Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 18:17:13 +0800
Subject: Re: HAB: Communicative Communism


At 22:41 25/03/1998 -0500, Ken wrote:
>I was reading Castoriadis's _The Imaginary Institution of 
>Society_ and came across an interesting passage in his 
>chapter on communism and the mythic: ... 
>
>I wonder if this insight could be applied to Habermas's 
>understanding of speech... which *could* be interpreted as 
>communicative communism.... (I am aware of some subtle 
>differences but there seems to be some weight to this kind of 
>critique).


Fairly obviously not. 

Speech, which is what Habermas argues is the thing that allows us to
develop understandings of each other, is a symbolically (and unavoidably
materially) mediated form of practice that may sometimes produce mutual
understanding between interlocutors. What is being talked about by
Castoriadis is the illusion of unmediated mutual understanding. 

This is the same problem that occurs in the Social Contract when Rousseau
argues that a knowledge of the General Will obviates the need for the
public debate of issues, since those who act in light of the General Will
will simply "know" what the right thing to do is, and will act in accord
with each other because, in effect, they all share the "same understanding"
in the metaphysical sense. Rousseau's explanation of social agreement is
the paradigm case of treating mutual understanding as an event in which an
"identity" of minds is achieved. Rousseau's problematic assertion that, in
a democracy worthy of the name, non-conformists can be "forced to be free"
is merely the logical consequence of this account of mutual understanding.
Most important here is that Rousseau's account deals with mutual
understanding as something that is made possible because of a process of
IDENTITY between minds. Habermas's self-declared objective in BFN is to
provide an account of the intuition of mutual agreement that Rousseau puts
forward while avoiding precisely the metaphysical excesses that result as a
matter of course from his identitarian explanation of this same intuition.

What your question implies is that you are of the opinion that Rousseau's
identitarian (and hence metaphysical) account of mutual understanding is
the correct one and that, consequently, Habermas's assertions concerning
mutual understanding make an identity theorist of him. But what if Rousseau
is right to argue that there's a form of mutual understanding that exceeds
what can be explained within the limits that a strategic account of the
rationality of social action allows (viz., Rousseau argues against the
aggregative account of democracy put forward by Hobbes and, subsequently,
Bentham, neo-classical economics, rational choice theory and games theory);
BUT that Rousseau is wrong in explaining this as the result of achieving an
identity of minds. It's the provision of this alternate explanation of
mutual understanding (i.e., as an unavoidably materially mediated process
and in which there is no identity of minds) that I see to be the impetus
for Habermas's call to move beyond a "philosophy of consciousness"-based
explanation of mutual understanding to a language based account of this.

Political speaking, in the absence of an alternative account of mutual
understanding to that offered by a strategic/instrumental account there
isn't a lot of room left to argue for an alternative to a socio-cultural
system which pathologizes people's lives to the degree that it presupposes
that treating people as objects of manipulation ((and in "normalizing" what
they do by making it integratable into a system of commodities that reduces
everything to the formal identity of a "price" in a market)) is an
untranscendable social norm and organizes their social and economic lives
accordingly. [apologies for the run-on sentence] Non-rationalist accounts
of social understanding/solidarity can be posited here as alternatives to
Habermas's rationalist alternative to the socio-cultural-economic status
quo, but if demonstrating this is one's (Ken's?) overall intention there's
no need to attack Habermas as an identity theorist. It would be adequate on
these grounds to criticize him for relying on a broadened notion of
rationality as the basis for an account of an alternative to instrumental
reason.

It has seemed to me for a long time that Habermas's project is an attempt
to resolve the problem that proved to be Husserl's undoing in the Cartesian
Meditations, in which the problem of intersubjectivity emerged precisely
because Husserl couldn't account for how we can explain how it is that we
know what others mean on the basis of a philosophy of conscious paradigm of
explanation; that is, Husserl argues that we know things with certainty to
the degree that we have unmediated experience of evidence for their being
as they are, but our knowledge of others is neither complete in this sense,
nor a complete nullity, as it would have to be if the only arbiter of
knowledge of something were the self-identity Husserl's critierion of
evidence demands. Habermas's turn to language is, for me, a fundamentally
"intersubjective" move in the traditional, neo-Kantian phenomenological
(not Gadamerian or Heideggerian) sense.

In any event, Habermas may be wrong about many things, but I think that it
is a misrepresentation of his position to conclude that because he has
attempted to resolve the problem of intersubjectivity without relying on a
model of unmediated mutual knowledge, he is somehow advocating a position
that asserts that intersubjectivity made possible as the result of
unmediated knowledge of others minds. What would be the purpose of saying
that _language_ is what makes intersubjectivity possible if Habermas did
not want to provide an account of how mutual understanding takes shape
through a materially mediated, and hence non-identitarian, process? Since
the problem CC points out in IIS is one of claims to unmediated forms of
mutual understanding, I think that Habermas's concern with how mutual
understanding takes place by means of materially mediated action fairly
much absolves him from this charge.
____________________________________________
Bryce Weber, Ph.D.
Lecturer
Department of Political Science
University of Western Australia
Nedlands, W.A.          6907
Tel.: 08 9380-3835   Fax.: 08 9380-1060 (N.B.change of area code)
email: bweber-AT-cyllene.uwa.edu.au


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