Relevance and Irrelevance

Theories, Factors and Challenges

Jan Strassheim, Hisashi Nasu, Jan Strassheim, Hisashi Nasu

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9783110470482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Information Management
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Relevance drives our actions and channels our attention; it shapes how we make sense of the world and communicate with each other. Irrelevance spreads a twilight which blurs the line between information we do not want to access and information we cannot access. In disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, the information sciences and linguistics, "relevance" has been proposed as a key concept. This book is the first to bring together the often unrelated traditions. Researchers from different fields discuss relevance and relate it to the challenges of "irrelevance", which have so far been neglected despite their significance for our chances of making well-informed decisions and understanding others. The contributions focus on theoretical and conceptual questions, on specific factors and fields, and on practical and political implications of relevance and irrelevance as forces which are even stronger when they remain in the background.

Challenges

Ilja Srubar

The Relevance of the Irrelevant

Ilja Srubar, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

Abstract: The formation of cultural worlds happens through selective mechanisms inherent to social action and communication. In social theory such selectivity is often thematized as the problem of relevance, i.e. as the problem of preferences orienting action and transforming open possibilities into the reality of specific life forms. The article thematizes the selective "machineries" of pragmatic relevance working in habitus, language, institutions, discourses and narratives. It argues that approaching the formation of cultural life forms from this point of view confronts us with the fact that the selective processes do not annihilate the excluded possibilities, which instead remain on the horizon of the respective universe of meaning while still forming its order. The mutual relation of relevance and the irrelevant within the construction of social reality is discussed in the final part of the paper.

1 Relevance and selectivity

The formation of cultural worlds happens through selective mechanisms inherent to social action and communication. In social theory such selectivity is often thematized as the problem of relevance, i.e. as the problem of preferences orienting action and transforming open possibilities into the reality of specific life forms. Approaching the formation of cultural life forms from this point of view, however, we are confronted with the fact that the possibilities left are not annihilated by the act of their exclusion, but rather remain on the horizon of the respective universe of meaning. Thus, the mutual relation of relevance and the irrelevant, or of order and disorder within the construction of social reality, seems to deserve some consideration.

One of the most prominent scholars who considered the problem of relevance as crucial for a theory of the social construction of reality was Alfred Schutz (1970). If we wanted to trace back the theme of relevance in his work, we would have to refer to the early Viennese period of his thinking in the late 1920s. In his papers from this time we find some notes (Schutz 1996, 3; 2004a, 51–54) in which he conceives of relevance as the basic problem of sociology in general and of the sociology of knowledge in particular. The starting point of his reasoning on relevance consists in Max Weber’s term “Wertbeziehung”, meaning “value-relation”, which Weber (Weber 1973) adopts from Heinrich Rickert (1913) in order to offer us an idea of how a cultural world endowed by meaning comes into existence. For Weber, empirical reality becomes “culture” when the actual facts are related to ideal values. It is the relatedness to values that separates meaningful items from meaningless things and molds a cultural order out of the orderless flow of being (Weber 1973, 175). Schutz realizes that this process is central for any theory that aims at the meaning structure of the social world and its constitution. From his point of view, however, such a theory would remain insufficient if it merely presupposed a preexistent system of values keeping the cultural world meaningful. Rather it would have to suggest how such values are constituted and how they provide orientation for social action. Seeking an answer to this problem, Schutz transforms the concept of “Wertbeziehung” into the problem of relevance (Schutz 2004a, Srubar 2007, 151–172). In this context, he looks for acts and social mechanisms which select meaningful elements orienting social action and which create structures of the lifeworld to which “values” would belong as important patterns orienting action.

Obviously, Schutz reverses Weber’s leading question: It is not values which give meaning to social action. Rather the social acts constitute relevancies selecting meaningful elements as parts of the lifeworld. Thus, the problem of relevance aims at the selective processes shaping the orientation of action and forming the structures of the lifeworld in which the relevancies are ­maintained.

Looking at the problem of relevance from this angle we can recognize that the possible realm of selective processes at stake here encloses many constitutive levels which are possibly implied within the scope of Schutzian thought but which have remained undiscussed or only roughly sketched (Schutz 1970; 2004b, 130). Ongoing research in social theory brings forth many inspirational approaches shedding light on the problems connected to the constitution of the relevance structures of the lifeworld and on the selective processes involved. In the following I will not only focus on the constitution of the lifeworld’s relevance structures in general but I would like to concentrate also on the selective processes providing differences between relevance systems, i. e., producing the variety of socio-cultural life forms. In this way I will avoid a mistake often made in regard to the phenomenological approach to social reality where the phenomenological search for general constitutive processes of the lifeworld is seen as not sensitive enough for the lifeworld’s variety given by its cultural diverseness. Using the example of relevance I hope to be able to demonstrate how such general processes in their progression generate the variety of cultural worlds.

2 The pragmatic orientation of relevance systems

One of the general motives in the Schutzian concept of the constitution of meaningful reality is that of pragmatic relevance orienting action (Schutz 2003a, 56–62, 132–143; 1962). According to Schutz the primary mechanism selecting meaningful elements of the lifeworld consists in the interaction with things and with others. “Pragmatic” in the original sense of “πρᾶγμα” refers to action in its relatedness to others and to objects which represents – together with the act of consciousness – an indispensable process endowing the world with meaning and transforming it into a meaningful lifeworld. While the pragmatic orientation of all relevance systems can be conceived of as an anthropological universal, its outcomes depend on the heterogeneous conditions of its realization. They materialize in various systems of relevancies providing the structure of the everyday world of working and shaping different life forms. Since the human approach to the world is not solely a cognitive one but is carried out by the body with its living experience and emotionality, the results of pragmatic action sediment, on the one hand, to an individual habitus. On the other hand, the pragmatic orientation is revealed in action where it becomes a subject of communication and generates intersubjective patterns of expectations structuring further interaction. Already in this basic process in which meaningful elements of the lifeworld are sorted out and ordered into primary relevance systems we can discern several levels of selecting “machineries” (Berger/Luckmann 1967, 104) providing social and cultural differences. At the core there are certainly the contacts with divergent social and material surroundings which constitute the actor’s living experiences on the one hand and the various artifacts of which the culture consists on the other hand. The selective processes taking place in temporal consciousness when current living experiences are transformed by recognition and recollection into personal typified structures of relevance were described by Husserl and Schutz (Husserl 1999, Schutz 1970). This goes along with an inscription of everyday routines and bodily practices into the corporal memory of habitus.

2.1 The habitus

In that sense, “habitus” is the result of at least three selective “machineries” consisting of working, of the activity of the consciousness and of bodily sensations. If we want to understand how the selective function appertaining to habitus forms the relevance system orienting action, we have to refer to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as a “structured and structuring structure” (Bourdieu 1977, 78). In Bourdieu, habitus represents the link between the conditions imposed on actors by social structure and the practices of the actors themselves. Living under different collective conditions, the actors acquire embodied patterns of perception, action and thinking which constitute a “matrix” (Bourdieu 1972, 178) defining the relevance of elements within their operational area. In that sense, habitus represents a selective structure generating relevancies that is similar to the concept of the pragmatic structure of the lifeworld in Schutz (1962) or to the “matrix of the lifeworld” in Luckmann (1979). It comes into action spontaneously without reflection and thus represents an unquestioned background which bestows meaning on our surroundings and actions.

Although Bourdieu (1972, 176) obviously adopts some central items of the phenomenological approach, his concept of the selective processes immanent to relevance systems reaches further. On the one hand, he considers the selective effects which the individual’s belonging to different social collectives and positions exerts on the habitus formation. On the other hand, he shows how action formed by the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Relevance and Irrelevance
• Theories
• Factors
• Challenges