Subject: Re: HAB: A non-intersubjective Other?
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2000 07:43:30 PDT


Dear Ken & List

I find the issue your post is addressing reveals the potential of Habermas's 
theory of communicative rationality/action.

Habermas's not so implicit rejection of an intentionalist ( and 
behaviourist) semantics begs the most important questions as far as I am 
concerned.

>Are the idealizing tendencies of speech limited to its intentional 
>structure?
>or do these idealizing tendencies also extend into written or 
>non-linguistic
>forms as well? Or is the question stupid, precisey because it doesn't 
>matter:
>since what matters is that the interpreter, or the critic, who attempts to
>understand engenders these tendencies in their attempt to understand.

Any recourse to psychoanalytics for me fudges the issue:

>The problem that one encounters with regards to intential structures 
>manifests
>itself in a problem that Habermas himself pointed to in his debate with
>Gadamer, namely, that unconscious motivates slip into ordinary language 
>despite
>conscious intentions. If this is the case, then it could be demonstrated, 
>in
>at least one case (there only need be one exception to the rule), that
>unconscious motivations, found within language, are themselves
>non-communicative or non-idealizing. The rejoinder of this, I suppose, 
>would be
>that such expressions are not communicative at all. But by the same token, 
>they
>cannot really be considered instrumental either, since instrumental action 
>aims
>at technical control, which probably insufficiently describes the full 
>range of
>unconsicous motivations that haunt consciousness. I guess what I'm asking 
>is
>whether there is room for a radically non-intersubjective Other in a theory 
>of
>communicative action (what else could we all it if it doesn't "fit" the 
>model
>of instrumental or communicative action?). The idea of nature, it seems to 
>me,
>fits this bill, and human beings are, after all, natural beings; in which 
>case
>despite all, there remains at least in some instances, a "bone in the 
>throat"

which is this:

>... an undigestable moment of any kind of intentionality (a "blind spot?").

I want to know more about the ORIENTATION of the participants taking part in 
a process of reaching understanding. This via reduction suggests a 
distributed rationality...

>We communicate precisely because we do not understand? (since when we do 
>understand something, we cease to talk about it until we no longer 
>understand).

This point also touches on the distinction Habermas makes use of between 
illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. Here the difference appears to 
be in 'the heart of the utterer' as it were, which reinforces the location 
of the essential rationality in the orientation of the participant to taking 
part in a process of reaching understanding. I am also sceptical that there 
exists an actual rationalised space in which the sphere of validity claims 
operate autonomously apart from the intentions of participants.

Don't get me wrong though; I find these possibilities in Habermas exciting 
as I see them to lift his theory of communicative action out of the 
strictures of the history of social-philosophy. At the very least it tells 
me there are human organisms out there who want to make noises about being 
rational.

Matthew Piscioneri
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