Self and Net/Lifeworld and System

Well, after that last entry, I gazed upon a stack of papers I've been meaning to work through. One popped out, "Communicative Action and the Network Society" (JPER, 2004) by Verma and Shin. Not a bad kernel of insight, so far as it goes. But, as is often the case with anyone dealing with Castells and Habermas, it resides at a fairly high level of abstraction. That's gripe number one. Gripe number two is that it is a crime of omission that most planners who cite Habermas still get all het up about his (laudable) work from the 70s. I've yet to read a good account in planning theory of Facticitaet und Geltung. Why on earth not? I'll get to gripe number one further in a minute and leave gripe number two behind (sticking in my craw...). Verma and Shin work through a brief description of Castells' notion of the "network society" and draw comparisons between it and Habermas' notion of lifeworld and system. Their basic interpretation: there is a lot of common theoretical ground between Castells and Habermas. Castells raises a concern that the growing hiatus between individuals and the Net creates a form of alienation that form and be formed by the creeping irrelevance of the nation state. This concern parallels, the authors argue, Habermas' basic model of colonization of the lifeworld by systems resulting in withdrawal of support and legitimacy. While Castells is more focused on diagnosis than cure, if redemption is to be found it is, surprise, surprise, in civil society (which for Habermas, of course, is the space in which communicative action tends to function and can "work its way up" into formal political and other discourse). For both, the question centers on reproduction of the lifeworld. How in either late capitalism or in the network society do "grammars of everyday life" take root? Or are they thoroughly colonized? For Castells, it seems, the big threat of the Net is that the immediacy of presence is lost, meaning that identities and social movements cannot coalesce. Castells sees very little potential for social movements online because, as the authors describe, they do not have a formal ("real") character. So, what does this have to do with infrastructure? Well, perhaps not much. I was arguing that communicative action and the tensions resident between lifeworld and system as described by Habermas may be a useful analytical approach for understanding the breach between system builders and adoption. This breach is the fundamental problem of infrastructure as I see it (and methodologically between LTS theory and SCOT). So Verma and Shin and barking up a similar tree. And they are working through Castells in order to do it. But they're not interested in "building" in the way infrastructure studies is. Rather, they remain at the level of meaning construction in an online world. So their work will warrant a citation, but isn't adding much to my thinking (today).