Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 23:27:39 -0800
Subject: HAB: Re: Disclosure


 Antti,

Thanks again for your very engaging paragraphs on disclosure, March 1
(<HAB: Disclosure>).

That was in response--partly, at least--to my curiosity about
“image-guided world disclosure,” used in an earlier posting by you
(<HAB: Money...>, Feb 25). You believe evidently that Habermas accounts
for symbolic power unsatisfactorily outside of the traditional, overt
way that power is used, for example, in advertising, which might be
called an external power of disclosure (or causality of the image?).

Yet, the problem with Habermas is not clear. If there is not “anything
in Habermas that would require the elimination of figural or poetic
language as such” (Mar. 1), then it seems that it’s not openness to
disclosure that concerns you, but rather an internal *power* of
disclosure or causality that is unsatisfactorily addressed by Habermas.
You write that “[i]n the Habermasian framework, this disclosure is a
function of the lifeworld, and its being already ‘political’ in the
sense of being influenced by different sorts of interests and relations
of power constitutes an implicit criticism of Habermas's locating power
as an independent ‘medium’ outside the lifeworld.”

But this can’t be a criticism, unless you’re indicating tacitly that
Habermas is not satisfactorily locating power as an independent medium
*inside* the world, given your main interest in emphasizing (both 2/25
and 3/1) “that level of world-articulation that we stand
on...preconditions functioning within” (2/25). Focusing on externality
is not of itself to distract from a focus on internality. You would,
then, be expressing that, for you, Habermas *isn’t* focusing enough on
internality, regardless of whether or not his focus on externality is a
deferral or displacement or, at worst, a failure of satisfactory focus
on internality--notwithstanding that this “impurity” is a lot more
durable “than many of his critics acknowledge” (3/1).

Where, though, did you get the idea that Habermas wasn’t broadly and
deeply appreciative of internality--from Bourdieu?

A careful look at your sense of image and disclosure indicates to me
that you’re considering disclosure as an auratic semiosis rather than
cognitive constitutivity. From a cognitive point of view, the possible
constitutivity of the image (as ontogenic prototype--Lakoff’s basic
interest) can have much more power than the analogicalness that you are
giving it (and associate with mere “metaphoricity”), allegedly contrary
to Habermas’ sense of disclosure. Habermas’ concern for systematically
distorted communication that made psychoanalysis an exemplar of what a
critique of ideology faces and his pervasive cognitive orientation
belies your indication of an implicit critique in terms of an exclusion
of an appreciation of internality by focusing on external relations of
power.

As Habermas indicates in a quote I offered yesterday, the potential of
articulability *is* the way that covert constitutivity is disclosable.
Throughout his career, an *emancipatory* interest is expressed in the
*ideally* psychoanalytic “discourse” of asymmetric power, as a way to
comprehend what is at stake with the most elusive internality of the
image, “systematically” distorted communication (mirrored in the
*mirrorplay* of distort-ING relations).

I believe that there is an intimate connection between “systematic
distortion” in Habermas’ sense of the internality of ideology and the
notions of deferral and displacement which are native to both
deconstruction and the psychoanalytic concept of repression (from which
Derrida has taken so much inspiration).

The fact that Habermas is more interested in a post-”Critical” theory of
democracy has no bearing on the merit of the project of immanent
critique that may be implied by his work.

I’ve been very interested in “metaphors and everything else rhetorics
studies” (2/25), as it relates to Habermas’ work. I first gained a sense
of “deeply sedimented images” through the work of Merleau-Ponty, several
years before I’d ever heard of Habermas. In the 1970s, when Habermas
first defended himself against the charge of inadequate appreciation of
embodiment, it was in terms of Merleau-Ponty that he acknowledged the
dimension of phenomenological experience (a number of years after his
Inaugural Lecture, which postured his KHI project in the wake of
Husserl).

But perhaps the *Heideggerian* sense of disclosure provides an opening
into the reality of the image that *is* unavailable to a Habermasian.
But such unavailability is not implied by the fact that Habermas is not
*attending* to this. That one is a lawyer, say, doesn’t imply that one
can’t authentically love clinical psychology. At the least, Heideggerian
thinking offers a more profound sense of *constitutivity* than a
rhetoric of semiosis (Bourdieu?), and Habermas’ work is *at least*
broadly and, I believe, deeply appreciative of *constitutivity* in our
“form of life,” though his *project* is about deliberative democracy, in
a phrase.

Rather than looking for critique, one might look for collaboration among
modes of discourse (see my posting of Nov. 2, 1997, <HAB: Cultivation of
Humanity>)--to find a sense of marriage between intersubjective
(“external”) and reflective (“internal”) inquiry. The challenge, then,
would be to disclose an intimacy between internality and externality in
reflective and discursive learning, rather than read externality of
power as a marginalization of internality, as relations of domination
seek.

Let me, then, make a radical claim: There is no incommensurability
between the work of Heidegger and the work of Habermas. Habermas’
polemic against Heidegger is a politically motivated stance against
so-called “Heideggerian” criticism that expresses subject-centered
reason. When I carefully read Habermas’ critique of Heidegger in _Phil.
Dis. of  Mod._, it was evident that the critique of subject-centered
reason was at stake, not Heidegger’s thinking itself. “Heidegger” there
is a stand-in for the genealogical character of poststructuralism.

In fact, very few persons understand Heidegger very well. Critiquing
subject-centered Heideggerianism has no bearing on the commensurability
of Heidegger and Habermas. Even if it is accepted that Habermas believes
that Heidegger’s own thinking is subject-centered (which, of course, it
is not), it still doesn’t follow that the two are incommensurable, only
that Habermas’ reading of Heidegger is incommensurable with both
Heidegger and Habermas’ project of rationalization (in the genuine,
philosophical sense). But, I no longer believe that Habermas really
believes that Heidegger’s thinking is subject-centered. I’m too close to
both Habermas’ and Heidegger’s thinking to believe that Habermas’
polemic against subject-centered reason could be anything more than a
politically-motivated stance directed toward a 1980s German audience. I
think that Habermas--a man, recall, who had been a student of
Heidegger’s work--*could* not really believe that Heidegger never
surpassed Husserlian consciousness.

In any case, I know that the Heideggerian sense of disclosure is not
incommensurable with Habermas’ sense of our form of life, whatever
Habermas believes about Heidegger.

You write: “With ‘disclosure’ I refer to the Heideggerian a-letheia,
coming into presence, the entry of beings into the clearing of Being”
(3/1). You know, though, that “coming into presence” is just a proximal
way of referring to nonconcealment.

The only time that Heidegger offered a course on _Being & Time_ was very
late in life, to a group of psychiatrists. This was a strong
corroboration of others’ association between Dasein analysis and the
disclosure that is native to psychotherapeutics (Binswanger, Sartre,
Boss, Lacan, others?). Accordingly, it is in the “Mitsein” of the
interactive bond--most Momentously, one might suggest, in the
therapeutic alliance--that awakening to one’s ownmost potential is most
dramatic--here, *and* in the origin of the work of art, of course (which
all philosophical work basically *is*--even given that philosophy itself
becomes a stand-in for anticipated reconstructive scientific work).
Since Habermas’ work is so artfully (*care*-fully) made--in the lineage
of lastingness within the history of philosophy--it’s disappointing that
so much argument can go on in this list without careful scrutiny of
Habermas’ work (granting the adequacy of translation for the English
commons).

Anyway, you are quite clear about the breadth of interest in Heidegger
from which your sense of disclosure is taken. Your narrative move
back-and-forth between notions of early and later Heidegger suggests
that, like Heidegger himself, you wouldn’t make a fundamental
distinction between the earlier and later thinking (expressed, for
example, in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” as well as _Time and Being_).
Dasein is that through which Sending stems.

But you’re not coming near to Heidegger’s nearness to disclosure by
characterizing disclosure in analogical terms of the medial image, no
matter how implicit that metaphoricity is posed as being. Constitutivity
doesn’t work like modeling. It works like the light that gives things
their bearing, like the mirror of the silent Other in a scene of
analysis who embodies one’s own struggle (as is the case with Ken’s
fiction of “Habermas’” performative contradiction).

When I became wound up with the Habermas-Gadamer debate years ago, I
came to the conclusion that these two friends did not really disagree
with each other as much as they shared a commitment to making the issues
that engaged them as public as possible. The “debate” was more staged
than it was expressive of a conflict. Likewise with Habermas’ critique
of Heidegger, I think.

In any event, my own interest in Habermas happens to be fundamentally
Heideggerian.

"Art is history..."

...Gary



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