In this quote we are deep in the midst of the internal debates of European,
and not just German, sociology, with the spirit of Bourdieu very much
present by not being explicitly mentioned. Habermas knows that what he is
saying about lifeworlds is very close to B's habitus idea, and he also
knows that B has made a strong critique of phenomenological models
(narrative-based, some kinds of ethnomethodology) and that that critique is
also generated by his own theory in slightly different terms. Habermas'
tradition owes a bit more to the German notions of Kultur as a sort of
reified Weltanschauung (MikeC refers to this in _Cultural Psychology_),
which is not too far from a macro-scale version of the micro-narratives of
'experience' that he (and B) criticize. But H is in a little tougher
position than B (whose French anthropological tradition is less
'romanticized', has no guilt burdens of 'master race culture', and never
diverged -- as the British and German ones did -- from mainstream
sociology). H knows that his ideas about lifeworld are uncomfortably close
to what B is criticizing in phenomenology, but he has been driven towards
them by the combination of his reaction against Luhmann and against pure
formalism (German intellectual cultural history almost seems to me the war
within writers between formalism and romanticism).
So we get H's argument against the limitations of narrative and
phenomenological, experience-centric social analysis. And what he is saying
basically is that it does not capture the macro-social, that it becomes too
particularistic, that it has no systematic basis for comparing or
aggregating (cf. generalizing) this local experience and that, the
experiences do not add up to the culture, the lifeworld, much less the
social system.
Somewhere out in intertext-land are Bruner and Geertz and those who are
trying to make their 'narratives' knit together and illuminate wider
contexts and so show us the macro as it impinges in the macro -- where
after all we get all our evidence about it from. Even the Durkheimian
evidence (B's mode), that, as Latour shows us, is itself micro and local
even if it arises in a center of calculation where the tentacles of a
far-flung network intersect.
JAY.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
---------------------------