ABSTRACT
The most important experience of others takes place in the face-to-face situation, which is the prototypical case of social interaction. All other cases are derivatives of it. The typifications of social interaction become progressively anonymous the farther away they are from the face-to-face situation. An important aspect of the experience of others in everyday life is thus the directness or indirectness of such experience. The social reality of everyday life is thus apprehended in a continuum of typifications, which are progressively anonymous as they are removed from the "here and now" of the face-to-face situation. Social structure is the sum total of these typifications and of the recurrent patterns of interaction established by means of them. Human expressivity is capable of objectivation, that is, it manifests itself in products of human activity that are available both to their producers and to other men as elements of a common world.
