Raymond Williams says that such a concept of culture is oriented on reproducing existing capitalist values and thereby society as it is: the ‘culture which is then being defended is not excellence but familiarity, not the knowable but only the known values’ (Williams 1980, 8).
3.3.11. Habermas: Three Forms of Knowledge
Jürgen Habermas (1971) distinguishes three forms of knowledge:
information that expands our power of technical control; interpretations that make possible the orientation of action within common traditions; and analyses that free consciousness from its dependence on hypostatized powers. These viewpoints originate in the interest structure of a species that is linked in its roots to definite means of social organization: work, language, and power. The human species secures its existence in systems of social labor and self-assertion through violence, through tradition-bound social life in ordinary-language communication, and with the aid of ego identities that at every level of individuation reconsolidate the consciousness of the individual in relation to the norms of the group. Accordingly the interests constitutive of knowledge are linked to the functions of an ego that adapts itself to its external conditions through learning processes, is initiated into the communication system of a social life-world by means of self-formative processes, and constructs an identity in the conflict between instinctual aims and social constraints. In turn these achievements become part of the productive forces accumulated by a society, the cultural tradition through which a society interprets itself, and the legitimations that a society accepts or criticizes. My […] thesis is thus that knowledge-constitutive interests take form in the medium of work, language, and power (313).
Habermas’s (1971) threefold distinction between technical knowledge, emancipatory knowledge, and practical knowledge reflects his later distinction that he draws in the Theory of Communicative Action between the economic system, the political system, and the life-world as the three realms of modern society (Habermas 1984, 1987).
There are, however, also problems in Habermas’ theory of knowledge and human interest and his strict separation of work (economy), power (politics) and language (culture, lifeworld):
• The labour process does not necessarily have to be a form of the control of nature and humans. In an emancipated society, work turns from labour into well-rounded human activity that is a form of freedom beyond necessity.
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Critical Theory of Communication