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Our Recognition through Narrative Identity

03/06/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"The same triadic relation of me/you/third person third person can be found on the plane we have distinguished by the question 'Who acts? ' 'Who is the author of an action? ' The capacity to designate oneself as the author of one's own actions is inscribed in a context of interaction where the other figures as my antagonist or my helper, in relations that vary between conflict and interaction. But innumerable others are implied in any undertaking. Each agent is bound to these others by the intermediary of different orders of social systems. We can, with Jean-Marc Ferry, designate with the term 'orders of recognition' the large-scale organizations that structure interaction: technical systems, monetary and fiscal systems, juridical systems, bureaucratic systems, pedagogical systems, scientific systems, media systems, and so on. It is first as one of these systems that the democratic system is inscribed in the sequence of 'orders of recognition….' That recognition is what is at stake in this organization has to be called over against a systematic abstraction that would banish consideration of those initiatives and interventions by which persons posit themselves over against such systems. Conversely, that the organization of social systems is the required mediation for recognition must be affirmed over against a personalist communitarianism that might dream of reconstructing the political bond on the model of the personal bond illustrated by friendship and love.

Some may doubt whether narrative identity presents the same threefold structure as do discourse and action. But they are wrong. Life stories are so intertwined with one another that the narrative anyone tells or hears of his own life becomes a segment of those other stories that are the narratives of others' lives. We may thus consider nations, peoples, classes, communities of every sort as institutions that recognize themselves as well as others through narrative identity. It is in this sense that history, in the sense of historiography, can itself be taken as an institution destined to make manifest and to preserve the temporal dimension of the orders of recognition we have been considering" (Ricoeur 2000:6-7).

Ricoeur, Paul
2000[199] The Just. David Pellauer, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Citation Style AAA

The Just at Amazon.com

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Consideration Through Narrative Identity

21/04/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"The same triadic relation of me/you/third person can be found on the plane we have distinguished by the question 'Who acts?' 'Who is the author of an action?' The capacity to designate oneself as the author of one's own actions is inscribed in a context of interaction where the other figures as my antagonist or my helper, in relations that vary between conflict and interaction. But innumerable others are implied in any undertaking. Each agent is bound to these others by the intermediary of different orders of social systems. We can, with Jean-Marc Ferry, designate with the term 'orders of recognition' the large-scale organizations that structure interaction: technical systems, monetary and fiscal systems, juridical systems, bureaucratic systems, pedagogical systems, scientific systems, media systems, and so on. It is first as one of these systems that the democratic system is inscribed in the sequence of 'orders of recognition.' That recognition is what is at stake in this organization has to be recalled over against a systematic abstraction that would banish consideration of those initiatives and interventions by which persons posit themselves over against such systems. Conversely, that the organization of social systems is the required mediation for recognition must be affirmed over against a personalist communitarianism that might dream of reconstructing the political bond on the model of the personal bond illustrated by friendship and love.

Some may doubt whether narrative identity presents the same threefold structure as do discourse and action. But they are wrong. Life stories are so intertwined with one another that the narrative anyone tells or hears of his own life becomes a segment of those other stories that are the narratives of others' lives. We may thus consider nations, peoples, classes, communities of every sort as institutions that recognize themselves as well as others through narrative identity. It is in this sense that history, in the sense of historiography, can itself be taken as an institution destined to make manifest and to preserve the temporal dimension of the orders of recognition we have been considering" (Ricoeur 2000:6-7).

Ricoeur, Paul
2000 The Just. David Pellauer, trans. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Citation Style AAA

The Just at Amazon.com

Filed Under: Narrative Identity Tagged With: , , ,
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Social Systems and Narrative Identity

11/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“‘Who acts?’ ‘Who is the author of an action?’ The capacity to designate oneself as the author of one’s own actions is inscribed in a context of interaction where the other figures as my antagonist or my helper, in relations that vary between conflict and interaction. But innumerable others are implied in any undertaking. Each agent is bound to these others by the intermediary of different orders of social systems. We can, with Jean-Marc Ferry, designate with the term ‘orders of recognition’ the large-scale organizations that structure interaction: technical systems, monetary and fiscal systems, juridicial systems, bureaucratic systems, pedagogical systems, scientific systems, media systems, and so on. It is first as one of these systems that the democratic system is inscribed in the sequence of ‘orders of recognition.’ That recognition is what is at stake in this organization has to be recalled over against a systematic abstraction that would banish consideration of those initiatives and interventions by which persons posit themselves over against such systems. Conversely, that the organization of social systems is the required mediation for recognition must be affirmed over against a personalist communitarianism that might dream of reconstructing the political bond on the model of the personal bond illustrated by friendship and love.

Some may doubt whether narrative identity presents the same threefold structure as do discourse and action. But they are wrong. Life stories are so intertwined with one another that the narrative anyone tells or hears of his own life becomes a segment of those other stories that are the narratives of others’ lives. We may thus consider nations, peoples, classes, communities of every sort as institutions that recognize themselves as well as others through narrative identity” (Ricoeur 2000:6-7).

Ricoeur, Paul
2000[199] The Just. David Pellauer, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Citation Style AAA

Filed Under: Narrative Identity Tagged With: , , ,
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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.

Citation Style AAA

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