Bad Habitus (A Poorly Maintained Sociology blog)

“Heaven’s On Fire” - The Radio Dept.

Consider the spoken word portion of this song alongside Habermas’s notion of “life-world colonization.”

For Habermas the lifeworld has to be just there, furnishing this sense of who we are and who we value being, but it also requires constant reaffirmation (note a slight influence of Garfinkel’s idea of practical accomplishment).  When we perform the parenthood, service, and so forth, we reaffirm to ourselves and each other who we are and what we value.  Value-commitments are reaffirmed, and the basis of influence is reestablished.  What’s crucial for Habermas is that because the lifeworld consists of communicative action—people reaching common understandings on everything from car pools to community action to foreign policy.  Communicative action and it alone has the ability to regenerate influence and value-commitments.  The quantitative systems media, money and votes, can express influence and value-commitments, but they cannot generate these qualities—only the communicative action in the life can do that.  Thus—crucial point—the legitimacy of the system depends on the lifeworld; it’s a one-way direction of the lifeworld making possible the legitimacy of the system.

via Arthur W. Frank