The Appearance of Nothingness

Abstract

Unexceptional by definition, the natural appearance of everyday life is not a matter of conscious awareness, let alone deliberate calculation, but an uneventful background against which, ordinarily, nothing special seems to happen. This feeling that nothing is going on, however, may be intentionally elicited (i.e., preserved) and used for instrumental purposes, through strategic actions that dissemble themselves to better affect their target. In this view, this chapter elaborates the concept of concealed strategic actions (CSA), actions that are not experienced as such by the observer and are designed to be so. Somewhat oversuspicious, this idea can be traced back to the work of Goffman on fabrications, normal appearances, and the difference between expressed versus transmitted information. CSA’s current relevance, more practically speaking, is shown by the extensive use in policy making of default options, which are interpreted here as a consequential form of interventions that do not feel as interventions at all. Though CSAs can backfire and are, indeed, inherently obsolescent, their ambition to deploy a reactance-proof strategy seems intriguing from an interactionist perspective, highlighting the nexus among intentions, actions, and reactions—something to eagerly inspect for an expansive symbolic interactionism.