Manipulation of Everydayness — the Invisible World
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Rusnak, A. (2025). Manipulation of Everydayness — the Invisible World. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17265376
Author: Alexey Rusnak
Translation Notice
The English version of this text was translated from the original Russian with the assistance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT (GPT-5 model) and subsequently reviewed and edited by the author to ensure conceptual and stylistic accuracy.
Abstract
This essay explores the relation between everyday perception and the invisible architectures of meaning that condition it. The argument unfolds around the idea that what is perceived as “present” has no autonomous existence outside of consciousness; rather, it is produced within the horizon of thought. Everyday thinking, bound to the visible and the habitual, is shown to depend on conceptual mediation — on a categorical layer that determines how things appear and acquire sense.
Such mediation, however, renders ordinary consciousness vulnerable to manipulation. When meaning itself becomes a field of control, the world is no longer merely interpreted but constructed through theoretical, moral, and ideological frameworks. The essay distinguishes several levels of manipulation — from informational and cognitive limitation to the highest, semantic form — wherein consciousness is governed by complex systems of meaning. By tracing this process, the text reveals how the invisible order of interpretation shapes the visible world, and how “presence” itself is always already an act of thinking.
Keywords
semantic manipulation; everydayness; invisibility; consciousness; meaning; interpretation; epistemic limitation; ideology; perception; phenomenology of thinking
Introduction
1. Manipulation of Everydayness and the Invisible World
The bearer of an everyday worldview, immersed in the immediacy of events, stubbornly fails to perceive that what appears as “present” has no existence apart from thinking — apart from consciousness itself.
What remains “not yet distinguished” is always already an inclusion of thought, a mode of interpretation mediated by one’s mentality. As this mentality arises, so too does the manner in which the world is disclosed — and thus the horizon of what can happen.
If the everyday realm — the world of objects visible through words — can still be interpreted and ordered through object-oriented cognition, then everything extending beyond the horizon of what is seen by the eyes demands a doctrine, a theory, a concept: a regime of semantic visibility. Yet — what the everyday mind does not know — even the visible is visible only through conceptual mediation, through categorical sense.
Hence unfolds an endless field for manipulation over those lacking both an instinct for such “priestly thinking” and the intellectual discipline it requires. These cognitive techniques allow the formation of “theories” that do not merely describe what is happening, but rather invent it — providing the very framework through which the real becomes intelligible.
2. The Absence of Direct Visibility
At first glance, most people appear to inhabit the borders of an “ordinary worldview,” a field of “direct visibility.” Yet this visibility is always conditioned by another — by a particular invisible world of meaning, which insinuates itself through the implantation of interpretive structures:
· Scientific positivism, or its intensified variant, scientism, which imposes reductive schemes of intelligibility;
· The moral code, which delivers prefabricated blocks of behavior and patterns of relational expectation;
· The imaginary of the invisible, populated by unobservable entities — life forces, collisions, alliances — that form various non-experiential ontologies.
3. The Meaning of What Happens
Patterns, connections, and constructions of semantic order may be offered to everyday consciousness as “the meaning of what happens.” Such mediation permits the regulation of perception and, consequently, of thought itself — establishing control over the consciousness of the everyday majority.
The paradox, and perhaps the irony, lies in this: the manipulated consciousness believes itself to be autonomous, guided by practical reason, unaware that its so-called immediacy is itself an effect of mediation.
4. Forms of Manipulation Arising from Limitation
· Manipulation through epistemic deficiency — deception made possible by the absence of specialized knowledge.
· Age-based manipulation — the exploitation of developmental insufficiency, where comprehension matures only with lived experience.
· Informational asymmetry — the gap between those who possess insider knowledge and those excluded from the structures of eventhood.
· Spatio-temporal manipulation — the displacement of reference, whereby what occurs “elsewhere” or “before” acquires a distorted presence.
5. The Supreme Form of Manipulation
The highest form of manipulation is semantic manipulation — the governance of consciousness through a complex architecture of meaning. By altering this semantic architecture, one may transform the entire structure of experience.
By altering these meanings, one can transform the entire consciousness of those involved, who do not realize that their very presence is always an act of thinking — including embodied thinking — thereby effectively transforming their lived experience.
References / Bibliography
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2. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books.
3. Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action (T. McCarthy, Trans., Vol. 1). Beacon Press.
4. Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Anchor Books.
5. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul.
6. Schutz, A. (1967). The phenomenology of the social world (G. Walsh & F. Lehnert, Trans.). Northwestern University Press.
7. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford University Press.
8. Searle, J. R. (1995). The construction of social reality. Free Press.
9. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
10. Eagleton, T. (2011). Ideology: An introduction (2nd ed.). Verso.
CC BY-NC 4.0
© Rusnak Alexey, 2025. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).