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01.08.2013 | Theoretical / Philosophical Paper

Alfred Schutz’ Theory of Communicative Action

verfasst von: Hubert Knoblauch

Erschienen in: Human Studies | Ausgabe 3/2013

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Abstract

This paper addresses the notion of communicative action on the basis of Alfred Schutz’ writings. In Schutz’ work, communication is of particular significance and its importance is often neglected by phenomenologists. Communication plays a crucial role in his first major work, the Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt from 1932, yet communication is also a major feature in his unfinished works which were later completed posthumously by Thomas Luckmann: The Structures of the Life World (1973, 1989). In these texts, Schutz sometimes refers to “communicative action,” and he comes to ascribe a crucial role to communication within the domain of the life world he calls everyday life. Based on Schutz’ texts, I shall first attempt to critically reconstruct the defining features of his notion of communication and communicative action. As a result, it emerges that Schutz’ notion of communication, particularly in its early incarnation, seems to be, at first glance, characterized by a dichotomy between virtual communication, that is communicative action in a narrow sense, and non-virtual communication. As I want to show with respect to the seemingly established dichotomous distinction between “mediated” and “immediate social action,” Schutz himself started to overcome this dichotomy. Based on this thesis, I will try to sketch a basic outline of a theory of communicative action, a theory less formulated by Schutz’ than built on Schutz’ writings. As the idea of communicative action, and particularly the transgression of the distinction between mediated and immediate action, affects the very structures of the life-world described by Schutz and Luckmann, I will ultimately demonstrate that any mundane phenomenology of the life-world requires a triangulatory method.

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I am grateful to René Wilke and two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

The notes were written before his death between 1957 and 1958. They include several hundred pages of text which have been published as “Notizbücher” as appendix in the German version of The Structures of the Life World (Schütz and Luckmann 1984: 215–404), yet not in the English version (Schutz and Luckmann 1989); in referring to the notes, therefore the German version will be quoted.

In his Bergsonian manuscript on the theory of the life-forms from 1925f., Schutz addresses issues of communication. Thus, he takes “speech” as “language kat exochen” (1981/1924–1928: 178), yet he does not make use of the word “communication”.

Schütz formulated the “Notes” in German; wherever I am referring to his publications in German language, I shall use his German spelling (“Schütz”).

As one attempt, see Knoblauch 2011.

One has to add that Husserl, in his own manuscripts on intersubjectivity published later, also adopted a quite mundane stance towards communication. See Knoblauch 1985.

Schutz himself indicated that the dominance of the paramount reality of everyday life “may itself be a result of cultural transformations, such as the secularization of consciousness and the rationalization of the ‘attention a` la vie’’’ (2003/1943: 71).

In the Konstanz archive I found a letter by Arno Huth to Alfred Schutz (5.11.1956) including a range of quotes and diagrams of communication theorists, such as Lasswell, Weaver, etc.

This distinction has been critized by Adorno (1964) as profoundly ideological.

Schutz himself uses the notion of “mediated communication” only in the sense of “indirect communication” of experiences from different provinces of meaning in the world of everyday life. See Schutz 1962, 1962a.

Schutz and Luckmann elaborate on these distinctions in chapter E of The Structures of the Life-World which is on “social action”. The importance of these forms of action for Luckmann is stressed in his theory of social action (1992a).

In the “notes” Schütz uses the notion of “Mich” (which appears to be a translation of Mead’s [1934] “me”) to indicate the socially reflexive self.

It is in accordance with this understanding that Schutz’ mundane phenomenology is then a reconstruction of the life-world from the perspective of the subject, as Gurwitsch (1974: 115) states: Schutz (2003/1943: 115) himself conceded explicitly that he assumes sociality to genetically precede subjective consciousness the same way as mothers precede their babies.

Schutz uses the pragmatic idea of “successful communication” explicitly (1962b: 321ff).

Here he also mentions the notion of "communicative work".

Objectivation is here used in the sense of Berger and Luckmann (1966: 49) as “products of human activity that are available both to their producers and to other men as elements of a common world”.

Schutz mostly uses the notion of “Leib” which stresses the subjective perspective on the body (i.e., “Körper”).

I should add that Habermas’ stress on the three references of communicative action (expression, proposition, and appeal), adapted from Bühler’s organ model, would need to be taken into consideration for a theory of communicative action—a task which cannot be pursued here.

The use of the axe may be a way of expression, it may also be a way how to show off (being masculine, being tough, being dangerous), it may also mean just “chopping wood,” a case in which the instrumental meaning is identical with the objective meaning.

Let me repeat that, also for Schutz, the other to which these actions may be addressed can always be “one's-self” in the sense of a socialized self (see Footnote 13). In one of the most daring interpretations, Luckmann (1970) argued that the other can be, in principle, everything the actor is oriented to intentionally.

It is quite obvious that Schutz considers the theory of signs as one of the major ways to guarantee “real” communication for symptoms do not allow to indicate subjective intentions. We know that Schutz drew this distinction in order to distance himself from behaviorism (which took every expressive act as movement). This distinction downplays, however, the relevance of symptoms which, one should be reminded, account for the primacy of the face-to-face relation over any other kind of situation.

This can be done without denying that the “relative directness of social relations,” he stressed, is one of the problems of “basic significance for the understanding of the constitution of social reality” (1964b: 29).

They consider instruments as objectivations of links within in-order-to contexts, particularly those which are routinized. More specifically, their instrumentality resembles routinized actions whose sense is not any more conscious. Still objectivations, their meaning is, so to say, hidden in practice.

As far as I remember, he did not consider the telephone.

A more elaborate discussion of mediatization and communicative action can be found in Knoblauch (in print).

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Titel: Alfred Schutz’ Theory of Communicative Action
verfasst von: Hubert Knoblauch
Publikationsdatum: 01.08.2013
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: Human Studies / Ausgabe 3/2013
Print ISSN: 0163-8548
Elektronische ISSN: 1572-851X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9278-9

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