QUOTE
This end is served by the separation of instrumental functions of the administration from expressive symbols that release an unspecific readiness to follow. Familiar strategies of this kind are the personalization of substantive issues, the symbolic use of hearings, expert judgments, juridical incantations, and also the advertising techniques (copied from oligopolistic competition) that at once confirm and exploit existing structures of prejudice and that garnish certain contents positively, others negatively, through appeals to feeling, stimulation of unconscious motives, [l] etc. The public realm [Offentlichkeit], set up for effective legitimation, has above all the function of directing attention to topical areas--that is, of pushing other themes, problems, and arguments below the threshold of attention and, thereby, of withholding them from opinion-formation. The political system takes over tasks of ideology planning (Luhmann). In so doing, maneuvering room is, to be sure narrowly limited, for the cultural system is peculiarly resistant to administrative control. There is no administrative production of meaning. Commercial production and administrative planning of symbols exhausts the normative force of counterfactual validity claims. The procurement of legitimation is self-defeating as soon as the mode of procurement is seen through.
Cultural traditions have their own, vulnerable, conditions of reproduction. They remain "living" as long as they take shape in an unplanned, nature-like manner, or are shaped with hermeneutic consciousness. (Whereby hermeneutics, as the scholarly interpretation and application of tradition, has the peculiarity of breaking down the nature-like character of tradition as it is handed on and, nevertheless, of retaining it at a reflective level.) [2] The critical appropriation of tradition destroys this nature-like character in discourse. (Whereby the peculiarity of critique consists in its double function [3]: to dissolve analytically, or in a critique of ideology, validity claims that cannot be discursively redeemed; but, at the same time, to release the semantic potentials of the tradition.) [4] To this extent, critique is no less a form of appropriating tradition than hermeneutics. In both cases appropriated cultural contents retain their imperative force, that is, they guarantee the continuity of a history through which individuals and groups can identify with themselves and with one another. A cultural tradition loses precisely this force as soon as it is objectivistically prepared and strategically employed. In both cases conditions for the reproduction of cultural traditions are damaged, and the tradition is undermined. This can be seen in the museum-effect of a hedonistic historicism, as well as in the wear and tear that results from the exploitation of cultural contents for administrative or market purposes. Apparently, traditions can retain legitimizing force only as long as they are not torn out of interpretive systems that guarantee continuity and identity.
The structural dissimilarity between areas of administrative action and areas of cultural tradition constitutes, then, a systematic limit to attempts to compensate for legitimation deficits through conscious manipulation. Of course, a crisis argument can be constructed from this only in connection with the broader point that the expansion of state activity produces the side effect of a disproportionate increase in the need for legitimation. I consider a disproportionate increase probable, not only because the expansion of administratively processed matters makes necessary mass loyalty for new functions of state activity, but because the boundaries of the political system vis-a-vis the cultural system shift as a result of this expansion. In this situation, cultural affairs that were taken for granted, and that were previously boundary conditions for the political system, fall into the administrative planning area. Thus, traditions withheld from the public problematic, and all the more from practical discourses, are thematized. An example of such direct administrative processing of cultural tradition is educational planning, especially curriculum planning. Whereas school administrations formerly merely had to codify a canon that had taken shape in an unplanned, nature-like manner, present curriculum planning is based on the premise that traditional patterns could as well be otherwise. Administrative planning produces a universal pressure for legitimation in a sphere that was once distinguished precisely for its power of self-legitimation. [5] Other examples of the indirect perturbation of matters taken culturally for granted can be found in regional and city planning (private ownership of land), in planning the health system ("classless hospital"), and, finally, in family planning and marriage laws (which relax sexual taboos and lower the thresholds of emancipation). The end effect is a consciousness of the contingency, not only of the contents of tradition, but also of the techniques of tradition, that is, of socialization. Formal schooling is competing with family upbringing as early as at the pre-school age. The problematization of childrearing routines can be seen in the popular pedagogical [volkspadagogischen] tasks that schools are assuming through parental rights and individual consultations, as well as in the pedagogical-psychological, scientific journalism on the subject. [6]
At every level, administrative planning produces unintended unsettling and publicizing effects. These effects weaken the justification potential of traditions that have been flushed out of their nature-like course of development. Once their unquestionable character has been destroyed, the stabilization of validity claims can succeed only through discourse. The stirring up of cultural affairs that are taken for granted thus furthers the politicization of areas of life previously assigned to the private sphere. But this development signifies danger for the civil privatism that is secured informally through the structures of the public realm. Efforts at participation and the plethora of alternative models--especially in cultural spheres such as school and university, press, church, theater, publishing, etc.--are indicators of this danger, as is the increasing number of citizens' initiatives. [7]
Demands for, and attempts at, participatory planning can also be explained in this context. Because administrative planning increasingly affects the cultural system--that is, the deep-seated representations of norms and values of those affected--and renders traditional attitudes uncertain, the threshold of acceptability changes. In order to carry through innovations in the planning process, the administration experiments with the participation of those affected. Of course, the functions of participation in governmental planning are ambivalent. [8] Gray areas arise in which it is not clear whether the need for conflict regulation is increased or decreased by participation. The more planners place themselves under the pressure of consensus-formation in the planning process, the more likely is a strain that goes back to two contrary motives: excessive demands resulting from legitimation claims that the administration cannot satisfy under conditions of an asymmetrical class compromise; and conservative resistance to planning, which contracts the horizon of planning and lowers the degree of innovation possible. Socio-psychologically viewed, both motives can be integrated into the same antagonistic interpretive pattern. Thus, analytically separable types of opposition can be represented by the same group. For this reason, laying claim to the "labor power of participation" (Naschold) is an extreme and, for the administration, risky means of meeting legitimation deficits.
http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/courses/legitcri.html
