HABERMAS' IDEAL SPEECH SITUATION

[kenneth.mackendrick@utoronto.ca]

On Sat, 28 Oct 2000 00:07:26 -0400 Ralph Dumain <rdumain@igc.org> wrote:

> Why is Habermas going afdter Adorno?  Does Adorno really belong with these
> others?  IS it becuase of DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT or something else?

Habermas thinks so, in a strange way. For Habermas, Horkheimer and Adorno's 
DofE goes too far - it is a totalizing critique. The enlightenment is... 
disaster triumphant. H/A, according to Habermas, see no progress, not to they 
establish grounds for possible progress. In other words, there is no standard, 
no measure. This is where Habermas pulls out one of his weakest arguments: the 
idea of a performative contradiction. He argues that H/A use reason against 
itself but using arguments to dismiss the validity of arguments - where 
ideology critique can no longer be assumed to be non-ideological. For Habermas, 
their critique is overdetermined. He doesn't must talk about DofE either, he 
draws in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. Habermas argues that there 
has been some progress in modernity - moral progress, entrenched in the 
institutionalization of democratic norms.

There are three competing conceptions of reason at work here. Instrumental, 
emphatic and communicative. Habermas argues that emphatic reason, the 
totalizing critique of the whole, is metaphysical, because it cannot sustain 
the validity of its own premises... (ie. 'what progress has been made that 
lends itself to the insight that we've moved into a new state of barbarism').

> Gilroy seems to miss something crucial to the utopian expressions he sees: 
that utopia is what we don't live now, in the everyday.

This is where H/A and Habermas differ. In TCA vol 1, second last page, Habermas 
writes, "Communicative reason does not simply encounter ready-made subjects and 
systems; rather, it takes part in structuring what is to be preserved. The 
utopian perspective of reconciliation and freedom is ingrained in the 
conditions of the communicative sociation of individuals; it is built into the 
lingustic mechanism of the reproduction of the species."

To wit... a utopian perspective ... is ingrained in... the reproduction of the 
species. As Castoradis notes, the idea that our biology has a built-in utopian 
perspective... "is an enormous logical blunder." I don't know. Maybe Habermas 
is right... but I'm more drawn to Castoriadis here: that we *create* utopian 
images, they aren't "built-in."

Anyway.... Gilroy seems to me to be keeping with a Habermasian perspective, 
that modernity, in some way, is actual progress - if not in that it facilitates 
self-reflective awareness...

> I don't mean just the subjection of blacks to the misdeeds of whites; I mean 
the relations prevailing among black people themselves--where the ideal speech 
situation is not even an ideal--whose culture and internal politics are ruled 
by authoritarianism, manipulation, fear, and fetishism.

A Habermasian response might run something like this: even in the most 
dictatorial situations, of fear and manipulation, reason persists, however 
diminished or distorted, because, despite all else, we still try to understand 
and communicate. Whenever we try to coordinate our actions through agreement, 
we abide by the ideals of autonomy and solidarity, which provide the measure 
and means of emancipation. No authority can ever be justified if it has not met 
with the rational consent of those who are implicated by the authority, and 
even then, we are obligated to retroactively and critically consider the 
legitimacy of the procedures in which our validity claims have come to rest.

> And Gilroy must know by now that black culture has lost--any vitality its 
cultural traditions & strategies might have had died out by the early '80s.

I must admit, I'm not completely surprised that you're willing to think twice 
about Habermas... I remember several years ago you launched a scathing attack 
on the Habermasians (which was quite amusing at the time). Despite my criticism 
and concern - there is something tremendously important in his work (even if 
his vocabulary tends to obscure it). A willingness to stand tall as a modernist 
and a steadfast refusal to let the butchers have the final word. So even in 
instances where cultural traditions and strategies have died out, Habermas 
encourages reason. Let me know if this doesn't help:

"If by way of a thought experiment we compress the adolescent phase of 
growth into a single critical instant in which the individual for the first 
time - yet prevasively and intransigently - assumes a hypoethical attitude 
toward the normative contenxt of his lifeworld, we can see the nature of the 
problem that very person must deal with in passing from the conventional to the 
postconventional level of moral judgement. The social world of legitimately 
regulated interpersonal relations, a world to which one was naively habituated 
and which was unproblematically accepted, is abruptly deprived of its 
quasi-natural validity.		If the adolescent cannot and does not want to 
go back to the traditionalism and unquestioned identity of his past world, he 
must, on penalty of utter disorientation, reconstruct, at the level of basic 
concepts, the nromative ordres that his hypothetical gaze has destroyed by 
removing the veil of illusions from them. Using the rubble of devalued 
traditions, traditions that have been reocgnize to be merely conventional and 
in need of justification, he erects a new normative structure that must be 
solid enough to withstand critical inspection by someone who will henceforth 
distinguish soberly between socially accepted norms and validy norms, between 
de facto recognition of norms and norms that are worthy of reconition. At first 
principles inform his plan for reconstruction; these principles govern the 
generation of valid norms. Ultimately all that remains is a procedure for a 
rationally motivated choice among principles that have been recognized in turn 
as in need of justification." Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative 
Action, pg. 126.

ken