Beyond Language

Revisiting Berger and Luckmann Through Embodiment and Media Theory
Reza Shirmarz

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966) remains a seminal work in sociological theory. It offers a profound and systematic explanation of how reality is constructed through social interaction, language, and institutionalization. Their argument, which frames society as both a human product and an external, objective reality internalized by individuals, has shaped entire fields from sociology to cultural studies and beyond. However, the book reflects key limitations of its time, particularly its overwhelming focus on verbal communication and its complete omission of mass media and non-verbal communication in shaping reality. Even in 1966, when mass media, radio, film, newspapers, and television, were already central to everyday life, their absence from Berger and Luckmann’s theory reveals an important theoretical oversight. This short article critiques Berger and Luckmann’s framework on two fronts: first, for its neglect of non-verbal, embodied modes of communication that contribute to identity formation and reality construction; and second, for its failure to account for the role of mass media systems as central producers and disseminators of symbolic universes. Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, Edward T. Hall, and Pierre Bourdieu, as well as mid-20th-century media theory, the critique highlights the need for a more comprehensive and multimodal theory of social construction.

Berger and Luckmann place language at the center of their constructionist thesis. Language, they argue, enables objectification, typification, and the transmission of a common stock of knowledge. Through linguistic acts, individuals name and stabilize their experiences while rendering them intelligible and socially valid. Symbolic universes, the overarching frameworks of meaning in society, are built and sustained primarily through linguistic legitimation, ranging from casual everyday speech to philosophical or theological systems.

However, this emphasis renders, in my opinion, their theory logocentric: excessively dependent on verbal expression and linguistic structures as the foundation of social life. By reducing the construction of reality to spoken and written language, Berger and Luckmann sideline the rich, embodied, and often unconscious forms of meaning-making that occur through body language, i.e. gesture, posture, facial expression, spatial behavior, as well as material culture. This blind spot significantly narrows their model's capacity to account for the ways in which social hierarchies, roles, and cultural norms are enacted and reinforced in non-linguistic ways.

Edward T. Hall’s The Silent Language (1959), published just a few years earlier, offers an anthropological counterpoint. Hall demonstrates that cultures communicate through unspoken codes, proxemics, body language, silence, and timing, that structure human interaction as profoundly as language. These non-verbal cues form what Hall calls a “grammar of culture,” operating below the level of explicit awareness but powerfully shaping social meaning. Similarly, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956) foregrounds the performative aspects of identity. Goffman conceptualizes social interaction as a theatrical performance, where individuals manage impressions through not only speech but also dress, gesture, facial expression, and the manipulation of physical space. In Goffman’s dramaturgical framework, reality is not merely narrated but enacted, and identities are constituted through embodied performance. Pierre Bourdieu pushes this argument further with his theory of habitus in The Logic of Practice (1990). For Bourdieu, social agents embody structures of perception and action through bodily dispositions learned over time, from how one walks and talks to how one occupies physical and social space. The habitus operates beneath conscious thought, yet it reproduces the social order with remarkable fidelity. Social reality, in Bourdieu’s account, is not only spoken but also inscribed in the body.

None of these bodily or performative dimensions are accounted for in The Social Construction of Reality. Berger and Luckmann treat the individual as a linguistic and cognitive actor but not as an affective or embodied being. In doing so, they miss how physical comportment and gesture participate in the construction of gender, race, class, authority, and resistance. This omission is especially problematic in analyzing marginality and difference, where the body often becomes the site of symbolic struggle.

Just as the authors overlook non-verbal performance, they also fail to anticipate the role of mass media in constructing symbolic universes. While their model includes institutions like education, religion, and law as transmitters of legitimation, it does not include media institutions, which by the mid-20th century had already become influential agents of socialization, representation, and reality-production. By 1966, television, radio, film, newspapers, and advertising were already shaping collective understandings of national identity, morality, gender roles, and social values. These forms of communication were producing and disseminating dominant ideologies on a scale far beyond face-to-face interaction. Yet, Berger and Luckmann give no analytical attention to the ways in which mass media create, reinforce, and challenge symbolic universes.

Television in particular stood out as a powerful medium for shaping "the self" and social reality. As a visually immersive platform reaching millions of viewers daily, television provided archetypes of family, professionalism, beauty, and authority that individuals could emulate or resist. Sitcoms, dramas, and televised news shaped how people perceived what was normal, desirable, or deviant. For instance, the nuclear family model promoted in 1960s American sitcoms helped construct a normative identity framework against which deviations appeared marginal or threatening. Moreover, the repetition and emotional resonance of televised content imbued these symbolic constructions with a sense of naturalness and inevitability, embedding media-produced meanings into the everyday consciousness of viewers.

Media also transforms the nature of socialization. Berger and Luckmann’s distinction between primary and secondary socialization, the former taking place through intimate caregivers, the latter through institutional roles, requires revision in light of how mass media infiltrates the home and shapes identity formation alongside, or even in place of, parents and teachers. Popular television shows, film narratives, news broadcasts, and advertisements carry typifications and legitimation strategies that impact how individuals understand themselves and others. Moreover, identity construction increasingly involves the consumption and imitation of media tropes. Mass media delivers not only content but also emotional models, aesthetic ideals, and behavioral scripts. It provides new archetypes and roles for people to perform, often bypassing traditional institutional gatekeepers.

The Social Construction of Reality continues to provide a foundational vocabulary for understanding how social worlds are built through language and institutionalization. But to remain theoretically relevant, the framework must be expanded to account for non-verbal, embodied, and media-based modes of communication. Social reality is not only narrated in language but performed through bodies, curated through visual and spatial cues, and mediated through institutionalized systems of mass representation. It is not just maintained in conversation, but also reinforced by images, broadcasts, rituals, and ambient cues that circulate through the cultural sphere. A robust sociology of knowledge must grapple with this complexity as well as integrate embodied performance and media institutions as co-equal components in the construction of social life.