Instrumental rationality’s dominance results from system-lifeworld uncoupling, not from reason’s inherent dialectic.

Evidence

Market and state function in isolation from the fabric of everyday life, using ‘[djelinguistified media of communication such as money and power’ to ‘connect up interactions in space and time into more and more complex networks that no one has to comprehend or be responsible for’. Consequently, ‘the conversion of communicative action over to media-steered interaction … “technicize[s]” the lifeworld in the sense that the expenditure and risk of consensus-forming processes are obviated while the prospects for purposive-rational action are enhanced.’ The prevalence of instrumental rationality which Weber and the early Frankfurt school regarded as characteristic of modernity is therefore a result of what Habermas calls ‘the uncoupling of system and lifeworld’. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 395

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘uncoupling of system and lifeworld’ and ‘delingustified media’ are exactly the concepts that would contest Jameson’s collapse of culture into economic logic. — connects to: Modern rationality is procedural rather than substantive across all value spheres — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 392; Rationality in social theory attaches to systems and functions, not individual decisions — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 308; Abstract systems do not colonise the life-world but interact dialectically with it — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 347 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Rationality in social theory attaches to systems and functions, not individual decisions #expands (0.85) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 308
• Abstract systems do not colonise the life-world but interact dialectically with it #contradicts (0.85) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 347
• Social organization displaces autonomous moral drive with instrumental and procedural rationality #corroborates (0.80) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 612
• Technical rationality makes irrational social control appear reasonable and rational #corroborates (0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 124
• Scientific rationalism becomes an instrument of social domination #corroborates (0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 141