Thu 14 Mar 2002 17:13
p408
Colonization of the Life-World
it should be made clear that Habermas's major focus continues to be on
communicative action. Free and open communication remains both his
theoretical baseline and his political objective.
{how do I want to work? I want to keep exploring this realm of ideas. I
really am only so far encountering the lips of the body of social ideas
(I really must learn how to wear eyeliner/eyemakeup too...),. AND I
wish to work with physical bodies and minds of people I can share
presence with--women especially-- and of the type of caring
relationship more often sought by females than males. Plan. just keep
running with the idea world- and work with real women as you can being
careful, attempting to be careful not to lose them because of
short-sight. That is a very simple plan for existence and goal
orientation. I am grateful to have such a simple plan and the freedom
to develop it (a 2.5 yr part-time position). Carmen has wispy hair!}
Habermas, cont.
It also has the methodological function of allowing him to analyze
variations from the model. His focal interest is the ways in which the
colonization of the life-world is adversely affecting communication.
o should I get a copy of the OED on computer?
substantive:
adj:
1. with practical importance
2. essential
4. expressing existence
5. independent
p409
To Habermas, the life-world represents an internal perspective. there
is only one society; life-world and system are simply different ways of
looking at it.
The lifeworld is the transcendental site where
speaker and hearer meet, where they reciprocally raise claims that
their utterances fit the world... and where the can criticize and
confirm those validity claims, settle their disagreements, and arrive
at agreements. (Habermas, 1987a:126)
which involves increasingly rational communication in the life-world.
The more rational the life-world becomes, the more likely it is that
interaction will be controlled by "rationally motivated mutual
understanding." Such a rational method of achieving consensus is based
ultimately on the authority of the better argument.
Habermas sees the rationalization of the life-world as involving
progressive differentiation of it's elements; culture, society, and
personality. Engaging in communicative action and achieving
understanding in terms of each of these themes leads to the
reproduction of the life-world through the reinforcement of culture,
the integration of society, and the formation of personality.
{understanding an object reproduces it?}
System
system involves an external perspective that views society from the
observer's perspective of someone not involved (H, 1987a:117).
p410
Cultural reproduction, social integration, and personality formation take place at the system level.
The system ultimately develops its own structural characteristics. Ex.
family, judiciary, state, economy. As these structures evolve, they grow
more distant from the life-world. As they grow in power they have less
to do with the process of achieving consensus & limit the
occurence of consensus in the life-world.
here we go again:
The fundamental problem of social theory is how to connect in a
satisfactory way the two conceptual strategies indicated by the notions
of 'system' and 'lifeworld' (1987a:151). These two strategies: social
integration, system integration.
p411
social integration is achieved more and more throught he processes of consensus formation in language.
demands on language grow and come to overwhelm its capacities.
Delinguistified media (money and power, e.g.)--have become
differentiated in, and emanating from, the system--come to fill the
void and replace, to at least some degree, everyday language. money and
power coordinate action. Life becomes monetarized and bureaucratized.
p412
Weber: formal rationality of West triumphs over substantive rationality
of East. Habermas: the rationalization of the system triumphs over the
rationalization of the life-world. how could it be any other way in a
society that is able to survive? Why should the system necessarily
undermine consensus capabilities? distancing of action from life-world-
what stupid terms.
The solutions are clear-cut:
The life-world and system need to be recoupled. The dialectic between
system and life-world needs to be reinstated so that, instead of the
life-world being deformed by the system, the two become mutually
enriching and enhancing. While the two were intertwined in primitive
society, the rationalization process that has occurred in both system
and life-world makes it possible that the future recoupling will
produce a level of system, life-world, and their interrelationship
uprecedented in human history.
p413
Habermas sees social movements such as those oriented to greater
equality, increased self-realization, the preservation of the
environment, and peace "as reactions to system assaults on the
lifeworld. Despite the diversity of interests and political projects of
the heterogeneous groups, they have resisted the colonization of the
lifeworld" (Seidman, 1989:25).
semiotics hermenuetics phenomenology linguistics structuralism
p415
Dietz and Burns (1992): four criteria must be met in order for agency
to be attributed to a social actor (body is downplayed- see shiling and
mellor 1996, shilling, 1997b). First, the actor must have power; the
actor must be able to make a difference. Second, the actions undertaken
by an agent must be intentional. Third, the actor must have some
choice, some free play. The result is that observers can make only
probabilistic statements about what actors may do. Finally,
agents must be reflexive, monitoring the effects of their actions and
using that knowledge to modify the bases of action. Overall, agency is
viewed as a continuum; all actors have agency to some degree and no
actor has full, unconstrained agency.
The other, structureal side of the equation, from Dietz and Burns'
point of view, are the constraints on agency. First, even if an agent
can imagine certain actions, they simply may not be possible, given
technological and physical realities. Second, structure (especially
rules) makes certain actions seem necessary while others appear
impossible. Finally agency is limited by other agents who have
sanctioning power, both positive and negative.
asian social theory?
p416
This tendency to see the actor as behaving mindlessly is being enhanced
now by the growing interest in rational choice theory in American
sociology. The image here is of an actor more or less automatically
choosinge the most efficient means to ends.
p427 giddens reflexive creation and maintenance of self design of self
and body. giddens modernity and self-identity, transformation of
intimacy
p 428 sequestration of experience
giddens looming threat of personal meaninglessness (1991:201) (mod and self identity)
All sorts of meaningful things have been sequestered from daily life;
they have been repressed. However, dialectically, increasing
self-reflexivity leads to the increasing likelihood of the return of
that which has been repressed. Giddens sees us moving into a world in
which "on a collective level and in day-to-day life moral/existential
questions thrust themselves back to centre-stage" (1991:208). The world
beyond modernity, for giddens, is a world characterized by
"remoralization." Those key moral and existential issues that have been
sequestered will come to occupy center stage in a society that Giddens
sees as being foreshadowed, and anticipated, in the self-reflexivity of
the late modern age.
(p 430 Giddens's career took a series of interesting turns in the 1990s
(Bryant and Jary, still forthcoming). Several years of therapy led to a
greater interest in personal life and books such as _Modernity and
Self-Identity (1991) and _The Transofrmation of Intimacy (1992).
Therapy also gave hime the confidence to take on a more public role and
to become an advisor to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.)
p428 Modernity and Intimacy
Giddens picks up many of these themes in _The Transformation of
Intimacy_ (1992). In this work Giddens focuses on ongoing
transformations of intimacy that show movement toward another important
concept in Giddens's thinking about the modern world--the pure relationship,
or "a situation where a social relation is entered into for its own
sake, for what can be derived by each person from a sustained
association with another; and which is continued only so far as it is
thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each
individual to stay within it" (Giddens, 1992:58). In the case of
intimacy, a pure relationship is characterized by emotional
communication with self and other in a context of sexual and emotional
equality. The democratization of intimate relationships can lead to the
democratization not only of interpersonal realtions in general, but of
the macro-institutional order as well. The changing nature of intimate
relations, in which women ("the emotional revolutionaries of modernity"
[Giddens, 1992:130]) have taken the lead and men have been "laggards,"
has revolutionary implications for society as a whole.
"The transformation of intimacy presses for psychic as well as social
change and such change, going 'from the bottom up," could potentially
ramify through other, more public, institutions." (Giddens,
1992:181-182)
p430 Ulrich Beck's _Risk Society: Toward a new modernity_ (1992; Bronner, 1995)
agents are becoming increasingly free of structural constraints and
are, as a result, better able to reflexively create not only
themselves, but also the societies in which they live.
"The newly formed social relationships and social networks now have to
be individually chosen; social ties, too, are becoming reflexive, so
that they have to be established, maintained, and constantly renewed by
individuals" (1992:97)
what does this have to do with the search for the largely negative and defensive goal of being spared from dangers.
p431 risks centered in poor nations.
p445 Habermas Modernity's unfinished project
First, restraining barriers must be put in place to reduce the impact
of system on life-world. Second, sensors must be built in order to
enhance the impact of life-world on system. Impulses from the lifeworld
must be able to enter into the self-steering of functional systems.
(1987b:364) These would constitute important steps toward the creation
of mutually enriching life-world and system. Habermas sees little hope
in the United States.
.