HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION

[kenneth.mackendrick@utoronto.ca]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2000 21:20:15 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain@igc.org> wrote:

> 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.

Of course! Habermas is more of a post-Marxist that most post-Marxists, since he 
openly acknowledges that class struggle is a strategic confrontation, not a 
communicative one (Wellmer has a nice quote, 'critical theory remembers what 
hermeneutics forgets, that we are bound up in relations of domination). I don't 
think he harbours any illusions about this. However... the existence of class 
struggle indicates that we need, more than ever, to transform instrumental 
forms of reasoning into communicative ones...

> 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. 

Right, we actors refuse to participate in rational debate, then we are 
obligated to employ strategic means. But, again, Habermas argues that even the 
most violent form of strategic action still rely on some degree of 
communicative action... it all reminds me of Augustine's argument about good 
and evil. For Augustine, peace can exist without war but war cannot exist 
without peace. Although Habermas wouldn't argue that communicative action can 
exist without some instrumental uses of reason, he does argue that instrumental 
reason is the sin qua non of communicative reason.

> 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.

Yep. And that's a real concern. Are procedural discourse always stacked? But 
this is why ideology-critique is so important (one of Habermas's most sustained 
critique of ideology sojourns is his attack on postmodernism [in the 
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity] - where he goes after Foucault, Derrida, 
Bataille, Horkheimer and Adorno, Castoriadis, Luhmann, Heidegger, and 
Nietzsche. Interestingly, Habermas has more recently acknowledged that there is 
something more to be said about Foucault and, I think, has encouraged further 
study on the matter (some of his students have gone on to work on Foucault and 
Gadamer)...

> For many reasons, I never belived in this ideal speech situation stuff, but I 
am interested now precisely because the spirit 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.

Well, to contrast, those who are partial to scientific inquiry and sociology 
usually stick with Habermas. And those partial to psychoanalysis and aesthetics 
stick to Adorno. This doesn't mean the two are mutually exclusive... 

> Now back to Paul Gilroy.  He's a bizarre character.  I re-read the section
> in which 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.

I'm reminded of Horkheimer here. Horkheimer and Benjamin had a debate at one 
point, and Benjamin argued that history is unfinished, which opens the 
possibility of redemption through anamnestic solidarity, so that the victims of 
the past do not suffer for nothing. Horkheimer responded by noting that "past 
injustice is done and finished. Those who have been beaten to death are truly 
dead." In Marsha Hewitt's discussion of the debate (in Critical Theory of 
Religion: a feminist analysis), which is in conjunction with Helmut Peukert's 
theologization of communicative action, she notes that "in the absence of the 
memory of our anonymous ancestors, we have no hope for a redeemed present or 
future." In short, historical amnesia generates a false consciousness that 
extends injustice and domination into the future, leaving human beings 
powerless to resist oppression... because our memories of the past are taken 
away. The debate is interesting, and I wonder about the degree to which future 
emancipatory projects rest on historical memory.  Habermas has written a bit 
about this, noting that the glossing over of history tends to provide some sort 
of malignant consolation...  Hewitt has another article on this, "Reasons 
without consolation: theological misappropriations of the discourse theory of 
j. habermas and their implications for the study of religion" in Secular 
Theories of Religion, ed. Jensen and Rothstein which is interesting as well.

ken