> that's it! i have it now! everyone should drink scotch and
play pool.
Fair enough. I once sunk the centered 8-ball off a break.
> the power of the state/captial is so fucking great
we have to use the juridco-legal system which it created and
turn its own creation back on itself. this further depletes us of
imagining that we have any substantive democratic practices
that are capable of change, protest, rebellion, revolution. this
was what weber called "a polar night of icy darkness and
hardness"
Aren't human rights bureaucratic?
And the idea that bureaucracy "depletes us of imagining" is really interesting. Why is that?
> and i think bernstein's right that adorno and horkheimer's
problem was they undertheorized rationality and
rationalization or rather that weber himself was confused. you
can see it already in horkheimer's 1930s essays on critical
theory and then in _eclipse of reason_ where the only
hope is the lonely marginalized intellectual who heroically
resuscitates the possiblities of social science.
Noam Chomsky? Angela Davis? ...
I think Horkheimer changed his view about this in his later work - esp. after Dialectic of Enlightenment - where the lone intellectual became an "imaginary witness."
> this is sociology's critique of kant: the opposition b/ pure
and practical reason is based on a set of philosophical
conundrums that it can't escape coz he's theology. tho soc
is theology too, eh?
I don't get it. Do you mean that Habermas provides a critique of Kant into order to subordinate the monological process of self-relfection and moral testing with an action theoretic?
I think what Habermas fails to understand here is that the lifeworld is more akin to Lacan's imaginary than it is Weber's rationalization...
> and you can't get rid of them for to get rid of them is a
demand to impose a new normative ethos, "no one should
judge others' behavior" and you'll demand that all institutions
operate this way. on my view, that's the most incredibly
sneaky mechanism of social control, and modeled on the
market ethos of social control where we live in a 'marketplace
of ideas'.
Yeah, no one should judge. Guess where that comes from. That's what I mean about not giving up on desire. Take the Sati ritual for instance. People are unwilling to be critical of it because it makes a religious claim.... so it is covered under "spellbinding power" and "I have no right to interfere with the religious beliefs of other people even if I disagree." This is the surrender of desire. You give up on universality, on speaking your mind.
> the ones who maintained that all theoretical positions
were equally valid.
Again, this seems to be a "giving up on desire" (not to mention any sort of reason!). It is one thing to support theoretical pluralism on an institutional level (academic freedom) but it is another to say that everything is true. As Hegel might has said, the actual is rational, and the rational is actual. I guess this is the end of ideology thesis run amok.
> i did fear harsh judgment from those who openly
argued that there were just a few right ways to be a
sociologist.
Funny eh? All theoretical approaches are valid, except for the ones arbitrarily chosen to be invalid or everyone is wrong except me.
> but back to disc. ethics. habermas is reconstructing them,
as you say. so he's asking for substantive democratic
practices, for a space in which the substantive ends *do*
matter and are made public rather than hidden behind the
appeal to 'i'm okay, you're okay' marketplace of ideas.
Actually, he's asking for normative practices - not substantive practices. The procedure of justification is, for Habermas, an impartial one (minted with the procedure of application to fill impartiality out). That's the problem. This is why Habermas is sadistic in theory. The substance comes from the validity claims *after* they have been redeemed. Like Kant, the substance is not prior to the procedure (ie. the moral law). But this places Habermas is the same problematic position. In Kant, the highest good (the fulfilment of the law) and diabolical evil (evil for the sake of evil alone) become indistinguishable.
So the validity claim that has passed, or the validity claim that was never raised, are identical. Benhabib's corrective here is to establish procedures openely as substantive, which is why she relies on an anticipatory utopia - a hope that these procedures are reflexive enough...
> i still see this fundamental need to resusitate democractic
practices b/c of the apathy which i see as about our inability to
imagine an alternative, to imagine that we can change
things through democratic social movements and protest and
rebellion. so my 'hope' is that sociality will rescue us. an
idealistic fool, i am.
This is why procedures are the problem. They generate apathy. Habermas gives the democrat two options: participate or agree with what has been decided. Well, give that arguments about policy are boring, people opt out. People are more inclined to work for Amnesty International than they are vote. Why? Well, AI is more interesting. So yeah, imagination has lots to do with this.
> and i was cracking up over that flick where the guy couldn't
deal with the priest knowing about the premarital escapade so
he had to risk his life coming in through the window in order to
get off.
Evil as an ethical act! If you risk consensus, you risk ethical suicide.
> and isn't this idea of democratization in the interest of
always questioning?
Not for Habermas. Procedures are about interrogation. The idea of democracy as a process or a regime provide a different view.
ken