Local Spaces and Identities— assembling the national Umwelt

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“The individual, then, divides his Umwelt into the designed and the undesigned, into project and setting, into the self-oriented and incidental....”
(Goffman 1971, 312).

Having examined the practices of state-sponsored normalcy, we need to now step back or away from this version to remember that, despite the intentions of ministries of culture and corporate advertisers, normalcy is also a condition of the lifeworld—and should the state and the market cease to be interested in it, this would still need to be cobbled together by individuals as a precondition for getting on with one’s daily life. Here my use of “normalcy” resembles what Goffman called the “Umwelt”.

Goffman’s Umwelt is a bi-modal frame within which the individual’s most immediate situations expectations are assembled. One mode is the “undesigned” mode, wherein normalcy resides: this is the sum of all surrounding circumstances concerning which the individual assumes she has both no control of, and where this lack of control is shared with others. The other mode is the project (or design) mode, where the individual assumes that her actions are responsible for the maintenance of her surroundings. Making a play within a game is a well-formed example of the latter. But, as Goffman noted, the “question of how much of any particular scene is part of the individual’s current design of action and how much is undesigned is interesting” (1971, 311).

This question is interesting here because the state’s¹ central interest seems to be in informing the “undesigned” Umwelt of its population, often in arenas where individuals might have otherwise devised their own projects. Again, normalcy has always been a condition of the lifeworld, it is the interest by state and the market in this condition that signals a change within modernity. The Prince, as Foucault would remind us, had other things to worry about.

How is it that the state (and, particularly in state-nations, in coordination with national capitalist enterprises) can acquire a hold upon the Umwelt? If the liberal question is “why do we need government at all?” this other question raises the opposite concern, which might be called the critical dilemma: How do we prevent the state from speaking for us? What are the preconditions of speaking against the position of the state?

These questions are all the more salient within state-nations where the state controls a rhetorical position that stretches from the “national interest” to the “collective will” of its citizens [see also: State-nations, and debates over democracy]. Curiously, while enlightenment apologists would still look to a rationality as subtending modernity’s critique of its own founding circumstances, modern forms of mystification also must be accounted for.

“The lifeworld [for Habermas] is the realm of personal relationships and (at its best) communicative action. But to it is counterposed a system ordered on the basis of nonlinguistic steering media (money and power), integrating society impersonally through functional or cybernetic feedback. This split cannot be overcome, Habermas argues, because there is no immanent logic of capitalism to produce its dialectical transcendence and because large-scale modern society would be impossible without such systemic integration (and dreams of doing away with such large-scale societal integration are not only romantic but dangerous because reduction in scale can come about only in catastrophic ways). Nonetheless, the lifeworld is the locus for basic human values and is undergoing rationalization processes of its own; it needs to be defended against the continual encroachment of systemic media”
(Calhoun 1992, 30-31).

Intentional, legitimated, and authoritative practices of misrecognition tend to obscure whatever rationality modern institutions might possess. This has led some critics of modernity to complain that this never achieved its own goals of replacing authoritative knowledge with knowledge grounded in reason. Others complain that these new forms of mystification are fully modern, and that only a post-modern reflexivity will push us to a new (and thus, ironically, modern) condition of life. Where various late-modern institutional-critiques increase Institutional reflexivity (e.g., an ability of institutions to reflexively monitor their own practices), this, in turn, may increase rationality within institutional discourses. However, this increased reflexivity may not extend to persons governed by these institutions (or expert systems).

The very act of governing, of acquiring an interest in a subject, may require that the subject not attain a reflexive awareness (a ken) of the circumstances of their subjectivity (see also Althusser 1986 [1970]). Because of this dependency on discursive misrecognition, one of the primary effects of the state’s interest in its population has been a substantial increase in the amount of “undesigned” Umwelt as compared to designed Umwelt as a feature of normalcy under conditions of late modernity.

¹Not only the interest of the state, but the instrumentalities available to the state and to capitalist organizations in modernity, as Habermas (1989) noted, increase the ability of the state and the market to penetrate into the individual’s Umwelt at the “undesigned” level.