Date: Sun, 08 Aug 2004 06:34:55 -0400
Subject: Re: [HAB:]  Standards of journalism: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH


The following is most likely part of the exchange I had in mind, which took 
place between me and Kenneth Mackendrick on the frankfurt-school list in 
October 2000.  I am excising other parts of the discussion, which had to do 
with poetic and symbolic discourse, Paul Gilroy, African American 
discourse, and feminism.  The quote marks are a bit skewed by the cutting 
and pasting, but hopefully you can tell whose remarks are whose.  The 
discussion seems to be inconclusive.

I can't help but think there is a relevant piece of this discussion 
missing.  I vaguely recall an exchange where I claimed that liberal 
democracy only partially instantiates liberal norms of communication, where 
someone else claims that Habermas doesn't make that qualification 
("partially").  This falls in line with my comments here that the deck is 
usually stacked and hence I don't believe in this procedural 
hocus-pocus.  This problem is evident in the recent heated exchange between 
Gary and Matt on terrorism, where Gary unintentionally revealed how full of 
crap he is, or I should say, how his Habermasian edifice is essentially 
ideological in the way that establishment liberalism was in the 1960s when 
it was a going concern.  Finally, there is my chronic suspicion that 
Habermasianism is essentially a New Class ideology which becomes more 
conservative with time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 13:44:32 -0400
To: frankfurt-school-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION

Thanks to all for the valuable input. I'm not sure I've properly digested
all the details, but so far my impressions are pretty much confirmed,
though I never would have anticipated solidarity and intersubjectivity as
concerns. There can be solidarity even in vigorous competition, as what
happens in argument. I'm more concerned about separating the individuals
in a discussion than fusing them, as inappropriate solidarity or
pretensions to such--identification and projection--are just as serious
problems as dissension.

I think my query began with a presumption of separating the interpersonal
relations of communication from the forms of communication, because their
interrelationship seems far from obvious to me. While I would agree that
the transparency in communication depends on the relationships between
people, it is not obvious to me that following the formal procedures of
argumentation guarantees a rational outcome of discussion, as the inbuilt
assumptions of a discussion may prove impermeable to rational argument, and
the implicit content belied by the form of tolerance and openness to
argument. But I would agree that implicit in real communication is the
openness of all truth claims to questioning and verification. Then again,
it seems impossible to be able to cleanly separate the manifest forms of
communication from the relations between the people.

I'm not sure anything I've just said is contradicted by the posts I just read.
My concern about distorted communication comes from some recent painful
observations of ritualistic and fetishistic forms of public communication,
where instead of the pursuit of truth and the exchange of information that
is supposed to be happening, fear, cultism, desperation, dogmatism, and
mental deadness are the governors of social interaction. I haven't thought
to correlate this with specific forms of speech, but with its content, but
above all with the guiding norms of interaction that contradict the spirit
of inquiry and suppress rational interchange between autonomous individuals.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

From: kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca
To: frankfurt-school-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION
Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 14:49:25 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)


On Thu, 26 Oct 2000 13:44:32 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> wrote:
 > While I would agree that the transparency in communication depends on the
relationships between people, it is not obvious to me that following the 
formal
procedures of argumentation guarantees a rational outcome of discussion, as 
the
inbuilt assumptions of a discussion may prove impermeable to rational 
argument,
and the implicit content belied by the form of tolerance and openness to
argument.

The guarantee is a 'transcendental' one. In short, counterfactual - it is
assumed but not necessarily "actualized." Habermas does in fact argue,
somewhere, that complete intersubjective transparency is impossible (and 
likely
undesirable) even when it is assumed that sufficient transparency can come to
light regarding very specific and narrowed interests. For Habermas, inbuilt
assumptions that prove to be impermeable cannot then be considered "moral"
issues. Moral issues are only those in which universal agreement can be
achieved (in actual discourse). In principle, Habermas argues that everyone
could agree to the principle of consensus as being a legitimate one for the
resolution of conflicts. Whereas the question of what I ought to eat in the
morning isn't open to 'discursive redemption' since it is really a matter of
taste and not justice (unless I happen to be a cannibal...).

 > But I would agree that implicit in real communication is the openness of 
all
truth claims to questioning and verification. Then again, it seems impossible
to be able to cleanly separate the manifest forms of communication from the
relations between the people.

There is a kind of division of labour that Habermas upholds here. First, he
maintains that all attempts to understand something with someone are implicit
forms of solidarity. However, he also notes that all such attempts are to be
subject to critical inquiry - which takes the form of a critique of ideology.

 > My concern about distorted communication comes from some recent painful
 > observations of ritualistic and fetishistic forms of public communication,
 > where instead of the pursuit of truth and the exchange of information that
 > is supposed to be happening, fear, cultism, desperation, dogmatism, and
 > mental deadness are the governors of social interaction. I haven't thought
 > to correlate this with specific forms of speech, but with its content, but
 > above all with the guiding norms of interaction that contradict the spirit
 > of inquiry and suppress rational interchange between autonomous individuals.

Yeah, for Habermas, fear, cultism, desperation, dogmatism and mental deadness
are bastard instrumental forms of communicative action. They are 
parasitical on
communicative forms in that they presuppose that the object of the rant will
understand what they are saying (ie. in order to be intimidated, one must
understand that one is being intimidated)....
ken

-------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 15:57:33 -0400
To: frankfurt-school-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION

.......................

At 03:19 PM 10/27/2000 -0400, you wrote:
 >If procedures do privilege certain kinds of discourses - then it is not, in
 >fact, a universalist ethic.

I don't understand such a conclusion, unless it related to my previous
reservations, that rational discourse in form may not in practice be
ultimately what it appears to be. Thus those who monopolize the means of
rational discourse have the upper hand. But why would a rational
discourse, which many have taken to be the great equalizer--cf. the Jewish
Enlightenment--be any less universalistic because not everybody has
discovered it?

 >Both Benhabib and Heller, in my mind, attempt to preserve some key
 >elements in Habermas without doing away with either reason or autonomy.

Very interesting.

 >....So it is difficult to answer the question, "Has
 >it been applied?" All criticism which attempts to enjoin solidarity with
 >autonomy and democracy is, for Habermas, fundamentally communicative
(whether
 >a theory of communicative action exists or not).

Well, the left is a very partisan discursive environment. One is not open
to any and all propositions on a daily basis. But I take this to be a
problem in very specific ways: cultism, authoritarianism, demagogery, or
more subtlely, the blockage of concrete inquiry into empirical reality even
on principles already agreed to in general.
.......................

--------------------------------------------------------------------

From: kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca
To: frankfurt-school-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 17:04:00 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)


On Fri, 27 Oct 2000 15:57:33 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> wrote:
 > Very, very interesting. I can't quite understand the quibble about
"applying" Habermas, as the test of the validity of any theoretical claim 
is to
apply it to various situations.

Habermas's theory is "post-empirical" in a sense. It can't really be 
tested. It
can be debated and argued, but this only verifies Habermas's hypothesis... 
that
debate and argumentation are the only means at our disposal for the
determination of what is true and what is right. The real question, in my 
mind,
is whether or not Habermas has constructed a tremendous argument that begs the
question of its own validity. In other words: does Habermas presuppose as 
valid
what he attempts to prove as valid. To varying degrees, Castoriadis, Horowitz,
Benhabib, Heller, Bernstein and Wellmer have all pointed this out.

 > Another question, before I return to your post. Does Habermas have anything
to say about Hegel? His theory of communication would seem to have an analogue
to Hegel's aesthetics, and to Hegel's opposition to the kunstphilosophie of
Schelling at al. I.e. that philosophy is ultimately on a higher conceptual
plane than any system of representation (vorstellung), that beyond a certain
point art cannot do the job of attaining the level of speculative truth.

Ha. You might find this interesting. One of Habermas's most recent articles
deals with Hegel. It can be found in Constellations 2000 (I forget which
volume). It is basically a slightly modified version of an article in his much
earlier work, Theory and Practice: "Labour and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel's
Jena Philosophy of Mind." But more interesting than that, Habermas wrote his
dissertation on Schelling (which hasn't been translated into english). Another
essay on Schelling, "Dialektischer Idealismus im Ubergang zum Materialismus -
Geschichtsphilosophische Folgerungen aus Schellings Idee einer Contraction
Gottes," was left out of the translation of Theory and Practice. The essay, as
Zizek notes (I haven't read it), is the first 'progressive' appropriation of
Schelling that interprets Weltalter as a break with the German Idealist logic
of the Absoulte, emphasizing the revolutionary political implications of this
break. Schelling's Weltalter can be found, freshly translated with Zizek's
essay The Abyss of Freedom / Ages of the World...

 > >If procedures do privilege certain kinds of discourses - then it is 
not, in
 > >fact, a universalist ethic.
 > I don't understand such a conclusion, unless it related to my previous
 > reservations, that rational discourse in form may not in practice be
 > ultimately what it appears to be. Thus those who monopolize the means of
 > rational discourse have the upper hand. But why would a rational
 > discourse, which many have taken to be the great equalizer--cf. the Jewish
 > Enlightenment--be any less universalistic because not everybody has
 > discovered it?

The problem is this: Habermas himself has admitted that there is a 
motivational
problem in his work. In other words, on some level, people have to *want* to
participate in an argument (a friend of mine conjured up the image of Habermas
pointing a gun with the caption, "Be reasonable!" - which might not be
completely fair). And maybe I should think twice about calling you on the
question of application. Perhaps it can be illustrated that procedures have a
tendency to "objectively" privilege certain kinds of discourse and certain
kinds of results. To the best of my knowledge, not substantial work has been
done on this (other than the criticisms I've mentioned). To quickly make
something appear and disappear, Zizek and Salecl have noted that impartial
judgement don't come with contentment or satisfaction. In other words, a
decision might in fact be rationally made, it might be fair, even objective -
but this doesn't mean it is going to be a good *or* desirable end. I have this
image that if we follow procedures stictly we'd end up in a world that looks a
lot like a cage - bored out of our skulls, truth in hand, waiting to run to 
the
bathroom or the nearest bar... I'm tempted to invoke Adorno here: that the
'objective' results of a procedure can only guarantee the 'objectivity' of the
procedure itself...

 > I imagine Gilroy has experienced and learned a lot since 1993, and he must
have learned by now that all of African-American communication--every bit of
it--is sytematically distorted communication.

In Habermas's big book, two volumes in english (The Theory of Communicative
Action) he outlines how power and money actually replace and colonize existing
forms of communicative action (the media of power and money steer
administrative systems and destroy vital aspects of the lifeworld - which
results in counter-enlightenment moves involving self-interest).

Another tag-on, one of the things that remains unthinkable for Habermas is 
that
meaning (lingustic meaning) results *from* distortions in language. Habermas's
aim is to free language from distortions (from his earlier work, Knowledge and
Human Interests). We might speculate that if we free language from all 
forms of
pathology, that communicating with one another would be impossible (ie. math
is a language, but it isn't communication). This idea has been taken up by
Chantal Mouffe in her recent critique of Habermas's theory (Democratic
Paradox). Mouffe makes the argument that Habermas's discourse theory flattens
out, or falsely reconciles, the paradoxical nature of democracy: the
unresolvable tension between rights and liberty. The key idea being that if we
all agree on something, and it is considered just, we either leave the table
'guilt-free' or we stop talking and sit in silence. The idea of consensus
worries me. It always makes me wonder exactly what I'm agreeing to, and what
has been missed that made the procedure so easy.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca
To: frankfurt-school-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 18:41:04 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

On Fri, 27 Oct 2000 17:00:10 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> wrote:
 > I must be moved by the struggle against irrationalism, in spite of my
skepticism of procedural thinking.

For Habermas, if you refuse procedural rationality you're irrational (maybe
even postmodern!), communicatively incompetent (skeptical is ok, as long as 
you
agree in the end), psychotic or, if nothing else, immoral.
There has long since been something that has bothered me about this approach.
ken
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 21:20:15 -0400
To: frankfurt-school-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION

"The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."
-- William Blake

One problem with following the rules of rational argument is that one is
always held hostage to the debates instituted by the representatives of the
(would-be) ruling class. I remember back in 1975 taking a course on
scientific racism, which demanded a mastery of a whole lot of knowledge in
different fields. Richard Lewontin even came in to discuss the misuse of
the concept of heritability by Jensen, Shockley, and the scientific racist
crowd. While it is useful to know all that stuff, it is unreasonable to
expect everyone to drop what they're doing and tie up their lives defending
themselves from an onslaught in which the debating parties are hardly on
the same footing.

I am also reminded of an episode of the Donahue show, when debate of
serious issues was still possible. Some Jewish guy, maybe a rabbi,
protests Donahue putting Nazis, Aryan Nations, etc., on his show, whereupon
Donahue justifies his actions with the principles of open debate. The
Jewish fellow responds: "If someone tells me: 'I want to kill you', and I
say 'Please don't kill me', what kind of debate is that?"

Much of the 1960s--when liberal empiricism ruled and the Right was a
handful of backwoods crackpots--was a rebellion precisely against having to
carry on discursive discussion in this manner. For me it is all summed up
in one moment in Pennebaker's documentary of Bob Dylan, where Dylan cusses
out a TIME Magazine reporter, and tells him that news reporting should be
replaced with collage. It all seems so embarrassingly innocent now. Now
collage is a brutal barrage, an exercise in cultural ego-stripping and
brainwashing, which can only make one yearn for a day in which logic and
reason counted for something even as lip service.

As to whether the refusal to participate in reasoned discussion is itself
coercive and regressive--well, it may well be, though it is not that
counter-hegemonic truth claims could not be substantiated by rational
argument. It could just be that people refuse to engage in a discussion in
which the cards are stacked.

For many reasons, I never believed in this ideal speech situation stuff, but
I am interested now precisely because the spirit of free inquiry and
transparent social relations are being threatened in entirely novel
cynical and twisted ways. All avant-gardes have been coopted now and the
only place to go is ... logic and reason.

[stuff on Paul Gilroy deleted]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca
To: frankfurt-school-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 23:28:46 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)


On Fri, 27 Oct 2000 21:20:15 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> wrote:
 > One problem with following the rules of rational argument is that one is
 > always held hostage to the debates instituted by the representatives of the
 > (would-be) ruling class.

Of course! Habermas is more of a post-Marxist that most post-Marxists, 
since he
openly acknowledges that class struggle is a strategic confrontation, not a
communicative one (Wellmer has a nice quote, 'critical theory remembers what
hermeneutics forgets, that we are bound up in relations of domination). I 
don't
think he harbours any illusions about this. However... the existence of class
struggle indicates that we need, more than ever, to transform instrumental
forms of reasoning into communicative ones...

 > While it is useful to know all that stuff, it is unreasonable to expect
everyone to drop what they're doing and tie up their lives defesning 
themselves
from an onslaught in which the debating parties are hardly on the same 
footing.

Right, we actors refuse to participate in rational debate, then we are
obligated to employ strategic means. But, again, Habermas argues that even the
most violent form of strategic action still rely on some degree of
communicative action... it all reminds me of Augustine's argument about good
and evil. For Augustine, peace can exist without war but war cannot exist
without peace. Although Habermas wouldn't argue that communicative action can
exist without some instrumental uses of reason, he does argue that 
instrumental
reason is the sin qua non of communicative reason.

 > As to whether the refusal to participate in reasoned discussion is itself
 > coercive and regressive--well, it may well be, though it is not that
 > counter-hegemonic truth claims could not be substiantiated by rational
 > argument. It could just be that people refuse to engage in a discussion in
 > which the cards are stacked.

Yep. And that's a real concern. Are procedural discourse always stacked? But
this is why ideology-critique is so important (one of Habermas's most 
sustained
critique of ideology sojourns is his attack on postmodernism [in the
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity] - where he goes after Foucault, Derrida,
Bataille, Horkheimer and Adorno, Castoriadis, Luhmann, Heidegger, and
Nietzsche. Interestingly, Habermas has more recently acknowledged that 
there is
something more to be said about Foucault and, I think, has encouraged further
study on the matter (some of his students have gone on to work on Foucault and
Gadamer)...

 > For many reasons, I never belived in this ideal speech situation stuff, 
but I
am interested now precisely because the spirit of free inquiry and transparent
social relationms are being threatened in entirely novel cynical and twisted
ways. All avant-gardes have been coopted now and the only place to go is ...
logic and reason.

Well, to contrast, those who are partial to scientific inquiry and sociology
usually stick with Habermas. And those partial to psychoanalysis and 
aesthetics
stick to Adorno. This doesn't mean the two are mutually exclusive...
..............................................

------------------------------------------------------------------------

From: kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca
To: frankfurt-school-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
Subject: Re: HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION
Date: Sat, 28 Oct 2000 09:26:19 -0400 (Eastern Daylight Time)

On Sat, 28 Oct 2000 00:07:26 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org> wrote:
 > Why is Habermas going afdter Adorno? Does Adorno really belong with these
 > others? IS it becuase of DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT or something else?

Habermas thinks so, in a strange way. For Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno's
DofE goes too far - it is a totalizing critique. The enlightenment is...
disaster triumphant. H/A, according to Habermas, see no progress, not to they
establish grounds for possible progress. In other words, there is no standard,
no measure. This is where Habermas pulls out one of his weakest arguments: the
idea of a performative contradiction. He argues that H/A use reason against
itself but using arguments to dismiss the validity of arguments - where
ideology critique can no longer be assumed to be non-ideological. For 
Habermas,
their critique is overdetermined. He doesn't must talk about DofE either, he
draws in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. Habermas argues that there
has been some progress in modernity - moral progress, entrenched in the
institutionalization of democratic norms.

There are three competing conceptions of reason at work here. Instrumental,
emphatic and communicative. Habermas argues that emphatic reason, the
totalizing critique of the whole, is metaphysical, because it cannot sustain
the validity of its own premises... (ie. 'what progress has been made that
lends itself to the insight that we've moved into a new state of barbarism').

 > Gilroy seems to miss something crucial to the utopian expressions he sees:
that utopia is what we don't live now, in the everyday.

This is where H/A and Habermas differ. In TCA vol 1, second last page, 
Habermas
writes, "Communicative reason does not simply encounter ready-made subjects 
and
systems; rather, it takes part in structuring what is to be preserved. The
utopian perspective of reconciliation and freedom is ingrained in the
conditions of the communicative sociation of individuals; it is built into the
lingustic mechanism of the reproduction of the species."

To wit... a utopian perspective ... is ingrained in... the reproduction of the
species. As Castoradis notes, the idea that our biology has a built-in utopian
perspective... "is an enormous logical blunder." I don't know. Maybe Habermas
is right... but I'm more drawn to Castoriadis here: that we *create* utopian
images, they aren't "built-in."

Anyway.... Gilroy seems to me to be keeping with a Habermasian perspective,
that modernity, in some way, is actual progress - if not in that it 
facilitates
self-reflective awareness...

 > I don't mean just the subjection of blacks to the misdeeds of whites; I 
mean
the relations prevailing among black people themselves--where the ideal speech
situation is not even an ideal--whose culture and internal politics are ruled
by authoritarianism, manipulation, fear, and fetishism.

A Habermasian response might run something like this: even in the most
dictatorial situations, of fear and manipulation, reason persists, however
diminished or distorted, because, despite all else, we still try to understand
and communicate. Whenever we try to coordinate our actions through agreement,
we abide by the ideals of autonomy and solidarity, which provide the measure
and means of emancipation. No authority can ever be justified if it has not 
met
with the rational consent of those who are implicated by the authority, and
even then, we are obligated to retroactively and critically consider the
legitimacy of the procedures in which our validity claims have come to rest.

 > And Gilroy must know by now that black culture has lost--any vitality its
cultural traditions & strategies might have had died out by the early '80s.

I must admit, I'm not completely surprised that you're willing to think twice
about Habermas... I remember several years ago you launched a scathing attack
on the Habermasians (which was quite amusing at the time). Despite my 
criticism
and concern - there is something tremendously important in his work (even if
his vocabulary tends to obscure it). A willingness to stand tall as a 
modernist
and a steadfast refusal to let the butchers have the final word. So even in
instances where cultural traditions and strategies have died out, Habermas
encourages reason. Let me know if this doesn't help:

"If by way of a thought experiment we compress the adolescent phase of
growth into a single critical instant in which the individual for the first
time - yet prevasively and intransigently - assumes a hypoethical attitude
toward the normative contenxt of his lifeworld, we can see the nature of the
problem that very person must deal with in passing from the conventional to 
the
postconventional level of moral judgement. The social world of legitimately
regulated interpersonal relations, a world to which one was naively habituated
and which was unproblematically accepted, is abruptly deprived of its
quasi-natural validity. If the adolescent cannot and does not want to
go back to the traditionalism and unquestioned identity of his past world, he
must, on penalty of utter disorientation, reconstruct, at the level of basic
concepts, the nromative ordres that his hypothetical gaze has destroyed by
removing the veil of illusions from them. Using the rubble of devalued
traditions, traditions that have been reocgnize to be merely conventional and
in need of justification, he erects a new normative structure that must be
solid enough to withstand critical inspection by someone who will henceforth
distinguish soberly between socially accepted norms and validy norms, between
de facto recognition of norms and norms that are worthy of reconition. At 
first
principles inform his plan for reconstruction; these principles govern the
generation of valid norms. Ultimately all that remains is a procedure for a
rationally motivated choice among principles that have been recognized in turn
as in need of justification." Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative
Action, pg. 126.

ken

------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
At 02:37 PM 8/1/2004 -0400, FREDWELFARE-AT-aol.com wrote:
>
>In a message dated 7/8/2004 9:31:55 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>rdumain-AT-igc.org writes:
>
>I  initiated an interesting discussion with
>someone, on this list or perhaps  the frankfurt-school list, about the
>degree to which  normative  liberal ideals remain just ideals or are
>effectively embodied in actual  institutions.
>
>
>The norms of equality and individual rights, which I think are normative
>liberal ideals, are applied in several institutional contexts, namely, legal
>procedures.  But, are often not abided in social contexts.  But then  this 
>leads
>to social interaction, albeit somewhat more emotional that preferred  by most
>I imagine, which is argumentative and may take on moralistic  connotations or
>responses of domination.  The only application I can think  of is
>argumentation or even conflict.  What did you detemrine?
>
>Fred Welfare


_________________________________________________________
"Wherever you find injustice, the proper form of politeness is attack."
          -- T-Bone Slim, A Short Treatise on Etiquette




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