HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION

[Ralph Dumain]

Very, very interesting.  I can't quite understand the quibble about
"applying" Habermas, as the test of the valility of any theoretical claim
is to apply it to various situations.

Another question, before I return to your post.  Does Habermas have
anything to say about Hegel?  His theory of communication would seem to
have an analogue to Hegel's aesthetics, and to Hegel's opposition to the
kunstphilosophie of Schelling at al.  I.e. that philosophy is ultimately on
a higher conceptual plane than any system of representation (vorstellung),
that beyond a certain point art cannot do the job of attaining the level of
speculative truth.

Now back to your post (see below):

At 03:19 PM 10/27/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>If procedures do privilege certain kinds of discourses - then it is not, in 
>fact, a universalist ethic. 

I don't understand such a conclusion, unless it related to my previous
reservations, that rational discourse in form may not in practice be
ultimately what it appears to be. Thus those who monopolize the means of
rational discourse have the upper hand.  But why would a rational
discourse, which many have taken to be the great equalizer--cf. the Jewish
Enlightenment--be any less universalistic because not everybody has
discovered it?

>Both Benhabib and Heller, in my mind, attempt to preserve some key 
>elements in Habermas without doing away with either reason or autonomy.

Very interesting.

>....So it is difficult to answer the question, "Has 
>it been applied?" All criticism which attempts to enjoin solidarity with 
>autonomy and democracy is, for Habermas, fundamentally communicative
(whether 
>a theory of communicative action exists or not).

Well, the left is a very partisan discursive environment.  One is not open
to any and all propositions on a daily basis.  But I take this to be a
problem in very specific ways: cultism, authoritarianism, demagogery, or
more subtlely, the blockage of concrete inquiry into empirical reality even
on principles already agreed to in general.

>Paul Gilroy briefly discussed the work of Seyla Benhabib (The Black
Atlantic, 
>pg. 37). Gilroy also picks up on several of Habermas's ideas directly 
>throughout the text - esp. Habermas's notion of the unfinished project of 
>enlightenment and the rational potential inherent to existing democratic
forms. 
>What I regard to be singularily important about Gilroy's work, however, is
the 
>way in which he illustrates how identity and communication is not merely 
>consituted by language. His analysis of music and memory speak to this. But 
>also his notion of "the politics of transfiguration" - which draws on the
idea 
>that inspirational and motivational "utopias" as more complex than
linguistic, 
>textual and discursive models permit. Here Gilroy picks up on the idea of
the 
>imaginary which can be found in Benhabib's work (as well as Jameson's) 
>although not richly developed.

Somehow I missed this before, but I shall have a look this evening.  What a
coincidence that you should mention him.  Not that I had any prior inkling
that Gilroy used Habermas, but because my late-blooming interest in
Habermas is prompted inter alia by the hostile reception of Gilroy's work
by black Americans!  How many black American intellectuals would ever write
a book called AGAINST RACE?  Gilroy recently spoke at the Schomburg, and
from what I heard the audience was out for his blood.  Gilroy is in an
excellent position not to be fooled by the mystique of African-American
shtik, because that is his worst enemy.  I imagine Gilroy has experienced
and learned a lot since 1993, and he must have learned by now that all of
African-American communication--every bit of it--is sytematically distorted
communication.


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