Date: Tue, 04 Feb 2003 18:44:29 +0000
Subject: Re: HAB: Habermas' conception of lifeworld
From: "Stefan Szczelkun" <stefan-AT-szczelkun.greatxscape.net>


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Ali, you said,

> The lifeworld about which Habermas says that it is a 'transcendental site'
(TCA II: 126) in the context of which communicative action takes
place.

Is this transcendental in the sense of undetermined?
A place in which communicative action is least predetermined and most
able to account for currently realities without systemic distortion.
Avoiding the old paradoxes of discussing freedom! But this is an
idealisation, a conceptual tool, rather than a real place.

>I tend to agree with Barbara Fultner when she remarks that Habermas
> 'conceives of the lifeworld both as diffuse and holitistic, yet also
> structured; as a taken for granted and counterfactual presuppositions, yet
> also as a kind of knowledge" (p. 419) [B Fultner, "Intelligibility and
> conflict resolution in the lifeworld" Continental Philosophy Review 34:
> 419-436, 2001].

Yes the social structuredness of lifeworld must surely be accounted
through ethnographic and sociological discourses, on societies least
impregnated by system e.g. 'Knowledges' by Peter Worseley (1997) is
useful.
And the diffuseness is bound up with an understanding of culture as a
realm of communicative action, as a place which is principally about
coming to agreements non verbally or at least orally (or agreements
that were come to, a history or archeology of our legacy of coming to
symbolic agreements - important the sense of process is accounted).
And then about the structuring of those agreements and their
legitimation as knowledges.
Which is were I'm at now in looking at classification via Foucault,
Bowker & Star (MIT 1999) etc.

I can't see how Bill can posit lifeworld as prior to communicative
action  or solidarity (Bill Hord seems to contradict himself here).
The point is that prior to system and its alienation people
experienced solidarity via the human ability to communicate and
invent languages in all sense media within a benign environment
(benign in the sense that successful social diversification was
achieved) . However I do agree that affect is a crucial dimension of
this understanding. Currently a fashionable subject - my workplace
has recently put on a conference on 'emotional computing'.

Basically to take the understanding of lifeworld forward seems a vast
interdisciplinary task, which I was attempting in my thesis but felt
overwhelmed by and felt all the while that the exercise could only
lead to a more effective incursions of system in sofar as it is
undertaken within academic hegemonies. I tend to want to go back to
counter cultures of resistance (which centers knowledge formed
through an oral discourse of demonstration. . . ?) as the only way of
developing such a perspective that is not turned into a weapon of
oppression by academia. Are cultures of resistance 'decentrated'
cultures in Habs terms? It is interesting to see this recuperative
process being noisily resisted on the Habermas list though!

Ali, could the difference in Habermas' apparent definitions of
lifeworld be illusory and come from the difference between the formal
abstract concept and its contemporary application, in which it can
only be found decentrated (which I take to mean existing through the
interstices of alienation). I cannot have time to try to fully back
this intuition up so its stays a weak suggestion.

How can our understanding of lifeworld be forwarded in lifeworld
terms?  I do agree with Habermas that a philosophic text can be
transcendent but only in its original forms (systemic distortions
soon occur even in translations and second editions I notice).

I equate lifeworld historically as a characteristic tendency of
Western folk cultures (urgh), or working class, or oral cultures, or
amateur realms etc. The systemic incursion rolls in with the
development of printing and the discourses of rationality that it
carries away from the folk engineers' unwritten discourses of
demonstration. These rely on discourses that do not limit themself to
visual mediations. I was just reading Foucault's description of the
rise of visual so I'll include it to finish.
"Observation from the C19th onward, is a perceptible knowledge
furnished with a series of systematically negative conditions.
Hearsay is excluded, that goes without saying; but so are taste and
smell, because their lack of certainty and their variability render
impossible any analysis into distinct elements that could be
universally acceptable. The sense of touch is very narrowly limited
to the designation of a few fairly evident distinctions (such as that
between smooth and rough); which leaves sight with an almost
exclusive privelege, being the sense by which we establish extent and
establish proof=8A" p144

My point is that lifeworld and its language is outside of this
paradigm of visuality.

Stefan

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HTML VERSION:

"Observation from the C19th onward, is a perceptible knowledge furnished with a series of systematically negative conditions. Hearsay is excluded, that goes without saying; but so are taste and smell, because their lack of certainty and their variability render impossible any analysis into distinct elements that could be universally acceptable. The sense of touch is very narrowly limited to the designation of a few fairly evident distinctions (such as that between smooth and rough); which leaves sight with an almost exclusive privelege, being the sense by which we establish extent and establish proof=8A" p144