Date: Sat, 3 Jan 1998 21:43:57 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Pragmatism


G'day Thaxalotls,

Justin ridicules (as per my request) my attempt at getting around some
theoretical impasses.  I've just returned from a fortnight in a sedan with
two infants, have no books handy, and am consequently in medulla-only mode.
But I spring to my defence - much like 'plucky little Belgium' in 1914
perhaps, but 'plucky little idiot' sounds better than just 'little idiot',
so here goes:

Justin begins:

>Why bother with what Aronowitz says?

[I thought I had a case against someone whose celebrated rebuttal of
historical materialism threatened to leave the academic left sans a
practical theoretical arsenal.]

>>argues (Bove, 1986, 9) that critical scholars, such as Habermas, refuse
>>to >>recognise that our knowledge is constituted by basically
>>discontinuous >>discourses

>Meaning, what? Kuhnian or Feyerabendian incommensurabiluty? Then how is
>that consistent with "transcendental truth"?

[Meaning that Aronowitz casts Habermas from the ranks of critical
scholarship on rather moot grounds.  I'm sure Habermas would be surprised
to find he's a naive positivist - which, in Aronowitz's own a priori
'binarising' - is what you are if you are not a constructivist (ie. one who
denies the role of experience as both source and verification of knowledge
because, s/he argues, independent cultural and/or individual and/or
intra-individual fragments etc construct experience and its objects).  The
source of my indignation was A's very trendy 'History as Disruption'
chapter in *TCIHM*.

So yeah, I guess something like a Kuhnian/Feyerabendian
incommensurability, between contending modes of rationality, of which the
instrumental rationality characteristic of science is but one - and also
irrationality - is what I'm trying to get at here.  My only points were
that Habermas indeed wrote a whole book about (modernity and)
incommensurable rationalities (*Knowledge & Human Interests*), argued that
these allow for both science as it is done and emancipatory social
reflection, by way of intersubjectivity.  The latter ideally critiques the
former where 'scientism' (ideology in disguise) threatens (the
Frankfurters' characteristic concern).]

>> and that transcendental truth,
>
>Do you mean, objective truth?

[I guess so - Caesar crossing the Rubicon is an objective truth (if one
could show that the Rubicon did not cross Caesar, at any rate).  'Humans
can cross rivers' might be a transcendetal truth, I s'pose.  A scientific
premise I could live with anyway.]

>> consequently the transhistorical subject,
>
>What's that?

[The self-indulgence of one who has always read Marx as a humanist and
refuses to take the Althusserian 'two Marxes theory'.  I reckon I could
carry an argument that, for Marx to make sense, his early implications as
to the essential nature of the human must be borne in mind.  Granted that,
humanity is a transhistorical subject - the danger lying in too detailed an
account of what is essentially transcendentally human - there lies racism,
sexism, ethnocentrism and economic rationalism.]

>> are untenable assumptions, he unwittingly opens the way for the pragmatic
>> rejoinder of Richard Rorty.
>>
>> Rorty suspects that Habermas's 'unfinished project' need not succumb to
>> this post-modernist criticism.
>
> What's the criticism?

[That any theory of emancipation based on a view of human history as the
ongoing resolution of contradictions, in light of (a) transhistorical
material categories (the modest humanism mentioned above) and/or (b)
historical material categories (the mode of production du juour - and also
the mode of interaction, according to Habermas) is untenable because it is
not only true that *nothing* is true (in the scientific sense) but also
fundamentally importantly true.  Material categories are always but
fleeting ideational and ideological constructs and emancipation is
absolutely relative because 'to be human' has no fixed meaning.]

>> In focusing on the notions of knowledge and truth, Rorty (1991a, 1)
>>invokes >> the 'antirepresentationalist', position:
>>
>> 'one which does not view knowledge as a matter of getting reality right,
>> but rather as a matter of acquiring habits of action for coping with
>> reality. '
>
>Ugh. I owe a lot to Dick, but this is him at his Deweyian worst.

[I don't suggest you subscribe to the view - just that you recognise it as
a currently dominant view in the pomo-blighted humanities that can serve
our political interests as much as those (if any) of the pomos.]

>> In short, he effectively denies that the truth of a statement can be found
>> by checking it against an objective reality.
>
>Well, he's right about that. We can't see reality in the raw apart from
>some conception of it, or as conceprualized in some concrete way. That's
>basic Kant. "Intuition without concepts is blind."
>
>> Rather, truth is determined by what social practices allow as evidence.
>
>Rorty tends to be careless. Officially he accepts that truth is a matter
>of satisfying a Tarski sentence, which is objective, but empty. But he
>does have a tendency to talk as if truth were merely consensus.

[The latter point was what drew me to him in the first place - it was a way
in for a keen apprentice Habermasian.  Marx said the 'socially valid' was
'therefore objective' and Lukacs (in H&CC) did too.  I've a feeling I'd
benefit from the lash of your pedagogical powers here - wanna flail a
little?]

>   This effectively makes of
>> humanity the very 'basis of which all knowledge could be constituted as ...
>> evidence'.  The subject is thus rescued from Foucault's antihumanist
>> prescription.
>
>Where does Foucault come from here?

[Excerpts from a pretty unreadable blather were boring enough - the whole
thing would have been unconscionable among comrades.  Surely you grant that
Foucault was nearly always vociferously antihumanist?  The quotelet above
is lifted from the last chapter in *The Order Of Things* - a rambling
collection of futile and damaging flourishes; fun at times, but often
unsubstantiated and rarely coherent to my untrained eye.]

>> The British Hegelian F. H. Bradley (1914, 258) was arguing along these
>> lines eighty years ago:
>>
>> 'In the realm of the special sciences and of practical life, and in short
>> everywhere, unless we except philosophy, we are compelled to take partial
>> truths as being utterly true.  We cannot do this consistently, but we are
>> forced to do this, and our action within limits is justified.'
>>
>
>Oh, no. Bradley's talking about something else. For Bradley, the truth is
>objective, it's the British Hegeliam Whole. But since we are finite beings
>and not Spirit, we can only know part of it. The point could not be more
>different.

[I'm quite aware of this.  I was trying to make the point - albeit via a
mediocre version of the very unconnected flourishes for which I've just
excoriated Foucault - that it needn't be all that important whether one
assumes the Hegelian history-as-self-realising-absolute (of which Marx
might or might not have entertained a version - on the basis of his early
writings, I suspect he might have had something like it in mind; y'know,
humanity ultimately realising itself in communism and all that), refutes it
altogether (as do our pomo friends) or refutes a logically inevitable
endpoint to the dialectic of human history - among which number I fear I
must number Schaap the perpetually frustrated humanist).  I reckon
important emancipatory work is always afoot for all these positions.]

>> and (1914, 266):
>>
>> '... within limits and in their proper place our relative view insists
>> everywhere on the value and on the necessity of absolute judgements.'

[And this work is always necessary - so we must always go with what we have.]

>> according to beliefs about
>> the universe that characterise a sociohistorical instance.  This is
>> effectively how Habermas defines it (1979, ch. 1), and Marx's German
>> Ideology can also be read as making just this point.
>
>Chapter and verse, please. I think Marx is a naive correspondance
>theorist about truth. From the GI: "the priority of external (or
>material?) nature remains unassailed."

[As I read this, we need not know, as positivists 'know', our reality.
Material reality affords scope and limit to our thoughts and actions,
regardless of our perceptions of it.  Those perceptions are themselves
conditioned by it, and, as it is our perceptions which guide our actions,
the ways in which we change 'out there' are contingent on a unity of Kant's
nuomenal and phenomenal categories.  Where does it say a realist ontology
requires a positivist epistemology?

Right now, an instrumental world-view predominates in conditioning our
sociohistorical instance, where the world is a bunch of things, and
luxurious things have become for us necessary things, and humans are
themselves things that help transform other things, and that, as things,
their activity too can be owned.  And so is the complex of  our relations
with self, others and world conditioned.  The *GI*, which you know better
than I, says something like this, doesn't it?

I could go on to argue it's transcendentally true that nuomenal reality is
such that this way of seeing and relating can predominate, at least
fleetingly, within its parameters.  I'd say it's objectively true that we
are inclined to see the world so, for if we did not, we would not see and
relate as we do.  I reckon you'd have to be a humanist to believe our
seeing and relating should be different, but it is transcendentally true
that it *could* be different.  The truth that concerns me is humanism, for
Rorty's pragmatism allows it because it 'works', Habermas because it is
discursively redeemable in our world, and Marx because that's how I reckon
he gets, if not from 'is' to 'ought' (my reading of him), then from 'is' to
'will be' (historical materialism as science plus, I suggest, more
radically and dangerously humanist than even I dare be).]

>> ... might join Geuss (1982, 94) in developing the significance of
>> this point:
>>
>> 'If rational argumentation can lead to the conclusion that a critical
>> theory (defined as 'the self consciousness') of a successful process of
>> 'emancipation and enlightenment' represents the most advanced position of
>> consciousness available to us in our given historical situation, why the
>> obsession with whether or not we may call it 'true'?'
>>
>Guess is making a  VERY NARROW point NOT about all scientific theory (e.g.,
>physics), but about a special kind of theory he calld "critical theory,"
>the point of which is to promote enlightenment.

[So am I.  Marx self-consciously wrote from within capitalism about
capitalism.  This is why he wrote little about the
communism-possibly-to-come and went to some lengths to distinguish
capitalism from other social modes in terms of those aspects,
characteristic of capitalism (which he was in a position to know about),
which were demonstrably absent or non-dominant in those modes (my copy of
Grundrisse has been nicked so I may be talking through my hat here).
Always capitalism is his point of departure.  His truth, the truth he
explicates at length at any rate, is at once the truth about capitalism and
the truth *in* capitalism, therefore as true as possible and as true as
necessary.  This constitutes critical theory because it addresses the here
and now, speaks deliberately and exclusively to people in that here and
now, in their language, categories and norms of argument, about what the
hidden dynamics of the here and now are, about how those dynamics might
undo the here and now, and why this could be a good thing if an end to the
thus-unmasked unfreedom is desired.  Habermas takes on part of this brief -
but has perhaps taken a few too many liberties with the other bits - I
dunno.]

>> Rorty (1991b, 168) sheets the responsibility home to the discourse of
>> scientism:
>>
>> 'we think we need this only because an overzealous philosophy of science
>> has created an impossible ideal of ahistorical legitimation.'
>
>The resonsibility for what?

[The responsibility for allowing Lyotard to thrash Habermas with the
argument that, as scientific standards of truth are untenable, nothing
Habermas can contribute is any truer than anything absolutely anybody else
might say - H is being a tyrannical expert, leading us to another Auschwitz
through his baseless imposed metanarrative.  Habermas reckons such a
critique (effectively categorising all science as scientism) rids humanity
of any possibility for coherent reform (never mind revolution).  I reckon
Habermas is right.]

>> Marx too was aware of the socio-historical contingency of truth.
>
>Rubbish. The historicity of norms of argument, maybe. But Marx thought, as
>do all sane people, not counting Rorty, that "Julius Caesar crossed the
>Rubicon is not "socio-historically contingent," except in the sense taht
>it's only true if Caesar _did_ cross the Rubison, which is course is
>contingent. (Bradley, by contrast, thought that all truths are necessary.

[Objective truth is the truth that is socially valid.  He said it!  'Men
are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active
men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive
forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these ... '.  He said that
too.]

>> ... Whether we be at a stage in historical development, as Marx, Habermas
>> or Geuss would have it, or trapped within a specific autonomous 'bloc' in
>> time, as Foucault, Lyotard and Aronowitz would have it, our place in time
>> and space may still be characterised as a stage, or an episode, of a
>> 'consciousness' which sets specific standards and possibilities of truth.
>
>You are running together, in a charcateristic Rortyian way, the historical
>realtivity of argumentative norms with the supposed relativity of the
>truth of the propositions that operate in the arguments.

[Not to do so is to say the world was not flat when everybody thought it
was.  That's a realist ontology.  That's okay for the sort of Marxist I am,
but not for pomos, for whom all truths are merely contending constructs -
and not for Rorty, for a round earth would not have 'worked' in a flat
earth society bereft of both the scientific falsifiability norm nor the
technology to falsify the theory anyway (the navigation instruments to
allow sailing away from coasts, telescopes and mathematics etc).]

>Puleez. What is "the modernist 'project'"? What is this pomo denial of
>"modernist historicism"? Why do we not want to contradict whatever the
>pomos say, just on general principles?

[Fair enough.

1)  I'm talking manifest enilightenment here.  Habermas made a speech on
the modernist project in 1980, and talked about the manifest desire to
realise and bestow widely the cognitive potentials of science, morality/law
and art.  In short, to enrich human life by way of rational principles.  As
Weber had it, this thinking made for compartmentalising knowledges (hence
ever more incommensurability and esotericism and expertise and bureaucratic
elites etc).  Well, Habermas reckons we're throwing out the baby with the
bathwater if we respond to the negative side of all this by rejecting the
rational and ngating expertise to the point of denouncing experts.  As
Habermas has it, the *intentions* of the enlightenment remain fundamentally
necessary to nourish hope, inform change and fulfill human lives.  Hence,
the modernist project is incomplete.  There's more to be gained down that
road, if you like.

Too right.

2)  If you are proudly ahistorical in your theorising and if you see all
recorded history as nothing but a contending discourse of a status no
different from any other, then you avoid the charge of modernist
historicism.  Where is the pomo who would dare defend history as one
process and EP Thompson's unbelievable research skills as inherently better
history than that of one who does not use or cannot even find primary
sources or contemporary artefacts to fashion their argument?  I can't think
of one.

3)  Pomos rule in large chunks of Oz academe.  You don't get anywhere
quoting Smith, Ricardo or Marx to people whose whole self-concept is based
on their negation (often sight unseen).  I was, and remain, convinced that
pomos can be persuaded (or damned, if spiteful recreation is your aim) with
recourse to the vaccuous obfuscations that come from the mouths of their
own champions.  The unreflectively ontologising Foucault, the nonsensical
Lacan, the circular reasoning of late Giddens, the inconsistent pragmatism
of Rorty, the Derridean impossibility of demonstrably extant human
communication, the inability of Levinas to find ethics where there is no
subject, blah blah blah ...

>> 'the unity of the objectivity of possible objects of experience is formed
>> not in transcendental consciousness but in the behavioural system of
>> instrumental action.'
>>
>Which means?

[I thought this was where Rorty decided he could bring Habermas into line
with his own champion.  Dewey of the 'truth is what works in practice at
the time' school.]

>> The Kantian distinction, between that which can be known and that which is,
>> has thus lost its relevance.
>>
>Pure idealism.

[I remain confused as to just what Marxian materialism amounts to in terms
of the old idealist-materialist dichotomy.  Have I got Marx right here:
Unknowable reality conditions, informs and delimits possible perceptions ->
these perceptions condition, inform and delimit possible actions -> these
actions condition unknowable reality -> next verse same as the first.  If
I'm wrong, it's because I unconsciously remain an idealist.  If I'm right,
it might be because Marx's notion of materialism was, as he said very
loudly, not Feuerbach's.]

>They certainly are. But why shouldn't we pursue all three sets of
>questions? You don't have to do epistemology or metaphysics if it bores
>you, Dick, but who appointed you the discourse cop to say that I can't if
>it doesn't bore _me_? I asked Dick this many times over the years, He
>never has any satisfactory answers.

[Here I'm with you.]

>> Please ridicule this by return mail, as I'm off in twenty-four hours.
>
>Consider it ridiculed.

[I can't complain.  Is the above uniformly ridiculous too?

I've a bad feeling I know the answer, but a bloke has to have a go, eh?

Good on you, Justin and as happy a new year as possible to all.

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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