HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION

[Ralph Dumain]

"The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

      -- William Blake

One problem with following the rules of rational argument is that one is
always held hostage to the debates instituted by the representatives of the
(would-be) ruling class.  I remember back in 1975 taking a course on
scientific racism, which demanded a mastery of a whole lot of knowledge in
different fields.  Richard Lewontin even came in to discuss the misuse of
the concept of heritability by Jensen, Shockley, and the scientific racist
crowd.  While it is useful to know all that stuff, it is unreasonable to
expect everyone to drop what they're doing and tie up their lives defesning
themselves from an onslaught in which the debating parties are hardly on
the same footing.  

I am also reminded of an episode of the Donahue show, when deabte of
serious uissues was still possible.  Some Jewish guy, maybe a rabbi,
protests Donahue putting Nazis, Aryan Nations, etc., on his show, whereupon
Donahue justifies his actions with the principles of open debate.  The
Jewish fellow responds: "If someone tells me: 'I want to kill you', and I
say 'Please don't kill me', what kind of debate is that?"

Much of the 1960s--when liberal empiricism ruled and the Right was a
handful of backwoods crackpots--was a rebellion precisely against having to
carry on discursive discussion in this manner.  For me it is all summed up
in one moment in Pennebaker's documentary of Bob Dylan, where Dylan cusses
out a TIME Magazine reporter, and tells him that news reporting should be
replaced with collage.  It all seems so embarrassingly innocent now.  Now
collage is a brutal barrage, an exercise in cultural ego-stripping and
brainwashing, which can only make one yearn for a day in which logic and
reason counted for something even as lip service.

As to whether the refusal to participate in reasoned discussion is itself
coercive and regressive--well, it may well be, though it is not that
counter-hegemonic truth claims could not be substiantiated by rational
argument.  It could just be that people refuse to engage in a discussion in
which the cards are stacked.

For many reasons, I never belived in this ideal speech situation stuff, but
I am interested now precisely becuase the psirit of free inquiry and
transparent social relationms are being threatened in entirely novel
cynical and twisted ways.  All avant-gardes have been coopted now and the
only place to go is ... logic and reason.

Now back to Paul Gilroy.  He's a bizarre character.  I re-read the section
in whcih Habermas is discussed and I don't buy his argument.  He criticizes
Marshall Berman and Habermas for their take on modernity and praises Hegel
for  tying it in with the master-slave dialectic, which implies that
modernithy cannot be discussed apart from slavery, conveniently left out
from the "eurocentric" assumptions of the others.  I don't see the cogency
of this argument at all.

And Gilroy is a mighty slippery character.  He begins with a sort of
sympathy for (black) feminist standpoint epistemology, but then he
criticizes Patricia Hill Collins for succumbing to racial essentialism in
spite of herself, and then ties in her presumption to be spokeswoman for
the black masses into Enlightenment rationality itself, as yet another
manifestation of it in spite of its contrary intention.  Gilroy is very
sophisticated, but I'm not impressed by the outcome of his argumentation.


At 06:41 PM 10/27/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>On Fri, 27 Oct 2000 17:00:10 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain@igc.org> wrote:
>
>>  I must be moved by the struggle against irrationalism, in spite of my 
>skepticism of procedural thinking.
>
>For Habermas, if you refuse procedural rationality you're irrational (maybe 
>even postmodern!), communicatively incompetent (skeptical is ok, as long
as you 
>agree in the end), psychotic or, if nothing else, immoral.
>
>There has long since been something that has bothered me about this approach.
>
>ken


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