From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca> Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 09:26:19 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time) On Sat, 28 Oct 2000 00:07:26 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> wrote: > Why is Habermas going afdter Adorno? Does Adorno really belong with these > others? IS it becuase of DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT or something else? Habermas thinks so, in a strange way. For Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno's DofE goes too far - it is a totalizing critique. The enlightenment is... disaster triumphant. H/A, according to Habermas, see no progress, not to they establish grounds for possible progress. In other words, there is no standard, no measure. This is where Habermas pulls out one of his weakest arguments: the idea of a performative contradiction. He argues that H/A use reason against itself but using arguments to dismiss the validity of arguments - where ideology critique can no longer be assumed to be non-ideological. For Habermas, their critique is overdetermined. He doesn't must talk about DofE either, he draws in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. Habermas argues that there has been some progress in modernity - moral progress, entrenched in the institutionalization of democratic norms. There are three competing conceptions of reason at work here. Instrumental, emphatic and communicative. Habermas argues that emphatic reason, the totalizing critique of the whole, is metaphysical, because it cannot sustain the validity of its own premises... (ie. 'what progress has been made that lends itself to the insight that we've moved into a new state of barbarism'). > Gilroy seems to miss something crucial to the utopian expressions he sees: that utopia is what we don't live now, in the everyday. This is where H/A and Habermas differ. In TCA vol 1, second last page, Habermas writes, "Communicative reason does not simply encounter ready-made subjects and systems; rather, it takes part in structuring what is to be preserved. The utopian perspective of reconciliation and freedom is ingrained in the conditions of the communicative sociation of individuals; it is built into the lingustic mechanism of the reproduction of the species." To wit... a utopian perspective ... is ingrained in... the reproduction of the species. As Castoradis notes, the idea that our biology has a built-in utopian perspective... "is an enormous logical blunder." I don't know. Maybe Habermas is right... but I'm more drawn to Castoriadis here: that we *create* utopian images, they aren't "built-in." Anyway.... Gilroy seems to me to be keeping with a Habermasian perspective, that modernity, in some way, is actual progress - if not in that it facilitates self-reflective awareness... > 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. A Habermasian response might run something like this: even in the most dictatorial situations, of fear and manipulation, reason persists, however diminished or distorted, because, despite all else, we still try to understand and communicate. Whenever we try to coordinate our actions through agreement, we abide by the ideals of autonomy and solidarity, which provide the measure and means of emancipation. No authority can ever be justified if it has not met with the rational consent of those who are implicated by the authority, and even then, we are obligated to retroactively and critically consider the legitimacy of the procedures in which our validity claims have come to rest. > 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. I must admit, I'm not completely surprised that you're willing to think twice about Habermas... I remember several years ago you launched a scathing attack on the Habermasians (which was quite amusing at the time). Despite my criticism and concern - there is something tremendously important in his work (even if his vocabulary tends to obscure it). A willingness to stand tall as a modernist and a steadfast refusal to let the butchers have the final word. So even in instances where cultural traditions and strategies have died out, Habermas encourages reason. Let me know if this doesn't help: "If by way of a thought experiment we compress the adolescent phase of growth into a single critical instant in which the individual for the first time - yet prevasively and intransigently - assumes a hypoethical attitude toward the normative contenxt of his lifeworld, we can see the nature of the problem that very person must deal with in passing from the conventional to the postconventional level of moral judgement. The social world of legitimately regulated interpersonal relations, a world to which one was naively habituated and which was unproblematically accepted, is abruptly deprived of its quasi-natural validity. If the adolescent cannot and does not want to go back to the traditionalism and unquestioned identity of his past world, he must, on penalty of utter disorientation, reconstruct, at the level of basic concepts, the nromative ordres that his hypothetical gaze has destroyed by removing the veil of illusions from them. Using the rubble of devalued traditions, traditions that have been reocgnize to be merely conventional and in need of justification, he erects a new normative structure that must be solid enough to withstand critical inspection by someone who will henceforth distinguish soberly between socially accepted norms and validy norms, between de facto recognition of norms and norms that are worthy of reconition. At first principles inform his plan for reconstruction; these principles govern the generation of valid norms. Ultimately all that remains is a procedure for a rationally motivated choice among principles that have been recognized in turn as in need of justification." Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, pg. 126. ken
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005