Date: Tue, 4 Nov 1997 02:51:05 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: M-TH: Ralph, James and Jurgen


[A quick one before bed.

Ralph agrees with James's reservations re Habermas:]

>Well, I think you've basically got Habermas' number.  Habermas is the
>vehicle of lukewarm liberalism gesturing toward the left for the alienated
>denizens of hackademia.

[This quote from Habermas (which, incidentally, I've just pinched from the
Habermas list) helps make the modest point I was trying to make:

"[However,] I do not want to repeat the mistake of [the history of the
idea of the university, of] characterizing the communication community
of researchers as something exemplary [for society as a whole]. The
egalitarian and universalistic content of its forms of argumentation
expresses only the norms of scientific and scholarly activity, not those
of society as a whole.  But they share emphatically in the communicative
rationality in whose forms modern societies, that is, societies which
are not fixed once and for all and which have no guiding images, must
reach an understanding about themselves."

Presented 1986 in a Heidelberg lecture series honoring the 600th
anniversary of the founding of the University of Heidelberg, translated
in _The New Conservatism_, pp. 122, 124, 125]

>There is somebody on one of these lists who very well summarizes what is
>good >in him--I think it is Scott Johnson--and you can take that and leave
>the rest.

[Too right.  If you're half interested, get at the Habermas archives and
save Scott's posts (especially up to September).]

>I couldn't stomach reading any further after KNOWLEDGE AND HUMAN
>INTERESTS, in >which Habermas repeats all the hackneyed social democratic
>lies about Marx, >positivism, instrumental rationality, etc.

[Habermas is a self-confessed socdem, true (he also rather grandly calls
himself 'the last marxist').  And he does interpret us all from a point of
view that simply gives too much ground (see my lonely posts of last month
if you're interested), but I did think his critique of instrumental
rationality and his distinction between communication (as experience and
action) and discourse (as the condition of possibility for
corroborated/theoretical knowledge - and a dangerously self-referential
closed system at that) fascinating and promising stuff.

After all, we keep believing 'the fundamentals' are good, even though our
lives are fucked - and there must be a system/lifeworld tension there worth
bringing up for public scrutiny).  And Rakesh's stuff on 'race' might find
some worthwhile basics in such an analysis (I wouldn't know Rakesh - just
blathering).

It's not new to most of you (it was to me), but is it really just 'twaddle'?]

>What twaddle!  Given his devotion to the non-existent ideal speech
>situation, I >wonder how Habermas got his kids through the terrible twos.

[Well, it is an *ideal* speech situation ...

It's about rationally tenable potentials to promote 'the socially
integrating force of solidarity' against capitalism's insertion into the
lifeworld of its 'unpolitical class rule' principle of organisation.

To my untrained mind, Habermas has not thrown everything out at all.  To
James I point out that he still maintains 'people can be more human than
their society permits' (all these quotelets come from 'What Does Socialism
Mean Today?').

I do agree that with the likes of Nancy Love (and therefore, to a qualified
extent, with Ralph) that Habermas's refusal to engage satisfactorily with
people as materially bound beings leaves him open to charges that there's
something of the liberal formalist about him.  As Dennis Fischman
(*Political Discourse in Exile*) says: 'if liberal politics at its best is
designed to make subjects free, but not people, not you and me, then we
need a new politics, one that aims to overcome our specific alienation and
to emancipate us as distinct human beings: in short, to return us from
exile.'

I suspect that particular problem emanates from Habermas's focus on
language.  As he says, language 'presents inalienably individual aspects in
unavoidably general categories'.

But then Marx focuses on labour.  Clearly, under capitalism, one is
alienated from and by his/her labour.  Am I being dense (again) when I ask
if labour too must *always* present 'inalienably individual aspects in
unavoidably general categories'?

Cheers,
Rob.]


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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