Subject: Re: HAB: Adorno & Habermas
Date: Tue, 06 Nov 2001 21:26:37 


Hello Ken,

To address several of the issues you raised in your last post. Isn’t the 
link being made between aesthetics, narrative and Adorno slightly tenuous. 
Doesn’t the mode of aesthetic production I think you are talking about (I am 
basing this on the number of cinema references you have made in the past and 
may be assuming rightly or wrongly here) belong to another stream of 
cultural life to Adorno’s endorsement of say Picasso and Beckett?

The mode of aesthetic production you may be pointing would instead surely be 
pertinent to Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry (no 
matter how radical the aesthetic narrative is).

In fact given the totemic and wholly sanitized status of works like 
*Guernica* even these exemplary instantiations (for Adorno at least) of the 
enlightening potential of great works of art have fallen under the 
oppressive dialectical spell of cultural reification.

On a more mundane level; hasn’t cultural & political *radicalism* been 
nicely sanitized and turned into the subtexts of benetton, coca-cola and 
nike ads? I probably can’t free this tired old brain from the blinkers of 
ideology critique, and then the critique of ideology critique (and so it 
goes!).

This isn’t to dispute the emphasis you are given to the role of narratives 
however in both social and individual identity formation. Sure as 
individuals and as cultures we tell ourselves stories and I agree that there 
almost has to be a dialectical connection between ethics/aesthetics/morality 
yet I can’t grasp the revolutionary *why* being suggested here. It’s not 
another newer explanatory version of why things pretty much stay the same, 
is it? :-)

Regards

MattP



>From: Kenneth MacKendrick <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
>Reply-To: habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>To: habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
>Subject: Re: HAB: Adorno & Habermas
>Date: Mon, 05 Nov 2001 08:48:04 -0800
>
>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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