>Yes and no. Think about it this way. How do you reinforce
>something that does not exist?
i shouldn't have said that ideals don't exist. they do in the sense that people have ideas about how things should work or the way things should be.
those ideas are shaped by the material conditions in which people live--they learn them through the actions, behaviors, words, etc of others--and, in turn, people acting on those ideals shape others and the material conditions in which they live. etc.
we--you n me--have an ideal of what friendship ought to be like. friendship as a social institution. [there's not really much of one now, but historical research on friendship is interesting --all that stuff on the debates over whether famous friends were gay/lesbian or not. some take the position that we're reading gay/lesbian into relationships that simply took on and exhibited different normative ideals of how one interacted with, spoke and wrote to a friend.] as a social institution it exists in so far as ideals are conveyed through various kinds of practices. the contemp ideal is prob something like this: friends don't use each other as means to ulterior ends. i'm not friends with ken just because i think he might know some important people he can hook me up with so i can advance my career. now, it's an ideal because in practice it may not be black and white. i may, in fact, be friends with ken b/c of his connections. but i might also be friends with ken for other reasons that may have no benefit or use to me whatsoever. in fact, he might annoy the shit out of me in many ways, but i put up with some of that because i enjoy his company for other reasons. now, i supposed lacan/zizek would like to talk about pleasure, neurosis, etc and so forth....
i'm not quite clear on why this is so difficult to grasp. it seems to me that it resolves some of these issues that are like cul-de-sacs that you like to circle around on your ten speed. but i realize that your thesis requires these cul-de-sacs. so.
that part i snipped... i haven't a klew what you're talking about. i get it slightly...not in the mood right now to really try harder. but you know i love you anyway.
>I'm totally cool with ideals. But *not* as universals.
and yet, habermas isn't claiming them *as* universals in the sense you mean. again, this is why i say you have to see hab as a sociologist too, not only a philosopher. right or wrong, sociology did try to deal with the epistemological conundrums kant left us by negotiating the opposition--mediating it by bringing in the *social* which kant leaves out.
scottish enlightenment comes into play here....
>You know, I've been harping on this emphatic reason bit for
>years now and I think I'm actually going to have to stop
>using the term. If emphatic reason signifies the
>convergence of prescriptive and descriptive elements...
>then I have to assume that such elements *could* be
>distinguished. I can't assume this. So I think i've
>actually changed my mind about this. Kind of depressing -
>it was the centre-piece of my thesis, and now I have to
>scrap it. But you probably knew this the whole time, eh?
ummmm well i don't think i've put it in quite the same way as you did above. but yeah.... read steven lukes on teh sociology of morality
>For sure. But can you distinguish, with certainty, the
>difference between expressive speech acts and communicative
>ones?
no. but the point is this: why celebrate the fundamental opacity required by the ego such that you then generalize this process in a way that describes how social institutions, social process, social structures work?
as i wrote back in august, and yoshie ought to appreciate this given that bhaskar is a big proponent of this position [and it is a position fundamental to all worthy sociologies], a social theory that accounts for history and social change [not explains in detail, but can *account* for it ontologically/epistemologically] must conceive of individuals and society as two different kinds of things. societies don't work like individuals. they have different properties/qualities that make them objects of our social theories. to collapse them into each other is to produce an undialectical social theory. or rather, you might produce a dialectical social theory but the dialectic amounts to circling around cul-de-sacs on your ten speed.
>Not at all. I'm not celebrating the problem, I'm trying to
>point it out. Opacity contributes to the possibility of
>understanding, not its block.
however, when you complain about a positive dialectics [??] as only capable of totalitarianism, universalism, and so on and so forth, then you are in some sense celebrating it and elevating opacity to the level of a transcendent universal in its own right. it seems to me that it's all unmoored from any meaningful historical context. i disagree with yoshie re gender/sex and psychoanalysis. simply pointing out the problem isn't necessarily reproducing it. but i think it matters *how* you point it out and it matters *how* you theorize sex/gender.
in other words, feminist or race theorists aren't necessarily pointing out gender/race oppression only to reproduce it. they are bodies of thought and political practices that, yes, require the existence of sexism/racism but they are also premised on the goal of eradicating sexism/racism. nonetheless, i think the ways in which these oppressions are conceived, explained and criticized matters --some reproduce oppressions statically, say, for ex, essentializing notions of race.
this is the subtlty yoshie is missing. but so are you.
>Fever in and fever out...
lots of fluids honey bunch. hope you feel better.
> For Habermas, when consensus
>is achieved, or understanding reached - and then
>implimented, this terminates one aspect of ethical
>consciousness. It is possible, in Habermas, in theory at
>least, to "pass" the discursive test. Once this is done,
>moral consciousness disappears ("ethical suicide"). And
>that's precisely when Habermas's theory becomes
>problematic.
ken, as i wrote to you on bad months ago, this ethical suicide bizzo is totally weird. it's like the example i gave you re marx and the claim that the proletariat is the product of capitalism and emerge precisely to dig the grave of capitalism --presumably, in doing so, they dig their own graves because to eliminate capitalism is to eliminate the existence of a proletariat. so it's suicide? so what? there was a footnote in that excerpt i forwarded--about mediating the dialectic and hegel and all that. this is what i'm getting at. now, i suspect that you think that the imaginary is a way of mediating it. but i remain unclear as to what the hell it's all about.......
anyway....
moral consciousness does not disappear. stop thinking about this as so friggin abstract as if to say that once agreement is achieved it's always and forever this way. as if the instance of one agreement, say the consensus we achieve over a common project like building a web page, somehow or other makes moral consciousness disappear. does it? does life stop once we've come to an agreement about what colors we want to use or the name of the zine or whatevA? did we commit ethical suicide? or do we start all over again in disagreement about other things.
>ken
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