Subject: HAB: A Little More on Disclosure
Date: Mon, 16 Mar 1998 16:42:52 +0200 (EET)


Gary,

Here is a partial and sketchy response to your comments on
disclosure. I am for the time being very busy with Habermas;
I have a sociology exam on TCA/TKH on Saturday and I aim to
read most of it in German by then. That is why I can't take the
time to reply to all the points made by Ken and others as well.

> 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, 

That is indeed what I was indicating.

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

Not really -- I've looked up some of Bourdieu's (critical) comments on
Habermas and it seems they're based on two misreadings. First of them is
Bourdieu's belief that formal pragmatics is transcendental in the sense 
of being ahistorical, which is not the case, as we know. The second
is quite confusing: Bourdieu claims that power comes to the language 
only from the outside, which means that illocutionary force can bind
only on the basis of language-independent power relations. This is not
only contrary to the thesis of disclosive power of language, but seems
to make impossible internal, rational conviction, on which the
non-violent nature of the 'forceless force of the better argument'
is based. (This should not be taken as criticism of Bourdieu's own
position, which I'm not really familiar with; only as a criticism
of his criticism of Habermas.)

My criticism of Habermas's understanding of power stems from
Foucault and the Foucaultians. However, that is also the source of
my contention that the resources of Habermas's framework are
too often misunderstood and underutilized - one of the central
claims of my thesis is that what is defensible in Foucault in
the first place is not incommensurable with Habermas. (Incidentally,
I do not subscribe to Honneth's views on this issue.)

> 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.

(I did actually intend both senses, I apologize for not having made
myself clear.)

> 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).

I have to admit I did not take this into consideration, due to the
fact that I am not familiar enough with Habermas's early work. Besides
KHI and 'The Hermeneutics' Claim to Universality', where does
Habermas deal with psychoanalysis? 

> 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.

Amen to that.

> Let me, then, make a radical claim: There is no incommensurability
> between the work of Heidegger and the work of Habermas. 

That is radical indeed. I would replace "Heidegger" with "the
central innovations of early Heidegger" or something alike.
The anti-argumentation stance of 'Letter on Humanism' is very
far from Habermas, as are other quietistic and apolitical implications
of the work of later Heidegger. 

> 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.

This sounds credible to me.

> In fact, very few persons understand Heidegger very well. 

(Understament of the month.)

> 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.

That is a very interesting topic of reserch. I don't "know" that
yet, but I wouldn't by any means rule out that you're right.

> 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.

You are right; I used "presence" because of the Derridean connotations.

> 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 

I wouldn't; I don't see a break, and even the Kehre is not
necessarily that radical (not nearly in the same scale as that between
early and late Wittgenstein, for example.)

> 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).

I would not characterize disclosure only in terms of images - that
would be equivalent to making the mistake of not differentiating between
direct perception and perception mediated by signs (which is
criticized by Husserl in Ideas I and by Heidegger in the brilliant
exposition of phenomenology he gives in History of the Concept of Time).
However, what I do believe needs to be done is working through
metaphors like "light" and "mirror" - Being may be _like_ a light
in which beings appear, but it _is_ not _a light_ (to be sure, it "is"
not anything, at least not any _thing_). Dreyfus has worked out one
non-mystifying paraphrase of this ("Being" as intelligibility
conferred by non-subjective background practices), but there is a lot
more to Heidegger, and a lot more ways to put Heidegger to work,
so to speak. That is why I think it is worth considering the role
of such mundane and lowly things as television in world-disclosure.
(You can recognize a devout Heideggerian from having fainted while
reading the previous sentence.)


Antti
 




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