>I'd like to see that Habermas argument.
Well, I did warn you it was meandering, long and superficial. Here 'tis:
So nice to see Habermas brought up here. I too think Habermas does a better job on the pomos (for I agree with EMW's project if not always her argumentative method) than anyone else. In my jaundiced view, the Pomos simply have to be answered if there's a practical left agenda to be salvaged/reconstructed. But the business of answering them is not simply one of defence against admittedly difficult questions; it is also one of asking some of our own. Habermas comes in particularly handy because his argument here also help us stick it to the neoclassicists.
(This is awfully long (sorry) and much of it is drawn from Geuss's *The Idea Of Critical Theory* which I read the other day (I only have time for short books these days). And I apologise if my amateur wrestling with some basics offends/bores the more sophisticated among you.)
H goes along with the scientists, and therefore at least the ostensible epistemological position of the neoclassicists, right up to the point where they say the normative statement is a meaningless category because there exists no way to test its validity scientifically, ie. by way of observed correspondence with the only world that counts - the one we can see and count. Simply put, if you can't count it, for this mob, it doesn't count.
But H seeks to show that one set of normative beliefs can indeed be more rational than another. As scientific knowledge does not allow such a claim, the claim of scientific knowledge to be the only tenable mode of knowledge must be opposed. For H there is also normative knowledge. In this category, the 'either/or' demand of scientism is replaced by distinction by degree. Which is how we tend to think, I reckon. We can't, after all, not hold normative beliefs.
This is important because the question neoclassicists never entertain (precisely because they are scientists) is: 'What is it that legitimates our desires such that the scientific claim can be made that a particular mode of social organisation (eg. the decontextualised 'market') confers the optimum balance between the meeting of desires and the associated regulation of human lives?'
For the neoclassicist, norms/desires/needs all reduce to 'demand', which they see as a natural phenomenon which enjoys the gratifying characteristics of observability and countability. As a legitimating category for social organisation/regulation/repression, 'demand' is all-powerful just now.
Marxists speak of 'interests' - a category that allows us to [re]ask the question: 'How best do we integrate our desires into 'the good life'. A more holistic and potentially radical question because it treats the category of demand as problematic (the satisfaction of that demand may be inconsistent with the buyer's interests because of social costs or incompatibility with components of even a self-articulated 'good life'.)
Now, the Franks in general distinguished themselves from other salient lefties du juour by incorporating a bit of Freud in their efforts to put Marxism and their own depressing experiences together (less true of H, who has generally been an altogether cheerier chap). The idea is that scientific knowledge (as described above, anyway) gives you all the empirical data there is, but still not, in itself, a reliable pointer to 'the good life' (exit Walras, Jevons and Pareto).
What H reckons (and it's in Marcuse's Eros & Civilisation too) is that psychoanalysis is the model for human emancipation. Our institutions are produced and reproduced by us because they enable a mode of social life - in this they must also constrain. One thing thus constrained is our proclivity to think outside those institutions once we've constructed 'em. Now, if you go along with the proposition that these institutions may come to a point where they repress more than they enable, then we're in the province of Freudian delusion. And in need of the same sort of remedy - to make ourselves conscious of the unconscious component of our motivations for believing and doing what we do. We may find determinate aspects in ourselves that we might not think legitimate, and to the extent these are institutionally constituted, we may then decide the institutional structure is itself illegitimate. The institutions are dominating us to the extent they are making us act in ways we do not feel we should act.
The only way institutions should be transformed or retired is (a) by their architects, who are (b) conscious of why they're doing it. Their motivation need not be a transcendental truth (and I don't think it matters whether you believe there are any such things here - the young Habermas followed daddy Adorno's idea of the ultimate arbiter as the epistemic principles that characterise a community in its time and place - this latter point being compatible with Marx's demands we always take history into account).
The older Habermas senses a problem here, and the problem he senses is the one the pomos got hold of. What if your epistemic principles are so much the product of domination that they write a 'good life' from go to woe, and consequently write entirely consistent acts? Beautiful internal coherence and human disaster hand-in-hand! Remember, H grew up in Nazi Germany, when the first generation Franks were already mature intellectuals and most, wisely, absent. Internal criticism won't necessarily get you out of building an Auschwitz (the blunt instrument with which Lyotard likes to beat us modernists about the head and body).
So we need a transcendental category after all.
Habermas thinks he finds it in the human use of language. He starts with the imaginary idea of an 'ideal speech situation' - one where absolutely free and equal people come together (the ideal-type 'citizen') and discuss everything freely and equally for as long as it takes. If truth there be - it be found here. Then H says we definitively enter speech acts with this ideal in our minds, even if counterfactually, because we definitively use language. We all speak a language, and all languages have within them capacities for the making of propositions, requests for clarification and substantiation, and the expression of understanding, agreement or disagreement.
The trouble with all this is, of course, that all this merely expresses an attachment to democratic priorities based on a belief in the decisive capacity of humans to reason. The pomos'll tell you (as does the extremely sympathetic Raymond Geuss) that this is nought but an historically specific amalgam.
This is getting way too long, and as a confirmed Kantian (in as far as 'treat all other humans as ends in themselves' goes) on matters moral, and a confirmed disgruntled participant in an order that demonstrably does not and can not realise this imperative, I say 'bewdy, Jurgen'! The point is, I think, not to give ground where it need not be given. If Kant and Habermas have made propositions, then it is the pomo's role to question them. Fine. Hume once did something just like this. But they do more than this. They call for the overthrow of our tyrannical discourse, and Hume did not go that far. If you want to replace one discourse with another, or even all others (and I reckon an *a priori* claim of strong linguistic constructionism and a logically concomitant incommensurable otherness constitutes a contending discourse) then I reckon we can ask the Lyotards of this benighted world, 'how does treating Nazism as a contending discourse or a linguistic epiphenomenon avoid an Auschwitz?' or 'how could rational argument involving all lead to an Auschwitz (I can't see the Jews, homosexuals, Slavs and socialists signing off on that one for a start)' or 'how is your universe of incommensurably different selves effectively different from a world inhabited by homo oeconomicus, that creation of scientism du juour?' (Habermas gets near this when he avers that pomos are new conservatives in his 1980 Frankfurt speech, I think).
I just can't understand what the pomo view, as I understand it, offers anybody! And to the degree they allow the likes of me to ask 'em anything (and I reckon they conveniently have it available to them to argue I can't), what standard and sort of substantiation should satisfy me?
At least Habermas follows Adorno in being practical in that he provides an epistemically convivial measuring stick against which we can test our presuppositions and actions in our time and place. If he has to go to a Kantian position for his legitimacy, let him. Much of our past could have done with a bit of Kant. One place Kant could not have taken us is Auschwitz. In fact, contra Lyotard, I don't think modernism in general could have. All that 'untermensch' and 'Valhalla' stuff - so fundamental to Nazism in general and Auschwitz in particular - didn't come from modernist paradigm, but from well before such constructions - and scientism, with all its arrogant narrowness, would have asked, and did ask - wherever it was allowed to speak - for observable and quantifiable evidence for those propositions. After all, phrenology, alchemy, astrology and religion all failed those tests long before Hitler emitted his first squawk.
'Tis surely sad that formal qualifications of expertise and a capacity for scientistic discourse are now requirements for entry into public debate (the public ascendance of the economist) but 'twould be sadder still if there were nobody there but a bunch of (incidentally equally qualified and expert) pomos desperately searching their universe of linguistically constructed fragmented non-subjects for a reason to do anything.
As Habermas says, to throw out a subject equipped with communicative and emancipatory rationality - and thereby intersubjectivity and its role as arbiter of norms - is to abandon 'the internal theoretical dynamic which constantly propels the sciences - and the self-reflexion of the sciences as well - beyond the creation of merely technologically exploitable knowledge.'
And to throw out all science, for, unlike H, Lyotard seems to include all scientific or instrumental rationality under 'scientism', is to throw out not just the Zyklon B, but also a discourse that would, had it indeed been the privileged discourse of the day, subverted the very underpinnings of Nazism long before that dreadful concoction was ever deployed.
No more long diatribes. Promise.
Cheers, Rob.