184 RüdigerKunow
theoretical move designed to further develop Habermas's view, Axel
Axelrod has suggested that the discrepancies and dysfunctions inside
such processes can be read as negative evidence of the presence of
socio-cultural normativities (1095-99, 1104). The Habermasian idea(l)
of communicative rationality finds both its expression and its primary
formincommunallyandcommunicativelysharednormsasnodalpoints
of social interaction. They are the grammar of such interaction.
Essentially, this is a proceduralist rather than a content-based
understanding of norms and (other than in the Foucauldian perspective)
onethatassignspeopleanactive,notamerelyacquiescentrole:intheir
everyday interaction, members of a given social formation exchange
information and views about pressing problems, and it is in this
communicative interaction as (ideally un-coerced) processes of will-
formation where norms come up for debate, revision, or reassertion.
Norms and the (non-)compliance with them are thus linked with the
functioning of the public sphere. As the collective voice of oughtness,
norms are part of what Rancière has called "the distribution of the
sensible" (12), crystallizations of what is considered routine in social
andculturalagendas.
Whatthisalsomeans—again in contradistinctionto theFoucauldian
view—is that the validity of a given normative cluster can only be
established and maintained "from below" (rather than imposed "from
above"). This is especially important with regard to post-conventional
societies and cultures (such as the cultures of the Global North). Here,
norms issue no longer from religious, not even from governmental,
institutions but from subject-to-subject-relations in communicative
interaction. What this also means is that the interpellative power of
norms, the compliance with them, depends on continued, iterative
communicativeprocessesamongthemembersofacollective.Thisisthe
preconditionfornormsbecomingpartofthesocialandculturalnormal.
Within the framework of Habermas's theory of social formation then,
normative routines of social and cultural reproduction are not, as in
Foucault's reading, top-down manifestations of power but sites of
transactionandtransformation,crossroadswherecommunicativepower
possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourse"
(Fa ctsandNorms107);cf.alsotheargumentinMoralConsciousness65-66.