Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 13:06:23 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Habermas and Creative Language


Re: HAB: HABERMAS, ANARCHISM & CULTURE AS LANGUAGE

Wonderful! A breath of new--dramaturgical--direction!

Stefan: 

I, too, am (have been for many years) interested in...

> ... the possibility of theory that can radicalise our ideas of
> democracy...

...but not any longer (as very ex-New Leftist)...

> in an anarchist direction.... 

Lastingness in the theatre of cultural evolution can be (IS largely)
authentic and can be such a beautiful thing (in its scale of
appreciability) only with intergenerational durability and ambitious
horizonality, which means a potential for coherence that anarchism
undermines. But *radicality* is a *generative* force in the
changes--hybridization, diversification, individualization--that give
Space its Time--giving Cohering its Flow or fluid evolutionarity.

> I have been attempting to use
> The Theory of Communicative Action as a framework from which to
> evaluate an autonomous 'underground' cultural Collective called
> Exploding Cinema, that has been active in London since late 1991,
> for my PhD at the Royal College of Art. 

More, more!

> In TCA Habermas schematises a
> space for non-verbal and less formal communications media but when
it
> comes down to it he seems to retreat into a formal definition of
> language and reason which implies written discourses or at best
> hierachiales communicative media. And points to rituals of
> legitimation that are legalistic rather than street wise.

Calling for a complementary discourse that is dramaturgical. Consider
Habermas (socioculturality) a partner, not retreating from the
"personal" street, but *opening* socioculturality to diversity of 
Voices in the public sphere. 

> Of course many of the critiques of TCA hinge on the aesthetic
aporia that seems to result from [a retreatist] formulation of
reason...

So, there's an especial benefit to be gained from a dramaturgical
partnernship with Habermas' sociocultural interest (which includes,
of course, dramaturgical action among dimensions of validity, but
Habermas is not a dramaturg, so he would yield to those
symbolists--generically speaking--who are). 

> 
> It seems necessary to boldly reconceptualise 'language' within a
more wholistic field of human communications before TCA can become a
revolutionary tool. 

I believe that any conception of language is compatible with TCA's
sociocultural project (which has an underdeveloped dimension of the
"personal" system vis-a-vis the "cultural" and "social"). This is an
open invitation (as obvious underdevelopment or impersonal interest)
to personalistic communications media (itself very sociocultural,
obviously) and arts fields.

> 
> As a practising artist of some thirty years it seems self evident
> that culturally intentioned communications contribute formally and
> informally to the discourses in all sense media that ultimately
> sythesize in shifts in our consensii and understanding. And that
> literary discourses cannot disengage themselves from informal
> cultural and oral or performative discourses. 

I fully agree.

> Are there any other artists out there reading Habermas?

Yes! 


Gary






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