(or the "Post Historical" Dialectics of the Textual "Instruction' of Humanity)

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Surrounded on all sides by the vast sea of empty space, the earth is a small island from which humankind has no escape. We can expect no salvation from some dialectic being, no rescue by an alien civilization, no deliverance from the consequences of our own possible evil.

If we took any haphazard assortment of people, and suddenly threw them together on a small island without forewarning and left them there long enough to organize themselves and create their own sense of a separate history (How many people would we need for our 'natural experiment' in group dynamics to work? Five? Ten or twenty? A hundred or a thousand? Or maybe only one?). What would be the possibilities which we might find expressed upon their unexpected rescue.

Take any odd grouping of people, a class, a department, a nation state, and place them into a commonly structured context, and who might become the candidates for the Gestapo, for the Aztec Priesthood, for the CIA or KGB, and who for the 'resistance' (and how 'random' would our sample need to be? How 'trans-cultural' or 'poly-ethnic' to have a genuinely, statistically 'heterogeneous' assortment of human possibilities?). What percentage of people could be expected to fall upon the extremes of the social continuum of authority and conformity, and how great a number can be expected to stand somewhat ambivalently but inertly in-between. As Stanley Milgram's (1965) and Philip Zimbardo's (1973) classic experiments in obedience to authority and institutionalized aggression so clearly suggest, the ethical ramifications of such 'experiments' transcend their science and their 'sense'.

Armed with its sense of holistic relativism and its science of cross cultural realities, anthropology has seen fit to use the whole world for its cultural laboratory, has treated many different culture historical groupings of humanity as if they were 'island experiments' and has tried to see how we have carved up the 'Grand Arc' of human possibility. What are some of the 'post historical' lessons it has learned from its explorations of the ranges and limits of the continuum of human experience? That 'no man is an island'? That there is no such thing as a pure, pristine, primordial, proto typical or primitive 'culture'? That all culture historical groupings of humankind are coeval, however bound by tradition? That no 'culture garden' however apparent homogenous and monolithic is completely unproblematic, 'dis-ease' free, non-contradictory and without the dynamic tension of an 'exogenous/endogenous' historical dialectic? That, whatever their cultural orientations, all humans have similar sets of basic needs, natural pre-dispositions, individual differences and inclinations? That however successfully adapted ecologically or as a 'civilization' all cultural groupings are yet beset and confounded with similar human dilemmas of authority and its succession, transmission of tradition, its alteration and adulteration by 'foreign' elements and influences, with the conflict between social order and individual interest, with the problem of corporate identity and survival against an historical background of 'unintended consequences'.

An especially important lesson anthropology has to teach us is that no human observer, no matter how authentically anthropological or behaviorally scientific is completely free from the contaminating influence of her/his own presence and position within the observation or may absolutely disregard the ethical implications of her/his involvement and that there is therefore no such thing as a wholly 'objective' and unbiased translation, or any 'human experiment' which is not ideologically un-predetermined or historically unrevised or textually unreinterpretable.

From the angle of anthropology, culture can be seen to work both ways in freeing humankind from the vagaries and vicissitudes of 'natural evil' and in fettering humanity by the possible perversities and arbitrariness of 'wo/man-made evil'. Anthropology instructs us that there may indeed be no common ground, no historical 'baseline' or cultural 'bottom line', no absolute, non-arbitrary, non-relative wholly natural fixed reference points or coordinates by which to 'triangulate' and frame the role of culture in shaping human experience. Anthropology also instructs us that there is no such thing as a culture historical or ethnographic/ethnological reconstruction of human reality which is not inherently 'textual' and pre-historical, and therefore not unaffected by the dialectical constraints of human 'inter-textualities' and 'con-textualities'.

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A critical re-reading of the book The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman, presents us with a problem of how best to frame and interpret it and poses the paradox that though the work is in many ways seminal and generally realistic, making 'dense sense' of how common sense figures in our ongoing reconstruction of our social 'realities', we must nevertheless well wonder 'if it is necessarily so?', 'good and fine, but is this all there is to it all?' and 'might it not all actually work in some other way?'. Perhaps not, but then what is it?

The book can be succinctly interpreted in terms of the explicit dialectics of its three ongoing, synchronistic 'moments' in the social construction (and sociological de/construction) of human reality. Its central dialectic is between objective, social and subjective, psychological realities (etic and emic) and how the construction of reality is first produced (institutionalization/socialization) and then 'maintained' (symbol systems/identity). The three 'moments' of 'externalization, objectification and internalization' converge upon the problem of the reproduction and transmission of social order (socio cultural dynamics?) and are summarized respectively as 'Society is a human product. Society is an objective reality. Man is a social product.' (page 61)

Common sense knowledge of 'everyday life' is 'temporarily structured' and phenomenologically posited in multiple intentional worlds which nevertheless depend upon and refer back to the 'paramount reality; of the 'here and now' realisms of consciousness which is an inter-subjectively shared world normally experienced as taken for granted, standard and unproblematic routine. This inter-subjectiveness of everyday reality becomes embodied in 'face to face' typifications of 'otherness/selfness' negotiated in social interactions and becomes externally 'objectivated' by the human expressivity and productivity of systems of signification, of which linguistic discourse, situated in face to face reciprocations, best represents and precipitates everyday reality, functionally integrating different 'zones' of differentially distributed knowledge through symbolic transcendence of the 'here and now' immediacy of experience. Such linguistic praxis constructs 'semantic zones' into a 'social stock of knowledge' permitting the relational positioning by degrees of relative 'familiarity/remoteness'. Though the totality of this world is 'opaque' the 'relevance structures' of different individuals intersect and overlap, and there is a general relevance structure of the 'social stock of knowledge'--'as possessed differently by different individuals and different types of individuals'. (page 46)

The first 'moment' of 'externalization' is the social production of human activity in the world construed as sui generis 'anthropological necessity'--humankind's underdeveloped 'instinctual organization' accounts for our 'world openness' and the resulting plasticity renders us susceptible to 'socially determined interference'--the constraints of human nature demands a stable environment and specialization and direction of human drives. Such externalized activity becomes 'habitualized' in repetitive, reciprocal social patterns (institutionalization) implying historicity and control by the constraining force of tradition and custom. Institutionalization reinforces as if 'typifications of everyday life the mutual relevance structures shared by individuals and social reality becomes experienced as if 'objective'.

Institutionalization requires legitimation achieved by the common sense 'logic' posited in the relevance structure of the 'social stock of knowledge' and precipitated by language--institutionalization becomes 'embodied' in such knowledge expressed primarily by language. 'Sedimentation' occurs when inter-subjective experience becomes 'congealed' in recognizable and memorable entities and when common biographical experience becomes part of the 'common stock of knowledge'. Self identity in social performance becomes typified in 'roles' (the social self interchangeable with others) within the relevant context of the 'common stock of knowledge'. Roles represent institutions, and institutionalization thus implies 'role typification and performance'. A society's stock of knowledge becomes distributed only as it is relevant to certain roles. The scope of institutionalization compared to the totality of human activity left 'un-institutionalized' depends upon the generality of the relevance structures, and the segmentation of institutions into specialized domains of knowledge presents problems of objective integration (as opposed to inter-subjective integration), problems of socially segregated 'sub-universes' of meaning which become increasingly 'hermetically sealed' and problems of legitimating such sub-universes vis-à-vis' competing domains.

The second 'moment' of objectification properly begins with the 'reification' of institutions which become apprehended as a 'non-human facticity'.

Such reification requires 'symbolic legitimation' or 'second order objectification' of meaning making objectively available and 'plausible' institutionalized 'first order' objectivations, which integrates the social order and 'makes sense' of that order as a 'subjective plausibility' and which 'explains and justifies' the social order by ascribing 'cognitive validity' and 'normative validity' to its symbolically objectivated meanings. There are four levels of legitimation: 1. Incipient linguistic legitimation; 2. Rudimentary theoretical propositions pragmatically and concretely oriented to specific actions; 3. Explicit theories of institutional domains of knowledge; 4. symbolic 'universes' integrating different provinces of meaning and encompassing the social order as if a symbolic totality, allowing transcendence of marginal situations, internal contradiction, conflict and inconsistency and providing horizontal and vertical coherence to the social order. Since alternative, 'heretical' symbolic universes threaten the social order, different 'conceptual machinery of universe maintenance'--namely 'mythology, theology, philosophy and science'--function through the mechanisms of 'therapy' and 'nihilation' to reinterpret or eradicate such differences.

The third 'moment' of 'internalization' is accomplished principally by 'primary socialization'--childhood enculturation involving highly personalized identification with significant others, and is reinforced by secondary socialization, reciprocal identity coming from formal and impersonal communication with figures of authority, involving the internalization of the institutional sub-worlds of the social order and dependent upon the status of the knowledge to be internalized. Secondary socialization does not possess the 'subjective inevitability' of primary socialization and its effects are much more shallow, 'fugitive' and vulnerable to challenging definitions of reality, but less susceptible to 'marginal situations' which renders it merely irrelevant and 'trivial'.

Socialization requires both 'routine maintenance' and 'crises maintenance'--the former involving the indirect constraints of social praxis and embedded in custom, the latter being a similar continuation of routine, except it is more ritualistically bracketed, explicit and intensive. Significant others occupy a central place in the 'economy of reality maintenance' by reinforcing subjective identity, buttressed by the 'chorus' of others in a dialectic. Conversation is the most important vehicle of such reality maintenance. "one may view the individual's everyday life in terms of the working away of a conversational apparatus that ongoingly maintains, modifies and reconstructs his subjective reality." (page 152). The casualness of the conversational apparatus 'realizes' a world in terms of the implicit, taken for granted routines of everyday life, 'in a double sense of apprehending and producing it'. Subjective reality depends up the maintenance of 'plausibility structures'--'the specific social base and social processes required for its maintenance'--the necessary credibility and concomitant 'suspension of doubt' attendant upon such subjective reality maintenance.

Alternation, the possibility of 'near total transformation' is a process of 're-socialization' which requires a context of an effective plausibility structure reinforced by significant others. To be successful, such alteration requires the displacement of previous worlds, reinforced by segregation, separation or disaffiliation from previous significant others (re-identification) and the reorganization of one's subjective plausibility structure. Besides the requirements of conceptual legitimation and routine maintenance, such alternation also involves reinterpretation of one's previous life in terms of a radical 'B.C./A.D.' rupture. Partial transformations avoid such a disruption, stressing instead continuity between previous and present lives. Similarly, successful socialization requires 'symmetry' between objective and subjective realities and unsuccessful socialization occurs when there is asymmetry or discrepancy between primary and secondary processes of socialization.

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The chain of dialectical permutations and contrasts informing this narrative might be summarized something like this: objective/subjective; externalization/internalization; institutionalization/socialization; objectification/(subjectivation);reification/role representation; first order objectivation/second order objectivation; symbolic legitimation/subjective reality maintenance; therapy/nihilation; horizontal integration/vertical integration; social organization for legitimation/psychological theories of identity (realizing process); pure theory/strengthening tradition; sedimentation/segmentation; institutional scope/institutional modes; paramount reality (everyday life)/marginal situations; language as a primary system of signification/conversation as casual actualization of reality; relevance structures/plausibility structures; inter-subjective relevance structures/general relevance structures; credibility/'suspension of doubt'; tradition/significant other; identification/typification; common stock of knowledge/'sub-universes' of meaning; symmetry/asymmetry; near total transformation (alteration)/partial transformation (re-socialization); symbolic universes/challenging ideologies. Such a dialectical chain is only approximate but it is possible that such a chain can be represented taxonomically with more general terms (upper case) subsuming more specific terms (lower case) and that this is in part reflects the structural outline of the text.

History is held to intentionally enter into this reciprocating chain of structural dialectics--"The insight into the dialectic between social reality and individual existence in history is by no means new. It was, of course, most powerfully introduced into modern social thought by Marx…" (page 187)--but similar to Marxist theory, history enters as very structured process, as a dorm of 'historical descriptivism' ('modes of production', 'social relations of production', 'labor theory of value', 'fetishism', 'exploitation') which itself becomes an a-historical reification attempting to fit 'facts to forms' and 'acts to ideas'. The inherent structural underpinnings of such dialectical theory conceptualizes the dynamics of historical patterning as constrained, regularized process which precludes history as an open minded possibility, as a sense of difference of what happened before, of how this process originated, of what results in changes during the unfolding of this process, of how people actually enact, transact and interact this reality on a day to day basis and how a larger social reality beyond the social constructions of the group enters into and influences this reality. Finally, history as the self organizing process of unintended consequences becomes impossible.

Though the steps of this process (externalization, objectivation, internalization) are synchronic, co-occurring 'moments' and though socialization is always partial, imperfect and incomplete, the structural dynamics of such a dialectical process is such as to confer upon its sense of history a degree of functional and structural integrity which actual historical patterning of social reproduction and cultural transmission may not really have.

The dialectical order of the text itself can be construed as a critical 'metalogue' for the reality which it 'constructs/deconstructs/reconstructs'. The contrapuntal chaining informing its narrative structure as well as the social realities it purports to represent, its consensual approach to 'common sense' and its common sense approach to 'consensuality', its empirically objective approach to 'non-positivistic' problems (phenomenology, relevance, symbols) and its rationalistic approach to 'non-sociologistic/non-psychologistic' historical 'structures', its introductory sociological contextualization and 'objectification' of the theoretical and empirical 'problem' itself.

Its own metalogue with its topic is especially apparent in the implicitness of the narrative ordering of the dialectic itself and in its failure to 'close the circle' by leaving the entire chain left open, even though such tautological closure is not only implicit but necessary to the meta-logic of its argument. This presents a definite 'slant' of the narrative as to which forms of reality, 'objective' or 'subjective' and 'external' or 'internal' are to be construed as 'independent' facts and which are 'dependent' variables. From this standpoint, in the beginning, the 'reality' of the dynamic is anchored to an anthropological necessity of externalization, linked to an instinctual 'deficit' inherent in human nature and to our evolutionary 'world openness' which makes social interference not only possible but inevitable. At the end, the 'empirical adequacy' of psychological theories explaining 'identity' as an empirical phenomena which is variable and open to modification and the function of these theories as 'realizing process' is discussed as if a 'dependent variable'--"Everything that has been said so far on socialization implies the possibility that subjective reality can be transformed. To be in society already entails an ongoing process of modification or subjective reality." (page 156) and "subjective reality is thus always dependent upon specific plausibility structures, that is, the specific social base and social processes required for its maintenance." (page 154) In-between the beginning and the end, there are innumerable instances which reveal a tacit objective and 'causal' orientation which always construes the subjective to be 'dependent' or based upon the objective--"The objective sense of the institutional order presents itself to each individual as given and generally known…if there is any problem at all; it is because of subjective difficulties the individual may have internalizing the socially agreed upon meanings." (page 82) or "The same legitimating function pertains to the 'correctness' of the individual's subjective identity. By the very nature of socialization, subjective identity is a precarious process." (page 100) or "These considerations imply that there will always be a social structural base for competition between rival definitions of reality and that the outcome of the rivalry will be affected, if not always determined outright, by the development of this base." (page 120) or "The representation of an institution in and by roles is thus the representation par excellence on which all other representations are dependent." (page 75)

There is in this dialectical order a sense of ideological if not tautological, circularity which posses a central paradox for any such analysis. If externalization/objectivation and internalization/subjectivation are construed as two interdependent sides of the same coin, then there is really no way to say which comes first, or which leads while the other follows. Even to claim that the dialectic moves in both directions simultaneously does not escape this dialectical dilemma, as we so not thereby step outside of its circular process. In this regard, it ultimately does not matter at which point we enter the circle, as it always leads predictably to the same sets of consequences. The entire process (externalization, objectivation, internalization) may in fact be reversible and still defensible from an alternative 'psychologizing' standpoint, such that (internalization/subjectivation/externalization) might be construed as more fitting the historical facts (or alternatively subjective/objectivation/internalization/externalization) Psycho historical interpretations, focusing upon such notions as 'displaced libido' and 'return of the repressed' and psychological projection as primary influences in historical 'dramas' attempt just such a dialectical reversal.

This dialectical dilemma creates a central paradox for the text as a whole, such that while it poses the problem of reification/de-reification as a central, pivotal issue in the understanding of the social construction of reality, the text itself must ultimately, literally reify or 'sociologically construct' its central problematic of 'reification and social construction' in order to then 'de-constructively de-reify' it. What it must terminologically, narratively reify in order to then de-reify is the actual history of the dynamics of social construction/reproduction as if this were structured dialectic and synchronistic process, somehow separately sealed in its own hermeneutic vacuum of psycho-sociological action and actualization.

This marked/unmarked dialectical orientation also confers upon it a 'socio centric' emphasis upon the human being, as individual actor, as a passive receptacle or 'tabula rasa' upon which society must leave its imprint. The natural inadequacy of instinct which makes externalization an anthropological necessity becomes in the end the individuating 'deviance' which is the unfortunate consequence of incomplete, asymmetrical, discrepant, 'unsuccessful socialization'.

Alas, 'social structure' is better than human nature, but it is still not perfect in its historical predetermination of the self. The individual participant is construed as somehow 'socially inadequate' and therefore 'deviant' if she/he has her/his own separate game plan, 'un-institutionalized relevance structure', independent sets of interests or 'plausibility structures' or intentional realities, biological pre-dispositions or behavioral orientations or existential raison d'être which is not mostly constrained, habituated, ritualized, symbolized, typified, institutionalized, socialized, objectivated and reified by the 'social constructions' of social structure. The focal problem of psychological identification is seen as primarily, predominantly constrained by the contexts of socialization, and the central issue of human identity in the world becomes a question of 'status role' typification vis-à-vis significant others, the structural functional integration of the organization and the corporate interests of the whole. As Science Officer and First Mate Spock of the USS Enterprise, on the series Star Trek keeps asking himself in his ethical/rational befuddlement as a hyphenated half human/half Vulcan--"Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one?"

There is a deep, basic sense in which our imperfect, partial models and theories about human reality reflect something important about ourselves, which is inescapable and inevitable on our part. To the extent that this theoretical model of the sociology of knowledge remains attached to, and embedded by its terminological reference, to a western tradition of sociology which is itself part of an older tradition of rationalism and empiricism, then we must be cautious of an implicit 'Euro-centric' structure of the narrative. We must ask in this regard whether the common sense, everyday reality which becomes 'constructed/deconstructed/reconstructed' is not that of a 'typical' WASP'ish organization Man and whether if alternative societies had their own indigenous sociologies and psychologies of knowledge, then whether they would incorporate the same 'common sense' socio centrism as does this work. Evidence of alternative 'socio centrisms' is available (Louis Dumont, 1970; Richard Shweder, 1991; Clifford Gertz, 1975). Similarly, we must be cautious of the hypothetical 'extreme case' or 'logical outcome' if we pursued any single theoretical version or empirical vision of humankind to its ultimate, 'reified' conclusion. In this way, it is possible to discern a 'homo hierarchicus' in Dumont, or a 'homo insectus' in E.O. Wilson, a 'homo auctoritas' for Emile Durkheim, a 'homo functionalis' for R. Radcliffe-Brown, a 'homo hymenoptera' for Claude Levi-Strauss, a 'homo domesticus' for Raymond Firth, a 'homo economicus' for Marxists, a 'homo dramatic' for Victor Turner, a'homo hermeneutic' for post structuralists, a homo symbolon' for Clifford Gertz, a 'homo habitus' for Pierre Bourdieu, a 'homo modernus' for Marvin's materialists, etc. For Luckman and Burger, I would choose the appellation 'homo societas' for though Man may indeed be nothing but a social animal, humankind might also be something more.

We must also be skeptical of the 'local logic' which frames a text within the ideational flow of a whole narrative context. External consistency must always be sacrificed to achieve the internal coherence necessary to the successful literary integration of a text. We must also become 'sophisticated' in our awareness of the possibility of 'counter factuals' in our wider, 'world logic' which constrains the credibility and acceptance of any textual narrative. Every explicit statement of a rule automatically entails numerous implicit exceptions which the hermeneutic 'distanciation of surplus meaning' must then eventually taken into account. Finally, we must resist any 'scientific' appeals to common sense or to consensus, however disguised by technical jargon or sophisticated nomenclature, and however 'sense making' such text may seem on the surface. All such appeals must be superficial and superfluous accounts and its credibility must likewise be shallow and spurious. Science is gained not by appeal to common sense, but in the suspension of credibility such common sense fosters, and in the excoriation of the ignorance which it always hides. In this regard, any narrative account which begins with common sense knowledge as a 'paramount reality' and ends with folk psychology as adequate accounts of human identity if they functionally serve as 'realizing process' of that identity must be read with more than a single grain of salt. We must reiterate a sobering critique of any functionalist explanation of human reality:

"Historically speaking, functional analysis is a modification of teleological explanation, i.e. of explanation not by reference to causes which 'bring about' the event in question but by reference to ends which determine its course." (C. Hempel; Aspects of Scientific Explanation, 1965: 303)

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If it is not the 'social construction of reality' then what is it?

Beyond suggesting 'the human construction of society' it is perhaps the ultimate paradox of this work that it poses in its dialectical metalogue some of the possible answers to this question--"One may ask in what manner social order itself arises…The most general answer to this question is that social order is a human product, or, more precisely, an ongoing human production…" (page 52) or "Because they are historical products of human activity, all socially constructed universes change and the change is brought about by the concrete actions of human beings…"(Page 116) or "Consequently, social change must always be understood as standing in a dialectical relationship to the 'history of ideas'. Both 'idealistic' and 'materialistic' understandings of the relationship overlook this dialectic and thus distort history…what remains sociologically essentially is the recognition that all symbolic universes and all legitimations are human products; their existence has its base in the lives of concrete individuals and has no empirical status apart from these lives." (page 128) and in its conclusion, "…sociology must be carried on in a continuous conversation with both history and philosophy or lose its proper object of inquiry. This object is society as part of a human world, made by men, inhabited by men, and in turn, making men in an ongoing historical process. It is not the least fruit of a humanistic sociology that it reawakens our wonder at this astonishing phenomenon." (page 189) Also relevant are the tangential 'dialectics' which are reiterated her and there through the work, for example the most suggestive discussion of death:

And the brief discussion of the role of symbolization in general--"Very much the same way may be said about the social (as against the just discussed individual) significance of symbolic universes. They are sheltering canopies over the institutional order as well as our individual biography. They also provide the delimitation of social reality; that is, they set the limits of what is relevant in terms of social interaction…" (page 102) and the following:

There are dialectics and then there is the Dialectic. It is not from the Dialectic of the world from which we need to distance ourselves, so much as it is from the density, difficulty and dilemma inherent in our own dialectics as an inherent form of theoretical argumentation that we must somehow separate ourselves in our attempt to understand how and why human history works.

Human History is not necessarily Dialectical, but the textual form of our theoretical understanding of this history is necessarily dialectical. In this regard, it is possible to construe the hypothetical Dialectical Structure as a complex and 'radical' structure, rather than in a more traditional sense as a simple movement between opposites and therefore our theoretical constructions which purport to 're-present' this Dialectical complexity of the World must also be dialectically sophisticated. There is no reason not to suppose a 'tri-partite' dialectical structure of which the materialist, the social structuralist and 'idealist' theories of historical dynamics and change are not all mutually interdependent and symmetrical 'equal' in their inter-causal connections, and these all simultaneously enter into a 'fourth' dialectical dimension in the 'socio-cultural' relationship between the individual and society and the self and others. With such a 'radical structure' of our dialectics, certain themes suggest certain other themes which may or may not suggest yet other themes, all equally interesting and nontrivial from a scholarly point of view.

The purpose and point of a 'post historical' perspective is precisely that it allows us to step outside of our dialectics of the Dialectic of History, while remaining engaged in the terminological tensions and textuality these dialectics confer upon our sense of the human past. From such a point of view it is possible to critically reexamine both the 'real world' dialectics and the purported 'inter-textuality' of the psycho sociological/socio psychological 'de-re-construction' of human culture historical realities and thereby attempt a more 'realistic/relativistic' reconstruction of the central roles of culture and history in such human dialectics. To be 'dialectically transcendent' and synthetic of the 'synergistic' realities it seeks to 're-present' all such reconstruction must also and always be a reflexive metalogue which always 'metalogically' and metaphorically brackets and re-frames its own iterations, statements and textuality in order to render it conditionally relative, explicate its implicitness and contextually, counter factually interrelate its own references and inferences in a wider framework of 'world logos'.

All dialectics are necessarily metalogical metalogues in that they are always simultaneously working upon two interconnected levels--the level of the 'Dialectic' and the level of the textual dialectics itself. The object of post historical reconstruction is to render this 'metalogue' explicitly reflexive of itself, thereby allowing it the possibility of an 'identity with a difference'--to entertain the possibility of Difference which the dialectical Dialectic is un-reflexively blind to.

In closing, it is worthwhile to suggest that the common sense construction and consensual reproduction of 'everyday life' is not necessarily the best place to begins an understanding of the dynamic role of knowledge in the dialectics of human history. A great deal of what humans know and has defied both common sense and consensus and history has somehow accommodated the difference. History must be seen as a 'self organizing' human system always sustaining itself upon the verge of chaos. It is a supercritical system into which minor changes can have major repercussions. Over the structure of the long run, it nevertheless demonstrates a 'massivity', a momentum and 'robusticity' which gives it a sense of direction, purpose, dialectic and order. As John Lennon sang in his last album before he was quite unexpected gunned down, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

There is a sense of self fulfillment if we posit that humankind is primarily determined by the common sense and consensus of the social world it is historically situated in. humankind does not all necessarily live within the same socio-cracy or ethnarchy--culture historical groupings have varied a great deal to how much they accommodated or assimilated the individual in subordination to a reified, super organic, corporate, institutional, tradition bound, 'social construction'. There is also a sense that societies may be as or more 'deviant' than the individual, and that if individual deviance is necessarily relative, so also is the possibility of such social 'archosis'. In this regard, one of the most vital functions of the illusions of reified symbolism, the deceptive delusion of ideology, is to protect and mediate the 'marginal situation' of separation, violence, inequality, injustice, loneliness, unfulfillment and deprivation and most importantly, death, for both the individual and for the group as a whole. These are the existential ethics, realities and uncertainties of the lifeboat.

Needless to say, some societies tend to do a better job than others in this, and some do a particularly poor job of it. We must deliberately resist totalitarian tendencies of the dialectical determinism of the Dialectic, especially as these are existentially expressed in 'everyday life'. A big and impersonal bureaucratic world of Big Brother is the only logical outcome of such a Dialectic: