Subject: Re: HAB: Communicative Action (re: Matt, 0202.103)
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 22:19:19 


Gary,

Seeing as your freetime is scarce and the currency you exact payment in for 
your participation on this List is the intellectual humiliation of lowly 
doctoral candidates, then I will attempt to be brief:

1. Whilst your intellectual bullying does not deter me from posting to this 
List I am worried that less thickskinned souls who have valuable insights to 
contribute may not venture into the open for fear of being virtually 
lacerated. In Habermasian terms, I am not sure whether an overly 
"unthematized rhetorical reception" will contribute much to the development 
of an "idealize[d] good practice" at our venue. Please excuse my weakness 
Brother Gary, but methinks ridicule, sarcasm, and patronisation contravenes 
the I.S.S.

[On this point, I want to briefly return to the thread on Heller and the 
primacy/priority of an actor's motivation to engage in rational 
communication over the embedded communicative rationality of JH. It concerns 
the oppressive inferences, slights, double entendres subtly embedded in what 
are otherwise *normal* speech acts. The perlocutionary character of these 
instrumentalising speech acts is explicated through
reference to the actor's intentions (motivational component). Yet in the 
speech acts which comprise the contents of the communicative exchanges of 
dialogical partners in search of understanding the motivational component, 
the rationality is located not in the *good faith* of the actor's intentions 
to exploit the emancipatory potentials of an undistorted language use but 
somehow in the structures of the language itself. So what? There is an 
irksome assymetry here.]

2.Gary, you have twisted my/the point:

>G: JH's own project doesnt have substantive normative
>objectives that he advocates ("holds out") for the project
>of modernity. Modernitys project is a *form* of
>communicative life, a self-determinative way of knowing, a
>societal *direction*.

The issue wasn't about the objectives JH holds out for the project of 
Modernity, but whether JH held out normative expectations for his theory 
construction. Even so, are you suggesting that JH isn't attached to 
Modernity's ethos that he mightn't give it the nod in preference to let's 
say the grotesque medieval dogmatism of the Taliban, for an overly obvious 
example?

3.
>G: OK, I challenge you: Give a shred of evidence.
>Eschatology is a Christian (and derivatively Hegelian)
>notion that is not relevant to a social evolutionary and
>modern approach to historical time. Are you posing a notion
>of redemptive time in idealized communication?

So, here we are at the OK Corral.

[I wish I didn't share Thomas's dislike of the artsy Foucauldians, because 
my intellectual wimpishness is far better suited to playing in their camp 
than here :-)]

Anyway Gary, re-reading *Between Philosophy and Science - Marxism as 
Critique* this morning - in preparation for our shoot out - it dawned on me 
that eschatology has shaped the whole damned philosophical discourse of 
Modernity. There you go. What more *evidence* do you need?

Best Regards,

MattP

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