Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 08:48:04 -0800
Subject: Re: HAB: Adorno & Habermas


At 01:12 PM 11/5/01 +0000, you wrote:

>What's funny Ken is that after posting the initial message I thought about 
>material I have recently read, and wondered whether Habermas was 
>attempting to hold on to earlier Ardornoesque motifs more vigorously than 
>Adorno ended up doing in _Negative Dialectics_. I.E more Adorno than Adorno ;-)


I don't think so. I thought that for a long time... it seemed as though 
Habermas was articulating a 'communicative negative dialectics' - but I've 
changed my mind about this. I'm not convinced that Habermas has read a 
great deal of Adorno's work.

>I will attempt to be more precise next reply except to say that Adorno's 
>critical/emancipatory *escape route* via aesthetics is put to one side by 
>Habermas who *continues* to insist on the *emancipatory* potential of a 
>dialectic rooted in communicative practices (or something like that).

There is a parallel between the general shape of Adorno and Habermas... in 
the sense that both adhere to a speculative ideal. In the case of Adorno, 
an emphatic ideal of human freedom. With Habermas, undistorted 
communication. On the surface, there is an analogy here, but it breaks down 
pretty quickly. As far back as 1963 Habermas argues that utopian ideas must 
be ground scientifically. Adorno does not trust science to do this.

>How are you characterizing the Adorno/Habermas relationship?

Confusing. When Habermas compares negative dialectics to a military drill, 
I can't help but think he's missed the point.

I'm find myself less interested in thinking about Habermas's relationship 
to Adorno... because I think Habermas's interpretation of Adorno is 
one-dimensional, painfully so. The fact that his critique has been so 
influential is almost mystifying... which isn't to say that he doesn't have 
good reasons in support of his claims. What I find more interesting is the 
way in which sympathetic critics of Habermas are looking at the internal 
connection between morality, ethics and narrative expressions. Aesthetics 
plays a huge role in the way in which we construct, reconstruct and 
deconstruct our identities. We appropriate narratives, sometimes through 
the stories of others, to learn about ourselves (I find Jay Bernstein 
compelling on this point, Recovering Ethical Life). Maria Pia Lara's book 
Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere is an 
extraordinary theorization of this. In effect, narrative is a moral 
imperative. This prompts a rethinking of the relation between morality and 
aesthetics and, following Wellmer, Lara argues for an expanded 
understanding of communicative rationality through the way in which 
narratives inform and expand on universal moral claims in a revolutionary 
way. Narratives, thus, transform the moral domain. Justice is still given a 
certain priority, but a sense of justice that is informed by the experience 
and substance of injustice. A simple way of expressing this would be to say 
that ethics, aesthetics and morality are dialectical. Without doing away 
with discourses of justification, thus putting Habermas on the same side as 
someone like Rorty, discourses of justification can be viewed in a more 
comprehensive context... one which is informed by a struggle for 
recognition within justificatory discourse. How we account for this 
philosophically is still unclear (at least for me) but I think it is a good 
start, and certainly provides a link between those sympathetic to Adorno 
yet working within the Habermasian field.

ken

ken



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