Put the partiality of the participants in dialogue is absolutely incorporated, in fact, without full participation, of all expressive moments of the subject, artistic flare and so on, then there could be no discourse to begin with. The aesthetic-expressive emerges through the dialogue. Habermas maintains, absolutely, that there is an aesthetic moment entails. However, we can differentiate, through discourse, different value spheres: thus questions of truth and rightness are distinguished from claims regarding taste (although there is no reason, a priori, to assume that questions of taste will not find consensus either, although this must be decided by the participants, and most indications point toward no, there will not be universal accord on questions of art or aesthetics. But this doesn't change the different orientation taken up in terms of rightness. We can distinguish - through the dialogical process - between questions that admit of truth and questions that admit of non-generalizable evaluative concerns. For instance, an interest in having all the money in the world is a non-generalizable interest, or it at least we can anticipate that it will not meet with universal assent.
> It's like trying to figure out how video cards work by
>analyzing the packaging on the box; you might get glimpses of interesting
>things, but if you don't work through what Adorno calls
>experience-content, you end up with a bunch of pre-dialectical
>observations that a whole lot of stuff is being communicated out there,
>somewhere (which ties in to the fact that Habermas is appallingly clueless
>about Adorno, especially Adorno's last, greatest works). Habermas'
>communicative rationalism is the Central European flip side of Derrida's
>telecommunicatory idealism; both have interesting things to say about
>certain local features of Eurocapital, but don't give us anything
>approaching Bourdieu's global habitus and field, e.g.
It's true that Habermas doesn't know much about Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, he admits as much, and usually defaults to Wellmer on this score. But Habermas has read Negative Dialectics and Dialectic of Enlightenment... and, I agree, in general, Habermas's reading is at best contradictory / ambivalent, and, at worse, simple nonsense. However, Habermas is very sensitive to experience-content, this is precisely what constitutes a living discourse. No a wink of ones experience is not admitted into the dialogical process. In comes out of the partiality and plurality of the participants. Habermas is steering between two poles: objectivism and subjectivism. For him, subjectivism, as relativism, is epistemologically incoherent, because it demands that the subject know, transcendentally, what the other subject is thinking in order to know that it is 'absolutely' different (his take on this is no different than Adorno's). Likewise for objectivism, which eclipses the subject altogether, thus fusing objectivist and subjectivist logic (this is also the argument of Horkheimer and Adorno in DofE). However, Habermas's position makes the claim of a paradoxical partiality toward impartiality. Through discourse we can subject norms and truth claims to rational debate, and drawing on our contextually embedded selves, explicate our intuitions in terms of arguments, with the help of our friends and neighbours. In doing so, the collective participants might - and Habermas emphasizes might - be able to find some sort of agreement. He points out that the conditions are formal, but this doesn't mean they can be actualized, although it doesn't mean they can't be either, but that we can act on these idealizations as a guide for coming to and understanding with other people and then, perhaps, reach an agreement. I'm not sure how this 100% participatory dialogue excludes aesthetic cognition... he goes out of his way to make sure that it is included, but warns that we shouldn't expect agreement on such matters (although he doesn't rule it out, he can't, only we can, in an actual discourse).
ken
As for Bourdieu, I have only read a single small newspaper article by him. I regard this to be *the* tragedy of my academic career thus far. He's on the top of my list after I finish this 'necessary' evil they call the dissertation. Maybe next year I'll have a Bourdieuesque critique of Habermas and reKant everything.