The Postmodern Condition

By Jean-Francois Lyotard

Lyotard defines Postmodern as incredulity toward meta narratives. That is due to the progress in the sciences. We have clouded by many narratives in regards of knowledge and understanding of our world, however, we don't necessarily know what are really meant. Our lives are under greater influence by these kinds of pragmatics of language particles than in the province of Newtonian theories.

Lyotard questions the legitimacy of meta narratives lie, technology? or consensus suggested by Jurgen Habermas? In postindustrial society, the question of legitimating of knowledge is in different terms.

First, what is knowledge? denotative discourse bearing on a certain referent does not really know what it thinks it knows. Positive science is not a form of knowledge, but rather a language game.

The legitimation by paralogy, as we cannot rely on grant narratives, but litter narrative.....

The pragmatics of science is centered on denotative utterance, which are the foundation upon which it builds institution of learning, but its postmodern development brings a decisive fact to the fore.

Science pragmatics development does not simplify but rather builds a monster formed by the interweaving of various networks of heteromorphous classes of utterance (denotative, prescriptive, performative, technical, evaluative etc.)

For this reason, it seems impossible to achieve the consensus of Habermas.

Lyotard's Concept of
Paralogy
Lois Shawver

In Lyotard's (1984) philosophy, the term "paralogy" means a flood of good ideas that are inspired by conversation. Postmoderns, he tells us, have a quest for "paralogy," a hunger for stimulating conversation and ideas that work in a satisfying way. To get those ideas paralogists often share an irreverent attitude towards well accepted theories, breaking them up and recombining them in revolutionary new ways. The point of paralogy is to help us shake ourselves loose of stultifying traditional frameworks that we have come to take for granted in order to enhance our spontaneous creativity.

How can we do that? Lyotard observes that people today (in our postmodern era) have discovered ways to create paralogy. He tries to analyze what he finds in order to reveal our paralogical techniques.

When paralogy works, it seems to rely on two techniques: First, postmoderns avoid "terror", where terror means arbitrarily removing people from the discussion, in order to prevent them from talking even when they are presenting themselves in ways not designed to shut us up.

Second, paralogists allow people to define their terms locally. That is, if someone says "What I mean by 'stuff' is everything that I have that isn't worth anything to anyone else," in paralogy we let that definition stand as a a local and provisional definition of "stuff." Rather than challenge the definition, we try to step inside the speaker's vocabulary. This is generous listening and it promotes a reciprocal generosity when it is our turn to speak.

Lyotard also felt that paralogy would be fostered by agonistics, or contention. angry words. He thought that people would be inspired by a good fight. I tend to disagree. A good fight may be inspiring, but in the end, if the verbal weapons are lethal enough, it shuts the conversation up.

I think what is needed is agreeable disagreement, alternative disagreeing ideas presented in ways that do not offend. Good ideas seem much more likely to flow when people do not anticipate having their character assasinated in pejorative language and when disagreement is less personal and more directed at the text being challenged.

Also, paralogy, in my view, is is more likely to happen when the participants give each other space to speak, let them negotiate the language they are going to use to say what they want to say. Generous paralogical listeners simply try to step inside each other's language and make sense of it before they extend alternative statements. This requires us to ask people good questions but also to give people the space and support they need to answer those questions. People often do not know what they think unless others are willing to ask about it and listen.

Does paralogy sound like something everyone would want? There are those that argue against paralogy. There is a paper you can access below by Hatcher. However, the call for paralogy in a number of papers also suggests that people might well fall into non-paralogical discourse unintentionally. These papers do not use the term "paralogy." But, if you read between the lines, you will see that these are papers far and against it.

http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~mhalber/Research/Paper/pci-lyotard.html

Lyotard claims that we have now lost the ability to believe in meta-narratives, that the legitimating function that grand quests once played in society has lost all credibility. The question then becomes, what now forms the basis of legitimation in society if there is no overarching meta-narrative? For Lyotard, the answer lies in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, which analyzes the way sub-groups in society regulate their behavior through rules of linguistic conduct. If we have rejected grand narratives, then what we have fallen back on are little narratives. Little narratives are Wittgenstein's "language games", limited contexts in which there are clear, if not clearly defined, rules for understanding and behavior. We no longer give credence to total philosophical contexts like Marxism which ostensibly would prescribe behavior in all aspects of life, rather, we have lots of smaller contexts which we act within. We are employees, we are students. These roles legitimate knowledge and courses of action in their limited contexts. By fragmenting life into a thousand localized roles, each with their particular contexts for judging actions and knowledge, we avoid the need for meta-narratives. This is the nature of the modern social bond. Our effectiveness is judged in the context of how well we perform in each of these many limited roles. We may be a good employee but a poor driver, etc.

Modernity and Postmodernity

Postmodernism as an intellectual and cultural movement gained momentum in the late twentieth century. Following Lemert, Jean Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition and Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature marks its inauguration as a subject of academic inquiry.

Starting from an expression as aesthetic movement, postmodernism rejects the modernism, especially "high modernism". While modernism rejects formal aesthetic theories in favour of the functional, postmodernism questions the adequacy of functional as an inspiration of artistic expression. In general, it may be said that where modernists tend to think in terms of totality, genre, or system, postmodernists think in terms of fragmentation, ephemerality, and discontinuity. The distinction of the two has more to do with attitude. While modernism laments the fragmentary and the chaotic, postmodernism accepts and even valorizes it.

Jean-Francois Lyotard says that Postmodernism may be characterized as "incredulity toward meta-narratives." (i.e. don't believe the big talks) Meta-narratives refer to grand theories about eg the spirit, man, the rational subjects, and the proletariat. Such grand theories often associate with Marx and Freud which are taken to have at their center a category (or sets of categories) that is assumed to be universal, therefore, marking the internal difference.

Postmodernism favors more small scale, local narratives that take into account the contingent, provisional and unstable nature of the social world.

For example, Foucault's concept of power. Moving away the idea that power is often vested in the state, Foucault trace the micro-politics of power in multiple locations and social context (Three type of powers)

Jean Baudrillard, reflecting on the power of mass communications media, questions the notion of reality in postmodern societies. The power of mediated images, he argues, has led to the production of the "hyperreal" in which it becomes impossible to differentiate between the imaginary and real. The world becomes a world of simulations, of images without an original. Since the postmodern world has come to be characterized largely by consumption and seduction, Baudrillard suggests that relations of production have now given away to relations of signs.

At the same time, the social structures also experiences significant changes, for instance, the economy has been deindustrialization and the increasing dominance of post-Fordist practices in which capital has become more flexible and disorganized. In other words, capital accumulation increasingly occurs through flexible work practices that have resulted in significant spatial de-concentration of work and labour.

Consumption dominates this new economy. Global information and communication technologies have come to assume a powerful role in our world.

Zygmunt Bauman in his book "Modernity and the Holocaust" explores the limitation of modernity. Holocaust, in his view, was a product of the modernist faith in progress embodied in the bureaucracy and technocracy. It was the desire to remake the world that motivated the Nazi project. Like Baudrillard, he agrees that capitalism has evolved from a system based on production to one based on consumption.

The risk of modernity

Giddens identifies four risks of modernity embedded:

1. The expanded ability of those with power to engage in surveillance in the interest of controlling information and monitoring and controlling people.
Because the surveillance capabilities of the state and capitalist enterprises have expanded dramatically in modern time, the ability creates increased risk of the growth of totalitarian power.

2. The rapid escalation in military power brought about by the industrialization of war. The development of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapon, have created high consequence threats to human beings.

3. The potential collapse of economic growth system. The recent financial crises triggered by subprime credit crunch had vividly painted us this picture. For years, the lucrative banking industry suddenly crumbles, and the trust on banking and financial institutions has diminished. Thousands people lost their lifetime investment and facing the desperate future. While the US Federal government had in principle agreed to inject US$700 billion bailout funds, it is still unclear whether this “abstract system” will be functioning properly, whether market will response it positively, whether the confidence and trust towards these “abstract systems” will be restored. No matter what would happen, the reality has given Giddens’ positive notes of modernity a heavy blow.

4. Ecological disaster. This is quite obviously indeed, from industrial population to global warming, the human beings are reaping the bitter fruits of their own inventions, namely industrialization and capitalism economy. Whether we can finally combat these battles remains very uncertain. Giddens certainly hopes that a system of planetary care will be built up. Habermas hopes communicative actions will finally lead to harmonized development of modernity. These hopes are apparently very dim.

Habermas-- the defender of modernity

Though belonging to Frankfurt school theorists, Habermas widens the understanding of reason as a duality. There are two dimensions to reason: instrumental and communicative, these correspond to parallel but distinctive patterns of development in modern society: technological and moral progress, respectively. This theoretical argument provides the foundation for Habermas's conception of critical theory as a normative project.

Habermas argues that there are two dimensions in modern society, the system and the lifeworld. These correspond to the two dimensions of reason on which the development of modern society depends. The asymmetry between the system and the lifeworld in modern society is the primary cause of problem. According to Habermas, this problem can be resolved by drawing on a potential for political self-determination which already exists within lifeworld.

Hebermas agrees with Weber that the development of modern society is driven by an underlying logic of rationalization. However, unlike Weber, he maintains that this logic has a dualistic quality, consisting of the two dimensions of reason. The first derives from the growth of instrumental reason, the second from the development of value rationality, or what Habermas calls communicative reason. Action oriented to reaching shared understanding following communicative reason, Habermas calls communicative action "is that form of social interaction in which the plans of action of different actors are co-ordinated through an exchange of communicative acts through the use of language oriented towards reaching understanding"

While the growth of instrumental reason underwrites economic and technological progress in modern society, the growth of communicative reason enables society to achieve a higher level of moral and political maturity. Whereas the classical theorists characterize social differentiation in terms of the specialization of key functions in society, Habermas points to a more basic division between two major dimensions of modern society, namely, the system and the lifeworld. He defines the system and the lifeworld in two ways, focusing on their operating logic and their empirical manifestation. The operating logic of each dimension is determined by the form of reason which is inherent to its formation. In empirical terms, the system includes economic and administrative organization; the lifeworld consists of the education system, media and family life.

The development of modern society depends on the uncoupling of the system and the lifeworld, not the differentiation of society as a whole into subsystems which operate according to instrumental reason. The subsequent stability of society hinges on the maintenance of equilibrium between these two dimensions.

The internal colonization of the lifeworld

Lifeworld consists of the stock of knowledge we need in order to enter into social relations. In traditional society, such knowledge was a matter of tradition. In modern society, the values and beliefs which constitute the lifeworld tend to be articulated and questioned. This is a rational process. We intend to accept certain value and belief only if there are good reasons. Habermas suggests that dialogue enables us to ensure that those values and beliefs apply to everyone, not just privileged or powerful minority. The problem is that the development of the lifeworld has been compromised by the predominance of the system in modern society. We have mistakenly applied criteria derived from instrumental reason to lifeworld questions, and to institutions that properly reside in their own dimension of society. Hebermas refers to this process as the internal colonization of the lifeworld.

Habermas's critique of modern society is that such a lifewold has not been allowed to develop in modern society. It has been compromised not only by a tendency for political discussion to be anchored to private interests, there are deeper, structural factors at work. By the far most significant derives from the expansion of the system and in the mode of reasoning into the areas of society that properly belong to the lifeworld. The system has increasingly invaded, or colonized, the lifeworld, distorting the operation of institution such as family and education system.

The two examples are :process of juridification and the phenomenon of culture impoverishment.

Pierre Bourdieu

Different from Marxist view of class, Pierre Bourdieu concerns the independent role of educational and cultural factors, especially, in modern society, the importance of formal educational institutions. Bourdieu uses the concept "field" to analyze the society.

Field, is a social arena in which people maneuver, develop strategies, and struggle over desirable resources. He stated:

"A field may be defined as a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions. These positions are objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations they impose upon their occupations....by their situation in the structure of the distribution of power (or capital) whose possession commands access to the specific profits that are at stake in the field.

A field, is a system of social positions, structured internally in terms of power relations.

Capital, in Bourdieu, also represents in three types :- economic, social and cultural. The first involves command over economic resources, and second command over relationships- networks of influence and support people can tap into by virtue of their social position; third, in which Bourdieu devoted the most attention, is associated with his most original contributions to sociological theory.

Cultural capital, and its transformation into advantage in educational terms.

Cultural Capital is comprised of three subtypes: embodied, objectified and institutionalised (Bourdieu, 1986:47). Bourdieu distinguishes between these three types of capital:

* an embodied state. This is where cultural capital is embodied in the individual. It is both the inherited and acquired properties of one’s self. Inherited not in the genetic sense, but more in the sense of time, culture, and traditions which bestow elements of the embodied state to another usually by the family through socialization. It is not transmittable instantaneously like a gift. It is strongly linked to one's habitus - a person's character and way of thinking.
o Linguistic capital, defined as the mastery of and relation to language (Bourdieu, 1990:114), in the sense that it represents ways of speaking and can be understood as a form of embodied cultural capital.
* an objectified state. This refers to things which are owned, such as scientific instruments or works of art. These cultural goods can be transmitted physically (sold) as an exercise of economic capital, and “symbolically” as cultural capital. However, while one can possess objectified cultural capital by owning a painting, one can only "consume" the painting (understand its cultural meaning) if they have the correct type of embodied cultural capital (which may or may not be transmitted during the selling of the painting).
* an institutionalized state. This is institutional recognition of the cultural capital held by an individual, most often understood as academic credentials or qualifications. This is mainly understood in relation to the labor market. It allows easier conversion of cultural capital to economic capital by guaranteeing a certain monetary value for a certain institutional level of achievement.

Reproduction and Habitus

Class reproduction, Bourdieu's theory helps in explaining that how one generation of an economic class ensures that it reproduces itself and passes on its privileges to the next generation.


The legitimation of cultural capital is crucial to its effectiveness as a source of power and success and in term of "symbolic violence", defined as "the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity" It means that people come to experience systems of meaning (cultural) as legitimate, as natural.

Habitus is a system of durably acquired schemes of perceptions, thought, and actions, engendered by objective conditions, but tending to persist even after an alternation of those condition. It is the key to reproduction because it is what actually generates the regular, repeated practices that make up social life. It is the product of social conditionings. so links actual behavior to the class structure.

Education, is such a potent and effective mechanism not simply because it involves learning technical skills or acquiring knowledge, but also because the accompanying general culture.

According reproduction theory, whenever there is a big increase in the numbers holding a qualification, the major losers are those who do not have the social capital to extract the full yield from it.

Idea of Practice,

Bourdieu suggests the reflexive sociological researcher should be with conscious attention to the effects of their position, and in particular their own internalized structures.

Most people, most of time, he argues, take the social world and its way of looking for granted. Sociologists are not free from this, for them too, perceptions and actions are shaped by a habitus and they must be aware of this. Reflexive sociology requires them to examine the most essential bias, the individual determination inherent in the intellectual position itself, in the scholarly gaze.

Bourdieu insists that human action and practice must be understood in the way, as a dialectical process involving both the dispositions produced by the habitus and objective conditions that individuals encounter in the fields where they operate.

Distinction--Pierre Bourdieu

"The social space and its transformations"

Question raised in this article:

- the aesthetic consumption, cultural consumption,taste affects competition in relation to logic of supply ie productions vs logic of demand i.e taste

- Habitus + field = practice

Field: a network, configuration of objective relations between social agents'positions that objectively defined in existing deposition of agents.

Field structure habitus, give habitus structure
Habitus is product of embodied, necessities of field; Habitus attribute the condition of field as a meaningful with sense and value in practice.

-Construct class by systems of variables.

Capital:
-economic capital
-social capital
-cultural capital
-symbolic capital: resources available to a person related to prestige, honour, position and respect etc

- social class and class trajectories, the initial and present position, statistical influence on social agents? unpredictable?

-three dimensional social space:volume of capital, composition of capital, and changes in these two properties over time (class trajectories)

Pierre Bourdieu--social space and symbolic space

The difference of people in society is a set of distinct and coexisting positions which can be defined in relation to one another. Social space is constructed in such a way that agents or groups are distributed in it according o their position in statistical distributions based on two principles of differentiation: economic and cultural capitals. The closer they are to one another in those two dimensions, he more they have in common; he more remote they are from one another, the less they have in common.

In his work, Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu tried to represent social space, agents are distributed in the first dimension according to the overall volume of the different capital they possess, and in the second dimension according to the structure of their capital, that is, according to the relative weight of the different kinds of capital, economic and cultural, in the total volume of their capital.

The space of social positions is translated into a space of position takings through the mediation of the space of dispositions (or habitus). The system of differential deviations which defines the different positions in two major dimensions of social corresponds to the system of differential deviations in agents' properties, that is in their practices and in the goods they possess. To each class of positions there corresponds a class of habitus or taste, produced by he social conditioning associated with corresponding condition and through the mediation of the habitus and its generative capability, which leads an affinity of style.

Habitus are generative principles of distinct and distinctive practices. Also habitus are classificatory schemes, principles of classification, principles of vision and division, different taste. They make distinctions between what is good and what is bad; right and wrong; but the distinctions are not identical.

Logic of classes: to construct class is to create as homogeneous as possible from the point of view of the two major determinants of practices and of all their attendant properties.

Theoretical class defined by researchers sometimes does not corresponding with the reality. The mode of Distinction defines distances that are predictive of encounters, affinities, sympathies, or even desires. That means that people located at the top of the space have little chance of marrying people located at the bottom, first because, they have little physical chance to meet each other, secondly, they will not really understand each other. On the other hands, proximity in social space predisposes to closer relations.

Here, Bourdieu did not constructed class as Marx did. In his opinion, social class does not exist, what exist is social space, a space of difference, in which classes exist in some sense in a state of virtuality, not as something given but as something to be done.

Therefore, in social reality, the social agents have to construct individually and collectively, in cooperation and conflict. These actions do not happen in void, but in the structure of the distribution of different kinds of capital, which also commands the representations of this space and the position taking in the struggles to conserve or transform it.

The intricate relation between objective structures and subjective construction is shown in social space, which is the first and last reality, which represents and commands that a social agent can have of it.

Post modernity--Postmodern society

Post modern society is often understood to mean the society which follows modern society.

However, Lyotard and Baudrillard refer the postmodern society to the demise of exhaustion of modernity.


Three concepts are closely linked to post modernity:

Post industrialism Daniel Bell provides five basic changes for post industrial society:

1. A move towards post-Fordist production, which holds principle that stocks should be highly sensitive to sales; and company budgets tend to be spent less on R&D than on marketing and advertising.

2. The emergence of a new professional and technical occupational class
3. A growth in the importance of theoretical knowledge as a source of innovation and of policy formulation
4. An increasing systematic orientation towards the future in the management of technology
5. The increasing use of organizational and information theory.

Consumerism which explains why in post modern society the exchange now plays a more important role than production.

Lash and Urry suggest, the consumption of goods on the basis of their symbolic value, or sign-value, has created a highly specialized market for consumer goods. Significantly, this tends to involve stylistic imitation, or pastiche, rather than invention. As a result, distinctions between styles from different historical periods or cultures are increasingly blurred. The sheer complexity of imitation, interchangeability and manipulation of sign-values has led to a decentring of subjectivity, our self-identity losses coherence.

Liberal democratic capitalism

Phenomenology and Ethnomethodology

Phenomenology:

Is a method in philosophy that begins with the individuals and his own conscious experience and tries to avoid prior assumptions, prejudices, and philosophical dogmas.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who was the first to use the term phenomenology, defined it as interest in those things that can be directly apprehended by one’s senses. The essential point about phenomenology: it denies that we can even know more about things than what we experience directly through our senses.

Phenomenological sociologists consequently see the task of sociology as describing precisely how we see the world, although they emphasize that our perceptions are molded intrinsically by our concepts. They also examine the ways we come to have similar perceptions to those of others- how we put together the phenomena we experience in such a way that we all construct a similar or shared everyday world.

Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) incorporated Weber’s concept of subjective understanding. For Schutz, the meaning that the individual impacts to situations in everyday life is of prime importance, he defines the situation includes the assumptions that individuals draw on a common stock of knowledge, that is, social recipes of conceptions of appropriate behavior that enable them to think of the world as made up of types of things like books, cars, houses, clothing, and so on.

Schutz’s stock of knowledge is similar to Mead’s generalized other. Schutz views individuals as constructing a world by using the typification or ideal types passed on to them by their social group.

Ethnomethodology

Is a study of member or people’s method of making sense of their social world. Harold Garfinkel disagrees with Durkheim’s view that social facts have objective reality, and are out there somewhere. Instead, Ganfinkel says, ethnomethodology sees the objective reality of social facts as an ongoing accomplishment of the concerned activities of everyday life. In everyday situations individuals invoke or recognize social facts, such as taken-for-granted norms and values, that interpret the meanings of situation for them. When they make sense of the situation by recognizing implicit social norm, individuals are constructing social reality.

Ethnomethodological studies is to analyze everyday activities as member’s methods for makings those same activities “visibly rational and reportable for all practical purpose”, that is “accountable” as organizations of commonplace everyday activities.

Essentially, ethnomethodology denies the functionalist’s suggestion that social facts have a reality of their own that impinges on individuals. It studies the process by which people invoke certain taken-for-granted rules about behavior with which they interpret an interaction situation and make it meaningful. The interpretive process itself is a phenomenon for investigation.

For functionalists, norm and values are out there, explicit, acting on the individuals;
For symbolic interactionists, norms and values emerge from the interaction process;
For ethnomethodologists, the origin or norms and values is not of primary interest, but the process by which human being interact and prove to each other that they are following norms and vales.

Encounters

reading “Two studies in sociology of interaction" by Erving Goffman

Role Distance is displayed in connection with roles one does not take seriously, or one finds it unwise to embrace.

A role that some persons take seriously most of their lives may be one that others will never take seriously at any age; The participation with a group of one's similars can lend strength to the show of role distance and to one's willingness to express it.

Using example of surgeon, the explicit instrumental role sometimes shifts to implicit new role assignment. Situated roles that place an individual in an occupational setting he feels is beneath him are bound to give rise to much role distance.

Role distance provides a sociological means of dealing with one type of divergence between obligation and actual performance.

1). Distance is not introduced on an individual basis but can be predicted on the ground of performer's gross age sex characteristics; Role distance is a part of typical role.

2). The means for expressing this disaffection must be carved out of the standard materials available in the situation.

The social setting provides the individual with trappings of a social role. A set of visible qualifications and known certification, well designed social setting as a showplace provide the individual with something more than an opportunity to play his role self. For this scene he needs to create a clear impression of what he chooses not to lay claim to. The more extensive the trapping of a role, the more opportunity to display role distance.

Disaffiliation between oneself and his role


The function of role distance for surgery

In a surgery, to a team of different socioeconomic status, role distance is routinely expressed.


Role distance helps to protect the individual's ego, self-esteem, personality or integrity from the implications of situation. Noted that when the individual withdraws from a situated self he does not draw into some psychological world that he created himself but rather acts in the name of other socially created identity.

The situated self faces social constraints with others.

For a team of surgery to function usefully, each member must sustain his capacity as a communicator, an individual capable of giving and receiving verbal communications and their substitutes. The chief surgeon must help any one who is incompetent handling himself. The chief surgeon is likely to find himself with the situated role function of anxiety management and may find that he must draw on his own dignity in order to fulfill this function.

Given the conflict between correcting a subordinate and helping him maintain his poise, it is understandable that surgeons will employ joking means of negative sanction, grounds the sources of tension.

In addition to maintaining the capacities and poise of other members of the team, the chief surgeon has of course an obligation to maintain his own. His self control is crucial in the operation. We may find that he engages "externalization" of his feeling in order to give security and confidence to other members of team, to distract concerns and to provide constant stimulus to team member's attentiveness and task engagement

The discuss of the special responsibilities of the chief surgeon and his frequent need to draw on informality in order to meet these responsibilities implies that superordinate present may have some special reasons for exhibiting role distance.

There are connected relations between role distance and social ranking.

Formalities of a role "status quo" provide one authority and social distance. It is often to the advantage of the subordinate to decrease distance from the superordinate and to the advantage of the latter to sustain or increase it.

Finally, the individual must be seen as someone who organizes his expressive situational behaviour in relation to situated activity role, but that in doing this he uses whatever means are at hand to introduce a margin of freedom and maneuverability, of pointed disidentification

SO when we talk about the individual exerts role distance, that means the injected identification will be more or less in opposition to the one available in the situated role. Role distance is an extreme instance of expressions, as long as the dominion of the situated role is not challenged, other role identities, can be sustained too.

Alfred Schutz on intersubjectivity

reading from "The everyday life-world and the natural attitude"

In this article, Schutz tries to explain how every life world be constructed by prevailing stock of knowledge and intersubjectivity with others. People need to take into account the motivations and actions of others to structure their own actions. Society is socially constructed through constructing intersubjectivity.

Everyday life: is the social reality that one assign and receive meanings.It is built upon natural attitudes (common sense) i.e. taken-for-grantedness such as:


1). the corporeal existence of other men
2). these bodies are endowed with consciousness essentially similar to my own
3). the external things endowed the same meanings to me and others
4). I can enter into the interrelations and reciprocal actions with my fellow men
5). I can make myself be understood by them
6). a stratified social and cultural world is historically pregiven as a frame of reference for me and fellow men
7). therefore, the situation I find myself at any moment it only to a small extent purely created by me.

The everyday reality of the life-world includes not only natural experience by me but also social and cultural world in which I find myself in. Therefore, the lifeworld is not created by merely physically objects or events we encounter in our environment, but also the meaning strata, which transform the natural things into cultural things, human bodies into fellow men, and the movement of fellow-men into acts, gestures, and communications.

It is true that like William James suggested that physical world is paramount reality, what is plain given to us in the natural attitude includes both external perception and cultural objects. The lifeworld must be understood in its totality as natural and social world, it sets the limits of my and reciprocal action.

In order to actualize our goals, we must master what is present in them and transform them, the lifeworld modifies our actions and our actions are acted upon it. The natural attitude or daily life is pervasively determined by a pragmatic motive.

Natural attitude is built up by our previous experience a stock of knowledge to society, cultural and fellowmen. All of those experiences in the life-world are bought into relation to the schema, a reference schema, from which I form my opinion and judgements.

It however brings problem. The typical experiences contained in the relative-natural world world view do not constitute a closed, logically articulated system, the higher form knowledge are replace by Scheler in opposition to the relative natural intuition. The deficient agreement of the components of my stock of knowledge does not fundamentally compromise its self-evidence. Taken for granted is only valid until further notice. What is taken for granted within the prevailing lifeworldly situation is surrounded by uncertainty. Habitual reference schema may lead us wrong judgements. When taken for granted interrupted, the reality of life demands me to reexamine my experience and interrupts the course of self-evident.

My stock of knowledge is not a logically integrated system but rather only a totality of my sedimented and situationally condition explications. The lifeworld is intersubjective from the very beginning, it something to be mastered according to my particular interests, at the same time is subject to my fellow men's behaviour and response.

The everyday lifeworld is therefore fundamentally intersubjective, it is a social world. All acts whatever refer to meaning that is explicable by me and must be explicated by me if I wish to find my way about in the life world, Understanding (interpretation of meaning, is a fundamental principle of the natural attitude with regard to my fellow men.

The Accidental Tourist

“When you go on a business trip, you just take what you need.

Checking in your luggage is asking for trouble;
Always bringing along travel size detergent, in case your laundry falls into unfamiliar hands;
Wearing a grey color suits which is suitable for all occasions, even a funeral;
A book, protection from stranger, but not too many, for one always overestimate his free time
…….

Most of all, never take things so dear in your life, in case you lose them, it will be devastating.”

That was what Macon’s job, to write travel guide books for business people. The job required him to travel constantly, though he hated it.

One day, when he returned from one of these trips, he was surprised to be told by his wife, Sara that she was leaving him. After their 12 years old son being shot dead two years ago, she felt the only link between Macon and herself was disappear. “I feel that in order to have a life again, I need to leave you, please let me go.”

It was a start of an accidental travel, for Macon himself.

He had to travel again, and his dog, Edward, was his son’s pet, he could not get rid of him. In the course of searching for shelter for his dog, he met Muriel, a dog trainer. She was a divorced single mother with a seven year old son Alexandra. Their relationship was a slow but natural development, Macon finally found himself stepping out the shadow of his son’s death, for the first time in his life maybe, and he opened up himself …to Muriel and her son.

“In the traveling, you may find something unexpected; pick it up if you want, but just bear in mind to take some inconvenient consequence, if you will…” Macon was writing to his readers and himself too.

Several months later, his wife wanted to come back to him; they did try for the second time. But it did not work. Accidental tourist in his own life, Macon found something new in himself , in his wife and the life with Muriel. It was really accidental.

“It impossible to prepare everything in traveling, sometimes, you just have to accept whatever comes your way.”

For sociological point of view, I found this movie even more profound than merely determines what subjective and objective meanings are. It was certainly a challenge to functionalism concepts in society, such as family, marriage, and love. It was a call for us to review those social structural institutions based on shared value or personal interests. Though it only focused on the micro level, the lives of a few families, but it revealed a macro level social dilemma --- the unexpected traveling in any humans’ life.

There seem no fixed rules of game. You just have to accept whatever comes along, but be aware of responsibility. If you don’t mind to be an accidental tourist, you may find it is not bad idea after all to go on a journey. Of course, this movie also showed us we don’t have to follow “the travel guide books” For most of times, even the authors themselves do not know.