ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that our everyday social interactions are organised according to participatory sense-making frames: autonomously organised habitual structures that shape our being-together at multiple timescales. When they are compatible they remain mostly transparent to us and we have the experience of being well situated. When, on the other hand, they are incompatible, we experience what I call social dissonance, and what was previously part of a transparent background is disclosed. The inhuman gaze is one example giving rise to such experiences; and what it discloses is something about our being-in-the-world-together. By investigating features common to it and other examples of social dissonance, we can, it is proposed, make intelligible the dynamics that undergird everyday social interaction, recognising them as norm-generating autonomous social structures functioning at multiple timescales, that is, participatory sense-making frames.
