File spoon-archives/frankfurt-school.archive/frankfurt-school_2000/frankfurt-school.0010, message 22


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, ......



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