Date: 	Fri, 24 Jan 1997 10:36:31 -0500
From: Kenneth MacKendrick <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: General Question


Hope you don't mind more than one observation....
> 
> > The golden thread of modern
> > self-consciousness is Hegelian Marxism.
> 
> This is an excellent place to pick up where we left off: please, expand
> on that statement. I've already argued elsewhere for the value of
> Habermas, so you know something of where I'm at. Where is this Hegelian
> Marxism today, and what does it have to offer that Habermas doesn't? You
> know that I don't appreciate "discourse masturbation any more than you.
> But you also know that I think that Habermas's focus on communication
> makes sense of the problems of the modern world, and that the remedy for
> those problems cannot abjure communication. Society is not just a thing,
> but it is the product of our purposive activity as well. To refresh your
> memory, here's what I wrote:
> 
>   Question: 
> 
> > Is the ability of Scott and
> > I to understand one other merely a matter of our alleged openness
> > and tolerance, or is it ultimately contingent on circumstances
> > which have created both us and our communicative resources and
> > thus transcends the subjective intentions of either one of us?
> 
> We both agree that those circumstances exist, but we disagree on their
> character. What is objective to me is in fact anothers activity, which
> has an "inside", so to apeak, is subjective. Imagine for a moment that a
> nerve gas bomb destroys D.C.. All the buildings are left intact,
> everything material is still there (including rotting bodies.) What
> happened to those material circumstances? The difference is obviously
> the missing activity, but not just in the repetitious motion of bodies
> but in the subjectivities thereof, which makes those motions activities
> which we know as doing this or that. And all this activity, I argue, has
> ends which are oriented towards a world which embodies the fundamental
> commitments of the actors. As Habermas puts it: "_Material reproduction_
> takes place through the medium of the purposive activity with which
> sociated individuals intervene in the world to realize their aims."
> [_Theory of Communicative Action V2_ (Boston: Beacon, 1989) p138]
>    You write:
> 
> > Self-consciousness, recognition, reflexivity, openness, etc. etc.
> > -- what are all these things but formally declared principles
> > which say nothing about the real possibilities of their
> > realization?  Did I say I wanted to flush them and pull out my
> > gun?  Or did I say that the arguments supporting these notions are
> > not what they seem, and that there is something going on behind
> > this scenery which is also a terrain for analysis, a terrain
> > unknown to idealist philosophers?
> 
> 
> Which is to say that there is a logic to the development of society
> which is other than the inner logic which constitutes the subjectivity
> of that society? YES! Which is why Habermas brings in functionalism and
> systems theory to complement an interpretive, phenomenological,
> hermeneutic approach. We can then understand how what is revealed by the
> two modes of analysis are different: system and lifeworld. Society is
> both. It would not be a system without the subjective meaning and
> motivation of the lifeworld, and the lifeworld is dependent on the
> systematic character of society for its "materiality". The systematic
> side of society is not alien to us--indeed it is our own work. It has
> followed its own logic, however, so that the mode of action appropriate
> to the systematic, structural aspect of society has begun to spill over
> into the communicative basis which fosters the subjective meaning and
> motivation which is the lifeworld aspect of society. This is what
> Habermas calls "colonization". When this happens, there are a number of
> lifeworld pathologies which follow, related to the disruption of
> cultural reproduction, social integration, or socialization; these
> correspond to the "structural components of the lifeworld": culture,
> society, and person. Culture is "the stock of knowledge from which
> participants in communication supply themselves with interpretations as
> they come to an understanding about something in the world." [TCA2
> p138]  Society is "the legitemate orders through which participants
> regulate their memberships in social groupsand thereby secure
> solidarity." [TCA2 p138] And personality structures are "the competences
> that make a subject capable of speaking and acting, that put him in a
> position to take part in a processes of reaching understanding and
> thereby to assert his own identity." [TCA2 p138] These systems are
> components of the larger social system. Each of the reproduction
> processes contributes something to all three systems. The following
> reproduces the chart on page 142 of TCA2:
> 
>                       Structural components: 1)Culture, 2)Society,
> 3)Personality
> Reproduction processes:
> 
> a)Cultural reproduction: 1)Interpretive schemes ("valid knowledge"),
> 2)Legitemations, 3)Socialization patterns and educational goals.
> 
> b)Social integration: 1)Obligations, 2)Legitematelay ordered
> interpersonal relationships, 3)Social memberships
> 
> c)Socialization: 1)Interpretive accomplishments, 2)Motivations for
> actions that conform to norms, 3)Interactive capabilities ("personal
> identity")
>

Thank god for charts.  When thought fails we can always turn to diagrams for the 
truth.  Anthony Giddens was right about this....  Habermas uses way to many charts 
and he always, contra Jung, expresses things in threesomes.
> 
> When these processes are upset, you have crises in the three dimensions
> corresponding to the reproduction processes: the rationality of
> knowledge, the solidarity of members, and personal responsibility. Using
> the same numbering for the structural components used above, we can
> reproduce Habermas' chart of crisis manifestations on page 143 of TCA2:
> 
> a)Cultural reproduction: 1)Loss of Meaning, 2)Withdrawal of
> legitimation, 2)Crisis in orientation and education
> 
> b)Social integration: 1)Unsettling of collective identity, 2)Anomie,
> 3)Alienation
> 
> c)Socialization: 1)Rupture of tradition, 2)Withdrawal of motivation,
> 3)Psychopathologies
> 
> Habermas is saying that we do not know what we're doing and why we're
> doing it, and that as it stands the social world is, even to those whose
> personal activities constitute that world, alien. This even reaches down
> into our personal identities, which are disordered outside of a genuine
> communicative context. He is not saying that we need to take some sort
> of action to patch things up and then get back to business, but that
> there is a fundamental disordering in our society which has to do with
> the overriding of the communicative structures in which even ideological
> consciousness is formed. The social-scientific perspective can reveal
> what is happening, BUT IT CANNOT FIX IN A TECHNICAL WAY WHAT IS A
> COMMUNICATIVE REALITY. The answer isn't to take the bull by the horns
> and reorder these or those social relations, because in fact just that
> sort of attitude is the problem in the first place. To free
> communication from systematic distortion, from the phony, external
> meanings which hide the dominance of systematic imperatives would open
> up the space in which those who have other thoughts and feeling on the
> matter. The beginning can be made within the ALREADY EXISTING
> institutions and practices, which have self-understandings and stated
> commitments which can be shown to be at variance with the reality of
> their functioning. What else could serve as a lever in which to move
> others but understandings and commitments that they already have? If
> white America is deluded, isn't it because it THINKS that it has no
> problem, WISHES it away with ideals which sound good but do nothing?
> 
> Wherein lies the superiority of your Hegelian Marxism? What does it have
> to offer? How can it make better sense of the modern world? 

I see, for now, six problems with Habermas:

1. he is a bit of a cypto-theologian.  reason will save us.  if he is arguing that 
reason is necessarily connected to universality, democracy etc.  he squarely 
jumps into the metaphysics fields.  Necessary relations give me the creeps.

2.  since he hasn't been bitten by the aesthetic bug he doesn't leave much room for 
aesthetics.  this is a problem.  aesthetics play a much larger role in life than 
simply affairs of the private.  ie. there is no poetry in habermas.  following agnes 
heller - "habermasian man has no feelings.... and is constituted wholly by 
abstract reasoning" (or something like that).

3. habermas thinks science is distinct from hermeneutics.  he argues that only a 
social science, via a critical theory of society, can illuminate monological linguistic 
systems (non-discursive discourse).  in this way he is a positivist.

4.  habermas ignores context.  a gender analysis demonstrates that habermas's 
radical separation of the public/private good/just is problematic.  ie.  fraser's 
"what's so critical about critical theory?"  i'm not saying fraser's right but seyla 
benhabib is.  habermas has no place for the concrete other - people are conceived 
in abstraction.  ouch.

5. habermas also underestimates the role of power.  power destroys and silences. 
 these dynamics are structured directly into our reasoning skills - consensus 
doesn't prove anything - it also has the element of assmilating dissent (ie. forcing 
people to accept arguments they disagree with but don't have "good grounds" to 
dismiss.  in this way - habermas's consensus theory is authoritarian.

6.  the nonidentical.  hermeneutics and science in habermas tend to play a positive 
role and the element of the nonidentical disappears (what else is new).  this may 
be an aporia but it also happens to be a very relevant observation (on the part of 
adorno).

ok.  i'm done with this habermas guy.  whose next?
ken mackendrick

"I think therefore I am."
 - Rene Descartes

"I think therefore there are unavoidable presuppositions of language which are 
always already in effect whenever speech is used communicatively toward the end 
of mutual understanding."
 - Jurgen Habermas