Date: Sun, 26 Oct 1997 15:55:11 -0800
From: Gary <gedavis-AT-pacbell.net>
Subject: HAB: Pragmatics & Rhetoric


Ken writes that: “In my work i'm looking at how Habermas 'missed' human
imagination in his categories of rationality.  Habermas has not probed
deep enough into psychoanalytic thought to develop an understanding of
imagination in regards to ethics.”

The “categories” of rationality are not his; they belong to language
itself. 

Look. These words, this text, this string of signs are tokens of a
shared language with which you take up a communicative relationship by
reading. Presumably, I am not a Turing machine; these words are offered
in a communicative relationship of writing, which can be modeled as a
kind of speaking (not aversely to Derridean grammatology, appearances to
the contrary). This act of reading, the trace of Gary’s writing, is the
illocutionary component of communication that presumes many standards of
communication, from grammer to presumptions of shared context that the
particular sentences work from. The intersubjective linguisticality of
our particular being is reaffirmed in every communicative act. Within
this pragmatic domain--this domain of action--anything can be its
subject or content. The semantics of communication is independent of it
pragmatics in the sense that, for any pragmatic structure, any range of
semantic sentences can be the propositional content of an assertion or
question, etc. 

Formal pragmatics is a reconstructive theory of the inherent
presuppositions of communicative action. Given its intent to articulate
the intersubjectivity of our linguistic nature, it is focused on the
standard nature of that intersubjectivity, which always shows in the
normative character of communication. Therefore, it is a metanormative
analysis of communication, inasmuch as all communication implies
pragmatic features governing its relationship to the world. The entire
domain of validity is a feature of language with a metanormative place
in linguistic cognition (to which there is obviously more than what’s
linguistic!).

This pragmatic mode of reconstruction is open to whatever semantic
content, no matter how imaginative.

But that’s not all. There is the rhetorical mode of language, which is
addressed in literary criticism. While semantics is the reconstructive
discourse of the content of language, and pragmatics is the
reconstructive discourse of the action of language, rhetoric is the
reconstructive discourse of the expression of language. 

Consider the following: O body swayed to music / O brightening glance /
How can we tell the dancer from the dance?

By writing this verse, just by writing this verse, I tacitly presume
that you will comprehend it (a semantic claim to comprehensibility,
which is part of pragmatics--that it presumes the semantic mode of
language--but which Habermas doesn’t thematize often, outside of his
specific discussion of pragmatics).

Do I presume upon you that what is written is true? Am I asserting that
we *cannot* distinguish the poet from his poem? Is this question even a
misinterpretation of the verse? Is it not about the condition of poetic
insight?

In any event, this imaginative wording, deserves to be taken to heart,
one might feel. The author’s intent is from the soul, you might say. But
is it genuine? (Am I being genuine, if I don't admit that I'm quoting
Yeats?)

Does this author have any business appealing to us this way? What is he
doing, by addressing the body and the glance? Is the body swayed unto
music? Is it the body that becomes music? Is it the perceptibility that
generates the brightness it beholds? 

To a degree, answers to these questions depend upon the imaginability
that you bring to the words. 

Are you a poet who understands what is being said here? 

In order to best appreciate what the poet is expressing, we must
articulate interpretations, and any interpretation implicates itself as
to its genuineness. That genuineness is constrained by what the author
intends, not that interpretation must confine itself to the author’s
intentions. But all interpretation either overtly or covertly implies a
stand on the author’s intentions, either that the meaning of the text
*is* such-and-such, for reasons related to claims made about the
author’s intentions; *or* the meaning of the text *is* such-and-such,
despite the claimed or presumed intentions of the text; *or* the
author’s intentions are considered irrelevant. 

In any event, a relationship to the intentionality of the author is
inescapable in reading, because all texts are authored, and all
authorship is intentional. 

The author may relate to her own text as a reader. In fact, all author’s
do, and, to various degrees (often dependent on one’s mood), take the
position of the non-authorial reader. The question of authorship belongs
to the author as well. The author may take a lot of creative license in
the interpretation of the text, and so becomes a rewriter or one’s own
writing. Likewise, a reader may take a lot of creative license in the
interpretation of the text, and so becomes a writer of what’s read. But
the writing in reading and the reading in writing cannot escape the
facticity of interpretative plausibility. The author doesn’t seek to
undermine his basic intentions, no matter how ellusive to him the
articulation of those basic intentions are. The author, to a degree (a
great degree in art, a narrow degree in science), is as much a reader of
her own intentionality as other *close* readers.

In all events, though, the entirety of sensibility belongs with the
interest in articulate understanding, while the entirety of sensibility
also looks to articulate understanding to advance itself.

In this dance of expression and representation, the question of what
belongs to the author (as agent) or to the work itself (as if channeled
by the author), is an open question for creativity. What knowledge
(truth), interpretive precedent (norms), and exemplarity (truthfulness)
one can bring to bear upon what a work expresses and takes for granted
is always a potential Opening for the work itself to better see its day.

But a work wants to be seen for itself in the light, not made a mere
mirror of another’s love of the work or another’s own difficulties.  The
work may want to make a contribution to another’s difficulties, but in
its own way. 

No matter how great the rhetorical mode of a work, it deserves pragmatic
appreciation, as to its intended meaning and its own designs.

Many artists couldn’t care less what the critics say. But criticism
itself--as such--doesn’t put boundaries on what is possibly meaningful.
The creator does. 

It has come to pass that criticism has become art, and thereby nears
philosophy. 

Ken writes: “Habermas has not probed deep enough into psychoanalytic
thought to develop an understanding of imagination in regards to
ethics.”

As someone who has probed deeply into psychoanalytic thought, I attest
that this is not an appropriate thing to say. A group of psychoanalytic
researchers (analysts in academic posts) at the University of Munich
have been developing psychoanalysis on a Habermasian model for a couple
of decades; two large volumes of their work are available in English
(but the citation is not close at hand). I became aware of this through
conversations with the lead researcher at the International
Psychoanalytic Association Congress in San Francisco, 1995, but didn’t
shell out the $100+ for the two volumes of work in translation. I say
this only to attest that, indeed, the Habermasian approach to
communication has been taken to have a lot of import for psychoanalytic
research.

But surely one cannot expect Habermas himself to have worked out all the
potential of his own researches (which, keep in mind, result from
extended work with others in a subject area before he comes to his own
position, as was the case in the development of _BFN_ and _TCA_, the
latter event of which I had a chance to witness in small part). 

It is a fantastic project to probe deeply enough into psychoanalytic
thought to understand imagination in regards to ethics constructively. 

But who knows how far *Habermas* himself has probed? He has not written
about this lately. But *something* is going on in “Employments” with his
association of ethical deliberation with “clinical” understanding!  What
might be going on?

In the early 1970s, there was a lot of controversy about Habermas’
indication of psychoanalysis as a model for emancipatory processes of
reflection in critical social science. But the upshot for Habermas was
that the dynamic of insight in the therapeutic scene could serve as a
ideal-typical model for the critical scene in efforts to dissolve
systematically distorted communication at the one-to-one level. Many
readers thought this entailed that Habermas was advocating
psychoanalysis itself as a practical model for emancipatory processes.
He was not. Rather, psychoanalysis provided an historical example--a
living discipline--where scientific claims to emancipatory reflection
(no matter how viably) could be located.  He held out the hope that
research into the structure of emancipatory learning in clinical
settings could provide valid knowledge for emancipatory interests,
analogously with the provision of practical knowledge through the
“hermeneutical” modes of the human sciences and empirical-analytic
knowledge through the experimental modes of the human sciences (This
isn’t quite the way he put it, but he liked this interpretation of what
he meant to do).

The heart of the matter is, first of all, the appropriateness of those
learning processes that take place in “clinical” (traditionallay
pastoral) settings for general learning processes in one’s own life; and
secondly, the domain--depth and breadth--of learning that can take place
in such settings, normally extended over a long period of sessions, of
course. 

There are many clinicians who have been involved with generalizing the
work of the therapeutic alliance into the broader culture, and everyone
is aware of this in bookstores and the media, in English-speaking
markets at least.  But it’s also going on in healthcare systems and
school systems in the U.S. (and, I suppose, UK). So much can be said
cynically about the market side of this, but only because so much of
this kind of thing is actually going on.

Within this is an inner culture of clinical work that is working itself
out quite genuinely, I think. One of its guiding motives is to bring
imaginative processes into problem solving, and there is a lot of
literature to show for it. 

Finding an imaginative literature with which to integrate Habermas’
work, from a clinical point of view, is quite feasible. 

And how one may constructively understand the therapeutic process
itself, in its intimacy, is a good sojourn---one I look forward to
addressing.

Gary


     --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---