Date: 	Tue, 20 Apr 1999 12:17:43 PDT
From: ken <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: Justification, Motivation, and Logical Gaps


On Sun, 11 Apr 1999 01:31:25 -0400  Blue8682-AT-aol.com 
wrote:

> Habermas' theory of communicative action which 
delineates the distinction with strategic communication, the 
forms of valid  and invalid argument, and the problem with 
perlocutions, not to mention the  requirements imposed upon 
speakers as distinct from those of hearers, is  important for 
the actual procedure of argumentation.  And, this is a brief 
list!

The distinction between valid and invalid forms of 
argumentation require a symbolic identification with an 
underlying fantasy structure (ie. it must already be 
entwined with the joiussance of the subject).  The participants 
in such a discourse are, in this way, already in agreement.  
The procedure of argumentation is circular.  In order be willing 
to participate the participants must already possess shared 
values.  The argument about the binding / bonding force of 
langauge in and of itself has not intrinsic persuasive power 
unless it meets desire half way.  If one starts with the 
assumption that communities are constitutively dysfunctional 
and that the human subject is always divided against itself by 
contradictory desires and identifications then the rationalist 
project must be informed by this.
 
> This doesn't sound right to me. Can you give some 
examples?  May I paraphrase? 'The non-universals of the 
good life do not make the ideas of reason and justice 
desireable?'  I can hardly believe that Habermas is 
eliminating reason and justice.

The so-called non-universals mark the positive constitution of 
universality (a fundamental plurality).  The attempt to take this 
plurality and liquidate it in the name of a greater universal, or 
a more fundamental normative idea, leaves participants in 
discourse without substance.  It is the antagonism that 
constitutes the possibility of democracy in the first place, 
democracy shouldn't be understood in such a way that it 
makes this antagonism harmonic.  The reality of particularity 
is what makes reason and justice of interest.  These are not 
universal though.  The remain particular.  The key here is to 
recognize that politics cannot exist without fantasy.  The 
social field is inconsistent and this inconsistency is what 
separates modernism from postmodernism.  Habermas's 
procedure, in this way, is postmodern - because it eliminates 
the antagonism (the self-reflection that is at the core of 
modernist thought) in favour of an "enchanted" normativity 
without the cynical irony.

ken





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