From: Samuel Lawrence Binkley <sbinkley-AT-pipeline.com> Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 10:42:05 -0500 Subject: >Habermas is Habermas, 'nough said. On Mon, Mar 11, 1996 3:09:36 AM at jln wrote: >Habermas is Habermas, 'nough said. Hmmm... Habermas is certainly habermas.... but, as someone who tends to line up with Foucault against the Habermafian (not a typo) critique, I'm experimenting with a new more sympathetic reading of ole Jurgen. I recently read "structural transformations of the public sphere" for the first time, and am currently going through "theory of communicative action"..... and trying to set aside what have by now become knee jerk responses to Habermassian "totalizing discourse", or the "ideology of communicative clarity" and so on. I mean, his history of the western public sphere is not in itself a bad thing. He is quite rightly critical of an over hasty tendency on the part of marxists and critical theorists to conclude that capitalists modes of production, rising out of bourgeois enlightenment, immediately turns enlightenment against itself as it rationalizes/colonizes the subjective world. Habermas inserts an intermediate phase in this developmental process, a sphere of bourgeois rational-critical debate, which, as he describes, is both the product of capitalist developments and supercedes the horizons of these developments. Is this really such a bad thing? Okay, maybe the conclusions he draws from this discovery (that such spheres of rational critical debate can be isolated and defended throughout societies, modern western or not) are frighteningly "totalitarian" as Lyotard calls him. But, is there a way to make use of Habermas's history of the bourgeois world that escapes an ahistoricizing-essentializing of rational communication? just curious. sam ------------------
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