Date: Tue, 25 Mar 1997 16:06:48 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: HAB: Re: Habermas and Social Action


I got an 'undelivered mail' response on this one - so I'm trying it again. 
Apologies if you already have it.     Rob.

Ken takes issue with my admittedly harsh opinion of the role of postmodern
intellectuals in our world.  In my defense I can but point out that the
offending sentence was an integral part of what I hope looked like an
argument.  Secondly, it is a position Habermas takes (at least he was still
taking it in 1980, when he made the 'Modernity - An Incomplete Project'
speech in Frankfurt).

There, Habermas sinks the slipper into Foucault and Derrida along just
these line (indeed he calls them 'young conservatives').  Habermas may have
changed his mind (I'm not aware that he has) - I have yet to.

For my part, I also think they fail to justify their positionlessness in
procedures of argumentation.  Whatever their rhetoric is, it is not
communicative action.  Hume explained his radical skepticism and then
explained why he'd felt moved to consign it to the flames.  Pomos have done
neither.  Taken together, the pomos I've read (and Derrida is among them)
turn intellectual skepticism into arrogant a priori negation.  

We have the metanarrative of (an effectively transcendental) will to power
instead of Habermas's modest and qualified humanism.  

We have (admittedly out of a sound attack on deSuassurian semantics - and
it is around here Habermas himself seems to have a problem, I think) a
denial of signification such that any signifier can generate infinite
secondary signifiers - ie. logically communication does not exist either!

Honestly, Ken!  Where does all this get us?  

Your humanist, essentialist, universalist, materialist, modernist mate,
Rob.










> Pomos are philosophical radicals and practical conservatives.
>> 
>I think this is a fairly unhelpful thing to say.  It is simply a slap in the
>face - mud 
>slinging.  Chomsky was right about this - there is no adequate response.  What
>can 
>you say to this?  No I'm not?  The terms radicals, reformers, liberals,
>ironists, and 
>conservatives marks out moments of identity thinking which steamrole over 
>individuals.  Simply because a philosopher has not spelled out a blueprint is
>no 
>reason to peg them as a conservative (this is a standard charge against the 
>Frankfurt School in general).  And simply because postmodernism presents one 
>criitque of metaphysics it does not constitute radicality.  Karl Kraus noted
>that 
>"origin is the goal."  By definition - the term radical applies here.  Has 
>postmodernism really cut to the chase - and hit the origin?  And is Derrida
>really a 
>conservative because his notion of justice is understood as something that is
>yet 
>to be?  These divisions also form a hierarchy of political theory - with
>radical = 
>good and conservative = bad - and it does not do justice to the actual
>contents of 
>the concepts being used and their inherent dialectical tendency (identity, 
>nonidentity or facticity, norm etc).
>
>ken




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