Familiarity reduces experienced world complexity until another self disrupts it

Evidence

Since the constitution of meaning and the world is consistently anonymous and latent, the full range of experiential possibilities which it allows – the extreme complexity of the world – will be excluded from consciousness. Which means that the familiar world is relatively simple and also that this simplicity is guaranteed down to fairly narrow limits. The complexity of its inherent possibilities does nevertheless make itself felt, in particular as a break, a schism, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the strange, the uncanny, something which has to be either fought against or treated as mysterious. As soon as another person figures in consciousness, not simply as an object in the world but as alter ego, as freedom to see things differently and to behave differently, the traditional taken-for-granted character of the world is upset and its complexity manifest in a quite new dimension, for which there are no appropriate ways for the time being by which it can be grasped or absorbed. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Stevens’s taken-for-granted world of service being upset by alter egos (Miss Kenton) in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day; connects to Luhmann’s complexity-reduction thesis vs. Giddens. — connects to: Commodity exchange reduces difference to identity through endless novelty — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 548