[In this master paper, I pull the rather unorthodox move of reading Foucault, Bourdieu and Habermas through the lens of the literary critic Wayne Booth. You can read it as a comparison of epistemologies, as an introduction to each author, or as a strange progression of paragraphs which keeps happening until it suddenly stops. Either way, our sociology department is rad and cool for letting me get away with this. You can read a truncated, slightly more to the point version of the Booth section here.]
Booth
Wayne Booth of Critical Understanding (1979) is all
about reconciling different views with each other. Through wit and extended use
of examples, he walks the reader through different ways of working out the
implications of a multitude of perspectives and what it means to have a
commitment to theoretical pluralism. As such, Critical Understanding transcends its humble pretense of merely
being a book on literary criticism, and comfortably strides into the epistemic
category of being a book on the methodology of science. In the following chapter,
I shall endeavor to demonstrate how and why that is, and how it can be used to
understand contradictory and complementary sociological theories without
accidentally confounding or confusing them.
Booth identifies six
archetypical attitudes to the multitude of approaches with regards to
criticism. That is to say, six ideal types (to impose Weberian terminology)
which can be used to describe what happens when the world is larger than human
attempts to understand and capture it in words and theoretical models. Seeing
as this is roughly analogous to what sociologists do in their craft, I reckon
each of these types will generate nods of recognition along the way.
The first ideal type
Booth identifies is an appreciation of the diversity of epistemic approaches,
and an implicit (sometimes explicit) hope that frequent clashes between these
points of view will garner insight into both the object of study and the models
used to study them. Different paradigms (to impose Kuhn’s terminology) will
strive to conduct the task of understanding the world their own way according
to their own internal rules, and through a process of comparing and contrasting
we as critics (and social scientists) will come to a better understanding of
what is going on and how to move forward. The debate itself is sufficient to
reconcile the plethora of perspectives.
Booth rebukes this
ideal type by pointing out that in actual practice, critics rarely respond well
to other critics making critical interventions and remarks on their work. More
often than not, the charge of misunderstanding is leveled in the direction of
those who voice dissenting opinions (be they ever so theoretically grounded),
and the only result of the interchange is both sides doubling down on their own
paradigms, rather than reaching some kind of elevated mutual understanding.
Although Booth is keen to point out that the process of peer review is
essential, on its own it is by no means sufficient to the task of reaching a
state of paradigmatic reconciliation and cooperation. At best, it amounts to
merely hoping for the best and soldiering on with whatever task one is
preoccupied with.
The second ideal type
is an attempt to reconcile different paradigms by resolving the semantic
differences between them, and thus make them linguistically comparable and
interoperable with each other. The goal of such an attempt is to show how each
and every theory relate to each other (and the inherent implications of these
relations), and to reduce the amount of conflict that arises from merely
semantic differences in theories that roughly describe the same entities. By
thusly creating a shared linguistic platform from which to operate, critics
(and social scientists) can proceed using either of the translated paradigms
with confidence.
An inherent assumption
of such an approach is that the main difference between paradigms is semantic,
and that clearing up any confusion caused by differences in vocabulary will
sort out any other important differences too along the way. Booth does not
mention the differences between quantitative and qualitative methodologies, but
it is easy to visualize that not even the most semantically clear communication
between adherents of these standpoints will solve disagreements in and of
itself. There is more at stake than merely not understanding one another
clearly enough; some differences persist even once semantic misunderstandings
are sorted out. Moreover, Booth concludes, any given project to unify the
multitude of perspectives would itself constitute another perspective, with the
implication that it too would have to be semantically reconciled down the road.
A third ideal type is
monism, the thought that there is a single correct point of view, and that we
(or, as the case may be, I) have it. Booth differentiates between two kinds of
monists. The first is a person who simply does not know enough to realize there
are other points of view, and proceeds under the assumption that their own
reference point is the correct one (by default). The second, more interesting
kind, are theorists that set out to create universal theories that can account
for every aspect of every thing in every way. One theory, one truth.
As you might imagine,
this approach does not solve the problem of reconciling different paradigms as
much as it proposes to do away with it altogether. If others are wrong, then
taking their viewpoints into account would be a something of a misguided effort
(e.g. quantitative and qualitative methodologies). As a critical endeavor,
Booth maintains, this approach tends to settle with showing how others fail to
approach the truth in a correct way, without engaging with the more complex
aspects of these other theories in a constructive or useful manner. Monists
are, in every sense of the word, uncritical.
A fourth ideal type is
skepticism, a critical mindset dedicated to investigating the faults and merits
of any paradigm it encounters. A skeptic differs from a monist in that the
former does not necessarily require the overarching theory characterizing the
latter; a skeptic might very well be skeptical in general, an equal-opportunity
critic. In a sense, all social scientists are skeptics, in that statements must
cohere with some minimum of plausibility before being entertained as
potentially true. In short, taking things at face value is not the skeptic’s
way, and a claim has to be substantiated with both evidence and logic to be
believed.
Booth, writing as he
did in 1979, did not have the advantage of being able to refer back to
postmodernism as the process of skepticism run amok.
Nevertheless, he describes the drawbacks of the skeptical mindset in a way that
is eerily reminiscent of the (sometimes unfairly ascribed) postmodernist
tendency to reject everything out of hand. While there is method to the
postmodernist madness, for our purposes it suffices to say that even skepticism
is not an ideal platform upon which to build a mutual understanding between practitioners.
A fifth ideal type is
eclecticism, the gathering of many different aspects from a variety of sources
into a new whole. The overall aim of this approach is to take the ‘good parts’
from different theories and, through a process of integration, end up with a
somewhat unified course of action, allowing the critic to proceed with a
confidence informed by many different perspectives. Eclectics are open to new
ideas and eager to put them to use; other points of view are not wrong, merely
different.
Booth, as you might
suspect, has reservations against this approach as well. For one thing, it
might devolve into an uncritical acceptance of disparate and contradictory
ideas, a hodgepodge of a little bit of this and a little bit of that. For
another, it might merely be a monism in disguise, accepting some aspect of a
theory while denouncing everything else as wrong. The initial premise of
eclecticism – to be widely read and open to new impressions – is easy to get
behind in theory, but in practice it tends to lead to scattered, undisciplined
and (paradoxically enough) dogmatic thinking, albeit without the advantage of
being aware of its organizing principle.
The sixth ideal type,
finally, is what Booth calls methodological pluralism. This approach consists
of taking in two or more paradigms on their own terms, and applying them on
real world phenomena according to their own internal rules. It does not try to
resolve the contradictions between paradigms, but rather attempts to keep them
both in mind at the same time. If one theory says A, and the other theory
not-A, this does not constitute a logical impossibility that has to be resolved
one way or another; rather, it is indicative that applying either method in
situations pertaining to A will have different implications that should be
taken into account when choosing the correct method. The plurality is not an
attempt to create a new monism, but a pragmatic admission that the world is
larger than our theories, and thus necessitates more than one.
At this point, a
reader might interject that this is all very general, and that we are no closer
towards having a positive framework regarding how to deal with the presence of
multiple points of view. To be sure, being able to entertain more than theoretical
outlook as plausible and possible to apply makes sense, but surely we did not
need this many words to arrive at this conclusion. How can we make things
concrete? Booth, fortunately, proceeds by making things concrete, by using
three contemporary critics as examples of three ways of applying methodological
pluralism. In the interest of expediency, I will omit the particulars regarding
the three critics (Ronald Crane, Kenneth Burke and M. H. Abrams) and focus on
their methodological approaches.
Crane, according to
Booth, subscribes to a methodological heuristic of first defining the problem
and then applying the best possible method of solving the problem as defined. This heuristic has the
initial advantage of being intuitive and straightforward – out of all the
possible methodological tools available, the best one is chosen for the defined
task. Define the problem, select the appropriate theoretical tools, then set
out to solve it. Preferably, the theories chosen should exhibit coherence,
correspondence and comprehensiveness with regards to the object of study (be it
poem or social phenomena). As simple and unproblematic as this approach might
seem from the point of view of the person doing the defining, choosing and
solving, it is not as straightforward when observed by an external observer.
Booth primarily focuses on the aspect that Crane explicitly defines his work in
a particular way, and his critics lambasting him for not doing the work of
solving another problem defined another way, and the confusion that results
from this state of things. For our purposes, we can go further and point out
that the same confusion reigns with regards to the choice of means as well as
the execution of the chosen solution. Merely making what we perceive as the correct
choice of theory and method is insufficient; what this approach offers in terms
of clarity of action it lacks in terms of intersubjective accessibility.
Burke, again according
to Booth, offers up another methodological wrinkle by pointing out that the
theory chosen by necessity brings with it its own set of definitions and
assumptions. Indeed, some problems might only be definable from within certain
theories, meaning that defining a particular problem in a particular way
overdetermines the choice of that theory. This is an inversion of Crane’s
approach, in that Crane began by defining the problem and then proceeded by
choosing the appropriate theoretical means to solve it. We thus end up in a
chicken-and-egg situation, where the problem to be solved is only ever made
possible to define by using the means to solve it. Thus, Crane’s described
process of defining a problem and then choosing the best possible means of
solving it becomes a mischaracterization of what actually happens. Burke is not
overly concerned with the epistemic wrinkles of this inversion, and settles on
concluding that this is the way theories work; adhering to any given theory
provides a “terministic screen” through which to view and define the world (and
the problems to be solved in it). Thus, being in command of a multitude of
theoretical perspectives allows for the formulation of a wider range of
problems to be solved through the methods at hand.
Abrams, still
according to Booth, performs yet another inversion of methodological propriety.
In his explication of the poetry of Wordsworth, Abrams draws upon a multitude
of historical and literary sources to show how this influence can be seen in
this way, and another in another and so on, in such an intensely close way that
the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. In one sense, Abrams’
project is an exegesis of a particularly dense poem; in another sense, it is an
expose of the entire historical moment commonly referred to as Romanticism. By
focusing so intently on the particular, something general is uncovered. But –
and this is the methodological wrinkle – Abrams did not follow a prescribed
method in his efforts, nor did he try to solve a defined problem. Rather, he
was guided by a sense of where the historical linkages were to be found and a
deep familiarity with the associations Romantic poets would have made at the
time. Abrams’ work was not the result of methodologically driven processes, yet
by virtue of the sheer performance on display throughout the work, it became a
cornerstone upon which further methodologically driven critics and researchers
have to rely.
The task at hand for
Booth is to develop a working model of methodological pluralism that takes each
of these inversions into account without succumbing into monism, eclecticism or
radical skepticism. In the simplest possible framing, Booth’s project is to
give readers the tools they need to keep two or more frameworks in mind at the
same time, without falling for the temptation to call either of them truer than
the other. In a sense, it is a return to Aristotle’s maxim that what
distinguishes an educated mind is the ability to entertain an idea without
accepting it, with the added critical wrinkle that ideas are not just
propositional statements, but whole worldviews whose implications have to be
thought through.
Foucault
With this, it is time
to let go of Booth and turn to Foucault. Foucault (2003) famously wrote on the
nature of knowledge and power, intertwining them in such a way as to say that
one is readily translatable to the other. This has been the source of a great
deal of confusion, as well as an equal measure of conceptual clarity. It is my
endeavor to begin this section by discussing the clarity, and then turn to the
confusion; readers might even now see where this is headed, but there is an
order to these things.
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault outlines
the mechanism whereby individuation is a paradoxical result of the
standardization of expectations. An example he mobilizes is the disciplined
soldier, whose ability to move in perfect formation and keep up an immaculate
appearance is a measure of his capacity as an individual agent. When seen from
afar, a regiment in formation seems to consist of a number of interchangeable
parts, where the particular placement of an individual is incidental to the
performance of the unit as a whole. When inspected up close, however, any
deviations from the expected performance can be noted as marks of individuality.
More often than not, they are marked as reasons for punishment – a ruffled
uniform, unpolished boots, movements that are ever so slightly out of sync with
the other troops’. Foucault zooms in on these small differences, and remarks
that it is here individuality is constructed. Not in the sense that
disobedience is the root cause of individuality, but rather that individuality
is constituted by the subtle variations in the degree to which and given person
coheres to the standardized expectations.
Another example of the
same process is modern education. Here, too, standardized expectations are at
play, and pupils are graded on how well they manage to live up to them. At the
beginning of the educational process, the cohort is an undifferentiated mass of
people whose precise characteristics have yet to be determined. At the end of
that same process, a myriad of evaluations have been made and documented about
these characteristics, and from these documents the pupils emerge as
individuals. Some have shown proficiency in one area, and are graded thusly;
others have shown affinity for other subjects, and are graded accordingly.
Based on the picture painted through the documentation created through the
educational process, the life trajectories of the individuated bodies can take
different courses. Some might be presented in such a favorable light as to be
railroaded towards a life of academia, while others find themselves struggling
to convince anyone that they are legitimate participants of polite discourse.
The process of subtle differentiations ends up resulting in differences that
are anything but subtle.
It is in this way
knowledge amounts to power. Not in the sense that individual pupils can
leverage themselves into a more powerful life status by learning well in school
(although this is a popular narrative), but in the sense that the fine-grained
practices of evaluation and documentation present in the school system as a
whole grants it the power to determine the life trajectories of a great number
of those passing through it. The knowledge produced about individuals by
documenting their every move becomes the very thing that defines them as
individuals – the individual does not exist prior to having undergone the
process of being evaluated with regards to the standardized expectations.
Foucault then shifts
his analytical approach from the particulars of barracks and schools, and
generalizes this principle of disciplined individuation to society as a whole.
At any given place in and given moment in time, there are any number of
standardized expectations at play through which individuals are being evaluated
and judged. Some of them are written down and formalized (as in the many
instances of bureaucratic documentation that permeates modern life), but a
great many of them are left unsaid, implicit in the general interplay of
individuals (such as social norms which dictate who is ‘hip’ and who is not). Rather
than give an account of each and every particular instance of this process,
Foucault generalizes it and describes the latent standardized expectations
inherent in social interactions as “the discourse”. This shift, while
understandable from the point of view of making a point and finally getting a
book ready for publication, is also the source of a non-trivial amount of
confusion. We shall return to this confusion after a brief discussion on
Foucault’s shift from the specific to the general.
If we view Foucault’s
move from the specific to the general through Booth’s typography of theoretical
approaches, we might notice that it more closely resembles Abrams’ approach
than anything else. Foucault did not set out to solve a defined problem using
an explicitly described series of methodological steps. Rather, he gave thick
descriptions of a series of [arguably early] modern practices in such a way
that, upon having read them, readers can not but nod to themselves in
recognition. This would, in one sense, make it bad science, an under-documented
investigation into the social processes of documentation and differentiation,
where inferences are made without adequate material support for moving from the
particular to the general. Yet, as with Abrams, the proof of the pudding is in
the eating. At some point during the reading, the sheer amassed volume of
details pointing in the same direction becomes overwhelming; the presentation
reaches a critical mass where methodological objections are somewhat beside the
point.
This does present
something of a methodological problem for those who want to apply Foucault,
however. They can not readily proceed through mere mimesis, by replicating his
feat in the same manner he performed it. Or, rather, they could, but the effort
involved would be greater than an average academic is likely to have available
in their everyday practices. A more manageable way to go about it would be to
follow the Burkean way of applying Foucault as a terministic screen for the
purposes of defining the problem to be investigated, and then proceed by
following Crane’s example in choosing the best method for the problem as
defined. The fact that Foucault pulled off being Foucault does not mean this
possibility is democratically or evenly distributed, and it behooves us to
temper our ambitions accordingly.
To return to the
confusion mentioned above, we might gainfully apply Booth’s six ideal types of
how to handle theories. What leaps to mind intuitively is that Foucault’s
insistence of referring to “the discourse” can be – and has been – read as a
commitment to radical epistemic warfare, the first of Booth’s types. “The
discourse”, understood as merely words without referent in the material, is a
free-floating social construct from which any and all social behavior is
derived, meaning that anything is possible and everything is permitted.
Unmoored from the material, the discourse offers a reading in which anything
goes, as long as it can be expressed with sufficient self-confidence. In the
postmodern condition, everyone gets a shot at pulling off a Foucault.
In hindsight, this has
not panned out. There are any number of books with the words “postmodern” in
their titles which can scarcely claim relevancy today, despite taking the
free-floating discursive premise and running with it. In part, this is due to
the fact that they rely on a misreading of Foucault, and in part because of the
untenability of their methodological premise; when everything is relative and
all truth-claims equally valid, it makes no sense to read them rather than
anything else. Donald Duck beats them by virtue of at least being amusing to
read.
A more rigorous
approach would assume the fourth type of attitude, that of radical skepticism.
If the categories we use to differentiate people from one another are socially
constructed, then it makes sense to critically examine and critique these
categories and their social effects. Up to a point, this approach manages to
accomplish what it sets out to do – it problematizes the systematic use of
certain labels to disenfranchise certain groups from participating in public
discourse (e.g. “hysterical” women), and increases awareness that words matter
in a concrete, material way. The challenge is to not fall into a knee-jerk
habit of dismissing every categorization out of hand, or to become so sensitized
to every nuance of every word that practical communication grinds to a halt.
While it is true that Foucault describes the present as the sediment of the
past (this is the premise of the Archaeology of Knowledge), one has to be
strategic when choosing when to engage in archaeological explication and when
to merely say things with the plainness the situation requires them to be said.
Those who wish to
engage Foucault in the mode of methodological pluralism have to confront the
fact that it requires at least one hard swallow. By this, I mean that given
that Foucault’s main mode of grounding his theory is demonstration, it follows
that readers either have to accept or reject what they have been shown along
the way, despite the lack of methodological progression from first principles
to full theory. If this can be accepted, then the theory can be applied in a
fruitful manner. If it can not be accepted, then Foucault merely comes off as
making one unsubstantiated claim after another, somehow managing to capture the
attention of a great number of people. The methodological pluralist would have
to take this into account when considering the applicability of Foucault’s
theories, and – should it come to it – bite the bullet.
Bourdieu
At first glance,
Bourdieu (2012|1990) tackles what might seem to be the same questions as
Foucault. Foucault tackled the question of power and how it operates; Bourdieu
tackles the question of how it comes that a great many individuals, all unique
in their own ways, nevertheless happen to act in the same manner and seem to be
formed from the same mold. The path each respective author has taken to getting
to these questions differ radically, however, and as we have seen the way to
arriving at a particular question is as important as the questions themselves.
The main difference between Foucault and Bourdieu being that the latter is
explicitly defining himself as a sociologist, while the former does not.
Bourdieu, the
sociologist, tackled the question of how structures and individuals can coexist
without one overdetermining the other. Or, to phrase it another way, how to
bridge the gap between methodological collectivism (Durkheim) and
methodological individualism (Weber). It is true that humans in groups exhibit
predictable tendencies that can be modelled without any particular knowledge of
any of the individuals involved. It is also true that biographical facts
sometimes trump these predictions and propel individuals into life trajectories
that are not accounted for by collectivist models (the life trajectory of
Bourdieu himself is a much-noted example of this). Having theories for both
collective and individual processes provides a bigger understanding of what is
going on, but it also leaves something of a gap between one and the other.
Bourdieu’s project was to bridge that gap, without reducing either category
into the other.
The main concept
Bourdieu uses to bridge the gap is that of habitus.
A habitus is a set of generative dispositions, tendencies and propensities that
frame the range of action and understanding in/of a particular individual.
These are inculcated into the individual through a combination of socialization,
ideology and lived experience, so as to form a totality of their being in the
world. No two individuals are alike, and they might differ in a great many
respects, whilst at the same time share an overall habitus that propels them
into similar life trajectories. The concept encompasses both these similarities
and these differences, without overdetermining either.
It is important to
note that a habitus is not akin to an algorithm, which produces the same
results every time when given identical input. The “generative” of “generative
dispositions” connotes a probability of acting along certain lines, but leaves
the specifics as to how these probabilities play out empty. This allows for
individual agency, whilst at the same time giving an account for why, given a
sufficiently large sample size, certain trends and patterns will emerge along
class lines. Individuals from the working classes will, overall, act
differently when encountering a work of abstract art than individuals from the
upper classes. This does not preclude the possibility of working class
individuals responding with a deep appreciation of the artwork at hand, but it
does maintain that, statistically speaking, this would be an outlier rather
than the norm. This outlook allows sociologists to speak both of individual
biographies and social structures at the same time, without engaging in complex
translations between individualist and collectivist theories.
The formation of
habituses is as much material as anything else. The formation of a working class
habitus is as much determined by the importance of work and the workplace in
the lived experience, as it is by the conditions outside and surrounding the
work itself. A vulgar example is the stereotype that workers are too tired to
read Hegel when they come home from work, and thus engage in less
intellectually stimulating activities, which means they never engage their
capacity for philosophical thought, which would explain why the working classes
are less philosophically inclined than those further up the class structure.
This example ascribes capacities to individuals of a group, and thus does not
describe a habitus; rather, it is a stereotype. A better, more nuanced
explanation of the same phenomenon is that those in the working class are not
encouraged to engage in the habits of casually reading anything at all, much
less Hegel in particular, and that (writ large) this means members of the
working classes are less likely to know someone who can get them into the
habit. The impulse to do something has to come from somewhere, and if this
impulse is not present, then something else will most likely be done. Those are
the probabilities.
The education of upper
class children, by contrast, more than likely include trips to museums, the
reading of important literary works and other excursions into high culture.
Whether individuals retain any specific knowledge about particular works from
these experiences is of lesser importance than the fact that they get
accustomed to going to these places and engaging with these activities. What is
ingrained is a set of habits, tendencies and memories associated with these
activities, and thus also a higher likelihood of engaging with them at a future
date. To be sure, there might be individuals who are utterly unmoved by any of
the aspects of high culture, but as a class the propensity to revisit these
sites of knowledge remains a permanent feature. An upper class habitus brings
with it a familiarity with these things, if nothing else.
In a seminal work on
education, Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) notes that the educational system has a
distinctly middle class character. The teachers, who are by definition educated
and in possession of a non-trivial amount of cultural capital, are more often
than not belonging to the middle class themselves, and accustomed to
socializing with others possessing a middle class habitus. The educational
aims, too, tend to assume the possession of a middle class habitus, albeit
implicitly and without framing it in terms of class. This results in a system
that, from the word go, treats children belonging to the working and middle
classes differently. The latter are already socialized in such a way as to know
what is expected of them, while the former suddenly discover that things are
not as they are at home, and that their success moving through the system is
contingent on learning middle class mannerisms and habits. Failure to do so
means academic death (which is to say, an exit from the system of education,
either after completing the mandatory part, or earlier than that in extreme
cases).
Working class pupils will, to put it bluntly, have to learn twice as much as
their middle class counterparts in the same amount of time. This is one of the
ways in which class structures reproduce and perpetuate themselves.
If we turn back to
Foucault, we see that there are similarities between their accounts of the
process of education. We also see that they arrive at these seemingly similar
conclusions through very different processes, and that it would be a mistake to
assume that they can be easily translated back and forth between one another
without losing important contextual and methodological assumptions along the
way. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, and the implicit assumptions with regards
to structuring structures, is not at all the same as Foucault’s concept of the
disciplining discourse, and the assumptions that go along with it. Class is the
name of the name of the game for Bourdieu; for Foucault, not so much. To invoke
Booth’s second archetype, these are not merely semantic differences which can
be sorted out through careful linguistic analysis and exegesis. These are
different conceptual universes that have to be understood on their own terms,
lest the sum becomes smaller than the sum of its parts.
From this, it is easy
to understand why Booth included eclecticism (the fifth archetype) as a
non-optimal mode of critical understanding. While the theorists overlap in
their subject matter, it would be a mistake to take a little bit of one and a
little bit of the other and uncritically combine in a theoretical stew. For one
thing, the different theories lend themselves to different methodological
approaches (Bourdieu is very explicit about his methods, and in the Distinction
(1984) I would argue he is explicit to a fault), which means careful
preparation is required to ensure that any inquiry informed by both theories
actually investigates what it claims to investigate. It is very easy to slip up
and begin empirically exploring Foucault’s theory of habitus. While this
approach would indeed manage be novel, it would not be informed by the same
conceptual apparatus employed by other scientists in the field.
Habermas
When it comes to
methodological pluralism, Habermas (1984, 1987) is it. In Communicative Action, he summarizes in exhaustive detail
the theories of Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, Mead, Adorno, Lukacs and a number of
other social theorists, in such a way that it is clear where each respective
theory ends and Habermas’ continuation begin. To say that Habermas is firmly
grounded in the theories of the sociological field (pun intended) would be to
understate the case – I reckon many a sociologist read Habermas and only then
firmly grasped what the aforementioned theorists were about. Clarity at length
is not just a stylistic achievement, however – it is a cornerstone of his
theory of communicative action.
Like Bourdieu,
Habermas is primarily focused on bridging the gap between individual and
structures. The former is expanded into the concept of lifeworlds, a concept
imbued with the full philosophical force of phenomenology, from Schutz and
Husserl onward. The latter is expanded into the concept of systems, derived
both from the then emerging systems theory (including and beyond Parsons) and
from Weber’s looming iron cage of rationality. Both of these concepts deserve
elaboration in turn.
A lifeworld is the
material and mental circumstance within which an instance of human subjectivity
finds itself. This encompasses everything encountered by the subject in
question, from the most private of experiences to the most public of actions.
This is at once both very general and very specific. On the one hand, there are
a great many experiences to be had between birth and death, and filing them all
under one singular rubric is ever so slightly handwavy. On the other hand,
Habermas needs to differentiate personal experience from the myriad of
objective societal and technological processes that take place in the world,
which affect said personal experience but do not stem from it. The wide/narrow
definition of lifeworld performs this function and manages to preserve the
human experience without reducing the scope of the theory to it; it is a move
that encompasses processes on the micro level whilst also acknowledging trends
on a macro level. It also avoids the reverse tendency: to fully and irrevocably
incorporate lived experience as aspects of larger systems.
A system is, as might
have been inferred from the above paragraph, the supra-individual processes
that affect and shape social reality; among them, capitalism is the most
general. Science, politics, art, technology – modernity consists of and is
constructed by an innumerable amount of systems working in concert and
parallel. What differentiates modernity from earlier historical periods is that
these systems have grown more specialized, autonomous and powerful at a rapid
pace (Bauman [1999], drawing on Hans Jonas [1994], would contend that they have
outgrown humanity’s capacity to manage them). As with the concept of lifeworld,
the wide/narrow definition serves an analytical function – it allows
sociologists to talk about macro level tendencies without having to seek recourse
in micro level counterparts.
This is not to say
that lifeworlds and systems do not interact. On the contrary, a substantial
portion of Communicative Action is
preoccupied with spelling out in exhaustive detail just how such interactions
take place on a theoretical level, and the implications of each such
interaction under various circumstances. In the interest of keeping things
short, I will now speedrun to the most famous of such interactions, which
Habermas refers to as the tendency of systems to colonize lifeworlds.
The easiest way to
characterize such a colonization is as an intrusion. In keeping with the
discussions on the other authors, it would be prudent with an educational
example. A student is embedded in a lifeworld, with a family, friends, social
relations and the whole phenomenological package. Then, she is given an
assignment of unusually large proportions, and have to devote more time than
usual to completing it. Thus, she has to take time from her other lifeworld
activities (socializing, attending family gatherings, etc) in order to ensure
that the assignment is completed within the allotted time frame. Somehow, she
will have to navigate the demands from both spheres. More often than not, the logic of the
(educational) system overrules the logic of the lifeworld. Not only in this one
particular instance, but also in the way our imaginary student over time
becomes more socialized into the specialized mindset that characterizes
whatever field she studies. Upon completing her education, she will be a
different person both compared to when she began, and compared to her peers;
the logic of the system has colonized her lifeworld.
To be sure, this
process is not an irresistible, one-sided endeavor. Rather, it is to be
understood as an endless series of negotiations instantiated within the context
of an individual and her lifeworld, where strategies to resist (or assist) the
process can be leveraged with various degrees of success. The point, for
Habermas, is to draw attention to the myriad of such situations that prevail in
modern societies, and the tendency of specialized logics stemming from
particular systems to permeate and determine the shapes of particular
lifeworlds. The logic of completing an education is but one such systemic
presence; the capitalist demand to get a job another, the medical imperatives
to adopt certain habits yet another, whatever ideological ideas have captured
the political moment is yet another still.
The point of pointing
out these tendencies is, as we alluded to in the beginning of this chapter, to
support and enable clear communication. Being able to clearly identify the
systemic demands put upon individuals allows them to clearly communicate about
their circumstances, and possibly also to collectively formulate courses of
action to deal with them. The most dramatic example of this would be, to invoke
Marx, the working class transcending being a class-in-itself to become a
class-for-itself, thus initiating the proletariat revolution (or, with a
slightly higher degree of probability, the formation of unions and the
initiation of collective bargaining). In less dramatic terms, it would help
reduce interpersonal drama caused by systemic (dys)functions. Our imaginary
student would be able to convey that university life demands a non-trivial
amount of time, and her lifeworld peers would be able to make the counterpoint
that there are other things in life than university assignments.
Here, we see a
distinct similarity with Booth’s second archetype (that of semantic resolution).
Ironically, this is also most frequent critique leveraged against Habermas in
general and Communicative Action in
particular. More often than is reasonable to count, it has been said that the
ideal forms of communication formulated by Habermas are unrealistic, utopian
and impossible to achieve. The irony is that Habermas would agree with these
assertions, but insist that the attempt be made anyway. Even if perfectly
undistorted communication is impossible, removing even one distortion would be
an improvement. This ethos shines through not only in his argumentation, but
also in his commitment to making sure each theoretical foundation is as
transparent as possible. While Habermas does not manage to translate every
social theory of individual and structural processes into one coherent,
all-encompassing whole, his attempt has made it easier to navigate the
theoretical landscape moving forward. Communicative
Action is not a Rosetta Stone, but – and this is the critical question –
why should it have to be?
References
Bauman, Z. (1999). Vi vantrivs I det postmoderna. Göteborg: Daidalos.
Booth, W. (1979). Critical understanding: the powers and
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Bourdieu, P. &
Passeron, J-C. (1990). Reproduction in education,
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Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: a social critique of the
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Foucault, M. (2003). Övervakning och straff. Lund: Arkiv.
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Munroe, Randall.
(n.d). Standards. https://xkcd.com/927/
