Date: Mon, 24 Mar 1997 00:02:44 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: Re: HAB: Habermas and Social Action


>In a message dated 21/03/97  20:53:36, Anne write:
>
><< dialectical thinkers (many of whom decry Habermas
> as retrograde) would call for.  >>
>
>The dialectician's critique of habermas is very much along the lines that he
>continues to use many of the methods of dialectical analysis immanent
>critique, deconstruction/reconstruction of either/or dualisms etc., yet
>transposes the grounds for so doing into a neo-Kantian framework which
>contradicts such methods. Perhaps, the point is more that this combination is
>retrograde not that Habermas in toto is?
>
>Michael S

I sense Michael is on to something very important here.  I have come to
Habermas via Marx and the early Frankfurters, and, to the disgust of many
of my lefty mates, find much in Habermas that helps underpin a critical
platform in which I can have some confidence.  So far I have discerned no
problem in fleshing out an essentially marxian view of the world with
Habermasian ideas.

'But what about bloody dialectics?' my mates shout at me.  Well, it all
depends, I think, on whether one sees room in Habermas for historical
motion outside the realm of language.  I know almost nothing about Kant
(which I realise is a serious handicap) - and I'm not a trained philosopher
(which may be no bad thing) - but if the Kantianism Michael refers to is
the phenomenon/noumenon dichotomy - and if, say, *The German Ideology* is
read as an outline of historical dialectics (where the phenomenal is always
under transformation in sympathy with the *process of productive
interaction* between an implicit noumenal reality and human minds) - then
can Habermas be said to be undialectical?

For Habermas, if I have him right, the system is currently squeezing the
lifeworld - instrumentalism (the current ascendancy of 'efficiency', for
instance) is pushing into a corner other modes of human being.  As this 
efficiency is a function of relative prices, all that is human cannot be
expressed by the current system.  If language is all to Habermas, if
Adorno's concern about reality not fitting into its concepts properly is a
nonsense because there is nothing outside language, then Habermas is not
dialectical.  But then he wouldn't bother writing a word either.  If we are
'fatally enmeshed' (Marcuse's term) in our systemic linguistic net, then
emancipation becomes a nonsense - we can't run away and there's nowhere to
run.  After all, the system would effectively be coterminous with the
lifeworld.

But it's not.  And I think Habermas is saying it can never be.  For him,
the lifeworld will be back (he implies in *TCA* that its vanguard might be
female - that class of people sufficiently marginalised by the system to
retain residual thinkable 'lifeworld' values - and I'm with Iris Young and
Teresa Ebert here - you don't have to revolutionise Marx to go along with
Habermas here). 

So we have an implicit historiography here that deliberately posits two
antitheticals (system and lifeworld), manifest as a constant process of
discursively 'disclosable' contradictions, which must generate a new
synthesis, arising out of the impossibility of denying an implicitly
timeless and universal (ie. outside language) human nature.  Reality
reasserts itself because communicative action is a constant human capacity
and emancipation is a category that (a) can always be the focus of
communicative action, if (b) freedom is thinkable (ie. while a
contradiction between lived life and a normative ideal can be validated
discursively).

All of this sounds dialectical to me.

A rambling post from a confessed leftie amateur - but a well-intended
critique would be gratefully accepted.

Cheers,
Rob.







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