Communicative Rationality and the Uncoupling of System and Life World - Book Report/Review Example

Communicative Rationality and the Uncoupling of System and Life World Introduction: Jurgen Habermas's critique of the Frankfurt School's ideologicalcommitments regarding the onto-teleological unfolding of history was the basis of his more general critique against the normative foundations from which they used to launch their attack against the culture industry and capitalism. Despite the critique of objective normativity, Habermas's program does not neatly fit into the postmodern relativism of his Continental counterparts such as Foucault and Derrida. Habermas's concept of communicative rationality established a theoretical stance from which to analyze the epistemological structures of society and individuals that appreciated and was sensitive to the contextualized and historicized nature of reason and rationality without giving in totally to the sort of radical relativism that his intellectual contemporaries are usually accused of. A proper explication of communicative rationality is embedded in his analysis of life-world and its fundamental tension to system in contemporary civilization. Moreover, his sociological interpretation of the role of agency and the problems of structure offers insight to the fundamental importance of the public sphere a fundamental element of Habermas's positive program vis--vis communicative action/rationality. In this paper, I will provide a summary of communicative rationality as regards the Problems of Agency and Structure coupled with my own reflexive commentary on the readings associated with these topics. Summary of Communicative Rationality: Niemi (2005) and others offer that the immersive nature of language, that is, language is that which we are born into, usually into the language of our parents or culture, and this fundamentally structures rationality and not merely the evidence of our application of reason or the instrument of that reason. Other accounts of rationality such as Kant's depend on a transcendental process, which fundamentally massages and mediates our structures of thought. These transcendental structures offer the "view from no-where" perspective of reason which is mediated through our manifold of sensible intuition. Habermas's model depends on coordinating social action, that is, action between at a minimum two agents. Habermas reasons that this is only possible if and only if there is a shared set of rules of linguistic interaction plus some recognized, if only implicitly, agreement on meaning and syntax. This sort of conclusion devalues or finds insufficient the sort of strategic or instrumental reasoning that seeks to manipulate natural laws and social facts that is indicative of the natural or pure sciences. This reasoning furthermore does not evaluate normatively the goals of it manipulation, or seeks to develop a basis from which to judge the efficacy of its ends. This rationality is the hallmark of system-rationality, which occurs "from above" and seeks to dominate by functioning as a machine which implements mass conformity. Communicative Rationality depends on the interaction of two agents through language, with the intention of achieving something other than a desired result, though a desired result can be had in the offing, but something like what might be called "understanding" or agreement (Nemi 2005, p. 218). In other words for communicative rationality to be effective in must occur wherein neither agent is interested in "influencing" the other. This type of rationality lies in distinction to instrumental or strategic reasoning, which almost exclusively requires that language be implemented to achieve a desired result or cause an action. Communicative rationality is not a method to reach veridical statements of fact, but instead a process or an interaction in which language is used to create agreement or disagreement, but at least some shared understanding which can be carried forward to other engagements with other interlocutors. Communicative Rationality works coordinatively and not hierarchically. Evaluation/Discussion of Habermas's Sociological Thought and Agency/Structure: It is this coordinative action which exists within the life-world of human existence for Habermas and such action has the potential and often lies in tension with the mass conformity of system and instrumental or strategic rationality. Habermas's project here is to reject the dire and bleak conclusions that the Frankfurt School theorists drew regarding the cultural industry and its ability to efficiently and without contradiction or opposition reproduce societal norms. Habermas sees a potentially liberating aspect to the public sphere in the life-world engaged via communicative action over and against the systems integrative structures. Specifically, this communicative rationality can lead to the development of new social movements, which resist somewhat successfully the system's imperatives. The system does not only consist of traditional forms of authoritarian sources of power, such as government or the church, but include many of the other institutions of hegemony which utilize strategic rationality as the primary mode of engagement, these institutions include: Science, Business, Mass or Popular Media and Education. The genesis of the public sphere wherein these new social movements developed originate out of the life-world experiences of people bonded together for the purposes of survival and economic prosperity. Economics is meant to be understood rather broadly here; in the way that Marx understood labor and trade, as constitutive of basic human activity. This collusion became more sophisticated throughout the late 18th and 19th centuries concomitantly with the exchange of ideas and words in the salons and caf's of Enlightenment Europe. These exchanges allowed for the flow of ideas outside the typical strands of ideological replication, giving birth to the public sphere. Habermas suggests that though economic concerns bound people together, it is the super-capitalism that pervades modern society that undermines the fruitful products of communicative rationality insofar that the burgeoning of popular culture and mass media brought about by the capitalistic impulse to consume and thus requiring a greater capacity to spend, has interrupted the coordinative channels of communication between agents necessary for the development of rationality and a healthy public sphere. Instead, what has occurred in contemporary societies is the regency of the technocracy requiring a full implementation of instrumental or strategic rationality in order to properly exist within certain features of the system. That is, the ability to live in modern society requires a mastery of the hegemonic rationality and a leveraging of a kind of language that preferences the functional norm-free language of that rationality. This type of language, the language of the system, on Habermas's account is distortive and lies in contradistinction to the type of linguistic structures that would be generated by communication in life-world rationality. This distortion alienates individuals from each other and reduces their capacity or desire to communicate on those levels, as the functional imperative perceives the desire for a cultivation of understanding as wasteful or irrelevant to the tasks or goals at hand. This has radical consequences for the humanities and the fine arts as the investment in these cultural products is reduced purely to a function of entertainment, rather than the liberating possibilities that literature, art and music might otherwise serve in society. The role of the artist and interpreter is replaced in the life-world rationality by the rise of the producer and consumer in the systems approach. Culture is produced in order to reproduce the values of the system, and culture is consumed according to the popularity or entertainment value measured in dollars and cents. The autonomy of the public sphere and the life-world is dependent on the use of language, the crafting of a sophisticated and flexible communicative rationality that is not distorted by the strategic communicative structures of the system. When that autonomy is threatened, the ability to transcend the apparatus of mass socialization, the very ability to think for one's self is radically undermined. Habermas points to the current political situation around the world, the faltering of the EU with Ireland's recent rejection of the Treaty of Lisbon, the generally unpopular war being waged in the Middle East, even the continuing intransigence of global powers to adapt to the impending environmental and energy crisis represents a failure of the mobilization of the public sphere within the life-world to modify the systems of domination. Reflectivity: When reading Habermas, it is clear that a fundamental understanding of the Frankfurt School and the Critical Theory school promoted by Adorno and Horkeheimer is essential in capturing the subtle but definite moves that Habermas makes over and against that sort of theorization. Moreover, it is clear that Habermas is attempting to distinguish himself from his postmodern cousins; however, it is not always clear how he intends to escape the sort of radical relativism of Derrida and Foucault in the practical sociological application of his theories. The strategic or instrumental reasoning that is replicated by the system, whether or not it lies in fundamental tension to the life-world or public sphere has proven helpful and effective in development of the medical and communication technologies that today many in the contemporary developed world find invaluable and essesntial. Mass media and popular culture despite its obvious weaknesses, its "lowest-common denominator approach" or path of least resistance is sometime painful to watch; however, it has also provided us access to the cultural products of places that would have otherwise been inaccessible without those structures or systems in place. When evaluating Habermas's argument, one has to wonder what is to be gained from the sort of analysis that attempts to rescue postmodernism from relativism, while maintaining the critique against the capitalist institutions that have provided consumers, of which we are all members of, so much in our estimation. It is unlikely that we would be willing as a society to give up on our mobiles, our Internet, our BBC, for the rehabilitation of the cafs and intellectual salons of our bourgeois forbearers, while Habermas does not present this either-or as part and parcel of this theoretical commitments; it seems at some point that if we are to genuinely uncouple system and life-world, some sacrifice along these lines will have to be made. Bibliography Baxter. (1987). System and Life-World in Habermas's "Theory of Communicative Action. Theory and Society , 39-86. Dallmayr, F. (1988). Habermas and Rationality. Political Theory , 553-579. Habermas, J. (1987). The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press. Niemi, J. I. (2005). Jurgen Habermas's Theory of Communicative Rationality: The Foundational Distinction Between Communicative and Strategic Action. Social Theory and Practice , 513-532. Giddens, Structuration Theory and Failing in School: A Perspective Anthony Giddens' interpretative methodology in his articulation of structuration theory offers an interesting analysis of everyday situations that could be analyzed from a myriad of different perspectives. In this regard, Giddens far-reaching theory offers a unique way to synthesize the various disparate social institutions and practices without resorting to grand meta-narrativization or obtusely philosophical pronouncements. Instead a close reading of the rules, structure, and actors involved in any institutional process vis--vis a close empirically-minded methodological outlook will reveal a structural program that is both context specific and actionable. One particular feature of Giddens's (1986) program is his analysis of Strategic Conduct wherein, "the focus is placed upon modes in which actors draw upon structural properties in the constitution of social relations" (p. 288). This analytical bent allows the primacy to be placed on the embedded actions of a definite group of actors in already given institution. The reliance on the already "given" nature of the institution is not necessarily part of the target of analysis, that is, we understand that the rules of interaction between actors in an institution is less determined by some academic or philosophical elucidation, but rather the concrete behaviors and negotiations between sets of actors uncover the rules that the institution operates; its failure or success is determined not by how those rules coordinate or are cognate with some predetermined definition but the real-life outcomes of that interaction. This sort of analysis is particularly helpful in understanding how and why individuals or actors might fail in school, insofar that there is a pre-given institution with a long historical and sociological basis of strategic conduct, with definite sets of actors that are easily distinguishable, administrators, teachers and students and distinct and easily traceable knowledge sets. In order to properly explicate Giddens's analysis of failure in school it will be necessary to first provide a summary of structuration theory, followed by how an analysis of strategic conduct reveals the endemic opportunities for failure. Giddens' formulation of the theory of structuration begins with a critique of various philosophical traditions namely hermeneutics and post-WWII analytical philosophy, which have placed great emphasis on the intentionality of human action without giving sufficient articulation to social structure and social causation. When the topic is broached, resource is given to sociological apparatuses which totally seek to dominate or negate human agency. This Giddens' refers to the "dualism of agency and structure" (Callnicos 1985). This dualism does not account for the hand that human agency has in the production of society, that somehow society has been produced and reproduced "behind the backs" as it were of unsuspecting human agents. This surprising supposition is attributed by Giddens's to the ethical or normative analysis that was enacted by those like the members of the Frankfurt School and Marxists that wished to attribute the evils of society to social institutions that reinforced authoritarian and unmitigated forms of external power, external to the remnants of human agency. Giddens's suggests that while the reproduction of social institutions must necessarily lie outside any individual actual person, it is here that social structures enter the scene, as the "unacknowledged conditions and unanticipated consequences" of human conduct in general (Callincos 1985, p. 136) Giddens's distinguishes sharply between these structures, and social systems, by which he means human collectives persisting in time and space. The persistence of a social system can only be accounted for by invoking structure, which is "non-temporal and non-spatial." It is a virtual order of differences pro- duced and reproduced in social interaction as its medium and outcome." Every social system possesses a set of "structural principles," the "structural elements that are most deeply embedded in the space-time dimensions of social systems" and that "govern the basic institutional alignments of a society." Giddens's distinguishes between three main dimensions of structure, signification, in which agents communicate and rationalize their actions by means of interpretive schemes, domination, arising from asymmetries in the distribution of resources, and legitimation, through which different forms of conduct are sanctioned by means of norms. Structural principles, according to Giddens, typically involve social contradictions, in the sense that they operate in terms of each other but at the same time contravene one another. These social contradictions are played in context specific ways in various institutions. It is these contradictions that play an important role in the analysis of strategic conduct of school children and is often constitutive in their failure. In his work The Constitution of Society, Giddens with the research of Paul Willis and his investigation into the education of working-class children in Birmingham. The research which Giddens' relies on bears out some of the features of structuration theory, that, student-actors are indeed aware and to some degree cognizant of the socializing imperatives of the institutions in which they participate. Moreover, these knowledgeable human agents are able to reflect discursively on the rules which govern their interactions of students, rather than prior conceptions of such students of being only passively aware of the structural rules that govern their milieu. The unintended consequences of the structure that Willis's research gives voice includes the lads taking up unskilled, and unrewarding jobs that unintentionally reproduce some of the features of the capitalist labour system. However, it must be emphasized that the boys themselves actively participated in the enacting of the rules of their institution, and the dialectic control was a coordinative process. Their rebelliousness, that sort of rebelliousness as generating the reproducing of working-class children attaining working class-positions, was not directly a reaction to the authoritarian structure imposed on by the schools, but indeed part of the "game" itself. The children are aware that misbehaviour in class, a failure to finish class assignments, general roughhousing would be regarded by teachers and administrators as unacceptable behaviour that might result in punishment or chastisement being meted out. However, the boys are aware that the handing out of punishments at every instance of misbehaviour would be counterproductive and antithetical to the rules of the institution. Moreover, the teacher is aware that in order to teach children, that he or she must be willing to build solidarity and unity with the children and thus the handing out of detentions or suspensions would be unhelpful in this regard. Thus, some mutual if otherwise unspoken understanding regarding the level of rebelliousness was had in the structure of the school. Despite the awareness of the children as regards the local environment, and their ability to negotiate the rules of engagement with teachers and administrators, what is missing according to Giddens is a proper account of their motivation to act rebelliously. In other words, teachers may or may not recognize the knowledge or intelligence that students have when comes to the institution in which they participate, but what they almost always fail to grasp is the motivation that generates the rebellious attitudes in the first place. Giddens attributes this attitude to a failure on the students part to understand the wider context in which their actions take place. That is, they might know the rules of the school well, but they do not know the rules of society that reproduce the working-class positions of their mothers and fathers. In this Giddens offers that a better analysis of their motivational structures, and therefore, a greater understanding of who these kids are as human agents, rather than as passive receivers of formal structure will better enable teachers to inject a wider-contextual meaning into the otherwise drab and hopeless lives of these boys and girls. This is quite different from the reactive model of teaching, which presumes that bad kids come from bad homes, rather disaffected and disillusioned lads are bored and anxious and act out because they know how to, and quite well, thus revealing to them the motivational structures which motivate them, might allow them to understand that there are other things they are capable of knowing, and knowing well and this after all is the purpose of education. Bibliography Callincos, A. (1985). Anthony Giddens: A Contemporary Critique. Theory and Society , 133-166. Donnelly, J. (2006). Continuity, Stability, and Community in Teaching. Educational Philosophy and Theory , 311-324. Giddens, A. (1986). The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gynnild, V. (2002). Agency and structure in engineering education: perspectives on educational change in light of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory. European Journal of Engineering Education , 297-303. Ray, L. (2004). Pragmatism and Critical Theory. European Journal of Social Theory , 307-321. Willmont, R. (1999). Structure, Agency and the Sociology of Education: Rescuing Analytical Dualism. British Journal of Sociology and Education , 5-21. Read More