Subject: [HAB:] Ralph: Myth of Reason
Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 07:43:09 +0000


Ralph,

trust some of this is useful,

regards,

MattP

Ralph,

Again apologies for the delay in responding to you close reading. I hope the 
following clarifies rather than confuses further:

RD: What interests me so far is this claim:

>I develop the argument that the primary theoretical and practical domain of 
>application for Habermas's reconstructed Critical Theory is the sphere of 
>radical and expert (critical) social scientific discourse in West Germany 
>in the late 1970s and 1980s. In this unique way, I explain, Habermas 
>achieves a unity of theory and practice on the basis of his theory of 
>communicative action. Specifically, I argue the stronger thesis that in the 
>first place the domain of application of Habermas's reconstructive 
>programme is "inside" the Frankfurt School tradition of Critical Theory. In 
>other words, prior to the external audience in the general radical, 
>intellectual and (critical) social scientific community of West Germany in 
>the late 1970s and early 1980s I contend that Habermas directs his 
>programme to an internal audience: his collaborators, research assistants 
>and students. Habermas's project, again in the first place, is a struggle 
>for the hearts and minds of his contemporaries and the next generation of 
>Critical Theorists against what he considers is the clear and present 
>danger of the revival of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, a cynical reason 
>and a reactionary neo-conservatism.

[the objective of the first part of the thesis was to try and sort out 
Habermas’s claims re-the status of Critical Theory in TCA – to test their 
coherency. The conclusion I reached was that JH’s claims made most sense if 
understood in this very situated way. JH’s claims of an interruption to the 
task of undertaking a critical theory of society, due to Horkheimer and 
Adorno’s critique of instrumental reason, point towards a more focussed 
domain of application of his reconstruction of C.T that is usually 
understood.]
Moving along:

>The challenge for Habermas is to outline a type of reason that is not 
>innately instrumental in nature and also capable of withstanding the 
>dialectical inversion Horkheimer and Adorno make central to their critique. 
>Against their pessimistic diagnoses Habermas proffers his conception of 
>communicative reason. The communicative reason Habermas derives from the 
>philosophy of language is intended to resist Horkheimer and Adorno's 
>totalizing critique of reason as an inherently instrumentalizing capacity 
>of the human species

RD: I am highly dubious of Habermas' project.

[as well you might be! His was a very ambitious undertaking generated in 
large part I believe by his sincere reaction to the threats he perceived 
(post/anti/pre-modernism…a new slide into fascism]

>The issues raised by Agnes Heller (1982) in her essay "Habermas and 
>Marxism" frame my discussion of Habermas's conception of the relationship 
>between theory and practice. Heller strongly argues that Habermas's 
>renegotiation of the relationship between theory and practice under 
>theorizes the motivational complex of practical engagement in the 
>critical-emancipatory project. According to Heller, Habermas fails to 
>explain why - on the basis of his reconstruction of Critical Theory's 
>normative authority - social actors would engage with processes of 
>theoretical or practical enlightenment. I extend Heller's point in two 
>ways. First, I argue that Habermas's reconstructed Critical Theory lacks a 
>sufficiently motivating or persuasive component, which would ensure that 
>the "always/already" emancipatory potential he finds in the meaning 
>generating structures of communicative language practice be realized in 
>practice. Second, I point out this problem is exacerbated given Habermas's 
>tendency to operationalize the critical-emancipatory impulse as a key 
>factor in processes of social integration. Habermas's affirmation of the 
>critical-emancipatory project's institutionalization in the structures of 
>social governance risks diminishing the advances his linguistic turn brings 
>to the tradition of Critical Theory. Not only does Habermas under-theorize 
>the motivational bases for participation in the critical-emancipatory 
>project, but also the social systems theory he introduces to Critical 
>Theory  I argue  acts to dissuade participation in processes of theoretical 
>and practical enlightenment.

Excellent.

[Thanks Ralph. The normative basis for participation in the 
critical/enlightenment project remains elusive IMO]

[snip]

>In the Conclusion I develop the argument that the critical potential of 
>Habermas's project remains tied, in an unexpected way, to Horkheimer and 
>Adorno's critique of instrumental reason. Their critique defines the 
>boundary conditions of Habermas's project. The shadow cast by their thesis 
>on the dialectic of enlightenment sets the limits, as it were, of his 
>reconstructed Critical Theory.

RD: This, I think, is unfortunate.

[Perhaps, but Habermas’s hermeneutical methodology almost commits him to 
this quasi-realist, cumulative position. It also, in a not too oblique way, 
re-affirms his central conception of the lifeworld. In other words, Habermas 
cannot enter the philosophical discourse of modernity WITHOUT a background 
of established meanings which to some degree or another sets the horizons of 
the discourse.]



RD: The problem here is that if one is held hostage to the logic of H/A's
nonsense, even to oppose it, one is going to end up in dire straights.

[Well, I am quite partial to H/A’s thesis, so I’m all ears on this one. 
Doesn’t enlightened thought convert into it’s opposite?]

>For Horkheimer and Adorno, it is in the logic of identity, which demands 
>the submission of the particular before the universal, that reason's 
>ineradicable tendency for domination inheres.

RD: Highly dubious of them.

[Again, I’m partial to H/A’s thesis here…categorization/generalization 
appears to overriding particularity and uniqueness].

>Habermas seeks to ground the justification for the normative authority of 
>his critical theory of society in the universal structures of communicative 
>language practices.

RD: If this is so, Habermas' strategy is highly dubious.

[well, it’s a grand philosophical system and I admire its architecture…quite 
an amazing elaboration of a fairly simple idea that rivals Parsons and 
Hegel… Habermas’s aesthetic is – in some ways – under appreciated in this 
age of pithy writing and an over emphasis on the lightness of touch :- )]

>In light of critical reason's historical acquiescence in the totalitarian 
>instincts of the logic of identity, Adorno restricts not only critical 
>reason's prescriptive or norm-generating capability, but also its critical 
>social function.

RD: Habermas is correct here, it seems to me.
[well you are obviously no fan of H/A. A negative dialectics has its place 
although even the negativity of critique DOES get distorted. Thus, we have a 
steady stream of negation in the media, for example (what is wrong with the 
world), which allows consumerism to flourish as the hedonistic relief. I’ve 
often expressed the view that the “baddies” of the world are paid actors in 
the grand farce of capitalism as the generative negative of escapism.]

RD: Matt's account of the practical nature of Habermas' interventions makes
sense to me.  I still don't quite grasp this claim about metacritique and
substantive critique:

>The flexible strategy of Habermas's critical practice that is evident in 
>his engagements with Adorno and Horkheimer's, the neo-conservative's and 
>post-structuralist's critiques of reason is made possible I believe by 
>Critical Theory's dual status as both metacritique and substantive 
>critique. It is why I feel justified in treating these critical 
>philosophical engagements as a substantive critical theory of society.

[The issue I was dealing with is locating the practical moment of Habermas’s 
reconstructed C.T. He argues for a return to the programmatic intentions of 
early C.T; one intention of which was to provide a substantive (and even 
prescriptive) critical theory of society. As I argue in Chap3 I think JH’s 
strategy is quite (brilliantly) complex whereby he locates the practical 
moment of his critique in his metacritique of H/A and the neo-Nietzscheans. 
This is why I emphasize that the site of Habermas’s practical engagement is 
the level of radical & expert critical social scientific discourse. JH’s 
point, I think, is that the SUBSTANCE of the social order is communicative 
reason so whilst the battleground is at the level of discourse and 
metacritique it has dramatic substantial implications.]

>A crucial aspect of this thesis is my contention is that Habermas designed 
>his theory of communicative action to intervene primarily in the West 
>German context of the 1980s in light of the tumultuous social, cultural and 
>political conditions and events of the 1970s.

RD: If true, this is very illuminating.

[well, not many Habermasians like such a localized reading of his project, 
and I am at pains to point out that I consider this reading as “in the first 
place”. This isn’t to say that JH’s work cannot be applied elsewhere. 
Anyway, in the interviews in autonomy and solidarity  JH is fairly 
circumspect with his claims for generalizing the theses he develops in TCA.]

Chapter 3:

On the reception of Habermas:

>I consider this is unlike the reception of either Michel Foucault's or 
>Jacques Derrida's work, for example. In place of the reconstruction and 
>modification that has occurred with Habermas, Foucault's work has generated 
>significantly more applied studies. The emphasis on application, I would 
>suggest, also occurs with Derrida. Put another way, whilst these 
>philosophers have all generated considerable interpretative efforts I 
>consider there has been far greater immanent critique of Habermas's work by 
>those sympathetic to his perspective and yet far fewer dedicated research 
>programmes that have followed closely the lines of inquiry and analysis he 
>has developed

[these contentions were fairly hammered by one examiner, although I stand by 
my p.o.v that applied Habermas is rarer than applied Derrida or Foucault. ]


>Habermas's complex thesis is that in place of the Kantian conception of a 
>unity of reason, there is - in advanced modernity - an independent 
>tripartite structure to reason.  Reason, according to Habermas, has split 
>into three separate moments: 'modern science, positive law and 
>posttraditional ethics, and autonomous art and institutionalized art 
>criticism' (1990: 17). The new role for critical philosophy is to maintain 
>the balance between these separate moments of reason by acting to mediate 
>conflicts and disparities between them, and, just as importantly, to 
>translate knowledge between them. In this way Habermas conceives of 
>philosophy as the 'guardian of rationality' (1990: 17):

RD: But how is this possible if philosophy itself becomes bureaucratized?

[Good question]

>Communicative reason, according to Habermas, forms the very conditions that 
>make such a discourse possible in the first place. In other words, Habermas 
>contends that participants in discursive processes of enlightenment do not 
>first have to make a choice for or against communicative rationality:

RD: Tell this to Dubya.

[yes, in this wretched new age of spin doctoring and hyper-reality, and the 
willingness of people {nay the demand} to be lied to].

>  For good reason, I think, Habermas finds odious the idea that the 
>critical-emancipatory project should rely on the unique insights and 
>feelings of a morally sensitive, almost priestly, class of social actors.  
>Rather, Habermas prefers to scientize the role of the critical social 
>theorist

This is not a priestly caste?

[Again, a good point… what would ameliorate the priestliness is the guiding 
presence of communicative reason rather than subjective reason].

On the Durkheimian moment:

>). My conjecture in this discussion is that by the time of writing TCA, 
>Habermas conceives of his theory of communicative action, and especially 
>his rhetoric in support of reason, as a strategy to re-assure the 
>collective ideal of reason in the West German polity, in the first place, 
>and then more generally (and grandly) in Occidental civilization: 'We need 
>a symbolic form of representation for those things for which we have 
>fought, for which a collective effort was made' (1986: 139). Understood 
>from this perspective, Habermas's theory of communicative action is a 
>fundamental critical social theory. The critical practice of Habermas's 
>Critical Theory addresses the primordial conditions of social integration 
>and reproduction in modern Occidental societies, and  in particular  the 
>threat he perceives to the order of West German society posed by the 
>disintegrative critiques of reason increasingly influential in the social, 
>cultural and political discourses of West Germany in the 1970s.

Distinguishing Enlightenment from religion as a unifying symbolic order:

>In place of Adorno and Horkheimer's thesis that enlightenment has reverted 
>to myth Habermas argues that whilst there are analogical continuities in 
>the structural form of social integration between traditional and 
>posttraditional societies, in modernity there occurred a distinctive 
>transition from a dogmatic theological reason to an emancipatory type of 
>communicative reason.

RD: Let's keep our fingers crossed.

[Hope? The most oppressive four letter word ever invented.]




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