Rob Schaap wrote:
> I believe communication can not be torn from the category of labour, and believe Habermas only did so (in *Knowledge and Human Interests*) because he swallowed the limited Ricardian conception of labour (as concrete, hence instrumental). Had he grasped the meaning of 'abstract labour', he'd have realised he was already talking
> about humans relating to (inter alia) humans, albeit as it manifests under capital. Were capital to be deemed a categorically contradicted dynamic, we would then have the additional dimension Habermas needs to make his insight interesting.
I'd probably lean more toward saying that Habermas did so on the advise of Hegel's earlier work (see his essay Labour and Interaction). I completely argree though, had Habermas remained closer to Marx, recognizing that communication itself is embodied labour (Peter Goodrich, it seems to me, accomplishes just this with regards to the law in his introduction to Oedipus Lex). I suppose it really comes down to the idea that Habemas was dissatisfied with the negativity of the FS, esp. the idea of 'working through.' Although he uses the phrase, and has written about it, I'm not sure he takes seriously the mourning & melancholia aspects of working through. He seems all too happy to set out the normative standards prior to the horse that does the work... I think Postone (as you've mentioned before) is one of the few people (perhaps Agnes Heller as well) to take Habermas to task on this.
sorrow and solidarity, ken