Modernity in Habermass Lifeworld and System - Research Paper Example

Modernity in Habermas’s Lifeworld and System I. Introduction Jurgen Habermas’s notion of the lifeworld is intended to draw interest on the communicative mechanisms through which experiences are structured and exchanged in a symbolical manner. The major attribute of communicative actions is their form of organization: they are unrestricted, informally structured, and directed to mutual understanding. On the contrary, his notion of system implies the purposeful integration of actions based on the standards of regulation that are remote to speaking and acting individuals. This form of integration is typical of the administrative system of the state and of the modern economy, which while absolutely attached to the normative consensus created in the lifeworld, in their habitual action are directed by media that have been made ethnically unbiased such as monetary value in the economic side and power in the administrative system (Fleming 1997). Habermas argued that the economy and the state administrative system are ‘subsystems of purposive-rational activity’ (Fleming 1997: 86) which posses an internal control that is fundamentally defiant to communicative mechanisms directed to attaining understanding. Hence even as economic and administrative activities consistently involve suppositions about system objectives, such as effective implementation of planned social agenda or productivity, one has to move outside the economy’s and state administration’s subsystems to dispute the objectives themselves. Habermas’s distinction between lifeworld and system can result into an excessively sharp demarcation between societal mechanisms, and Habermas has been ridiculed for committing the same mistake himself. But the goal of Habermas’s dualistic theory is not to facilitate a divided understanding of social mechanisms, but rather to determine and explicate different types of societal exchanges. The emphasis on societal exchanges is apparent in his another work entitled Legitimation Crisis, in which he analyses the transaction between economy and state administration in the cases of welfare state and classical liberal societies. In that particular work he considers the state’s structural change under forms of advanced capitalism and puts emphasis to the new function of the state in economy management (Pusey 1993). His central assumption is that the new-fangled joint venture of the economy and the state is escorted with four distinctive types of ‘crisis tendencies’ such as “economic crises, rationality crises (a result of contradictory demands on the state), legitimation crises (a result of failure to meet social-cultural expectations), and motivational crises (which indicate an erosion of the values needed to sustain the market-state enterprise)” Pusey 1993: 106). Whilst foreshadowing a great deal of the later theory of Habermas, his Legitimation Crisis is mainly interested with the relationship between two media-directed subsystems, namely, the economy and state administration. Soon after, in 1981, in his work about communicative action he explores another form of exchange, that is, between lifeworld and system (Pusey 1993). II. Habermas: Distinction between Lifeworld and System In his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas unites two viewpoints, namely, internalist and externalist, in a distinctive manner under the perspectives of lifeworld and system respectively. Furthermore, he develops a lifeworld that is communicatively shared. The lifeworld is illustrated to hold the context of shared meanings that facilitates commonplace symbolic interaction and, in addition, it now clearly takes account of those structural parts such as institutions and social practices that facilitate social reproduction (Cook 2004). These attributes are shown in this table: Reproduction Processes Structural Components Cultural reproduction Interpretative schemata susceptible to consensus (‘valid knowledge’) Legitimations Behavioural patterns influential in self-formation, educational goals Social integration Obligations Legitimately ordered interpersonal relations Social memberships Socialization Interpretative accomplishments Motivation for norm-conformative actions Capability for interaction (‘personal identity’) Table 1: Contributions of reproduction processes to maintaining the structural components of the lifeworld (Habermas 1982: 279) The common attributes of this side of the illustration are simple enough to understand. Primarily, it is obvious that individuals exist in a symbolic realm of meanings as shown in row one of Table 1, and that we amend, explain, modify and incorporate the components of this symbolic realm through the common mechanism of communicative action, that is, through processes of consensus, discourse, and negotiation that persist in commonplace social interactions and relations. With these communicative actions, intermingling individuals as well share a collection of knowledge that presents the context for the legitimation of society and also for self-development. In a similar way, as shown in row two of Table 1, social integration perpetuates duties, reasonably directed interpersonal relationships and psychological symbols of membership and associations on the society. And, as shown in row three, through the mechanism of socialization with capable and experienced reference individuals or groups, children attribute a lifeworld that permits them to understand meanings in a dependable way and they gain knowledge of how to conform with social norms and to interrelate with other individuals in a manner that equally protects identity. In contrast, with his modified and expanded notion of system, Habermas builds up significant compromises to Luhmann and to the framework of the systems theory. It is with this notion of system that he discovers the intricacy and the highly differentiated systems of roles that are evidently typical of late capitalist society. ‘Roughly speaking the system’ implies those massive territories of modern society that are disengaged from experiences that are communicatively shared in common language and “coordinated, instead, through the media of money and power” (Steuerman 2000: 83). Money is obviously the typical motivating medium. With his reinterpretations of the arguments of Marx, Habermas aims to demonstrate how vast domains of the lifeworld such as the public sphere, nationality, education and others, have been ‘mediatized’: “and that is to say dissolved and then reconstituted as imperatives of the economic sub-system” (Steuerman 2000: 84). Power, on the other hand, is a less ideal medium due to the fact that it is rigidly connected to bureaucratic functions and structures that less resembles nature and more simply understood in communicatively shared interpretation. However, in spite of these distinctions, power still serves as a directing medium that occupies domains of the lifeworld and afterward restructures them as the entities of state regulation. Most importantly, these two media form and diffuse the ‘technocratic consciousness’ (Fleming 1997: 87). The ties with Marx and Weber are simply discernable. Money transforms actual labour into an intangible commodity in a free market economy, or also referred to as the process of commodification, whilst power transforms value-rational as well as practical action into Weber’s nature-like imperatives, or also referred to as negative rationalization process. Moreover, both media organise and ‘behaviorise’ activities by directing it with imperatives that posses all the attributes of what is referred to as the ‘social facts’; they organise activities ‘from the outside in,’ with a compulsory force as well as a ‘nature-like’ approach that is remote to contemplation through actual experience remembered and shared in common social interaction (Fleming 1997: 87). Essentially Habermas encourages us to examine our own modern situation as a form of conflict between the lifeworld and the system. Communicative rationality exclusively emerges in the lifeworld as an attainment of communicative rationale that could, in due course, result into more rational structures: ...to authority without fear or exploitation and thus to changed organizational principles that would be based on the interests of all and so deserve the genuine legitimacy of consensual agreements (Pusey 1993: 108). Every difficult stride in this path entails a ‘linguistification of nature-like system structures’ that must be reassigned through ‘communicative action into the lifeworld.’ The lifeworld is, given the inflexible organizational standard of capitalist society, from the other path, persistently subdued to ‘mediatized’ occupation by the state and the economy (Pusey 1993: 108). The crisis tendencies and shortfalls that were initially explored in Legitimation Crisis resurface now at the ridge between the lifeworld and the system. Through the directing media of money and power, social interactions and relationships in the lifeworld are ‘monetarised and bureaucratised’—Habermas’s term for the latter concept is ‘juridification’--- and hence resolutely tailored to the functional conditions of the system. Yet, this occupation of the lifeworld retaliates at the entire mechanism of rationalization and becomes problematic when it imperils the symbolic perpetuation of society (Fleming 1997: 88). Specifically, for instance, exactly what occurs as competitive form of individualism and consumerism generate such severe demands for ‘achievement’ as well as for the ‘utilitarianization’ of every set of values that family arrangements disintegrate under the demand and/or generate other unhealthy consequences in gender relations and others. Likewise, the ‘juridification’ of the roles of the citizens through the welfare states converts acting individuals and legal claimants into reliant entities of bureaucratic control in a manner that weakens independence, psychological wellbeing, and symbolically ordered memberships and associations (Fleming 1997: 89). The detrimental effects of occupation could so destabilize communicative action in other explicit and purposefully critical areas as policy formulation and higher government as to make rational and reliable performance severely problematic. In the meantime it is sufficient to refer to the numerous disorders in the reproduction of society that are brought about by the damaging effects of this occupation of the lifeworld. Structural Components (of the lifeworld) Disturbances in the domain of Culture Society Person Cultural reproduction Loss of meaning Withdrawal of legitimation Crisis in orientation and education Social integration Insecurity of collective identity Anomie Alienation Socialization Breakdown of tradition Withdrawal of motivation Psychopathologies Table 2: Crisis phenomena connected with disturbances in reproduction (Habermas 1982: 280) Habermas’s distinction between lifeworld and system has to be perceived as facilitating a more composite analysis of what Marx theoretically assumed as the fundamental elements of social labour. According to Habermas himself, lifeworld and system arise in Marx as ‘realm of freedom’ as well as ‘realm of necessity’ (Cook 2004: 114). Habermas’s objective in further differentiating lifeworld and system, the one into state administration and economy and other into public and private spheres, is to present for an explanation of advanced capitalism that considers the growing intricacies of democracies and welfare state. More particularly, he aims to facilitate analysis of the essential exchange between lifeworld such as the private and the public sphere and system such as the state administration and economy (Cook 2004). As Habermas stated, the interchange between the lifeworld and the system occurs in the two media, namely, money and power, and is standardised in the social roles of consumer, employee, citizen of the state and patron of state bureaucracies. In terms of consumer role, he explains private households as an entity transformed to mass consumption, reconstructed as system environments, and eventually subjected to the administrative and economic necessities of the monetary-bureaucratic setting (Steuerman 2000). Although Habermas is less precise in his work on communicative action of gendered identities and duties tied to socialisation mechanisms, he maintains to comprehend social development in terms of the processes of learning linked to interactive capabilities, and moral and realistic ideas, and he claims that the processes of socialisation are oriented in family institutions. To a certain extent, he perceives the role of socialisation as more vital for modernity than it ever was for the most primitive ‘human’ societies. For instance, he claims that in primitive lifeworld, in which there are rudimentary personality structures, socialisation is quite inconsequential (Steuerman 2000). On the contrary, in modern lifeworlds, developed personality structures are the means to the continuous perpetuation of the lifeworld, and the prevailing reproduction mechanism is socialisation. Since Habermas views socialisation processes as vital for maintaining and replenishing the individual capabilities related with developed personality structures, the ‘female’ function of socialisation not merely does not mislay its significance in modernity, but arises to direct the entire process of perpetuating the lifeworld (Steuerman 2000). III. The Contribution of Habermas’s Distinction of the Lifeworld and System to the Idea of Modernity The 1981 discussion of Habermas of the interchanges between the lifeworld and system creates the dilemma of the unwarranted juridification in autonomous welfare states. To determine the nature of the dilemma, he recreates the origin and development of the modern state system of Europe in terms of four stages of juridification. As Habermas argued, the first stage took place during the Absolutism period and drove into being the bourgeois state structures. This particular juridification stage is vital for understanding modernity, in the sense that it facilitates the separation of lifeworld and system, a mechanism wherein the economy and state affirm their autonomy of the cultural and religious necessities of the primitive social order and surface as purposive-rational actions’ subsystems (Pusey 1993). The second stage of juridification resulted into the constitutional state and forms a legitimate foundation for ‘private individuals’ or those citizens who are “given actionable civil rights against a sovereign” (Fleming 1997: 90). The third stage, related with the development of the democratic constitutional state granted constitutional legitimacy to the “idea of freedom already incipient in the concept of law as developed in the natural law tradition” (Fleming 1997: 90). The considered most current, and challenging, juridification stage was attained through the proletarian or workers’ movement and supplies for the democratic welfare state structures (Pusey 1993). So what is the relevance of these four juridification stages to our understanding of modernity? The first three stages of juridification gave Habermas the focus for a developmental interpretation of modernity or the modern lifeworld. The first stage established the foundation for an independent and unique lifeworld. The second puts emphasis on the self-governing position of the lifeworld for the reason that the life, liberty and property of private individuals, which are cast-ironed by civil law, may no longer be assumed as merely emerging out of relations in the economic system (Fleming 1997). Advancement was likewise guaranteed by the formation of the democratic constitutional state wherein there is an assumption that laws articulate a general interest and necessitate the consent of all. At the heart of this analysis of juridification is the notion that the lifeworld, formerly separated, possesses its own rationality entrenched in unrestricted and communicative mechanisms and that historical development entails the progress of that rationality, free of the assertions of the economic subsystem. With the progress for the welfare state, though, such development is doubted due to the fact that there is presently a re-separation of lifeworld and system. According to Habermas, the welfare state cannot be perceived as basically an extension of earlier types of juridification that facilitated the evolution of the lifeworld (Cook 2004). While he perceives previous legal directives as irrefutable benefits of the lifeworld, the democratic welfare state, which spawns and establishes class conflict and depends on legal techniques to resolve social problems, is defined by confusion and carries with it a discrete transformation in the guise of juridification. The democratic welfare state is incapable of laying claim to the “unambiguously freedom-guaranteeing character” of previous advancements because its strategies are ordered by the “ambivalence of guaranteeing freedom and taking it away” (Fleming 1997: 91). In the meantime, Habermas’s concept of ‘lifeworld’ should be viewed as a contextual pointer to relate action theory with the processes of rationalisation. This association demands understanding not merely of how certain actions could be assessed as rational instead how rationality stays incomplete throughout independent domains of life under circumstances of modernity. Simultaneously, an extent of rationality or also referred to as ‘rationalisation’ stays rooted in certain actions and hence facilitates rational behaviour of commonplace life. Therefore, human action remains understandable even where individuals cannot completely express the logic mirrored in commonplace experience and hence taken for granted. In fact, Habermas correctly interprets this lifeworld as the neglected or taken for granted realm of commonplace existence. The lifeworld, for Habermas, is the dissemination of communicative action by institution and routinised manner of performing things individuals carry out in their everyday life. The lifeworld can be defined as a pre-understood set of varieties of life in which everyday behaviour comes out. In the point of view of Habermas the perspective for the process of the evolution of society, individual personality and the larger culture is the expression of the lifeworld that associates with an intrinsic language system (Steuerman 2000). It is indeed logical to assume that the lifeworld shapes the linguistic framework for communication processes. Rationality then is the means both to hegemony and to liberation. According to Habermas the rationalisation of the lifeworld is the course by which social revolution, taking account of emancipatory potential, is assumed to take place. Mechanisms of rationalisation within the lifeworld are assumed to take place through communicative action whilst irrational mechanisms of evolution take place through strategic action. By broadening and strengthening the theory of rationalisation by Weber, Habermas argues that society can survive along paths of continuous delineation and rationalisation. Habermas, perpetually the diverse thinker, also adopts concepts the social system by Talcott Parsons to propose that as it turns out to be more distinguished, the lifeworld becomes more and more rationalised (Pusey 1993). The significant point here, which relates to modernity, is that the lifeworld and the system turn out to be more and more discriminated from each other; however, as these two entities become more differentiated, each new system built up can improve life possibilities and hence liberation. The failure to realise these possibilities results into counter-liberation: the conquest of communicative necessities through strategic vitalities thru occupation of the lifeworld; on this line rests the well-known ‘iron cage of modernity’ brought into play by Weber. Yet Habermas remark is that the bleakness of the ‘iron cage’ is not the least bit unavoidable (Pusey 1993). By defying counterfeit rationalisation and disguised hegemony, we harbour hope for other goals for our communal existence, disclosed, claims Habermas, by particular progressive movements such as environmental lobbying, feminism, and shield of the lifeworld against the invasions of the market and the bureaucracy, or in other words, the invasions of modernity. IV. Conclusions In the previous years, conflicts have brewed in highly developed societies that, in several instances, diverge from the welfare-state trend of established conflict over allocation. These recent conflicts are no longer rooted in regions of material production; they are no longer directed through organisations and political parties; and they are no longer capable of being alleviated by reparations that obey the rules of the system. To a certain extent, the latest conflicts emerge in regions of social integration, socialisation and cultural production. They are evident in quasi-traditional, extra-parliamentary types of resistance. The core deficits indicate depersonalisation of communicative dimensions of action; this depersonalisation cannot be avoided with merely the use of the media of money and power. The concern is not one of reparations that the welfare state can grant. To a certain extent, the concern is now to protect or restore imperilled traditions and everyday practices, or how to put into effect transformed everyday practices. In sum, the latest conflicts are not triggered by difficulties of allocation, but involve the structure of forms of life. The implication of this dichotomy between the lifeworld and the system cannot be foretold. It could be that the difficulties which arise out at the gap between the lifeworld and the system will be mended in support of the system through enhanced directing performances that lessen the weights of awareness, reflection and decision. On the contrary, the idealists anticipate that shell from a lifeworld shredded of its institutional structures could, through new types of communicative action, revive a disintegrated public domain and generate new ‘communicatively achieved agreements’ with new ‘structure-forming effects’ (Pusey 1993: 115). References Cook, D. (2004), Adorno, Habermas and the Search for a Rational Society, New York: Routledge. Fleming, M. (1997), Emancipation and Illusion: Rationality and Gender in Habermas's Theory of Modenity, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Habermas, J. (1982), Habermas: Critical Debates, London: Macmillan. Pusey, M. (1993), Jurgen Habermas, London: Routledge. Steuerman, E. (2000), The Bounds of Reason: Habermas, Lyotard and Melanie Klein on Rationality, London: Routledge. Read More