File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_2000/habermas.0011, message 35


From: "matthew piscioneri" <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: HAB: Individuation & Sociality 
Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 11:51:27 GMT


Dear Gary,

Thanks for the memories:

>This was fun---refreshingly recollective.

Thank you for your extensive reply. I am still reeling from the shock of 
what I don't know! I am aware that my Habermasian interest is dated, and I 
can say that without feeling TOO anachronistic. Interestingly enough, here 
in Australia we are facing a concerted assault on the viability of tertiary 
funding, for example. Many of the issues facing me - as a politically 
engaged postgrad. - could come straight out of _Towards a Rational Society_.

One of the lines of response I would urge to the economic rationalist motive 
driving the funding cuts to Arts subjects is a variation on the 
cyberneticist reading of Habermas's theory of social evolution and the role 
played by social movements in the developmental learning processes of the 
social system. That is the humanities in academia in late modernity provide 
a conduit for the transference of remedial problem solving data in the 
training of the next generation of social managers (and yes there flies the 
owl of Minerva!)

This accounts partly for my stale interest in Habermas's social movement 
theory :-) Also, here in Tasmania, the co-optation or mainstreaming of Green 
politics is particularly relevant. On this very local level - where the 
effects of globalisation happen TO a community  - then it is useful to try 
and construct frameworks for understanding what is happening around you. 
This isn't to say that I ignore the macro picture; yet I remain mindful that 
- as Max Pensky reminds us - Habermas's work is often parochial, although 
the trials and tribulations of his *local* community do have more of a 
global impact than what happens in regional Australia.

____________________________________________________________________

Actually Gary, I wonder if here I am not susceptible to perpetuating the 
violence done to the subtleties of thought many a prominent thinker has had 
to endure in the sad interests of packageability.

>I believe there's a much stronger importance to individuality for
>Habermas than, as you validly say, that "there do appear to be traces
>of an extra-socialised individual identity being made available for
>Habermas's analysis of the connection between individual and social
>learning processes" (11/10, "Hab's sociocentrism").

Is your reading of Habermas here uncontroversial?

>I would go further than this because I believe that individuality is 
> >integral to his sociocentric thinking, from his early reading of Jena 
> >Hegel ("Labor and Interaction....") through the notion of the 
> >emancipatory interest; in the distinction between ethical and moral 
> >interests and above all as the equiprimordiality of subjectivity 
> >relative to objectivating and intersubjective meaning (and the >correlate 
>expression of intentions that can be questionably genuine >in any speech 
>act); and *therefore* individuality is integral in
>reconstructive scientific analysis, specifically for theorization of
>learning.

Reading Habermas on the status of an intentionalist semantics is one more 
example (as far as I am concerned) of now you see it, now you don't! Are you 
suggesting that for Habermas Grice is equiprimordial with Wittgenstein?
____________________________________________________________________

>M: On one level, I find Habermas's transpositioning of Piaget's
>developmental model onto societal evolution ....Too metabiological
>for me I suppose.
>
>G: I regard what Habermas is doing here as he regards it: aspects of
>a fallibalistic research program that is as interested in (1)
>exemplifying new KINDS of reconstructive scientific inquiry--the kind
>of interdisciplinarity that he thematizes as such (beyond "philosophy
>as stand-in") in the first two chapters of _MCCA_--as he is
>interested in (2) making specific falliblistic claims (in  specific
>terms of given research models, Piaget and Durkheim say). It would be
>invalid to say that Habermas is "transpositioning" developmental
>modeling "onto" social-evolutionary modeling. Rather, he is
>exemplifying an initial proposal--or initializing an
>exemplification--of the prospect that social-evolutionary modeling
>can be BASED ON developmental modeling. In other words, at the birth
>of the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, Habermas was
>already cognitivist anthropology post-hermeneutically (_TCA_).

Gary, please excuse the heretical tone of this response, BUT when do 
Habermas's work-in-progress *excuses* end? Actually, as my reading of JH has 
deepened slightly, I am given over to treating the sort of provisional 
statements from KHI etc as to the status of JH's work as signifying a 
foundational methodological commitment not so much to the transitory or 
conditioned but to the *fusing* rather than to the *fusion* , and to 
synthesis as both thesis and antithesis. No wonder Habermas and Derrida can 
work together at last :-)
____________________________________________________________

>M: ....I believe there is enough textual basis for a reading of
>Habermas's social systems theory in the writings of this period which
>can make explicit an implicit mechanical cyberneticism in his
>analysis.

>G: Good luck. Or not: How do you distinguish hermeneutical projection
>from hermeneutical disclosure?

Isn't the process of reaching understanding ALL a fusing of horizons? I 
think you are asking me to specify Habermas's....intention? How can I ? You 
and I are engaged in this particular process.

>The evidentiary burden is severe, given that Habermas was a leading 
> >critique of scientism, instrumentalism, and technicism before the >_CES_ 
>period.

What follows is admittedly POOR philosophical methodology, but JH decries 
the *philosophy as a kind of writing* in PDM, yet openly describes the _TCA_ 
as part polemic ( which both Hohendahl and Rorty acknowledge. My spurious 
point is that JH is part polemicist, and as Pensky reminds us wrote very 
much as an engaged intellectual. I agree with your response that JH makes 
all the noises of anti-scientism/ instrumentalism/ technicism, yet I am 
happy to provide the pre-CES passages where I think Habermas is infected 
with the mechanical cybernetic systems analysis around at that time, mainly 
from _Legit. Crisis_ and _Towards a Rational Society_.

____________________________________________________________________

>M: This [cyberneticism] fades in my opinion by the time of the _TCA_
>admittedly,....
>
>G: But Habermas might respond that the _TCA_ is a deepening and
>extension of earlier work, not a different time. _LC_ was overtly
>"argumentation sketches" and, of course, _CES_ is a collection of
>essays. Very credibly, _TCA_ is the integrative deepening and
>extension of prospective and variously focused *prior* work, not any
>kind of break with formatively earlier work.

I would agree mainly with you here. I don't find all that many ruptures in 
Habermas's work. I can read _On the Logic of the Social Sciences_ nearly 40 
years on without too much dislocation from JH's current work.
________________________________________________________________

>M: Where I am attempting to 'imagine' something akin to Popper's
>evolutionary epistemology is in the explanatory gap which exists in
>Habermas's under-accounted for transpositioning of "individually
>acquired learning abilities" into "societal learning processes"
>_CES,1979,121_  ....
>
>G: But since this so-called "gap" is filled-in by _TCA_ and the
>complementary   _MCCA_ merely two years after _TCA_, wouldn't you
>have to implausibly truncate works (1980-1983) that are
>deep-structurally isomorphic with work of the mid-70s (where the
>later work *provides* the deep-structural homology that integrates an
>extended discourse extending into the late '80s) in order to maintain
>the appeal of Popperian kindredness?

To be honest, I am not sure how to respond to this reply. The _MCCA_ seems 
to fall over from the socio-anthropological emphasis still present in the 
_TCA_. By this I mean there is less of the grand historical meta narrative 
going on in the _MCCA_. It appears to me that by the time of the _MCCA_ JH 
is working mainly within the territory of memetics, a sort of Popperian 3rd 
worldly discourse analysis, and the prescriptive futuristic design of 
either. That is at the coal face of a hermeneutics with pratcical/political 
intent by which I mean an ideologised program of democratic apologism.

_____________________________________________________________________

>M: Again the potential usefulness of memetic theory is suggested to
>me. If I am reading Habermas correctly in his essay, _The Development
>of Normative Structures_ , then the advent of modernity has enabled
>newer ontogenetic potentials of will formation, which are carried
>through from the individual level to the societal level.
>
>G: As generalizable interests.

I think this begs the question Gary. What is the nature of the relationship 
between individual interests and generalisable interests? What makes some 
individual interests *generalisable*? Thus the emphasis on environmental 
selection.
____________________________________________________________________

>M: Yet there are of course a multiplicity of interest groups
>operating and competing in a social system. It becomes a question of
>understanding the logic by which the "latently available structures
>of rationality" that are expressed in a social movement can come to
>be consolidated in a form of "institutional embodiment", especially
>given the multiplicity of interests operating in a social system.
>
>G: Which Habermas addresses extensively in work of the 1990s on
>democratic law, especially _Between Facts & Norms_.

Another 500pp of close reading beckons. Thanks.
____________________________________________________________________

>G:This is the realm of understanding that Habermas attends
>to in _Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_ , beyond
>"subject-centered reason" in a psychoculturalized society (which
>seems to be going on, as far as Habermas' is concerned, with master
>memeticists such as Foucault, Derrida, and other suspicious French
>slackers).

Never before realised the connection between these French slackers and 
memetic theory. The nail has been hit on the head!

All the best,

MattP
_________________________________________________________________________
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