>Simple questions: do you think mutual understanding is possible?
Mebbe. But I reckon it hardly matters. You and I go at it as if it is - and there's the human project in a nutshell, eh?
>And I'm not
>talking about an agreement about what to make for dinner.
Well, Habermas is. I mean, coordinated action is the upshot of agreement, which is the possibility engendered by mutual understanding, which is the upshot of communicative action. Given that we do act together (which is what living together amounts to), do seek mutual understanding, and can try to fashion our processes and structures such that power distortions are less than otherwise they might be (first amendments, public service broadcasting, universal service obligations on telcos, public education systems, gender-race reappraisals, secret ballots, simple manners etc might all be read as such attempts), it seems an ideal well and truly embedded in us. Some might argue Habermas is complicit with those who disguise substantial distortions with purely formal focii on free communication (and some pomo does this), and some (like me) argue that he helps highlight whatever the gap between the currently real and the immanently ideal might be. I reckon Marx is a very handy ally in this latter project (Habermas gives you the yardstick and Marx helps you look for the difficult-to-see shortcomings).
>What happens to us
>when we agree about something? What are the limits? the conditions? How
>do we
>know that we agree? What empirical conditions must be present for an
>agreement
>to be said to exist - from first, second, and third person perspectives?
All we have to go on is the empirical condition that all say they agree. If you can't get beyond it, live with it, I reckon - death'n'taxes sorta thing.
>Is it possible to intuite from within communicative relations the
>(ultimate) core of such relations without contradiction?
Nope. So don't anguish yourself by trying. Derrida's eternal chain of possible signifiers is just so much wank, I reckon. Taken to its logical limits, it puts Derrida in a performative contradiction (nothing can mean because anything can mean anything, yet I pursue a sharing of a meaning other than, eg, Habermas's meaning). Taken less far, it's the trivial potpourri of inter-related claims that you can't know whether your intended meaning is truly shared by the person who proclaims their understanding; that meaning is historically contingent; and that even where speaking and hearing occur at the one moment in the one room within the one speech community, you might get a a bunch of concepts in one head other than those intended by the other. As you can only check on this via communication, communication is the end of the thing. Beyond it lie only spectral dragons.
>It seems to me that there is always a "vanishing mediator" in all of this.
>Whenever you try to illuminate something from within that thing, you need to
>break away from it
Some things you can get outside and some things you can't. We can't get outside communication (although the fact that babies - and at least one species - become languaged creatures suggests to me there is a little room outside language). You do the best with it you can, and you realise it might have a bearing on what you think 'best' - although that, too, ain't worth worrying about. The *theoretically* contingent best is always to be *practically* conceived as a metaphysical thing, I reckon. Remember, it's always up for grabs (Habermas's core point), so it'll chop and change over time.
>(is it possible to make class struggle transparent to
>those who actually *experience* and *live* within actual class struggle?)
Yep. We're all in class relations, but we all live within other relations, too. Furthermore, a multitude of possibilities persist in class relations themselves: they're as dependent on cooperation as they are on competition, on peace as much as on combat, on equality as much as on hierarchy, on sharing as much as on witholding, and on the collective as much as on the individual. We've plenty in that daily experience to grasp possibilities of extending some of those and delimiting others. Just as a little tectonic shift might take the pressure off this part of the plate-front, it might bring closer a huge earthquake elsewhere or at a later date. Revolutionary possibilities today, and actual social revolutions in other places and times, might usefully be viewed in such terms, to my mind. I think that (at least the younger) Habermas sees revolution as immanent in these ongoing, shared, and often apparently minor, reflections on making things 'righter'.
>(can
>you derive an ontology from within historical contingency?).
Epistemologies produce ontologies and ontologies produce epistemologies - this stuff changes over time, too - coz it's part of the above, no? All I persist in saying here is that it's fine to recognise the possibility/probability/theoretical unavoidability of historical contingency - it's central to Marx's materialist conception of history, after all - but all that greyness has to be either black or white in the moment of practical necessitry/action. It's metaphysically true in the practical sense that you assume the pool is full before you jump off the diving board. Just like you and I assume the metaphysical truth of mutual understanding when we blather at each other. It just has to be so!
That's my metaphysical claim for the day, anyway.
>In short, there is something fundamentally un-understandable
>about understanding. Which means, for all intents and purposes, that any
>agreement reached must be treated as suspect. We must tarry with the
>negative
>a bit longer. The conversation continues, and consensus taken to be a
>problematic burb.
You said it! 'The conversation continues'. I treat the truth du juour as an eternal transcendental truth, until my sensuous-being-in-the-world suggests a new eternal transcendental truth. And, yes, agreement is theoretically never proven - but empirical agreement is all we can go on - so we go on it. No problem, for mine.
>My Lacanian point is this: what Habermas locates with his reconstructive
>sciences is a "master signifier" - a quilting point of all symbolic
>matrixes.
>For Habermas, this takes the form of a procedural understanding of
>rationality
>as a moral paradigm, in modern thought, in philosophical terms. In other
>words, Habermas has not "discovered" *the* moral point of view, but has
>unveiled the limits of the moral imaginary of a procedural democratic ethos.
>If read in this way, Habermas can be taken not to outline the final form of a
>democratic society, but the limitations of such a society.
He'd agree with that last bit, I reckon, but perhaps not in the sense you intend. Anyway, Habermas's proceduralism is a fine way for us to reflect upon how far we are from the ideals upon which our order legitimates itself and how we might get a little closer to those limitations of yours (they look more like tantalising possibilities to me).
Anyway, we won't know where democracy takes us, and where it can't, till we try some.
Cheers, Rob.