From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca> Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 23:28:46 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) On Fri, 27 Oct 2000 21:20:15 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> wrote: > One problem with following the rules of rational argument is that one is > always held hostage to the debates instituted by the representatives of the > (would-be) ruling class. Of course! Habermas is more of a post-Marxist that most post-Marxists, since he openly acknowledges that class struggle is a strategic confrontation, not a communicative one (Wellmer has a nice quote, 'critical theory remembers what hermeneutics forgets, that we are bound up in relations of domination). I don't think he harbours any illusions about this. However... the existence of class struggle indicates that we need, more than ever, to transform instrumental forms of reasoning into communicative ones... > While it is useful to know all that stuff, it is unreasonable to expect everyone to drop what they're doing and tie up their lives defesning themselves from an onslaught in which the debating parties are hardly on the same footing. Right, we actors refuse to participate in rational debate, then we are obligated to employ strategic means. But, again, Habermas argues that even the most violent form of strategic action still rely on some degree of communicative action... it all reminds me of Augustine's argument about good and evil. For Augustine, peace can exist without war but war cannot exist without peace. Although Habermas wouldn't argue that communicative action can exist without some instrumental uses of reason, he does argue that instrumental reason is the sin qua non of communicative reason. > As to whether the refusal to participate in reasoned discussion is itself > coercive and regressive--well, it may well be, though it is not that > counter-hegemonic truth claims could not be substiantiated by rational > argument. It could just be that people refuse to engage in a discussion in > which the cards are stacked. Yep. And that's a real concern. Are procedural discourse always stacked? But this is why ideology-critique is so important (one of Habermas's most sustained critique of ideology sojourns is his attack on postmodernism [in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity] - where he goes after Foucault, Derrida, Bataille, Horkheimer and Adorno, Castoriadis, Luhmann, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. Interestingly, Habermas has more recently acknowledged that there is something more to be said about Foucault and, I think, has encouraged further study on the matter (some of his students have gone on to work on Foucault and Gadamer)... > For many reasons, I never belived in this ideal speech situation stuff, but I am interested now precisely because the spirit of free inquiry and transparent social relationms are being threatened in entirely novel cynical and twisted ways. All avant-gardes have been coopted now and the only place to go is ... logic and reason. Well, to contrast, those who are partial to scientific inquiry and sociology usually stick with Habermas. And those partial to psychoanalysis and aesthetics stick to Adorno. This doesn't mean the two are mutually exclusive... > Now back to Paul Gilroy. He's a bizarre character. I re-read the section > in which Habermas is discussed and I don't buy his argument. He criticizes > Marshall Berman and Habermas for their take on modernity and praises Hegel > for tying it in with the master-slave dialectic, which implies that > modernithy cannot be discussed apart from slavery, conveniently left out > from the "eurocentric" assumptions of the others. I don't see the cogency > of this argument at all. I'm reminded of Horkheimer here. Horkheimer and Benjamin had a debate at one point, and Benjamin argued that history is unfinished, which opens the possibility of redemption through anamnestic solidarity, so that the victims of the past do not suffer for nothing. Horkheimer responded by noting that "past injustice is done and finished. Those who have been beaten to death are truly dead." In Marsha Hewitt's discussion of the debate (in Critical Theory of Religion: a feminist analysis), which is in conjunction with Helmut Peukert's theologization of communicative action, she notes that "in the absence of the memory of our anonymous ancestors, we have no hope for a redeemed present or future." In short, historical amnesia generates a false consciousness that extends injustice and domination into the future, leaving human beings powerless to resist oppression... because our memories of the past are taken away. The debate is interesting, and I wonder about the degree to which future emancipatory projects rest on historical memory. Habermas has written a bit about this, noting that the glossing over of history tends to provide some sort of malignant consolation... Hewitt has another article on this, "Reasons without consolation: theological misappropriations of the discourse theory of j. habermas and their implications for the study of religion" in Secular Theories of Religion, ed. Jensen and Rothstein which is interesting as well. ken
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