Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 01:17:34 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comedu.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: HAB: #2: Autonomy as dogma


G'day Matt,

The way I read Antti's (always very much appreciated, only sometimes
understood) posts, autonomy is a dogmatic assertion; a belief enacted, and
a claim made, necessarily and exclusively socially.  So could we not leave
our necessary dogma alone (if we can't validate contradictions of claims
like Ken's autonomous 'imaginary', anyway) and stress that second clause?
Can't we, for instance, tenably read that into BFN's 'co-origination'
stuff?  And wouldn't that be politically fertile for whatever's left of
Habermas's project circa TCA?  I mean, if freedom is something I can only
pursue/enjoy/enact socially, would that not be enough to set 'emancipation'
and neoliberalism in neatly opposite camps?

Seems to me 'freedom', 'emancipation' and 'autonomy' would be definitive
'externalities' (in the patoir of our day) - beyond attainment by the
exchange relation (to which neoliberalism would reduce us), yet vulnerable
to it (if rationality has any perlocutionary force at all, this
vulnerability would then cut both ways - is that what you mean by 'critical
reform', Matt?).

The extension/expansion of the exchange relation would then get us back
(and not too elliptically) to what I thought Habermas was on about back in
the days of 'colonisation', 'system' and 'lifeworld', and, for that matter,
the old idea that validity can't be bought - that communicative action and
freedom are mutually constitutive, ergo categorically social, ergo
categorically outside the market ...

This road I'm paving has streetsigns along it that go back to 'ideal speech
situation', then 'public sphere', and then (yet again) that old bone of
contention between Habermasians and Marxists - between Habermas's assertion
of the autonomy of communication (KHI ch2) and Marx's stance on the
inextricable mutual constitution of communication and the relations of
production (as in ch 1 of *The German Ideology*); betwixt 'class' (in which
reason is conceived as historically contingent) and 'reason' (in which said
relations need only fail the test of communicative rationality to
disappear) as contending metanarratives.

Er, now I AM getting elliptical.  Sorry.  It's late, and my brainlet hurts.

As always, apologies for both crap-spouting and point-missing.

Yours antipodeously and autonomously socially-contingent,
Rob.

>Dear Antti,
>
>thanks for the ramble :-) I can assure you that all information is useful to
>this struggling student of Habermas!
>
>Your musings here are particularly interesting...
>
>>The Kantian strategy is to argue that we cannot prove that we
>>are free (and so autonomous), but all the while we cannot help
>>conceiving ourselves as such.
>
>Given many layperson's critical existential attitude has - I would argue -
>both a self-preservationist premise AND the dogma of autonomy at the core of
>their understanding of the world; what chance has a program of critical
>reform which seeks to draw its normativity from sources OTHER than these
>(illusory or not)?
>
>Just an antipodean pre-bedtime thought on a wet July night.
>
>Best Regards,
>
>MattP
>
>
>________________________________________________________________________
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>
>
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