On the Production of Common Sense and the Reproduction of the Social Order

Goffman argued the order of interaction pre-exists, insists on and resists all kinds of social-historical structures, insofar as it is only in the dimension of encounter that they show their nature. Consequently, macrosocial structures can only be considered as expressions of a specific order of interaction. Even setting the question in Bourdieu's terms, it is only in “these processing encounters […] that the quiet sorting can occur which […] reproduces the social structure” (Goffman 1983, 8). This stance is closely akin to that of Garfinkel with regard to the priority of the “local production order” (Rawls 1987, 148): “what is at stake is not the theoretical problem of order, but the substantive production of order on singular occasions” (Lynch 2001, 140). While structures are certainly present, then, within local practices and meanings – as it is for Bourdieu – for Garfinkel, the properties and logics of the structures are all embedded on that local level, to the extent that only the proceedings and methods through which we ascribe meaning to the world makes us participating, producing and competent 'members' of a social order (Garfinkel 1988). Both stances respond to the attempt to establish a research paradigm such that the dimensional substratum inside which any sociological interpretation cannot but move is that of ordinary, everyday practices, taken for granted; and inside spheres of existence, meaning, and of local relations. In short, one cannot do without the experience of everyday life based on common sense knowledge, and it follows analytically that the social reality that counts, the “privileged”/ “dominant”/“par excellence” reality is that of “everyday life” (Berger, Luckmann 1966). Taking this into account, we will argue the recognition “that there is a primary experience of the social that [...] is based on an immediate belief relation that automatically leads us to accept the world” cannot but “pose the problem of the conditions of possibility of this [...] doxic experience” (Bourdieu 1992, 49). Hence, we discuss some conceptual reference points that allow to approach “common sense as what we do not ask questions about”, but as inseparable from “common sense as a cultural system” (Geertz 1983). This conceptual framework can be usefully integrated by following Bourdieu's indications regarding the doxa as something contiguous to common sense. It represents the accessibility to representations, models, and modes of primary experience of the social world, nevertheless, this accessibility is by no means universal, but structurally bound to class differentiated capabilities: the ways and the access for drawing on symbolic repertoires depend on the social conditions and resources. So, there is a differentiated distribution of legitimate meanings on which the sociological gaze can be placed in terms of an analysis of the hegemonic divisions and classifications that structure the conditions of production of ordinary interactions and situations. It will be shown, then, how the obvious and the taken-for-granted on which common sense insists are produced by hegemonic processes based on the oblivion (and the structural acceptance of this oblivion) of that very common sense, in its historically built nature. The ongoing construction of shared social reality in interactive situations, as in the case of linguistic exchanges and communication, is thus the product of a consensus and involvement of agents, but it cannot but remain implicated in asymmetries and hierarchies linked to the possession of legitimate social and symbolic resources.