On Sat, 29 Jan 2000 03:04:26 -0500 rc-am <rcollins at netlink.com.au> wrote:
> Rob wrote:
> >(agreeing with ol' Jurgen the whole way) we essentially must presuppose the
> >'ideal speech situation' in our practice - thus we must open ourselves to
> >questions concerning the truth and acceptability in and of our speech acts.
> >This ideal, and our implicit commitment to it, seems inescapably 'there' in
> >any social organisation aspiring to democratic legitimacy, I reckon.
Hey Rob. I missed this the first time. I'm quite shocked that you agree with "ol' Jurgen" here: "we essentially must presuppose the ideal speech situation in our practice." Most Habermasians swallow the performative contradiction / "transcendence within" argument... but it has *serious* problems - politically, logically, and theoretically. First, Habermas begs the question to get to his argument. The validity of reconstructive sciences is based on the validity of three separate "value spheres" distinguished by communicative actions. Communicative actions, then, are validated on the basis of reconstructive sciences (yes, it's all in TCA Vol 1 & 2)(I'm giving you the conclusion, not the argument). So, to avoid a vicious circle, which would render his theory trivial from the standpoint of universality, he *translates* the idea of subjectivity into language. In other words, when Benhabib criticizes Habermas for upholding a model of the "generalized other" - which is a definitional identity - Habermas' response is this: Yeah, that's the point! As he notes in TCA vol 1, all affectivity must be eliminated in discursive procedures, there is no room for irony, play whatever. Furthermore, he makes a razor sharp distinction between the just and the good. The good *is* the affective elements of what it means to be human - what Agnes Heller calls the "romantic elements of Marx" (who charges Habermas with this: "Habermasian man has no body, no feelings...")(Habermas and Marxism, in Habermas: Debates). So, as a result of all this fiddling, Habermas's "subject" is language (worse, Habermas' model of cognitive development is teleological - there is only ONE kind of competent subject)(see Stella Gaon, Review of Politics, "Pluralizing Universal 'Man.'" To add to this, he obliderates the Freudian unconscious in this reinterpretation of psychoanalysis (knowledge and human interests). For Habermas, the uncs *is* language, distorted language. In other words, there is no prelinguistic or nonlinguistic reality - it's all language in the wrong order. If you don't much like Lacan ("the uncs is struc like a lang") then you should really hate Habermas who is far more of a fundamentalist about this.
However, this may or may not directly speak to the idea of "transcendence within" (ideal speech situation). To address you point directly - Albrecht Wellmer has a fantastic article about this in his book Endgames. Basically, it isn't *universal idealizations* that are present in language (which, to be honest, is just weird - EVERYONE EVERYWHERE THROUGHOUT ALL TIME MAKES AN IDENTICAL INTUITIVE PRESSUPOSITION? Come on). Rather, when we use langauge we make PERFORMATIVE idealizations. We draw from our local linguistic structures, ideals and so on. The up side, this makes good sense. The down side, it is more difficult to establish a universalist moral theory from this. I'm really cutting the arguments down here - only conclusions, stuff for thought (as my friend Stephan once phrased it while talking about Levi-Strauss, "thinking is good to eat").
Actually, on another note, I was quite surprised to read that you accept Habermas's argument here - esp. when you had spoken so glowingly about Postone's book. Postone's argument isn't incongruent with the one I'm making here. Basically, Postone is arguing that labour must be considered when looking at language use. Ie. labour, work and so on affect how we use language - in other words - labour serves as part of the performative ground of linguistic utterances. Postone is preserving (at least as far as I understand him) those romantic elements of Marx that Habermas liquidates for the sake of univerality.
Angela wrote:
> I've been thinking about Habermas a little more, and I can't help but think
his stuff is really tied to the post-war west german experience of the
police state and the terrorist corollary, hence H's assumption of the
figure of 'democracy' as the indisputable terrain of rhetorical legitimation,
as a simultaneous move both against and around terrorism, the CD machinery and
east german 'totalitarianism'.
This might well be the case, but it doesn't confront his argument (I'm assuming you know this, which is why I'm tried to flesh this comment out above). It's more like an ad hoc explanation. Although if we follow Wellmer here, then this certainly makes more sense. Habermas' reading of language comes out of a certain democratic imaginary, a democratic ethos which upholds specific historically conditioned ideals - imaginary in the Castoriadisian sense (I think a more powerful critique can be made from a Lacanian perspective, via Zizek, but I know that Rob thinks this is bunko, so I'll keep to Castoriadis, Wellmer, Heller, Benhabib, and Postone here).
> For instance, wasn't the Battle over Seattle within the left in many ways
about the ways in which the 'demos' is being delimited through the figure of
those rule-breaking anarchists; or isn't much of the pain and flame of e-list
discussions a feature of the assumption that the other speak 'the same
language' (must perforce ask the same questions, etc) as a matter of course; or
isn't australian politics more amenable to a discussion of representation and
violence when we come to thinking about, say, the ways in which Howard stands
up to give his Invasion Day address and announces a new round of dole-bludger
floggings?
The irony of all of this is the, if one follows my reasoning, then Judith Butler and Habermas are two sides of the same coin. Habermas reduces the idea of subjectivity to language, by liquidating the Freudian uncs, and Butler does the same thing, she opts for transgressive politics and, in doing so, splinters the imaginary and equates it with the fragmentation in the symbolic (in other words, she reduces the Freudian uncs to language as well). While Habermas works with consensus, Butler works with transgression of norms. They're both in the same situation from opposite ends. This isn't good news for modernists who like Habemas and don't like Butler, likewise, its bad news for those who don't like modernism in favor of postmodernism. I am amused by the paradox.
ken
PS. I've put all of this in an article and submitted it to Critical Horizons, a new Austrialia journal.