>On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, Kenneth MacKendrick wrote:
>
> > dangerous). It is possible to develop, I think, valid standards for human
> > rights.
>
>Sure, the 1947 UN Declaration does a pretty good job of that already,
>though some stuff is obviously missing from the original document
>(cultural rights, economic rights, etc.). But that's not the point; anyone
>can sit back and say, gee, people ought to be really, really nice to each
>other, and all that torture and murder and exploitation is, like, you
>know, bad. That just doesn't explain *why* the total system exist, and how
>it perpetuates itself, through the most terrible and continuing violence;
>any discussion of communicative rationality would have to rise to the
>concrete level of mediatic capital.
Habermas argues that totalizing systems exist come to predominate through steering mechanisms that overburden or altogther destroy various forms of social and political integration. He points to money and labour as two such mechanisms: labour is alienated when it is splintered from the interests of those who are working, capital colonizes the lifeworld, and so on. Such mechanisms secure their force through the fusion of validity and power, creating systematic distortions in social learning and coordinating processes. These mechanisms make communication action impossible, forestalling the possibility of agreement through massive injury and fragmentation. These rifts can only be bridges, healed, whatever, through the renewal of communicative action - or, in a term he borrows from Arendt, communicative power.
> Where is Habermas' analysis of Eurocapitalism? Heck, where's his
> analysis of *German* capitalism?
>Fantasms of phenomenological life-worlds won't cut it against Bertelsmann,
>my friend.
Legitimation Crisis is Habermas's most sustained analysis of European capitalism, a bit out of date since it was written in 1973 (trans. 1975). Similar arguments are raised (and developed) again in The Theory of Communicative Action (1980). In the early 1970s Habermas was the head of a research group and their primary task was to provide an analysis of political economy, and that's pretty much just what they did. One of the collaborators with Habermas, Claus Offe, has written far more on the economy than Habermas (and Habermas is much indebted to his analyses).
> > regards to this 'insane total system' - if the system is total, than any
> > dialectical experience is moot, since we would be living in a
> > post-dialectical world. Perhaps it is more accurate to say, totalizing...?
>
>"Total" does not mean "static". It means that the marketplace encompasses
>everything and everyone on the planet, and that vast flows of capital
>ceaselessly mediate everything and everyone; not an iron cage, rather
>silicon patterns, each time a little different, running non-identical
>software codes.
I'm still not sure that 'total' is the best way to describe it. To call a system total indicates that it is autonomous and self-regulating (this is Habermas's critique of Luhmann). No social system, economic or otherwise, can exist without reproducing itself in communicative action... which means it is, and not only in principle, open to reversal, critique, or elimination.
ken