Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 13:19:53 -0800 (PST)
Subject: HAB: Lifeworld without masking (re: "Lifeworld Oppression," Matt, #78)



M> ...I guess where I wanted to head with my comments on
your account of the dynamic relational processes in
Habermas's Lifeworld was...how unsatisfying aspects of
Habermas's picturing of the Lifeworld is. In particular,
his lack of recognition of let's say the ongoing
subterranean conflicts which the settled structures of the
Lifeworld mask.

G:  We must distinguish between describing something in
principle and accounting for individual differences, just
as an understanding of health is necessary for recognizing
what's unhealthful (Largely human history has accepted
unhealthful conditions as natural or unavoidable;
recognition of what's wholly healthful gives perspective
for critique of what's presummed natural or fateful).   

There is no lack of recognition of conflict in JH's
accounts. He renders the lifeworld in a manner that
critique would *recommend*, and he also does critique,
based on the full metatheory of communicative action
(lifeworld and system correlation). 

But critique presupposes an understanding that it
recommends against unacceptable conditions. A healthful
life is not defined by its risk of unhealthfulness. The
risks exist despite an orientation toward health. Though a
healthful life relates to risk prudently, knowledgeably,
and effectively, the healthful life merely *includes* this;
it isn't understood *primarily relative* to risks. Rather,
a healthful life is understood in terms of the character of
healthfulness and the practices of a healthful life.
*Relative* to this, we can be clear about what treatment or
prevention aims to actualize. 

M> Thomas McCarthy's essay _Rationality and Relativism_ in
the Thompson & Held anthology draws attention to Habermas's
*ignoring* of ethnomethodological and socio-linguistic
research. Aspects of these extensive researches indicate
how oppression is ingrained in the background structures of
the lifeworld to the extent that foreground interactions
can usually proceed unproblematically, because - in a sense
- everyone knows (or should know?) their place in the
social hierachy.

G: Here, oppression is distinguishable from the background
lifeworld that embodies it; and "ingrained" is an empirical
issue (It's not engrained in many lives). One can't
anticipate (or work toward) having a particular life
without oppression unless one generally understands "the"
lifeworld without that oppression. I (via JH's work) can
*say* what a life without masking of conflict is, e.g., in
terms of openness to reflective problem-solving and
interactive "reflections" with others. 

M> All sorts of visual, linguistic, and situational cues
present (prep.) to social interactions manage the implicit
hierachical and oppressive order of the Lifeworld.

G: Yet the phenomenology of oppression cannot provide a
basis for understanding a post-oppressed life; a
phenomenology of oppression *serves* emancipatory work
toward a no-longer-oppressed life, only inasmuch as a
non-oppressed life or post-oppressed life is understandable
or understood.  

M> In Habermas, the Lifeworld is something of a sacred cow.


G: NOT at all. It's a valuability that is partly defined by
its openness to reflection and critique. Sacred cows are
unquestionable. 

M> Obstacles to the development of emancipatory
consciousness are not always institutional and the
Lifeworld (as I think Foucault more clearly grasps) is the
repository of an insidious and permanent form of
oppression/suppression.

G: Sometimes, but this is an empirical issue, not a matter
of principle as to what the lifeworld is understood
fundamentally to be. But the need for so-called
emancipation is why there are social workers, clinicians,
and educational specialists (relative to your point apart
from from institutional obstalces, which involve political
action). 

Evidently you don't believe that one can have a good sense
of healthful life and also work with conflict--which may
mean only that you want a good sense of healthful life, as
we all do. Learning never ends. But again, this is another
matter from focusing on the alleviation of oppression,
which happens IN LIGHT of living otherwise, for those who
would help others (once helped by unoppressed others, if
oppression was once indemic). 
_______________________________

G>>You claim that "there is a dialectical core to
Habermas's mode of inquiry," but all of your examples are
about the *object* of inquiry, not JH's mode of inquiry...

M> I find it useful to understand Habermas's mode of
inquiry as realizing a dialectical logic.

G: But "dialectical logic" appears to be basically a
talisman for whatever seems critical to you; it's not
informative of any dynamic beyond the difficulties of
subject-centered reason (that lack a good intersubjective
basis). 
 
M> I also find it useful to describe his characterization
of the logic of self-reflection which underpin the
specifically modern methodologies of
technological/practical/emancipatory reason as dialectical.


G: Well, that's unfortunate, since, again, the "logic" of
self-reflection (as JH understands it) presumes an
intersubjectivation that is lacking in dialectical rhetoric
(which is constituted by "subject-centered reason"). 
________________________________________________

G>> If we were to look in detail at JH as critical reader,
we would see that "synthesizing strategies" misses the
prevailing character of his critical hermeneutic.

M> If the prevailing character of Habermas's work was
solely *hermeneutical* then sure forget/ignore its
dialectical quality....

G: "...it's dialectical quality" is your imposition here.
The *critical* quality of his work can't be validly
rendered with the rhetoric of the dialectical paradigm. 

M> ...But as you so rightly point out its a *critical*
hermeneutic and without the promise or objective of a
dialectical resolution (which for JH hinges on the modified
and modest hopefulness of an *open ended futurity*) then
engagement with social theory production is some form of
aesthetic/banal intellectual pursuit which abandons the
emancipatory task of philosophy once and for all.

G: No, it's just that hermeneutical critique is
post-dialectical critique. 
__________________________________________

M> For me one of Habermas's remarkable (and fairly brave)
strategies (esp. in _BFN_) is - perhaps resignedly - to
build (accept) the dialectic of enlightenment ("the
dialectic of empowerment and tutelage") into his analysis
of the topography of the social world in democratic
advanced capitalist societies.

G: Sure. The topography of the social world *includes*
distortive / distorting dynamics, which were first
approched through the dialectical paradigm. But, it turns
out, the dialectical paradigm was a stage in the evolution
of social life which provided no basis for understanding
life without distortion or beyond distortion. The theory of
communicative action provides such a basis.  

Regards,

Gary







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