Date: Fri, 27 Mar 1998 22:42:13 -0800
Subject: HAB: On Intersubjectivity


I agree with Bryce that “Habermas's project is an attempt to resolve the
problem that proved to be Husserl's undoing in the Cartesian
Meditations” (<Re: HAB: C.C.>, 3/26), inasmuch as intersubjective
understanding is fundamental to his broad-based philosophy. Husserl was
never satisfied that intersubjectivity could be derived from
transcendental reflection, and _The Crisis..._ was an attempt to redress
this, many years before the politics of German Idealism led to
bureaucratic statism and the politics of mass identity.

The problem of intersubjectivity, as to “how it is that we know what
others mean,” could only exist for a sensibility that presumes the
integrity of the very *different* individualities of others. Ironically,
perhaps, the problem of intersubjectivity presumes a pluralism of
*subjectivities* who are “in” common grounds of Place and Time. Given
that we are not primordially social, as inter-*subjectivities*, how is
it that *inter*-subjectivity provides the way to knowing *other*
subjectivities?

This is a different kind of problem from the sociological problem of
understanding the inter- as such and subjectivity inasmuch *as* it is
*inter*subjective. Though attention to “social” theory is the dominant
feature of _TCA_, a problematic of intersubjectivity is more fundamental
to Habermas’ work than sociologization of thinking, which lends itself
more readily to identity politics than does the differential
“moral-cognitive” condition of human development which prevails in
Habermas’ work immediately prior to and immediately after TCA. The
theory of communicative action is less a theory of *social* evolution
and *social* system vs. lifeworld analysis than it is a translation of
the tradition of discourse about all this *into* the theory of
communicative action that Habermas clarified in the late 70s---while, of
course, elaborating and deepening this beyond the work of the late 70s
*discursively*, that is: relative to discursive engagement with primary
figures of 20th century social thought. _TCA_ is an Event of
*appropriation* of the tradition of social thought (not in the
assimilative or reductive sense of appropriation, but in a hermeneutical
sense).

I disagree, then, with James Chriss that “[a]ll this talk of Habermas's
philosophy or psychology or anthropology is missing the crucial point:
Habermas is taking a predominantly SOCIOLOGICAL perspective in his
argument” (<Habermas’s SOCIOLOGY>, 3/9). Granted that Habermas is
“arguing that the philosophy of consciousness is dead, and that
sociology is the discipline par excellence which has dealt with the
‘rationality’ problem taking into account both the systems and lifeworld
levels” (3/9), this is indeed why he so methodically sought to address a
sociological audience that basically did not *yet* understand his
philosophical project, as he had formulated that project in the
early-to-mid 1970s (Perchance you think this is mere "rumor" [Chriss,
3/27], I assure you, it is not).

The problem of consciousness belongs to the tradition of social theory
just as much as to any other human sciences and or area of the
humanities; but sociology is, more than most other disciplines, more
susceptible to a potentially-dangerous identity politics that comes with
a generalization of subject-centered understanding, apparent in radical
populism, as well as in elitist statism.

The intersubjective correlate of the problem of consciousness shows in
problems of inter-group, inter-gender, inter-cultural, inter-regional,
and inter-national understanding. Is there a great degree of isomorphism
between the way one Understands intersubjectivity and the way one
interprets inter- problems of various kinds and scales? When C.G. Jung
(the infamous betrayer of Freud), in the 1950s, associated the
fascination with UFOs and the insidious dialectic of "Cold War" with a
“spiritual” crisis of the times that was “archetypally” pervasive in the
intersubjectivity of the lifeworld, was he missing something
sociological? When Habermas, in _KHI_, finds Hegel’s positivism of the
Absolute echoing in Marx and counterposes the “Nietzschean” Moment of
Freud as an exemplification of the scale of ideological embodiment, is
he missing something sociological?

I think not. Rather, the problem of intersubjectivity belongs to social
thought just as inherently as modernity has advanced the Cartesian dream
of an Archimedean science through countless alienations from Descartes’
particular formulations.

Of particular importance in inter-*subjectivity* is the question of the
other’s *genuineness*, most often expressed as an estimation or
suspicion of the other’s intentions: strategical or open? benevolent or
not?  So much attention is given to tacit validity claims of what is the
case or what is appropriate; but the tacit validity claim to genuineness
is possibly the most difficult of all to work with---so much so, maybe,
that a focus on other validity claims can be, at times, a concealment of
issues of genuineness or unquestionable questionabilities of the
intersubjectivity of interaction that “Must” remain interpreted in
existentially distant terms of what’s “practical,” what’s “provable” or
what’s “true”. The search for “truth” often lacks the dimension of
self-implicative truthfulness because intersubjectivity will not face
its inter-*subjectivity*.

This dramaturgical dimension of understanding is not only axial to all
actual communicative relations, but is especially questionable when
intersubjectivity is *only* textual. That is, intersubjectivity--a
back-and-forth of communicative relations--may be limited by textuality
(as with this medium).

Consider the difference between writing as author-to-audience and
writing as one-to-another, where the latter is a process of
communicative back-and-forth, like letter-writing; that is, ideally, a
textualization of the situation of the telephone call or the literal
voice--a speech as text that literally invites your speedy answer or
responds to you, your words---a form of interaction that would prefer to
be face-to-face conversation, and is, accordingly, derivative of
actually being with you. Here, writing is a supplement to speech (as
Derrida emphasized so often).

But author-to-audience is different. It’s easily comprehensible as a
writing that is writerly, involved with its textuality as a vital
dimension of itself.

In cyberspace, the condition of the letter and the article become
entwined, maybe confused, maybe creative (a hybridization of the word).
Intersubjectivity inherits the condition of this hybrid textuality.

Inasmuch as intersubjectivity is essentially *inter*-subjective and *is*
textual, the inter- of daily life becomes infused with the condition of
this textuality, like the condition of writing into silence, later read
from a silent trace. Subjectivity’s inherent, enacted difference between
intentional stance and intentionality becomes infused with the
difference between textual moment and authorship. Identity becomes a
kind of textuality, to some degree, inasmuch as social interaction is
textualized (which pertains especially to academic life). The validity
claim to genuineness is entwined with the condition of narrative--voice
and pretext of narratability.

And this condition of intersubjectivity is inestimably compounded by
multimediazation, where daily life is not *as if* on stage or on camera,
but actually mediated by computerized or digitizable video media. Sherry
Turkle’s _Life on the Screen_ (a study of cyberculture; New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1995) is increasingly a significant facet of the lives of
those in knowledge-intensive society who affect the lives of others
(especially those without access to a global commons of the
*interactive* screen).

The reality of the page, the screen, gives intersubjectivity an
immanence not unlike Husserl’s sense of unmediated experience. But where
Husserl tried to understand the other through a paradigm of the object,
the fundamental human condition is a paradigm of the immanent other,
from which objects are abstractions (not *like* others, young children
learn) that retain auras of the presence of another, born from
unmediated intersubjectivity (itself born from infantile presences).

But the greater reality of this intersubjectivity is its
interworldliness of internality and externality, internality of
externality (for example, in personification, identification, and
inspiration) and externality of internality (for example, in impulse,
distantiation, and anxiety). Intersubjectivity is infused with the
internality of the text and the externality of a stance, the internality
of the writing and an externality of being written, an internality of
one’s stance-in-context and the externality of one’s stance-in-context.

Habermas’ work provides a venue for bridging the textuality of
intersubjectivity with the whole of embodied dailiness that is
profoundly original--Originary, maybe--in its breadth of engagable
Openness.

And this medium *will* be, in James Chriss’ words, a “poor substitute[]
for the real work,” as long as it is postured this way.

But consider this: The entire archive of a listserv such as this doesn’t
take up 10% of a  3 US$  Zip disk (which holds 100 megs), which is
searchable, in terms of key concepts and topics, and organizable as an
integrable archive of contributions to a possibly cumulative and
*evolving* body of shared understanding and learning, in a topography of
engagement hallmarked by those who cared to make the landscape worth
retaining. Such can arise with as much integrity as any journal (with
possibly less of the tenure-track-led motivation for publishing and more
of what one *escapes* to conferences to audit), with the practicality of
any classroom (a *complement* to embodied discussion), even as a
possible venue of long-term friendship (which so often ends up
textualized by careerism *anyway*), but with no pretense of awaiting
absent loved ones, that Ken projects into some improvised geography.

Gary
Berkeley




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