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Colonization of the Lifeworld

28/03/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"The crises associated with late capitalism affect society and individual and threaten-both objectively and subjectively-the identity of society and individual. Objectively speaking, late capitalism manifests an identity crisis or inner contradiction between incompatible steering imperatives. The state is caught in the midst of a system crisis in which it vacillates between behaving like a socialist state and behaving like a liberal capitalist state. Like a socialist state it funnels public revenue into welfare projects and the economy (through tax breaks, economic stimulus, etc.). Like a liberal capitalist state, it reacts against its mounting debt by reversing course, in effect 'downsizing' and privatizing public services while deregulating markets. Seen from another perspective, the state behaves dictatorially (bureaucratically) and democratically, paternalistically and in a laissez-faire manner. Shifting its contradictions from one system to another, the schizoid state also engenders a subjectively felt identity crisis within its own citizens, who experience themselves as active and passive, independent and dependent.

In his book Legitimation Crisis (1973) Habermas says that the 'system' onto which the contradictions of economy and state are pushed is 'society.' Society becomes anomic-persons lose respect for one another; they lose respect for government, which they see as incompetent, unjust, and illegitimate, and lastly (and most important) society fails to instill the proper motivation in citizens to produce and succeed (TCA 2 143,386). Motivation crises reflect the limits of bourgeois ideology in motivating single-minded devotion to work and consumption. Yet, in principle they can be forestalled to the extent that socialization is 'uncoupled' from a culture that encourages critical inquiry, aesthetic illumination of new sensitivities (through postauratic modern art that abjures authoritative representations of timeless beauty for the sake of social commentary), and autonomy and equality (universal morality)….

Written almost a decade after Legitimation Crisis, The Theory of Communicative Action expands further on the identity crises besetting late capitalism. Here, however, Habermas has in mind something besides social crises reflecting a loss of respect for law, government, and social values, namely, two tendencies that directly undermine the reproduction of cultural meaning and identity, on the one hand, and personal psychological well-being and reflective agency, on the other. These tendencies exploit these other resources (cultural patterns and personality structures) in the process of temporarily ‘resolving’ crises of anomie, legitimation, and motivation (TCA 2 386). In their place, they leave psychopathology, stunted education, and alienation (on the side of disturbances affecting the personality structure) and loss of meaning, identity, and traditional continuity (on the side of disturbances affecting the transmission of cultural patterns) TCA 2 143).

The first tendency, which Habermas dubs the colonization of the lifeworld, involves substituting strategic forms of economic and legal action mediated by money and power for communicative forms of action responsible for socialization, cultural transmission, and social integration. Also directly implicated in the colonization of the lifeworld is the second tendency, which Habermas characterizes as cultural impoverishment caused by the splitting off of elite subcultures. This second tendency involves truncating or suppressing critical discourses within everyday communication in a way that produces a 'fragmented consciousness' incapable of integrating cognitive, normative, and aesthetic understandings of reality in a critical way" (Ingram 2010:271-272).

Ingram, David
2010 Habermas: Introduction and Analysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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National Identity

16/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“Nationalism, as it has developed in Europe since the end of the eighteenth century, is a specifically modern form of appearance of collective identity. After the break with the ancien regime and the dissolution of the traditional orders of early bourgeois society, individuals became emancipated within a framework of abstract civil liberties. In that situation, nationalism satisfied the need for new identifications. It differed from previous identity formations in several aspects. First, the ideas establishing this identity were drawn from a secular heritage that was prepared and mediated by the emerging Geisteswissenschaften. This explains something of the simultaneously penetrating and conscious character of the new ideas. They caught hold of all strata of the population in a similar manner and were dependent upon a self-activating, reflexive form of appropriating tradition. Secondly, nationalism brought the shared cultural inheritance of language, literature and history into coincidence with the organizational form of the state. The democratic nation state which issued from the French Revolution remained the model to which all nationalistic movements were oriented. Thirdly, in national consciousness there was a tension between two elements which remained more or less in balance in the classical nation states. I am referring here to the tension between the universalistic value orientations of democracy and the rule of law, on the one hand, and the particularism of a national demarcating itself off from the outside world, on the other. In the context of nationalsim, freedom and political self-determination mean both the popular sovereignty of citizens with equal rights and the political self- assertion of a new sovereign nation. The former element is reflected in international solidarity with the oppressed, from the enthusiasm for the Greek and Polish causes in the early nineteenth century to the hero cults and revolutionary tourism of our times (China, Vietnam, Cuba, Portugal, Nicaragua). The latter element is manifested in the stereotypical images of the enemy that have lined the paths of all national movements. (Between 1806 and 1914 the Germans had such images of the French, the Danes, and the English.) The tension between the two elements is exhibited not only in such antithetical tendencies, but in the state and the historical consciousness through which nationalism took shape.

The form of national identity makes it necessary for every nation to organize itself into a state, if it is to be independent. In historical reality, however, the state with a homogeneous national population was always a fiction. The nation state itself generated those movements for autonomy in which oppressed national minorities struggled for their rights. In subjecting minorities to its central administration, the modern state places itself in opposition to the very premises of self-determination on which it rests. A similar contradiction runs through the historical consciousness of the public spheres in which the self-consciousness of a nation takes shape. To form and maintain a collective identity, the linguistic-cultural complex has to be made present in such a way as to produce meaningful orientations. But the very medium of making affirmative pasts present, the Geisteswissenschaften, work against this. Their claim to truth obliges them to be critical; it stands opposed to the integrative functions in whose service the nation state wanted to make public use of historical scholarship. The usual compromise was a historiography that raised emphathetic identification with what existed as a methodological ideal and rejected the idea of ‘combing history against the grain’ (Benjamin)” (Habermas 1988:5-6).

Citation Style – Link to JSTOR Stable URL
Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: Remarks on the Federal Republic’s Orientation to the West
Author(s): Jürgen Habermas
Source: Acta Sociologica, Vol. 31, No. 1 (1988), pp. 3-13
Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4200681.
Accessed: 16/02/2011 12:36 .

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Memory and Promises

09/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“In memory and promises, the problematic of self-recognition reaches two high points simultaneously. The one is turned toward the past, the other toward the future. But they need to be considered together within the living present of self-recognition, thanks to several features that they have in common.

In the first place, they are inscribed in an original way within the cycle of capacities of the capable human being. True, we speak of the abilities to remember and to promise just as we speak of other abilities. But in each case real problems arise when the emphasis is placed on the moment of actualization. Now I remember; now I promise. This first feature in common justifies a distinct treatment from what we granted to the preceding capacities.

Another remarkable feature: at the moment of actualization, memory and promising get placed differently in the dialectic between sameness and ipseity, the two values constitutive of personal identity. With memory, the principal emphasis falls on sameness, without the characteristic of identity by ipseity being totally absent; in promising, the prevalence of ipseity is so great that the promise can easily be referred to as the paradigm case of ipseity.

Finally, and this is not the least of their features, both are affected by the threat of something negative that is constitutive of their meaningfulness: forgetting for memory, betrayal for promises. We thought we were justified in treating the different modes of doing things, the ability to speak and act, the ability to recount, up to and including imputability, without giving an equal weight to the inabilities that correspond to them-something that would be open to criticism if we had to take into account the psychological, the sociological, and especially the pedagogical dimension in the effective exercise of these capacities. But we cannot allow such a deadlock in the cases of memory and promises. Their opposite is part of their meaning: to remember is to not forgot; to keep one’s promise is not to break it” (Ricoeur 2005:109-110).

Ricoeur, Paul
2005[2004] The Course of Recognition. David Pellauer, trans. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

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Social Systems, Identities, and Crises

04/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“The range of tolerance within which the goal values of a social system can vary without critically endangering its continued existence or losing its identity obviously cannot be grasped from the objectivistic viewpoint of systems theory. Systems are not presented as subjects; but, according to the pre-technical usage, only subjects can be involved in crises. Thus, only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of crises. Disturbances of system integration endanger continued existence only to the extent that social integration is at stake, that is, when the consensual foundations of normative structures are so much impaired that the society becomes anomic. Crisis states assume the form of a disintegration of social institutions.

Social systems too have identities and can lose them; historians are capable of differentiating between revolutionary changes of a state or the downfall of an empire, and mere structural alterations. In doing so, they refer to the interpretations that members of a system use in identifying one another as belonging to the same group, and through this group identity assert their own self-identity. In historiography, a rupture in tradition, through which the interpretive systems that guarantee identity lose their social integrative power, serves as an indicator of the collapse of social systems. From this perspective, a social system has lost its identity as soon as later generations no longer recognize themselves within the once-constitutive tradition. Of course, this idealistic concept of crisis also has its difficulties. At the very least, a rupture in tradition is an inexact criterion, since the media of tradition and the forms of consciousness of historical continuity themselves change historically. Moreover, a contemporary consciousness of crisis often turns out afterwards to have been misleading. A society does not plunge into crises when, and only when, its members so identify the situation. How could we distinguish such crisis ideologies from valid experience if social crises could be determined only on the basis of conscious phenomena?” (Habermas 1975:3-4).

Habermas, Jürgen
1975[1973] Legitimation Crisis. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

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