Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 00:07:26 -0400 From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION Why is Habermas going afdter Adorno? Does Adorno really belong with these others? IS it becuase of DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT or something else? I myself tend to be partial to aesthetics but also to science. However, aesthetics seems in the present situation unable to fight back. I never believed in Adorno's militant aesthetic negativity, as everyone here knows, but now I find myself in a comparable situation, where every aesthetic act aims at undermining the expectations of the audience. The very words "theology" and "feminist philosophy" make me break out in hives, but OK, it's interesting to know. As for Gilroy, there is much in him I admire. His chapter on Wright is Gilroy at his best, and he convincingly shos what some bnuit far from the majority have understood--the radical, philosophical brilliance of Wright's achievement. However, it is precisely Gilroy's perspicacity that worries me when he fails to follow through. His commentary on Benhabib and the utopian politics of transfiguration are a case in point. His attention to black expressive culture gives some sort of analytical perspective to a phenomenon often observed but rarely analyzed, but Gilroy's own arguments elsewhere against the mystifications perpetrated in African-American ideology contradict his seemingly uncritical valorization of black expressive culture. Gilroy seems to miss something crucial to the utopian expressions he sees: that utopia is what we don't live now, in the everyday. Black Brits live in a paradoxical relationship to African-American cultural hegemony over the black diaspora--they both follow it and fear it at the same time. Gilroy should have learned something from the hostility he receives (and returns) as a Black British intellectual. Note his constant complaints (see SMALL ACTS) that Afrocentrism is really Americocentrism, deceitful and self-serving. And yet it seems he has yet to see through the veil of African-American expressive culture to discern how little freedom or democracy or rational accountability there is in African-American culture as everyday lived experience. I don't mean just the subjection of blacks to the misdeeds of whites; I mean the relations prevailing among black people themselves--where the ideal speech situation is not even an ideal--whose culture and internal politics are ruled by authoritarianism, manipulation, fear, and fetishism. (Only Adolph Reed Jr. seems to be able to face up to this problem. The rest of public Af-Am intellectuals and their white cheerleaders are a pack of bullshit artists.) And Gilroy must know by now that black culture has lost--any vitality its cultural traditions & strategies might have had died out by the early '80s. Perhaps becuase he is a foreigner he has not yet been exposed to the utter bankruptcy of the situation, and yet, how can he not know, because the abuse he has to take from American blacks is an unmistakable manifestation of their utter ideological bankruptcy. At 11:28 PM 10/27/2000 -0400, you wrote: >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. >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... >I'm reminded of Horkheimer here. Horkheimer and Benjamin had a debate at one >point, ...... --------------------------------------------------------------- Check out Ralph Dumain's "The Autodidact Project": <http://home.thirdage.com/education/ralphdavid> Regular visitors can see what's new on the site at: <http://home.thirdage.com/education/ralphdavid/whatnew.html> "Nature has no outline but imagination has." -- William Blake
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