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The Theory of Communicative Action / Jürgen Habermas

I started reading this as I was interested in the thread that starts in digital and virtual communication media, which I feel correspon with phenomena of rationalization and reification of society, leading then into political conflict, lack of ability to reach agreement and conversations laden with hate and prejudice. I am seeking for practices in construction and uses of technological mediums that could aid in political discussion.

Volume one

From Lukacs to Adorno: Rationalization as Reification

Starts with a criticism of Weber's view of of the process of rationalization of society. For Weber it seems that the various subsystems of society became rationalized with a shift of human consciousness and the creation of institutionalized and self-referential systems of science, art and law. However, Weber neglected to address to process of reaching understanding between participants and the need for consensus before those systems can be realized.

Weber missed the true catalyzing forces behind the coordinated action of everyday life that enables those purposely rational action. Habermas believes that steering media such as money and power replace language as the coordinating medium for rationality. The economic system is differentiated via money and the administrative system is differentiated via power.

Only with the conceptual framework of communicative action do we gain a perspective from which the process of societal
rationalization appears as contradictory from the start.
The contradiction arises between, on the one hand, a rationalization of everyday communication that is tied to the
structures of inter-subjectivity of the lifeworld, in which language counts as the genuine and irreplaceable medium
of reaching understanding, and, on the other hand, the growing complexity of subsystems
of purposive-rational action, in which actions are coordinated through steering media such as money and power.

Habermas argues that this is the basis for the paradox of the rationalization of society and Weber spoke of. The systems of rationalization have a self destructive and disintegrative effect on the lifeworld. Enlightenment developed and rationalized metaphysics and at the same time robbed it of credibility. The same idea is present in the writings of Marx who speaks about how wage labor and the idea of offering you own labor power as commodity had a contradictory and destructive effect on economy and society. Those notions were carried on in the west by Lukacs, Adorno and Horkheimer.

Horkheimer in his Eclipse of Reason develops Weber's ideas and connects them to Lukacs' Reificationon:

Thesis of the Loss of Meaning

Horkheimer claims that concepts such as objective reason, which induced rationality from some cosmological order, organizing principles of the universe and human destiny, have gave way to subjective reason, calculated formally from internal logics and relativism. These came from the dis-enchantment that followed the enlightenment of the bourgeous. With the advent of Protestanism(maybe?), religious-metaphysical knowledge passed by teaching and inherited wisdom, became dogma and practical traditions. Sacred objective knowledge transformed into subjective beliefs and the word faith by definition is detached from true knowledge. “Justice, equality, happiness, tolerance” lost their objective rational grounds and instead their rest on traditions and historical documents.

Subjective, instrumental, reason is driven by self-preservation, thus social solidarity, integration, and unity become irrational.

Thesis of the loss of freedom

If I understand correctly, this is the loss of individuality to rationalized bureaucracy and societal subsystems. Horkheimer and both Weber agree that initially the ascetic nature of Christianity and Protestanism allowed the flourishing of the individual, maintaining personal ideals while avoiding instant gratification, allowing society and the infinite nature of man to exist. Later, however, rationalized subsystems replaced personal ideals and were in fact elevated to the level of ideal. The loss of freedom is the replacement of these aspirations with adjustments of the individual to maintain those technical rational subsystems.

Connection to reification

Coined by Dilthey - form of objectivity - the interactions of human beings with their environment, the objectivity of their inner and outer lives. It transforms with society as a while. The form of objectivity that predominates in capitalist society prejudices the world-relations, the ways in which speaking and acting subjects can relate to things in the objective, the social and their own subjective worlds. According to Lukacs this prejudice is reification, driven by commodity fetishism. The lifeworld is reified.

Te rationalization of society involves the reification of persons and thought, as people now represent calculable wage labour. Reification of people = abstraction and prejudice? Unlike Weber, Lukacs sees a more casual connection between the economic system and the commodity form to the rationalization of man and society.

With labour as a commodity that is subjected to instrumental rules and calculations - the market - then human relations themselves are being objectified, picking up a life of their own, becoming detached from actual values, morals, desires and goals of people. No longer agreed upon by natural language, but instead formalized and institutionalized. Passive rational information systems are alienated from active and natural expression. Use-value switches to exchange-value. From the point of view of action theory, workers coordinate their interaction through the medium of exchange value rather than through norms and values.

In exchange for obtaining the freedom of choice, being able to offer your labor autonomously an independently, we also lose our objective reason and value to reification.

Thought: Other than the capitalist method, how does the virtual world and social media contribute to reification? What about AI? Is it also reifying human values into it?

phd/book-journals/communicative-action.1582122877.txt.gz · Last modified: 2020/02/19 14:34 by avnerus