> but institutions *do* suggest and they do so in and thru
people, their re/actions, their statements, etc.
Don't you think institutions do more than merely "suggest" patterns of behaviour? And I'm wondering about the role of a bureacracy in terms of normativity...
> is anyone being forced?
Is anything free? The mechanisms that enforce list behaviour, I suspect, are fairly subtle, but they still exist.
> and, as you know, habermas is hardly a model of the good
discourse ethicist. he's pretty awful in Philosophical
Discourses of Modernity, no?
But he invented discourse ethics! Bust my gut. Habermas truly is a model of the good discourse ethicist, except in regards to Derrida... he's responded to almost all of his critics publically, his systematically outlined his program and given reasons... My disagreement with Habermas is mostly theoretical... and I could do without some of his politics but not all. In the beginning of Between Facts and Norms, he notes that communicative actions seeks to explore the anarchistic core of a democratic ethos (something like that). Yes, I definitely agree with this.
> dah!! getouttaheeya! the capitalist market is an institution
and its normative practices are not at all about not hurting one
another. its moral imperative is "do whatever you want but
suffer the consequences if its not rational"
Damn Kell, that's a brilliant spin on existentialism. Yer killin' me this mourning.
> now THATS procedural
I'll buy that! Give me three procedures and a validity claim!
> who said anyone has to love others in order to engage them
in political dialogue?
Well, if love is about the encounter with sameness (as it is for Lacan and Salecl) then in order to engage in dialogue, you have to look into someone elses eyes and see something of you in them (Habermas actually says this somewhere, Postmetaphysical Thinking I think). So there has to be love in order for everyone to sit at the table - otherwise known as egalitarian reciprocity and universal moral respect.
> i don't love anyone here and yet i try my best to listen to
them. when i think they're up the creek without a paddle i try to
tell them and explain why i think this.
You tell them because you care about them.
> ??? you mean the difference between children and adults?
or make an evaluative judgment about who's mature enough
to engage in a dialogic forum? well tough luck but some
people don't belong. everyone can start out belonging, but
they have to prove themselves capable of engaging in
reasonable discourse.
This is interesting, everyone starts out belonging. So people are weeded out on the basis of their inability to produce good counterarguments. So the person in a coma is out right away, as are infants and such. If you withdraw from conversation you can either have an advocate speak for you, or you can simply pass a prejudgement, "I'll be fine with whatever you decide" with the option of rejoinder later.... but this is all wrong... Habermas notes that his model isn't representative of reality... it is a theoretical model (supposedly) of counterfactuals... this conversation never (really) takes place... any correlation with reality is a failed one. Anyway, I'm only saying this because I made the mistake earlier of trying to bring it to a concrete level... the real task is to provide a critique of Habermas's discourse ethics on a theoretical level. And I think this can be done pairing Habermas with Sade (have you read that post?).
Shit, I just realized, when you said that I was divorcing DE from the social, you were talking about Discourse Ethics not Dialectic of Enlightenment, right? Maybe not. Where are my files!
> if they want to hit people, then they're out.
"There are only participants in the Enlightenment." Habermas, Theory and Practice.
To continue...
dreamdate ken wrote:
>So we are left with the regulative principle of hope. Isn't this
a bit Blochian? And could it not be said that "raising the idea
of hope to the level of a principle is akin to running amok to
God?"
ken, i usually like to watch you wank and sometimes i help even. i've been a good partner haven't i. but come on ken.......errrr.....ummm....i mean this beating around the bush is getting boring to watch. and i'm like into scopophilia when i'm in the mood but not for damn ever!!!!!!!!!!
No, I was serious. In that passage, where Bernstein talks about hope and discursive rationality being the best thing... isn't this like raising the idea of hope to a principle? We can make the world a better place because we must make the world a better place (I HOPE). In other words, he installs hope at the procedural level, like a regulative ideal. Benhabib talks about this too, although she doesn't formulate it in terms of hope... rather of anticipatory utopia... (however negatively determined). I don't know. It really sounds religious... but this is where Lacan becomes interesting. There is no pathological content per ce, rather, it is how we relate to this content that is pathological. As I've mentioned before, I think Habermas is a pervert, because he relies on consensus to secure "knowledge." Once consensus has been reached, actors act as if they know (same goes for the reconstructive sciences). And Butler is the same. Actors must know the law in order to trangess it. This is a denial of the Freudian unconscious. Perversion grants no access to the unconscious because it pretends to know... whereas hysteria is always questioning... this is why both Butler's drag performer and Habermas's rational citizen BOTH coincide with capitalism... a perverted system.
ken, bring on the comps!