with fewer illusions even at the expense of wellbeing. To bear the social contradictions exposed in acts of social defamiliarization without pursuing illusionary pseudo-solutions, one must love truth more than the feeling of being at-home in the world. There are two limitations to this defense. First, there is a historical contradiction: one aim of the Enlightenment was to increase human wellbeing through the application of reason, i.e., to understand in order to reform social institutions. However, due to objective reification, there is a yawning gap between understanding social institutions through reason, on the one hand, and reforming them in line with reason, on the other. It is in part due to this gap that social defamiliarization breeds discontent. Second, there are good philosophical reasons to consider the possibility that the relation between lucidity, on the one hand, and wellbeing, on the other, is negative (e.g., Cioran 1970). Time may tell if this inverse relationship is essential to being human or merely a socially contingent reaction to living in an irrationally rational society. Though it should be noted that this argument cannot be shrugged off as a deformity of “bourgeois pessimism” because the idea itself, even if false, is ancient: “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow” (Eccles. 1:18). A second justification for social defamiliarization is that defamiliarization is an inevitable feature of modernity for social reasons—rapid social change, secularization, disenchantment, etc. (see Chapter 3)—and sociological consciousness merely clarifies this experience. Something akin to this argument is made in Heidegger’s cryptic Contributions to Philosophy (1999): if the desire of the modern era is to “return from rootlessness to a rootedness” it cannot do so by returning to the familiar because, in part, we are “rootless and estranged just when we are the most in the midst of familiar beings and objects” (Mugerauer 2008: 144, 146). To live in the modern era “abandoned by being” is to live in a familiar world that is necessarily strange, or, specifically in Heidegger, uncanny. But this still begs the question: Would this objective condition of rootlessness be to better not to think about? A third practical defense of social defamiliarization is that the discontents generated by knowledge of social contingency and social changeability

The anti-consolation of sociology 109 will increase the probability of humanitarian reforms and/or social revolt that have the potential to bring about social conditions conducive to human flourishing, less suffering, and sustainable relations with the environment. The assumption runs like this: people who are aware of the fact that starvation, a good deal of suffering, environmental degradation, etc. are caused by contingent and changeable social conditions—namely, the private ownership of resources necessary to survive, a condition justified by various reifications and legitimations—are more likely to support or build humane social conditions. Who would not bear discontenting knowledge about social contingency and social changeability if it meant that spreading this knowledge would even remotely increase the probability that future innocent lives will not be deprived of healthy food for the irrational drive to accumulate capital, for example? Knowledge of the contingency and changeability of society is a necessary condition for rationally dismantling objectively reified structures and creating a society of subjects (Paci 1972) or an “authentic human community” (Goldmann 1971). For example, creating social conditions in which no one starves requires, at minimum, the collective awareness that justifications for starvation amid plenty are reifications that are as mythological as justifications for the caste system. Society will only be humanized if there is a society-wide realization that we are creating, and are collectively responsible for, those systems that currently cause immeasurable harm. Being a necessary yet insufficient condition for intentional and positive social change is the only relatively sound practical justification for bearing and spreading the discontents of social defamiliarization. Even here, however, a tragic tension arises in knowing that a better world is possible yet made highly unlikely due to reified social conditions and resulting reified consciousness.4 From the perspective of individual wellbeing, in a world in which the potential for utopia is being actively snuffed out due to ecological destruction, it would be better not to know that this potential ever beckoned. Kierkegaard’s (1954: 177) belief that it is worse to be unconscious of one’s despair than conscious of it is contingent on the assumption that truth brings one closer to salvation. Today, salvation—a qualitatively different future social world, an “authentic human community”—is an unlikely outcome in the foreseeable future for the whole and, therefore, the individual. In reified social conditions that show few signs of the real possibility for achieving a society of subjects, uncovering truths about society as it is casts one deeper into the desert rather than nearing salvation from it. Here, the sociological imagination is paradoxically a practice in self-imposed exile.

Notes

1. A past-oriented form of consolation through reification cannot be explored here: “comfort through amnesia” (Turner 2001: 111, emphasis added). 2. Sartre the individualist did not take seriously enough the collective implications of the meaning of “we” and “ourselves” in this definition of abandonment.

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3. There are deeper questions that cannot be pursued here. First, knowledge of social contingency does not necessarily result in nihilism, extreme relativism, or heroic individualism. There are ways of deliberately and rationally creating meaning systems, such as deliberative democracy. However, if one engages in social defamiliarization, these meaning systems can never again take on the comforting yet illusional forms of fixedness and naturalness. Second, the experience of disenchantment or essential meaninglessness may itself be historically contingent. Although highly unlikely, it is possible that future humans could discover that human life or the universe are essentially meaningful in some way that is incomprehensible to contemporary understanding. In other words, the insight that the universe is essentially meaningless (described as the absurd in Chapter 3) may only have historical validity (see also the discussion of “nonhuman defamiliarization” in Chapter 4). 4. A tension most pronounced in the works of Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkheimer (Gunderson 2015). Lucien Goldmann (1964) reasons that tragic thought (e.g., Pascal’s) is a precedent to dialectical thought, though in an ahistorical form (Cohen 1994: 165f). Tragic thought juxtaposes a “radically unsatisfactory world” (Goldmann 1964: 62) to absolute values that are impossible to realize in this world, whereas dialectical thought juxtaposes a radically evil world with the potential for a better future, even if the concrete details of this better world are unclear. Dialectical and tragic thought are even more interdependent today, for historical reasons. Though it retains belief in the human potential for “achieving authentic values by his [humanity’s] own thoughts and actions,” dialectical thought, in the face of contemporary social conditions, is often forced to shrink back into a tragic mold, though a historical form, where “the demand for absolute values”—, or, rather, the realization of positive human futures already possible in the present—cannot be realized in reality, at least in the foreseeable future (Goldmann 1964: 46, 59, 62). I think this is one shade of the many meanings of negative dialectics (Adorno 1973).

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. Abbot, A. 3, 70, 77, 79, 90, 95, 97n1; notion of “methods of discovery” 60; social defamiliarization by 10–11 abstracted empiricism 73 abstractions: belief as formal 28; real 39; through identification 27–31; 38 abstract labor 26, 29–30 absurd 53–57; arbitrariness 54; familiar 51, 53; inauthentic 54–55; ludicrous 55; social 54; sociological treatments of 50 Academics no longer think: How the neoliberalization: of academia leads to thoughtlessness (Pack) 66 acquaintance-type familiarity 59–60 actor-network theory (ANT) 91 Adorno, T.W. 7–8, 22, 24, 32, 56, 92, 97n6; approach to critical theory 40; critiques of Husserl 25; definition of identification 27–28; identity thinking 20, 28–29, 38; interaction of enframing 35; negative dialectics 110n4; notion of bourgeois coldness 22, 35–36, 37, 38; notion of forgetfulness 20; pseudo-activity 104; social “miscarriage” 108; “socially necessary illusions” 18, 27; uses term identification 27 alienation effect 3, 61 Anthropocene 94 arbitrariness 54, 57, 64, 66, 95 Asylums (Goffman) 78 attentional deviance 11 attentional norms 46 attentional shifts 11 attentional subcultures 46 authentic human community 109

Berger, P. 3, 4, 5, 18, 23, 24, 26, 54, 80, 84, 102; experience of sociological discovery 10; experiencing the absurd 57; formal rationalization process 30; social change process 63–64; use the language of forgetting 20–21 Bergson, H. 23–24, 56, 93 Bloch, E. 28, 31, 51, 89, 102 Bourdieu, P. 17, 22, 23, 24; social defamiliarization 66, 95 Brecht, B. 3 Brown, R. H. 3, 5, 61, 71, 77, 79, 82, 84; notion of “problematizing the obvious” 10–11 Capital (Marx) 18, 19 capitalism 4, 19, 21, 29, 34, 58, 71, 95; commodification under 31; exchange principle 20; Fordist to post-Fordist 64; marketing-oriented monopoly 79; modern 74; realism 22 Cioran, E. 53, 55, 67n4, 107 classical sociology 1, 4, 65, 70, 71 cognitive sociology 11 commodification 29–31, 39 commodity form, relation between identification and 29–30 common sense 8, 10, 17, 23, 24, 38, 56, 66, 73, 81, 82, 96, 101, 102 comparative-historical defamiliarization 11, 12, 70–73, 100 conceptual defamiliarization 96 constitutional ossification 18, 21–22, 28, 62, 99 contracts 37 Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger) 108

130  Index Cottrell, W. F. 91 critical defamiliarization 87–89, 101 critical social theory 4 crude materialism 18 cultural blind spots 11 Debord, G. 58 deconstructionism 7 decontextualization 29; and quantification 31 defamiliarization. see social defamiliarization detachment 35–38; “cold calculation” of 39; emotional 37; objective context 37–38 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 32 Dialectics of the Concrete (Kosík) 44 dialectics 89, 97n7 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 12 discipline-wide reawakening 65–66 discovery: Abbott’s notion of methods of 3–4, 60; Brown’s logic of 77; Copernicus’ 101; sociological 2, 10; of uncanny in social life 58 Dominant Western Worldview (DWW) 92 doxic experience 23–27; detachment 35–38; identification 27–29; monothetic acquisition as 26; objective context 26–27; secondary 24–25; sedimentation 23–24; of social world 24–25; of taken-for-granted 24–25, 27 Durkheim, E. 64, 75, 78, 95 Eclipse of Reason (Horkheimer) 32 emotional detachment 83 Energy and Society (Cottrell) 91 enframing 31–35; blinds consciousness 33; constitutional ossification of 32–33; objective context 33–35; reversal of subject and object 35; as standing-reserve 31; as subjective reason 32 essentialization 8, 24 estrangement 61 ethnography 12, 74, 83, 86 ethnomethodology 13, 102 existential knowledge 47 existentialism, 7; Camus 53; Heidegger 22, 31–32, 47, 108; nausea 93–94; Nietzsche 79, 80, 82; Sartre’s 50, 54, 93–94, 103

familiarity: absurd 53–57; familiar world as reified world 48–49; Goffman’s notion of “rules of irrelevance” 46; knowledge and 47–48; objective 43–44; Schutz’s notion of unfamiliar 50–53; strange 49–50; subjective 44; sufficiency in 44–45; typifying same and similar 44–46; uncanny and 57–58 Fink, Eugen 6 formalization 29–30 formal rationalization 29–31, 39 Frankfurt School 7, 31, 32, 38 Goffman, E. 32–33, 55, 67n6, 77, 97n4, 101; compares social interaction 78– 79; notion of “rules of irrelevance” 46; social defamiliarization and 78 Goldmann, L. 63 Grundrisse 18 habitual possession 44 Heidegger, M. 32, 108 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács) 19 Human Exemptionalism Paradigm (HEP) 90 Husserl, E. 5, 8, 15n5, 25, 26, 32, 41n5, 53, 99 identification 27–29; belief and 28; and commodity form, relation between 30; definition of 27–28; developed instance of 28; objective context 29–31 identity thinking 28–29 immanent critique, as form of social defamiliarization 87–88 inauthentic, as second face of absurd 54–55 indefinite intensification 77 Indian caste system 72 instrumentalization 31 instrumental rationality 38 intramundane transcendence 88 “intuiting essences” 8 inverted consciousness 17 Invitation to Sociology (Berger) 54 isolated competitor 37 James, W. 56 knowledge: acquisition 23; about social phenomena 59; of acquaintance 59;

Index 131 elements of 47; existential 47; of recipes 47; routine 47; of skills 47 “knowledge of social changeability” 62, 106, 108 “knowledge of social contingency” 62, 107, 108 Kosík, Karel 44, 46, 48–49, 57, 61–63 latent function 81 lifeworld 4,7, 41n5, 52, 59, 83, 84, 87, 88; fundamental opacity of 52 ludicrous 55; automatism and 56; misfortunes and tragedies 56; social action 55 Lukács, G 19 macroscopical defamiliarization 74–75, 76 manifest function 81 Marx, K 18–19, 33, 40, 80, 87, 88 Marxist theory 18–19 matter of factness attitude 33 mechanical monster, the 34 mechanistic reductionism 60 mere exposure effect 105 mesoscopical defamiliarization 75–76 metaphorical defamiliarization 100 methodological errors 86 microscopical defamiliarization 74 Mills, C. W. 1–2, 9, 64, 71, 73, 74, 82, 104 modernization theory, proliferation of 72–73 modern technology 31–32 The Modern World System (Wallerstein) 73 Moll, J. W. 60 monothetic acquisition 26 Moore, B., Jr. 73 motivational relevance 45 natural attitude 22 naturalization 24 natural laws 19 Negative Dialectics (Adorno) 20 New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) 90 nonhuman defamiliarization 90–94, 92, 101 nonidentity of objects 28–29 objective context: detachment’s 37–38; doxa’s 26–27, enframing’s 33–35; identifaction’s 29–31 objective familiarity 43–44

objective reification 18, 19, 21–22; Horkheimer and Adorno view of 20; as social context 22 The Order of Things 71 Paci, E. 34 Pensées (Pascal) 56 phantom objectivity 21 phenomenology, 41n7; and Marxism 4; epoché 6; Husserl’s 7, 8; MerleauPonty’s 6–7, 9; Ricoeur’s 61, 78, 80, 82; Schutz’s 4–5, 7–8; see also social defamiliarization The Philosophy of Money (Simmel) 39 A Poetic for Sociology (Brown) 61 possibility blindness 18, 21–22, 99; implication of 22 post-structuralism 7 potential-actual comparison 87 problematization, notion of 10–11, 63 pseudo-compassion 37 pseudoconcrete 49 quantification, decontextualization and 31 rationalization, formal 29–31 recognition 20 Reflections on the Problem of Relevance (Schutz) 44, 51 reification: concept of 18–22; of consciousness 24; consolation 105–108; definition of 20; experiential modes 22; Honneth’s 20, 35; of intelligence 28; key moments of subjective 18–22; Lukács’ formulation of 19–20; Marxist theory and 18–19; modern technology and 34–35; objective 18, 19; process of 20–21; source of 34; subjective and objective dimensions of 39; typology of 17; see also social defamiliarization ressentiment (Nietzsche) 82 reverse marking, act of 11 Ricoeur, P. 61, 78, 80, 82 root metaphors: theatre as 78–79; theoretical frameworks 77–78 routine knowledge 47 same vs. similar 44–46 Schutz, A. 4, 7–8, 25, 59–60, 67n1, 85; limited employment 8; natural attitude 22; notion of routine knowledge 49; notion of typification 49; notion of

132  Index the unfamiliar 50–52; phenomenology 4–5, 23; theory of familiarity 43–48 scientific projections 25–26 scopical defamiliarization 73–76 sedimentation: of experiences 23–24; phenomenological notion of 23–24 self-declared motivations 80 self-reification 35 semiotic subversions 11 Shklovsky, V. 2 Simmel, G. 30, 32, 37, 56, 78, 85; cold calculation of detachment 39; defamiliarization 74; sociological models and theoretical frameworks 77; urbanism 64 Smith, D. E. 11, 66, 85 social absurd 54 social action 55 The Social Construction of Reality (Berger and Luckmann) 4 social contingency 6–7, 24, 25, 62, 106–109 social defamiliarization 2–5, 10–12, 58; aim of 61; benefits of 103–104; conditioned by society 66; critical defamiliarization 87–89; estrangement, as synonym for 61; examples of 4; formulation of phenomenological methods 6–7; Foucault’s work as 12–13; Husserlian phenomenology 7–8; macroscopical defamiliarization 74–75; mesoscopical defamiliarization 75–76; methodological dimensions of 65; microscopical defamiliarization 74; modes of 17–40; 69–97; nonhuman defamiliarization 90–94; objective foundations of 63– 64; objective-sociological dimension of 66; phenomenological reduction 5–9; practical benefits of 61–62, 108–109; root metaphors 77–78; scientific benefits of 58–61; scopical defamiliarization 73–76; social dimensions of 62–66; as sociological method 9–13; sociologists engage in 17; by Spiegelberg 5–6; suspicional defamiliarization 80–82socially necessary illusion 18, 27 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Moore) 73 social phenomena: interpretations of 60; knowledge about 59 social-scientific theory 12

social transformation 10, 14, 28, 30, 52, 61, 63, 72 Society of the Spectacle (Debord) 58 sociological consciousness 10, 13, 65 sociological imagination 64; to self-consciousness 2; structure 1–2 The Sociological Imagination (Mills) 1 sociology: anti-consolation of 99–109; Bauman’s characterization of 10; cognitive 11; limitations 50, 60, 66, 101–103 standpoint epistemology 85 strange: absurd 53–57; familiar 49–50; unfamiliar 50–53; uncanny 57–58 The Structures of the Life-World (Schutz and Luckmann) 44, 47 subjective familiarity 44 subjective reification 18, 19, 21; Horkheimer and Adorno view of 20 suspicional defamiliarization 80–82, 101 sympathetic defamiliarization 11, 12, 101 sympathetic introspection 83–84 tacit knowledge 13, 64 taken-for-granted experience 4, 9–10, 12, 13, 17, 24–27, 43, 46, 50, 53–54, 58–59, 62, 64–65, 69, 72, 76–78, 82, 84, 87, 90, 93, 96, 101, 103–104 technistic alienation 34 techno-economic domination 33–35, 39 technological rationality 33, 38 topical relevance 45 typifications 7, 25, 27, 38, 39, 44–47, 57 uncanny, definition of 57–58 unfamiliar strange 50–53; causes of 51–52; reasons for experiencing 50 useful knowledge 47 vanity of existence 55 Verstehen (Weber) 83 Wallerstein, I. 73 Weber, M. 1, 30, 32, 34, 64, 83; comparative-historical defamiliarization 70, 72; definition of formally rational economic action 28; notion of disenchantment 107; suspicional defamiliarization 81 Wittgenstein, L. 58 wonder 59, 65, 101–102, 105, 107 Zerubavel, E. 3, 11, 46, 51, 64, 66, 85 Žižek, S. 63, 104