From: <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: Re: HAB: From Colonisation to Compromise
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2001 12:13:57 -0500 (Eastern Standard Time)



On Sun, 07 Jan 2001 06:41:52 matthew piscioneri <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com> wrote:

> Is the point that in advanced modernity the iron cage always has been 
something worthy of a Kafkaesque myth?

The problem, I think, is that in postmodernity we think / act as though 'the 
castle' has been exposed. Let's take the difference between Kafka's novel, "The 
Castle" and the movie "Kafka." In the film, everything is revealed, from the 
inside out. In the novel, we're left paranoid. In the novel, it isn't that the 
Castle doesn't exist as a figment of our crowed imagination - the problem is 
that it exists everywhere - as a spectre that infiltrates every waking and 
nocturnal moment. In the film, on the other hand, the Castle is revealed, the 
mighty telescope - everything is knowable if you're looking in the right end of 
the lens. The problem with the 'self-clarification' of society is precisely 
this. It either acts as though everything has been revealed, wherein which we 
can then acts as though we please, in full knowledge that it is all a myth, or, 
that it is too present, invisible yet constraining. Either we're stuck in a 
self-transparency (the knowing subject), the postivistically self-confident 
modernity - which is postmodernity - or, we're stuck in the paranoid abyss, 
never sure who is watching and where. I suspect that today, we're seeing the 
collision of both: we know the truth (ideology, systematically distorted 
communication, systems theory, cognitive development, liberal democracy as 
the only way), and yet we are still paranoid (video cameras, 'reality' TV, 
computer chips which record everything, even after we've deleted it)...  This 
clash can also be seen in the difference between the B&W version of "The 
Haunting" and the digital CG version. Either we haven't seen the monster, and 
we are left to our paranoid imagination, or, we see everything and we can 
remain at a safe distance from the horror.

In both instances we shift from 'the unknown' to the known. But in this shift, 
there is also a profound shift in the way in which we relate to the symbolic 
order. The former is paranoid, frighteningly authoritarian (premodern) - the 
symbolic as 'the other of the other' - and the latter, safe and cynical 
(postmodern) 'the other as subject.'

I mention this because, in addition to exploring further Habermas's relation to 
Freud, we also need to explore Habermas's relation to Hegel. Is the Jena 
struggle for recognition primary, or is it, as Hegel would have it, a bump on 
the road to the Phenomenology. I'm tempted to say that that medium of language 
is simultaneous with the medium of labour, and that one cannot be subordinated 
(morally or conceptually) to the other: what words are to language, property is 
to labour. If this is the case, then revisiting Habermas's treatment of Hegel 
is, in fact, worth pursuing. What is relevant, then - at least in terms of 
evolutionary structure - is whether Hegel's understanding of ground and 
condition, as retroactively constructed, can be construed as a more radical 
thesis than Habermas's communicative self-formative processes. Habermas has 
argued that communicative action is, in effect, the essence of being. But if 
essence is appearance qua appearance, it is necessarily "empty." Habermas's 
proceduralized understanding of rationality, then, is too positive... too 
formal... and what is necessary is a reclaiming of the Hegelian dialectic in 
negative terms...

speculatively,
ken



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