4.04 Lifeworld &
System
From these bases Habermas
develops his concept of communicative action: Communicative action serves to
transmit and renew cultural knowledge[1]
in a process of achieving mutual understandings. It then coordinates action
towards social integration and solidarity. Finally Communicative Action is the
process through which people form their identities.[2]
One of the functions of
Exploding Cinema is surely to 'transmit and renew' a particular field of
cultural resistance.[3] This is both
historical, evoking the Sixties, and ideal - using the collective as a symbol
of an idealised work community. It is also a cultural space in which people
form their identities on various levels. Whether as a person getting their
first opportunity to show their film to an public audience or as a long term member
who has made a major life commitment to the project.
Society is integrated
socially both through the actions of its members and systemically by the
requirements of the economic/ hierarchical/ oppressive system in a way that
tends to interpenetrate and overwhelm autonomous action orientations. This
gives rise to a dual concept of modern society; the internal subjective
viewpoint of the 'Lifeworld' and the external viewpoint of the 'System'.[4]
Following Weber, an
increasing complexity arises from the structural and institutional
differentiation of the lifeworld, which follows the closed logic of the
systemic rationalisation of our communications. There is a transfer of action
co-ordination from 'language' over to 'steering media', such as money and power,
which by-pass consensus orientated communication with a 'symbolic
generalisation of rewards and punishments'. After this process the lifeworld
'is no longer needed for the coordination of action'. This results in humans
('lifeworld actors') losing a sense of responsibility with a chain of negative
social consequences. Lifeworld communications lose their purpose becoming
irrelevant for the coordination of central life processes. This has the effect
of ripping the heart out of social discourse, allowing complex differentiation
to occur but at the cost of social pathologies.[5]
In
the end, systemic mechanisms suppress forms of social integration even in those
areas where a consensus dependent co-ordination of action cannot be replaced,
that is, where the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld is at stake. In these
areas, the mediatization of the lifeworld assumes the form of colonisation.[6]
At the same time the system
tends to reward or coerce that which legitimates it from the cultural spheres.
These requirements of legitimation cast a shadow over the supposed freedom
available on the cultural scenes. This is the intuition that motivates artists
to identify with an 'underground' or to band together as independent
collectives to form autonomous zones in an attempt to refuse the containment
that comes with such legitimation.
Following Weber, we see that
specialisation separates the scientific, moral and legal, and art scenes, which
develop separate epistemologies cut-off from each other and 'uncoupled from
orientations to use value'. Reaching understanding, the primal and binding
aspect of social life, requires cultural discourses that range across the whole
spectrum of the lifeworld. We can remember this integration of cultural media
is commonly part of rural cultures and to some extent of early urban forms. As
we have noted Exploding Cinema harks back to early Musichall forms with its
mixture of live action and projection, in a space in which the boundaries
between media begin to dissolve.
Habermas argues that Horkheimer
and Adorno, like Weber before them, confused system rationality with action
rationality. This prevented them dissecting the effects of the intrusion of
steering media into a differentiated lifeworld and the rationalisation of
action orientations that follows. They could then only identify spontaneous
communicative actions within areas of apparently 'non-rational' action, art and
love on the one hand or the charisma of the leader on the other, as having any
value.[7]
According to Habermas,
lifeworlds become colonised by steering media when four things happen:[8]
1. Traditional forms of life
are dismantled.
2. Social roles are
sufficiently differentiated.
3. There are adequate
rewards of leisure and money for the alienated labour.
4. Hopes and dreams become individuated by state canalization of
welfare and culture.
These processses are
institutionalised by developing global systems of jurisprudence.[9]
He here indicates the limits
of an entirely juridified concept of legitimation and practically calls for more
anarchistic 'will formation' by autonomous networks and groups.
Counterinstitutions
are intended to de-differentiate some parts of the formally organised domains
of action, remove them from the clutches of the steering media, and return
these 'liberated areas' to the action co-ordinating medium of reaching understanding.
[10]
[1] 'Cultural Knowledge' is dealt with in a very academic
discursive form. The argument is not taken, as we shall see, explicitly into
the arts.
[2] See TCA2 p140 for a detailed formulation of these
three areas.
[3] This field, the underground, has a canon but is without
institutions, or at least authoritative ones, being by definition
anti-institutional.
[4] Life world is defined by Maeve Cooke:
"In the lifeworld,
co-ordination of action takes place primarily by way of communicative action
and depends on the action orientations of individuals in society. System
co-ordination, in contrast, operates by way of the functional interconnection
of action consequences and by-passes the action orientation of individual
agents." (Cooke, 1994, p5)
It is worth noting that
Raymond Williams had a similar concept in his hugely influential Culture and
Society (1958) with his 'agent' who
communicates on the behest of another and 'source' who communicates
transparently from her own thinking. The agent's communication can be seen as
'dominative' whilst the sources's is as an 'offering'. See Williams (1958 pp303
and 321).
[5] TCA2 p267
[6] TCA2 p196. In order to examine these pathological side
effects in more detail Habermas returns to Marx via Weber in a reverse
chronology:
"Capitalist modernization
follows a pattern such that cognitive instrumental rationality surges beyond
the bounds of the economy and state into other, communicatively structured
areas of life and achieves dominance there at the expense of moral-political
and aesthetic-practical rationality and... this produces disturbances in the
symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld". (TCA2 p304/5)
These moves are "subjectively
experienced, identity-threatening crises or pathologies". At the same time
acting subjects are subsumed under the 'objective force' of bureaucracy and mainstream
institutions. In these organisations discourses for mutual understanding are
replaced with the steering media of money and power. Although this process can
never be complete, most enterprises are at best not driven by the motives of
their members. In this way the system gradually colonises the lifeworld.
[7] Habermas cites the welfare state as an example of the
intrusion of steering media into the lifeworld justified by a rationalisation
process, which produces social pathologies. Welfare is a process which renders
class antagonism innocuous whilst reducing the zones with which we organise our
own community self-help through communicative actions.
[8] TCA2 p356
[9] A network of 'client relationships' spreads through
all, until now, private areas of social life. Schools gradually become welfare
institutions. Invaded by economic and administrative subsystems with dynamics
of their own, they paradoxically become dysfunctional. (TCA2 p372). When
socially integrating processes are not merely supplemented by law but
'converted over to the medium of law' we can expect functional disturbances to
arise. (TCA2 p369). In this way
juridification aids the colonisation of lifeworld.
[10] TCA2 p396