Subject: Re: HAB: Thinking generally about Habermas' project
Date: Mon, 26 May 2003 00:54:44 +0000


Gary,

Thanks for the detailed reply. As I have said before, I simply could NOT 
have been able to progress my thesis without the generous assistance 
provided by people such as yourself. The following responses therefore are 
not antagonistic, but rather requests for further clarification of issues 
which are central to my research so I trust you have the available time to 
respond:

This is very useful. I am arguing that given his engagement in the late 
1970s/1980s with the neo-Nietzschean influence in the FDR *in the first 
place* his focus was in that context:

"I work as a philosopher and sociologist and therefore the people to whom my 
work is addressed primarily occupy positions in the scientific and 
educational system…In both cases it [Habermas’s audience] tends to be left 
intellectuals who are interested in what I write – and of course my old 
sparring-partners on the other side." (Autonomy & Solidarity,1992: 184)

>G: What JH told me, 1980, was not that his project had
>failed, but that he had failed to *communicate* his project
>to mainstream social theorists adequately; he deeply
>believed that he had been speaking to social theorists
>generally, in the 1970s, but he was considered by the
>mainstream to be a neo-Marxist addressing an especially
>Marxist-Hegelian audience. He hoped for influence in
>mainstream social theory outside of the Frankfurt School
>tradition. You see in _TCA_ that Habermas is bridging
>traditions---engaging both with FS sources and mainstream
>human science (esp. AngloAmerican)---while also continuing
>to advance his thinking on its own terms.

There seems to be a few strings to JH's bow. This is the impression I get. 
The metatheoretical component alongside the situated engagement. It is a 
balancing act of interpretation where I am trying
to keep all the balls in circulation:

>There was clearly an evolution in his thought during the
>1970s (_Legitimation Crisis_ is a major innovation), and
>this evolution continues, large-scale, in _TCA_ (then
>onward in the 1980s). _TCA_ is entirely concordant with
>_CES_ and _LC_, but thinks beyond those statements,
>relative to his discursive engagement with specific others
>(Anglish anthropology, Weber, Adorno, Parsons, etc). _TCA_
>is a set of readings---a reconstructive-critical
>hermeneutic---that advance his philosophical-reconstructive
>theory of communicative action *interactively*.

Certainly concur here, although there are continuities - would you agree - 
between his 1960s work (_KHI_) and then his later work. As far as I can tell 
if there is a break in JH's work it comes in the 1980s where his attention 
turns to developing his programme of discourse ethics, although this itself 
is entirely supported by his theory of communicative rationality. I guess 
what I mean is that - agreeing with Wiggerhaus - the explicit project of 
re-inventing Critical Theory falls away.

My sense of this is that JH *gives up* on the idea of developing an 
interdisciplinary research programme as critical theory of society and turns 
to ethics. Except, I also consider that _BFN_ is an extension of the _TCA_ 
so *in another sense* there is a continuity of the ambition to realize a 
critical theory of society at the end of the 1980s.
---------------
>M> I am having all sorts of difficulties "placing"
>Habermas's  reconstructive project within Critical
>Theory-within-western Marxism.
>
>I'm not surprised, but it's a good sort of
>difficulty---potentially very useful for other theorists.
>But JH is not basically working "within" that tradition,
>rather working WITH it. *Relativizing* JH's project to that
>tradition is an important and useful endeavor, but basing
>his project in that tradition is a mistake. The
>Gadamer-Habermas debate indicates JH's early engagement
>with Critical Theory in tension with tradition---as an
>intention whose intension is WITH tradition, standing "in"
>its own discursive telos, so to speak, which became his
>theory of communicative action (already identified as such
>by Thomas McCarthy in the mid-70s, as he emphasized the
>notion of communicative competence in JH's thought while
>U.S. readers where still struggling  with JH's critique of
>instrumental reason in _Toward a Rational Society_ and
>critique of Hegelian Marxism in _KHI_.

Gary, if only it was that easy :-). Again, I have JH turning away from C.T 
in the early 1970s with the move to Starnberg, and re-engaging with Marx in 
the series of collaborations with Claus Offe. Of course in the background to 
these moves are a number of significant historical events; the death of 
Adorno and the vehement disputes with the radical protest movements in the 
FDR. In particular, JH reveals his increasing preoccupation with the 
resurgent influence of Nietzsche's philosophy in the radical-intellectual 
milieu of the FDR. So is there any sense of a *return* to Critical Theory? 
In interviews JH states that H. & A's critique of instrumental reason and 
its debilitation of C.T had left him without a viable vehicle to defend the 
project of modernity, as it were.

Perhaps my mistake is trying to construct a linear evolutionary line. For as 
you correctly point out in _CES_ there is again a dedicated reconstruction 
of historical materialism along lines informed by JH's attention to Piaget's 
model. Or is JH getting ready for the _TCA_? One thing I sense about JH is 
that he had a programme of works set out well into the future, and that it 
was always a question of time alone for him.
---------------
Yes I agree with this interpretation. I consider JH posits his theory of 
communicative action as a replacement for Marx's theory of value (as well as 
several other competing approaches he lists at the end of the _TCA_). 
Actually I was thinking about earlier..in the 1960s _KHI_ era.


>M> In your opinion, does JH conflate the C.T of the
>Frankfurt school with Western Marxism or historical
>materialism?
>
>G: I'm not clear what you're asking. In _CES_, he performs
>a "reconstruction of historical materialism" that IS his
>stand (in part---along with _LC_) toward Western Marxism;
>the aim toward a theory of social evolution in the 1970s is
>post-Marxist. And this reconstructive endeavor has left
>historical materialism altogether in _TCA_, only to return
>to Marx critically in the end, to assess what remnant
>remains fruitful for contemporary social theory. After
>_TCA_ reconstructive endeavor is a matter of developmental
>psychology, discourse ethics, modernity, etc.
>
>M> he appears to move between the two as if they are one.
>
>G: He "appears...as if," but the movement itself isn't
>articulable in terms of either. Already in the
>"Introduction" to _TCA_, he is standing outside of the
>Marxian tradition. The promise for historical materialism
>that was still alive in LC and CES is gone in TCA and work
>afterward. His discursive bridge between system and
>lifeworld is complexly his own. Already in CES, the 3-fold
>isomorphism of language and world, ego-to-ego and
>group-to-group is unrecognizably Marxist or Hegelian or
>even Kantian, and this flowers into a 3-fold isomorphism of
>person, culture and society that is truly a specifically
>Habermasian hybrid of influences.
-------------
>M> yet, the aporia of H. & A's critique of instrumental
>reason surely only had a  substantive impact on the
>tradition of F.S Critical Theory. Other proponents of
>western Marxism didn't appear to be overwhelmed by the
>dialectic of enlightenment thesis.
>
>G: So, what you mean is that only the critique of
>instrumental reason had a substantive impact. I think
>that's fair. In the U.S., the importation of specifically
>FS work happened at the same time as much other
>"Continental" work was coming into translation, and there
>was already a tradition of social critique in the U.S. So,
>FS work became available along with new phenomenological
>work, such as Husserl's _Crisis_, Heidegger's work after
>_B&T_ (which spawned a school of Heideggerian critique of
>technology), Lukacs, and Merleau-Ponty, Gramsci, Enzo Paci,
>and others (The Northwestern UP series on "Phenomenology
>and Existential Philosophy" was well-established before
>H&A's _DoE_ was available in English; the great journal
>_Telos_ was a very hybrid creature, as much
>phenomenologically-inspired as Marxist-Hegelian). There
>wasn't a sense of the FS offering something unprecedented
>for the 1960s and '70s, though the FS work was very useful
>among other work, as complement in a broad discourse of New
>Leftist theorization.

This is great data for someone both geographically and temporally distant 
from this time. I will have to read Jay again. So my question is when 
Habermas writes of an aporetic interruption to the task of undertaking a 
critical theory of society (_TCA_, Polity Press, 1995: 1.386) what is he 
talking about? Is it solely the FS C.T? Is it western Marxism? Is it the 
entire critical-emancipatory project?

If this position is to make sense then it would appear that JH could only be 
referring to the FS .C.T. Of course, given the metatheoretical emphasis of 
H. & A's critique of instrumental reason JH could expect that their 
critique, in a sense, *should* impact across the spectrum of the 
critical-emancipatory project including marxist critical social theory and 
non-marxist critical social theory. If this was his understanding, the 
empirical continuity of these variants of critical social theory surely call 
into doubt his central thesis that H.& A's critique had stimulated an 
aporia.
-----------
Gary, thanks again. I realise this stuff is old-Habermas, but given the 
continuity of themes in his work it is also useful to understanding JH's 
present pre-occupations.

Regards,

MattP

p.s: I don't mind cross posting between Yahoo & Spoons, but if there is no 
development of this thread from other Spoons subscribers I am just as happy 
to keep this discussion within the Yahoo domain.

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