Communicative action has nothing to do with 'the whole.'
We coordinate our action through linguistic means. Language is privileged *only* in the sense that we cannot coordinate action without it. This does not at all discount instrumental, purposive, or strategic action - nor does it discourse issues of power and labour, nor the sacred or the pre-linguistic. All of this is within the realm of mutual recognition, mutual understanding.
>I'd even say, again not trying to offend or namecall, that to reduce the
>other way is something analogous to Marx's commodity fetishism -
>linguistic fetishism. Commodity fetishism is the substitution of
>relationships between things for relationships between people ,
>briefly. Analogously, we don't want to substitute the relationship among
>words and symbols for the relationships among people which they represent.
But Habermas accounts for this. Yes, we can treat people like objects, yes - people are treated like objects, but this can only come *after* socialization. Prior to socialization, the concept "subject" and "object" are not applicable (for instance, an infant does not distinguish between subject and object at the earliest stages, but by about 6 months evidence shows that such distinctions begin to emerge - sexuation, for instance, is concretized by one or two. Habermas is not at all a linguistic fetishist.
Basically, what you are accusing Habermas of is this: that because he points out that A comes before B, he's fetishizing A.
>CB: Language is a main medium of the coordination of our activity, as well
>as being itself an activity. (In capitalism, the production and exchange
>of commodities also is a main medium of coordination of our activities. )
>
>However, what seems to me really big in language and culture (symbolic
>action) is that they "coordinate" the activity of the living generation
>with the activity of many past generations. Thereby it is an enormous
>expansion of the living generation's social being. The individuals of a
>living generation get to vicariously share the experiences of many , many
>other individuals from the past, thereby "coordinating" their
>activities. This also gives rise to a living generation purposefully
>communicating to future generations through symbols, especially language,
>that it leaves behind. So Shakespeare celebrates how his poetry will live
>on. I think the main importance of the symbolic is this role as the
>medium of enormously and qualitatively expanding the social in this way
>into the historical or socio-historical.
How does this contradict anything that Kell or I have argued?
>Of course, this is also a basis for social conservatisms and dogmatisms of
>all types ! For Levi-Straussian structures, the more things change , the
>more they stay the same. I won't get into this paradox for
>revolutionaries right now (!)
Which is why Habermas grounds his critique in the normative structures of communication. Dogmatism of all sorts is the cementing of language into a rigid form. What is required is critique and reflection on the coagulated symbol (which manifests itself concretely in labour and power) as a means of 'dialecticizing' it. We bring the dogma into something discursive, which means debatable. Normally, these power structures take place beneath the level of consciousness, they simply form the dogma of our lifeworld. But this can be shaken if, and only if, they are called into question. This is a process of self-reflective criticism.
> As far as I know, no other species has anything like this. Bees have
> enormous communication ( and communicative action) within the
> contemporaneous generation, but transgenerational communication among
> bees is nothing like that of humans, as far as we can detect, no ? The
> symbol ( both language and rituals , culture in general ) somehow
> carries out this transgenerational communication. How does it do this so
> powerfully and efficiently ? Even most of the communication within the
> living generation is carried out with a system , most of the elements of
> which are developed by past generations.
Right. Again, you seem to be outlining what Habermas is arguing.
>And what is the symbol, but an essential dialectic - not A is used to
>represent A , a unity and struggle of opposites. A symbol is defined as
>the opposite of an imitation or imitative representation such as a
>drawing. Does this give the symbol its transgenerational communicative
>ability ?
I'm not sure what you mean here. Yes, symbols - as is all language - is 'backed' by some sort of tradition. In discourse, we can debate this, call it into question - contest it. Normally we don't, sometimes we ask for clarification, but usually we let these things slide and assume, however counter-factually, that we share meanings.
>Maybe Habermas says this in a different way, I don't know ? I do think
>that anybody focussed on communication, symbols and language must consider
>these ideas .
And Habermas has spent his entire career doing just this.
>As to your comment on consciousness below, I don't think materialism or
>Marxism denies the existence or effective causality of consciousness, but
>that it sees consciousness as the form and sociality or social relations
>as the substance in relation to consciousness's form. That is ,
>individual's conduct is caused and shaped by their individual
>consciousness, but the main cause of individual consciousness in humans (
>beyond the neuropsychological that Carrol refers to, the privileged
>individualness of which we share to an extent with other species more than
>we share the symbolic with them ) is social or symbolic ( as discussed above).
Right, 'individual consciousnesss' *is* intersubjective. Privatization only occurs when 'instinctual impulses' attach themselves to linguistic forms, thus distorting them and rendering them meaningless, both in terms of the individual and in terms of the community (more or less). You probably wouldn't but it like that though...
So far, nothing that has been posted in this or other threads has convinced me of the fundamental incorrectness of Habermas's proposal. The moment that anyone has offered up an alternative or put an explanation into their own words, it has coincided with much of what Habermas is concerned with.
Communicative action is the fundamental category through which human beings reproduce social relations. Inherent within the logic of communication action is the potential for rationalization, which can occur through the reciprocal process of giving and taking reasons. This is ethically binding insofar as it is necessary for any possible orientation in the world (external, internal, social) and insofar as there is no possible alternative. A person who rejects communicative relations literally exorcizes themself from all living relations - this can happen intentionally or not - and when it does the only possible means of restoring such relations is through language.
ken