Date: Sun, 2 Nov 1997 13:08:49 +0000
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: intersubjectivity?


In message <l03010d02b08204b408df-AT-[137.92.42.5]>, Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comser
ver.canberra.edu.au> writes
> A
>dialectic of communicative rationality based on a bit of instrumentalism, a
>big lump of the practical (exploring how social meanings are transposed
>into scientific fact - say, like Rakesh's critique of all that Bell Curve
>nonsense), and an almost heroic belief (wedged as we are between the
>gung-ho instrumentalist rationalists on one side and the irrationalist pomo
>collaborators on, well, the same side) in the emancipatory power immanent
>in language at large (always a proposition can be socially tested for its
>validity, sincerity and appropriateness) and the emancipatory urge manifest
>in late modernism itself: always to question and always to reason.
>
>I reckon Habermas is fine on this - this *is* a kind of praxis - and one
>appropriate to our time and place.  I mean, things can change quickly, and
>Habermas's pessimism regarding modern society's capacity to make radical
>change is most definitely itself the manifestation of our time, but the
>thing is to see value in intersubjectivity!  It's about seeking out chances
>to reflect publicly and engender political dissent.  We have language and
>we (our societies) pay, at the very least, lip service to those late
>modernist values - there's heaps of unarticulated emancip[atory urghe
>wherever you look these days!  

I see things rather differently. I think it is right to say that the
elevation of intersubjectivity is a consequence of a disappointment with
revolution, but that only suggests to me that it is a morbid
preoccupation, that subsitutes for radical change, and essentially
conservative. Habermas (and his English side-kick Giddens) suggest that
the rexlexive sociology is profoundly self-critical. I disagree: self-
criticism is encouraged in one-dimension, but banned in another. Any
position within the dialogic democracy has its claims relativised, but
the fact of the dialogic democracy/intersubjectivity/etc itself is put
beyond question. But what if the framework of dialogic democracy itself
smuggles in a partisan objective? I suggest it does, and that in fact it
is only an idealised expression of market relations, albeit one that is
more appropriate to social relations in the late twentieth century. Then
we would have to criticise it in the same way that we criticised Adam
Smith for naturalising the laws of the market as laws of nature, or Kant
for idealising the mutual recognition of free subjects of market
exchange as a categorical imperative.

It seems to me that Habermas displacement of subjectivity by
intersubjectivity is a move that blocks off radical change and is in its
substance conservative. In its logical structure it is not that much
different from the methodological individualism of Popper and Hayek.
Like them he is saying that there can be exchange, but society is too
complex to engage in a collectively rational endeavour - ergo socialism
is an impossiblity. 


>So I'm

not

> with Chris all the way when he writes:
>
>>Now why is this of any relevance to marxism? I suggest that if we concede
>>that Marx and Engels did not successfully predict the definitive revolution
>>in the last 150 years, 

I don't think they intended to engage in Crystal ball gazing but to make
a case for revolution, a case that despite making the best case yet, did
not succeed.

>one of the prices we should pay theoretically in
>>arguing their continued relevance is that they highlighted the
>>contradictions of capitalism which form a system both turbulent and
>>self-perpetutating.
>>
>>That system is in many ways an intersubjective one. No economic activity
>>could take place without intersubjectivity, and imagination. Workers
>>imagine. Capitalists imagine. Value is not price, it is intersubjectivity.
>>Exchange value is a subset of all socially valued productive and
>>reproductive interactions. Partly reciprocal and partly exploitative,
>>perhaps like all relationships. Are we valued? Do we value others? Are we
>>used? Do we use others?

It is an interesting point that the Marxist categories stripped of their
revolutionary side become pretty much what Habermas is trying to achieve
- an idelaisation of the market that takes into account its destructive
side, to sidestep criticism arising from that. But this is to
misrepresent Marx, and, I suggest, capitalist society.


>>
>>I think James sees only the negative potentialities of the concept of
>>intersubjectivity. It is much more than the market, though I do not know
>>the Frankfurt School well enough to be able to say whether they made that
>>clear.

I agree that it is meant as much more than the market, but I consider it
a narrow reading of the theory of Capitalism that it only operates at
the level of strict exchange. I would rather go on to show that
relations of law and state are, as subordinate moments of capitalist
social relations, governed by the terms of the market too. I am thinking
for example of Pashukanis explication of legal categories out of Marx's
commodity fetishism, or of the state derivation theorists elaboration of
the state form out of capital in the seventies. My poiint is that the
socilogy of Habermas takes into acocunt a great many social formations
that seem to be opposed to the exchange, but in fact are governed by and
take their form from market relations. What this means for Habermas, I
think, is that while he expresses criticism of the market (usually
sublated criticisms of mass society and the vulgar tastes of the hoi
polloi) in fact his entire account of intersubjectivity reads society
through the prism of social forms that are specific to capitalism: the
mutual hostility and dependence of subjects, in which any transcendence
of that mutual hostility is read as autocratic, and criminalised as
'instrumental rationality'.

Any thoughts?
-- 
James Heartfield


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