>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> > In other
> > words, Habermas's "ideal speech situation" and "lifeworld" are dialectical
> > twins (individualism and organicism) that exist to obscure the primary &
> > secondary contradictions of the bourgeois civil society: class, gender,
> > race, and so on.
you know yoshie, i didn't read this til i saw daniel's post. don't have time to get into it at the moment, but just let me say now that you probably actually need to read habermas to understand what "ideal speech situation" and "lifeword" mean in his work. the ISS doesn't exist. H doesn't say it does. the lifeworld, errr, H completely recognizes its backwardness because that's why he'd like to get rid of capitalism -- in order to make it more rational b/c he argues that the lifeworld fosters racism, sexism, bigotry, etc. but last time i checked your reaction to H was Yuck.
carrol, sorry, but i'm swamped with work. don't even have time to post to my own list. as best as i can tell, though, we're not even on the same page. i am a sociologist. i know how it works and what it's possible to say about individuals, about small groups, about institutions, social structures, social movements, etc and i know how you study them in order to ask those questions. as best as i can tell, studying psyches is no different than studying other social phenom. i'd urge you to read marxist feminists who drew on freud before you dismiss what they were up to. it's quite interesting stuff. the reason why they felt sexism might just be more entrenched than racism is that, at the time, working in marxist organizations, with marxist men, they saw a lot of men capable of fighting racism on all sorts of levels but those men still treated them like shit --in terms of their sexual, personal, work relations-- so they turned to psychoanalytic theory. didn't use to think it was terribly persuasive--the concern that marxist men hadn't taken women seriously -- of course now that i've been hanging around LBO and see differently i concede the point they were making
if you'd like to read some interesting stuff on how psychoan is used in organizational settings, see larry hirschhorn's work. don't agree with it.
it is thought provoking though.