Introduction
The concept of "civil society" plays a prominent role in articulating alternative modes of social organisation to that of the state-society relationship of the Keynesian welfare state.
But there are limits the usefulness of "civil society" to ground social criticism and articulate alternative visions.
"Civil society" does not capture the complexities of state-subject relations. It is based on a juridical account of power inadequate to the task of analysing modern strategies of goverment.
"Civil society" is tied, in the work of Habermas and others, to an understanding of criticism which contains rather than resolves the antinomies signified by the term "civil society." While basing criticism on "civil society" may have freedom-enhancing effects in certain contexts, it may also be a term which constrains our critical capacities by tying us to what we already are.
Genealogy of the concept
Civil society originally equated with political society.
Civil society "emancipated" from politics with the breakdown of feudalism. I.e. civil society was originally the product of the early modern European separation of state and society.
Eighteenth-century debates concerned the relationship between civic virtue and civil vitue in the context of newly emerging forms of private and commercial life. For writers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Hutcheson, Ferguson, Hume and Smith), "civil society" was a solution to the problem of resolving the tension between the one and the many, unity and diversity, of producing a vision of a unified social order and simultaneously recognising the autonomy of legal, moral and economic spheres.
They turned to the ideas of natural sympathy and moral affections to underpin accounts of a social order based on innate mutuality. This became the basis of the idea of civil society as a spontaneous order, a space of ethical interactions, not simply of market exchange.
[But also cf. Smith's invisible hand, & De Mandeville's "private vices, public virtues"].
Scottish Enlightenment thought: from Montesquieu, they took a modern notion of political freedom in terms of economic progress, social refinement and a balanced constitution. But various degrees of trust in the capacity of modern commercial society to deliver social progress: Adam Smith had considerable faith in it. Ferguson sought to revive the classical meaning of the civic and to balance modern political economy with republican elements.
Eighteenth century German reception of Scottish Enlightenment: civil society tended to remain within the jurisprudential tradition alien to Ferguson and was understood to mean "all political ties which form any kind of goverment." Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society (1768) tended lose its civic activist implications. [Eh?]
With Hegel, "civil society" became a private sphere of trade and social interaction counterpoised to the public realm of law and goverment, the state.
Hegel's account of civil society as comprising the system of needs, the administration of justice and police [?] was a realm of conflict between particular interests in sharp opposition to the state; Hegel's philosophy resolved the tension between the individual and the community throught the subsumption of particular interests beneath the unfolding of the universal, and civil society lost its autonomy.
When Marx took the term civil society from Hegel he focused on civil scoiety as the system of needs, that is, on economic relations. This turned the traditional meaning on its head [?], locating civil society as the realm of individual egoism and self-interest, as "bourgeois society" and as something to be overcome. The Scottish Enlightenment meannig of "commerce" as social intercourse and communication as well as economic transaction as thus lost in Marx's focus on productive relations.
The question of the relation b/w state & society has been elaborated sociologically by Arendt, Bobbio, Habermas & others through a focus on citizenship and the welfare state. These accounts stress how during the 19th and 20th centuries, the bourgeois emancipation of society has been replaced by a reappropriation of society by the state in the shift from a constitutional to a social state.
[The post-war welfare state compromise is part of that reappropriation. Also cf. Adorno & Horkheimer on the dialectic of enlightenment. Cf. also Habermas's distinction b/w liberal capitalism and advanced capitalism].
These accounts suggest that a conflict exists between the protected and the participating citizen. How are we to understand the dynamic established by this conflict?
Two main approaches:
(1) Civil society sometimes refers to the realm of individualism which developed with the Enlightenment and the economic relations of capitalism (see MacIntyre, 1994), associated with the rule of law and markets. The coherence of civil society rests not on common language, conventions or territory, but on market exchange, the rule of law, impersonal means of communication and sometimes even coercive authority. Civil society is the closest of all human groupings to having no substantive purpose [cf. Weber, instrumental vs. value rationality, etc.]. These things are left to individuals and associations, the role of which is therefore enhanced.
(2) More commonly, civil society refers to the non-market, non-state sphere of "social life." Also separate from family. Civil society is the locus for the potential development of critical public spheres capable of generating resistance to forms of unaccountable expert authority and administrative power. Habemas: "the institutional core of 'civil society' is constituted by voluntary unions outside the realm of the state and the economy and ranging from churches, cultural associations, and academies to independent media, sport and leisure clubs, debating societies, groups of concerned citizens, and grassroots petitioning drives all the way to occupational associations, political parties, labour unions and 'alternative institutions.'" It sounds shit.
Habermas: Modern Social Relations, Juridification and the Dilemmas of the Welfare State
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) plots the emergence of a "bourgeois public sphere" in eighteenth-century European society as a result of the rise of the modern state and the development of capitalist economic activity. On Habermas' account, the separation of state and civil society which developed with the growth of commerical life facilitated the emergence of a modern public sphere. Zines & Costa.
18th century civil society was the genuine domain of private autonomy that stood opposed to the state. Private people came together as a public. They engaged the public authorities in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatised but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labour. The medium of this confrontation was without historical precedent: it was people's public use of their reason.
But there has been a progressive "refeudalisation" of the public sphere as a result of the emergence of commercial mass media and the welfare state. The former replaced critical public opinion formation with manipulation, the latter development transformed the form of the state from a constitutional to a social state and re-fused relations between state and society.
The functioning of the public sphere has shifted from that of rational debate to the negotiation of interests. [Cf. Schmitter on corporatism].
The welfare state has produced forms of clientelism and a bureaucratisation of everyday life, through which citizens become subjects whose consciousness is characterised by "generalised particularism."
In TCA, using the systems/lifeworld distinction, Habermas nevertheless identifies civil society as a privileged site for the redemption of modernity.
Purposive-rational action distinguished from communicative action. Former oriented to success, latter to understanding. Each form of action has its own separate process of rationalisation.
The modern lifeorld is a reservoir of "taken-for-granteds," replenished through communicative action. The lifeworld is defined as the private nuclear family and the public political sphere.
The concept of "system" refers to mechanisms of modern society that are uncoupled from the communicative context of the lifeworld and are coordinated through functional interconnections via the steering media of money and power. The system is defined as the modern economy and state administration.
Rationalisation of systems is as an increase in their bureaucratic complexity and steering capacity.
We can conceive of society as a system that has to fulfil conditions for the maintenance of sociocultural lifeworlds [?].
The lifeworld becomes mediatised to the extent that de-linguistified media of system integration are used to relate the system and lifeworld. This process occurs through the social roles of employee, consumer, citizen and client which crystallise around these exchange relations. [Cf. Bauman, ambivalence].
This mediatisation takes on the form of an internal colonisation when the delinguistified media of the system take over the essential symbolic reproduction functions of the lifeworld itself, thereby objectifying or reifying social relationships.
He elaborates this thesis in a more empirical mode as the "juridification of communicatively structured areas of action." Juridification refers to an increase in the preponderance of positive law. A web of client relations is spread over the private spheres of life. For example, legal intervention into social life through welfare policies.
The welfare state compromise is not about increasing the density of an already existing network of formal regulations, but rather legally supplanting a communicative context of action through the superimposition of legal norms.
A shift from the class-based explanation of Legitimation Crisis: major channels of conflict in modern capitalist societies arise from the selfdestructive consequences of system growth.
There has been a "selective" or one-sided rationalisation, so that the success-orientation of economic and administrative systems have come to domnate many aspects of the modern lifeworld.
There is a need to retrieve the potiential for rationality of pracitical and communicative activity. Therefore the possibility of an undistorted intersubjectivity "must today be wrung from the professional, specialised, self-sufficient culture of experts and from the system imperatives of the state and economy which destructively invade the ecological basis of life and the communicative structure of our lifeworld.
Guys, we need to erect a democratic dam against the monestarisation and bureaucratisation of life.
Habermas's recent work is an attempt to reconcile and move beyond the limits of liberalism and republicanism through a procedural account of law and democracy which combines liberal constitutionalism with associations in civil society forming "strong" and "weak" publics respectively.
Foucault: Governmentality and the Aporia of Modern Political Rationalities
In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality Foucault develops the theme of biopolitics as an expression describing the general rationality of modern power. Biopower is used to designate what brought life and is mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.
The beginning of this period of the exercise of power over life is dated from the mid-seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, the period of the formation of the modern prison and concern over, and new knowledges of, population.
[Raison d'etat, priority of population over territory, Hobbes].
Two aspects: body as a machine to be made useful through discipline; supervision and regulation of the species body. A power whose highest function was "perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through."
Idea of the individual case history and the discipline of statistics emerge coevally.
These individualising and totalising forms of knowledge are made possible and linked by the development of the human sciences and by panoptic and confessional technologies as institutional sites for the emergence of the concern of the "sciences of man."
These forms of knowledge and power link the welfare of individuals with the nation state and forms of political rule in new ways.
In his work on governmentality (1979), Foucault links his general concern with biopolitics as a modern form of power over life to the question of political rationality, of "rationalities of rule" as specific forms of the conduct of conduct. Foucault defines government in a general way as "the conduct of conduct."
Governmentalisation --> techniques of rule emerging in the 16th century, developing as practices of government from 18th century. Shift from raison d'etat [state acts on population, there isn't civil society as such] to modern mechanisms of government, arguing that a new art of government is formed around the problem of population.
Within the recognition of population as an issue and the possibility of its management we see the emergence of a domain of the social and the development of a range of new techniques of government centred on regulating and surveying this domain. Central to this is "the welfare state problem"; the "trick adjustment between political power wielded over legal subjects and pastoral power wielded over live individuals." Juridical or "sovereign" forms of power (power as right, law, repression) distinguished from disciplinary or "normalising" forms of power (power as the capacity to organise, sustain and enhance life). The two are linked: the modern individual is simultaneously a citizen with rights, part of a juridical polity, and a subject of normalisation, part of welfare society. Indeed, the emergence of this nexus of govermental relations is accompanied historically by the development of modern notions of citizenship. In this way practices concerning the management of populations are linked with discourses of sovereignty which remain as their justification. The modern epoch is thus characterised by thtis heterogeneity between a public right of sovereignty and a polymorphous disciplinary mechanism. This analysis opens a space in which to consider liberalism as a mode of government and to explore the ways in which the welfare state and civil society are conjoined in modern society.
Liberalism, as a critique of state reason, involves a political and an epistemological revolution. With its emergence we see first, the idea of economy and society having natural laws, thus the liberal problem of the appropriate boundary between state action and inaction, where, secondly, this boundary is organised through the elaboration of methods of government by which liberty and security are linked, the rule of law and the idea of a realm protected against the state relying upon an ordering and management of social existence. Within liberalis, appropriate roles for the state are defined by reference to an already existing autonomous economy and society, the state's role being to secure the self-reproducing existence of these processes, enforcing "natural" processes with mechanisms of security through "social government."
From his specification of the relation of sovereignty, discipline and government Foucault concludes that we must see things not in terms of the substitution for a society of sovereignty of a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a governmental one; in reality we have a triangle: sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the populaion and as its essential mehanism apparatuses of security.
Modern liberal political rationalities combine the "city-citizen game" and the "shepherd-flock" game. That is, we are simultaneously citizens with rights produced through law, and subjects of discipline and normalisation produced through partnership and positive knowledge. The "welfare state problem" is that of reconciling "law" with "order", producing "the social" as a governed domain. This process involves a continual negotiation of the public and the private, achieved through the deployment of forms of normalising knowledge and expertise.
It is the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on; thus the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality.
In this way of conceptualising relaionships, "civil society" is neither an ideological construct nor an "aboriginal reality", a natural given repelling government or opposing the state. Rather civil society is a "transcendental reality" at the interface of political power and the government of populations.
Civil society is a ground for a problematisation and for the development o a set of innovative techniques of government; it is both an object and an end of government. As a concept it collectively organises social experience and is a site of governmental organisation concerning the conduct of "autonomous" individuals.
As such, the term "civil society" encompasses the tensions between the natural and the managed within liberalism: it is not the point of their resolution. Thus, Foucault: "I haven't spoken about civil society. And on purpose, because I hold that the theoretical opposition between the state and civil society which traditional political theory belabors is not very fruitful" (Foucault, 1991).
[The "naturalness" of man is civil society.]
Specifying the Welfare State Problem
Habermas and Foucault raise similar concerns relating to the development of technical complexes of knowledge in the name of enlightenment and the accompanying scientisation of politics. Both focus on the implications of contemporary statesociety relations in the context of the development of modern welfare states. However, they frame these concerns in very different ways. Habermas analyses the welfare state in terms of state and society meshing through processes of juridification and colonisation; Foucault discusses the welfare state in terms of the aporia of law and order which this set of relations exhibits.
According to Habermas, the welfare state repoliticises the market and produces forms of clientalism. The welfare state is a central aspect of the monetarisation and bureaucratisation of the lifeworld. Welfare states were designed to produce and maintain social integration but have significantly failed in this task as their juridical-administrative form produces pathological effects by reducing or usurping communicative relations, replacing them with money and power.
In the face of this, Habermas suggests reaffirming the importance of procedures underpinning the constitutional state, coupled with a reinvigoration of the civil associations of the public sphere. This is given sustained attention in BFN. Habermas builds on his earlier analysis of the distinction between the system and the lifeworld to develop a propositional theory of la and democracy which he argues is capable of regrounding the legitimacy of the elfare state by forging closer links between the public spheres of civil society and the state. By briefly examining some features of this later argument, we can see how Habermas recognises but then overlooks important aspects of the welfare state highlighted by Foucault: its normalising character.
Habermas: the dilemma of the welfare state comprises a dialectic of empowerment and tutelage. Built into the very status of citizenship in welfare state democracies is the tension between a formal extension of private and civic autonomy, on the one hand, and a "normalisation" in Foucault's sense that fosters the passive enjoyment of paternalistically dispensed rights on the other.
However, the normalising dimension of welfare states slips from Habermas's account as he focuses on this process as one of juridification. For example, he suggests that we can divide the freedomenhancing from the tutelary aspects of the welfare state. "For the criteria by which one can identify the point where empowerment is converted into supervision are, even if context-dependent and contested, not arbitrary."
That is, Habermas suggests that we can separate legitimate from illegitimate law by examining its sources in relations to processes of democratic will formation.
Habermas suggests that the peculiarly ambivalent effects of the welfare state occur because of the inadequate insititutionalisation of the democratic genesis of law. Law, separated from its sources of validity in autonomous public spheres and the formal institutions of democratic legitimation, is "instrumentalised" and "deprived of its internal structure." The solution to the dilemmas of thewelfare state thus consists in further democratisation: "With the growth and qualitative transformation of governmental tasks, the need for legitimation changes; the more the law is enlisted as a means of political steering and social planning, the greater is the burden of legitimation that must be borne by the democratic genesis of law." In this way the undesirable effects of welfare-state provisions can be countered by a politics of qualifications for citizenship.
This formulation eclipses the tensions between juridification and normalisation such that legitimate law is theorised as banishing power. The constitutional state must evenly distribute political power but also strip such power of its violent substance by rationalising it.
This in turn rests upon the presupposition of a lifeworld that remains substantially free from power.
[Does it?]
For Foucault, the welfare is an expression of the combination of citizenship with subjecthood, legal ith normalising power, hich organised on the plane of the social through the 19th and 20th centuries, and which involves legal determinations of right as well as the development of a range of positive knowledges of the social domain.
Difficulty w/i Western political reason: how to reconcile law with order without subordinating law to order. [Cf. Schmitt, decisionism, the exception.] Scepticism about invoking a politics of resistance founded on the notion of civil society as independent of and opposed to the state. From this point of view, Habermas's critical theory is inadequate to the task of resistance to the increased codification and surveillance of life as this theoretical framework precludes the analysis of the problem of power at the level of government.
Lifeworld is positioned as an arena of potential autonomy and communicative rationality which persists despite the colonising tendencies of the system. Exhibited clearly in Habermas's formula for the solution of legitimation problems in the constitutional states of advanced capitalist societies. He grounds the legitimacy of lawmaking in the idea of spontaneous inputs from a lifeworld whose core private domains are intact. Legitimate law reproduces itself only in the forms of a constitutionally regulated circulation of power, which should be nourished by the communications of an unsubverted public sphere rooted in the core private spheres of an undisturbed lifeworld via the networks of civil society.
Showing posts with label Habermas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Habermas. Show all posts
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Habermas on religion
In LC, religion -> increased demand for discursive redemption of validity claims compared with myth
In TCA -> archaic mode of social integration
Approach of “methodological atheism.”
But “indispensable potentials for meaning are preserved in religious language.”
As a reflection on faith, theology must not renounce its basis in religious experience and ritual.
Philosophers must satisfy themselves with the “transcendence from within” given with the context-transcending force of claims to truth and moral rightness.
Duties of believing citizens to translate their religiously based claims into secular, publicly accessible reasons. Burdens of citizenship.
Audi: believers must support only laws for which they have sufficient public reason
Rawls: believers may introduce reasons for any comprehensive doctrine into debates about constitutional essentials, providing they are eventually translated
Habermas: the demand for translation, rather, pertains only to politicians and public officials with institutional power to make, apply, and execute the law.
Weithmann and Wolterstorff undo the neutrality principle that undergirds modern constitutional democracy, with its separation of church and state: the idea that “all enforceable political decisions must be formulated in a language that is equally accessible to all citizens, and it must be possible to justify them in this language as well”.
W/o background framework --> factionalism?
Dialogic translation: believers seeking publicly-accessible reasons, non-believers approaching religion as a potential source of meaning.
In TCA -> archaic mode of social integration
Approach of “methodological atheism.”
But “indispensable potentials for meaning are preserved in religious language.”
As a reflection on faith, theology must not renounce its basis in religious experience and ritual.
Philosophers must satisfy themselves with the “transcendence from within” given with the context-transcending force of claims to truth and moral rightness.
Duties of believing citizens to translate their religiously based claims into secular, publicly accessible reasons. Burdens of citizenship.
Audi: believers must support only laws for which they have sufficient public reason
Rawls: believers may introduce reasons for any comprehensive doctrine into debates about constitutional essentials, providing they are eventually translated
Habermas: the demand for translation, rather, pertains only to politicians and public officials with institutional power to make, apply, and execute the law.
Weithmann and Wolterstorff undo the neutrality principle that undergirds modern constitutional democracy, with its separation of church and state: the idea that “all enforceable political decisions must be formulated in a language that is equally accessible to all citizens, and it must be possible to justify them in this language as well”.
W/o background framework --> factionalism?
Dialogic translation: believers seeking publicly-accessible reasons, non-believers approaching religion as a potential source of meaning.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Samantha's notes on Habermas - society
Lifeworld and system: Habermas’s characterisation of modern society
The Public Sphere
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989) was Habermas's first published book; its themes are still relevant. This work reflects the emphasis of the early critical theorists - reflection on consequences of the rise of mass communication.
Habermas plots the emergence of a 'bourgeois public sphere' in eighteenth century European society. This a result of the rise of the modern state, the development of capitalist economic activity, the separation of state and civil society, the development of print media and the establishment of coffee houses in which open discussion of the issues of the day could take place. This period saw the development of the idea of society as separate from the ruler and of a public of private individuals debating the authority of the state through engaging in the 'public use of reason' (1989: 27). Habermas characterises c18 civil society as 'the genuine domain of private autonomy [that] stood opposed to the state' (1989: 12).
Habermas suggests that through the c19-20 there has been a progressive 'refeudalisation' of the public sphere, due to:
a. the emergence of commercial mass media - replaced critical public opinion formation with manipulation, so that the public sphere became another domain of cultural consumption;
b. the development of the welfare state - transformed the form of the state from a constitutional to a social state and re-fused relations between the state and society.
Result: critical potential of public opinion has been denuded - the public sphere has shifted from being an arena of rational debate to focus on the negotiation of interests.
Comments:
a. is 'refeudalisation' an adequate way to think about the impact of mass communication on the conduct of politics?
b. in this account individuals are treated as though they are passive consumers - do audiences receive messages in uniform ways?
Legitimation crisis
Changes to capitalism in c20:
a. importance of research and technology as productive forces;
b. intervention of state into economy to ensure stability.
Habermas argues that Marx's account of historical materialism is one-dimensional; societies develop along two dimensions - purposive rational action and communicative action. Account of development of societies needs modification: state intervention to manage economy produces a logic of crisis displacement - economic crisis breaks out, state intervenes. Can become a crisis of the state, a rationality crisis. If this continues, becomes a legitimation crisis, people withdraw support. If this continues, motivation crisis - apathy.
Important idea: logic of crisis displacement. Conflict does not necessarily emerge as overt class conflict. Possibility for transformation: people make increasingly critical demands that society meet the claims of a universalist account of justice. Alternatively, new forms of legitimacy may be found within the system – via rolling back the state, appeals to family, etc.
Questions:
To what extent is legitimacy required for the exercise of power?
Do states require active support or merely acquiescence?
The problem of 'colonisation'
With The Theory of Communicative Action (1981/1984 & 1987) Habermas changes his approach and develops his argument through an account of rationalisation. He posits two dimensions of rationalisation:
a. rationalisation of the system - economy and state - increasingly complex and bureaucratised, rationalisation as increased steering capacity;
b. rationalisation of the lifeworld - family and public political sphere - bearers of communicative action, rationalised through increased criticism and demand for rational justification.
Distinct tensions of modern era can be understood in terms of the intersection of a and b: a tends to impinge on b in ways that threaten the communicative rationality of the lifeworld with 'colonisation' (e.g. juridification and colonisation of the family).
Habermas argues that in modern societies conflicts break out along the seam between the system and lifeworld around, for example, the clientalism engendered by the welfare state, environmental destruction caused by the economic system, etc. He suggests that such conflicts underpin the formation of new social movements – these are not expressions of class conflict but of conflicts concerning the destruction of the infrastructure of the lifeworld (self destructive consequences of system growth).
Constitutionalism
The colonisation thesis is closely linked to Habermas’s account of communicative rationality and of the rationality basis of speech. Between Facts and Norms (1992/1996) extends Habermas’s critique of the social constitutional state and points to a positive resolution of these problems. He argues that a procedural account of law and the development of deliberative democracy in the public spheres of civil society are central to the renewal of the legitimacy of the constitutional state. He demonstrates his argument by reference to the 'paradox' of the welfare state – this was meant to ensure stability but produces dependency and dis-welfare due to inadequate mechanisms for input into the formation of legislation by those subject to it.
This argument has been vital to contemporary discussions of deliberative democracy and to debates about the future of constitutionalism. Habermas’s response to problems of contemporary constitutionalism is a proceduralised conception of law and deliberative model of politics. He argues that this can deliver the public and private autonomy that he discerns to be necessarily conceptually bound up with the constitutional democratic state, with its dual articulation of the dominance of popular sovereignty on the one hand and the rule of law on the other.
Questions and criticisms
a. Habermas’s work shows a longstanding concern to analyse the lines of conflict between states and societies and his work has gone through significant transformations along the way; is the theory of social evolution on which this work rests defensible?
b. the thesis of the ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ is illuminating with respect to the emergence of new social movements; however, this thesis also militates against the analysis of power relations within the lifeworld (when does state intervention into the family become 'pathological'? Is the lifeworld free from power? Is it a domain of authenticity?)
c. to what extent is Habermas’s attempt to reconcile popular sovereignty and the rule of law successful?
d. Habermas’s account provides an internalist account of the development of modern societies - what of external boundaries and conflicts?
The Public Sphere
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989) was Habermas's first published book; its themes are still relevant. This work reflects the emphasis of the early critical theorists - reflection on consequences of the rise of mass communication.
Habermas plots the emergence of a 'bourgeois public sphere' in eighteenth century European society. This a result of the rise of the modern state, the development of capitalist economic activity, the separation of state and civil society, the development of print media and the establishment of coffee houses in which open discussion of the issues of the day could take place. This period saw the development of the idea of society as separate from the ruler and of a public of private individuals debating the authority of the state through engaging in the 'public use of reason' (1989: 27). Habermas characterises c18 civil society as 'the genuine domain of private autonomy [that] stood opposed to the state' (1989: 12).
Habermas suggests that through the c19-20 there has been a progressive 'refeudalisation' of the public sphere, due to:
a. the emergence of commercial mass media - replaced critical public opinion formation with manipulation, so that the public sphere became another domain of cultural consumption;
b. the development of the welfare state - transformed the form of the state from a constitutional to a social state and re-fused relations between the state and society.
Result: critical potential of public opinion has been denuded - the public sphere has shifted from being an arena of rational debate to focus on the negotiation of interests.
Comments:
a. is 'refeudalisation' an adequate way to think about the impact of mass communication on the conduct of politics?
b. in this account individuals are treated as though they are passive consumers - do audiences receive messages in uniform ways?
Legitimation crisis
Changes to capitalism in c20:
a. importance of research and technology as productive forces;
b. intervention of state into economy to ensure stability.
Habermas argues that Marx's account of historical materialism is one-dimensional; societies develop along two dimensions - purposive rational action and communicative action. Account of development of societies needs modification: state intervention to manage economy produces a logic of crisis displacement - economic crisis breaks out, state intervenes. Can become a crisis of the state, a rationality crisis. If this continues, becomes a legitimation crisis, people withdraw support. If this continues, motivation crisis - apathy.
Important idea: logic of crisis displacement. Conflict does not necessarily emerge as overt class conflict. Possibility for transformation: people make increasingly critical demands that society meet the claims of a universalist account of justice. Alternatively, new forms of legitimacy may be found within the system – via rolling back the state, appeals to family, etc.
Questions:
To what extent is legitimacy required for the exercise of power?
Do states require active support or merely acquiescence?
The problem of 'colonisation'
With The Theory of Communicative Action (1981/1984 & 1987) Habermas changes his approach and develops his argument through an account of rationalisation. He posits two dimensions of rationalisation:
a. rationalisation of the system - economy and state - increasingly complex and bureaucratised, rationalisation as increased steering capacity;
b. rationalisation of the lifeworld - family and public political sphere - bearers of communicative action, rationalised through increased criticism and demand for rational justification.
Distinct tensions of modern era can be understood in terms of the intersection of a and b: a tends to impinge on b in ways that threaten the communicative rationality of the lifeworld with 'colonisation' (e.g. juridification and colonisation of the family).
Habermas argues that in modern societies conflicts break out along the seam between the system and lifeworld around, for example, the clientalism engendered by the welfare state, environmental destruction caused by the economic system, etc. He suggests that such conflicts underpin the formation of new social movements – these are not expressions of class conflict but of conflicts concerning the destruction of the infrastructure of the lifeworld (self destructive consequences of system growth).
Constitutionalism
The colonisation thesis is closely linked to Habermas’s account of communicative rationality and of the rationality basis of speech. Between Facts and Norms (1992/1996) extends Habermas’s critique of the social constitutional state and points to a positive resolution of these problems. He argues that a procedural account of law and the development of deliberative democracy in the public spheres of civil society are central to the renewal of the legitimacy of the constitutional state. He demonstrates his argument by reference to the 'paradox' of the welfare state – this was meant to ensure stability but produces dependency and dis-welfare due to inadequate mechanisms for input into the formation of legislation by those subject to it.
This argument has been vital to contemporary discussions of deliberative democracy and to debates about the future of constitutionalism. Habermas’s response to problems of contemporary constitutionalism is a proceduralised conception of law and deliberative model of politics. He argues that this can deliver the public and private autonomy that he discerns to be necessarily conceptually bound up with the constitutional democratic state, with its dual articulation of the dominance of popular sovereignty on the one hand and the rule of law on the other.
Questions and criticisms
a. Habermas’s work shows a longstanding concern to analyse the lines of conflict between states and societies and his work has gone through significant transformations along the way; is the theory of social evolution on which this work rests defensible?
b. the thesis of the ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ is illuminating with respect to the emergence of new social movements; however, this thesis also militates against the analysis of power relations within the lifeworld (when does state intervention into the family become 'pathological'? Is the lifeworld free from power? Is it a domain of authenticity?)
c. to what extent is Habermas’s attempt to reconcile popular sovereignty and the rule of law successful?
d. Habermas’s account provides an internalist account of the development of modern societies - what of external boundaries and conflicts?
Monday, September 17, 2007
Early Habermas on reason and critical theory
Weber's rationalist proclivities nonetheless establish a path to relativism and decisionism.
Zweckrationalita(:)t.
Adorno and Horkheimer generalise Zweckrationalitat by interweaving it with Marx's alienation and Lukacs's Marxian-Hegelian reification. They approach the Heideggerean (!) concept of "Gestell", enframing. Their dialectics are read as wavering, the priority of negativity read as "totalising" or "generalising," and this shift away from critical social theory is a threat to the explanatory-diagnostic function of Critical Theory. Horkheimer: social critical theory unfolds as a single existential judgement.
Critical theory risks regressing to a kind of post-Left Hegelianism, what Marx and Engels called "critical criticism."
Cf. idealism, charismatic function of immanence.
Knowledge and human interests: quasi-transcendental cognitive interests. They are:
(1) technical --> purposive --> work --> fallibilistic empirical sciences
(2) practical --> communicative --> symbolic interaction --> hermeneutic sciences
(3) emancipatory --> power --> critical sciences
Cf. Aristotle (techne (making, poesis) vs. praxis (assoc. w/ lexis: intersubjective practice).
Technical interest: nomological regularities, fallibilism, dissection of object into dependent and independent variables, negative feedback etc. Habermas is sympathetic with Gadamer's expose against tthe scientism which tacitly presupposed all knowledge to be of this type.
Practical interest: associated with understanding meaning and interpreting texts.
Habermas: meaning and understanding are empty concepts without reconstruction of the validity claims made by participants in meaning.
Hidden positivism (cf. symbolic interactionism) in the claim that we can bracket critical rational evaluation. Cf. Weber's interpretive sociology.
The critical interest is a synthesis.
Technical and pratical interests contain an internal demany for non-coercive communication. Cf. Popper's falsification thesis, and Gadamer's resistance to final closure (cf. hermeneutic circle).
The critical interest gives communicative parameters to the Marxian insistence, "the point is to change it."
Such thought can only advance coevally with the realisation of the social conditions for freer communication.
Self-reflection is the framework which determines the validity of propositions in this category. The subject-object of critical thought has an interest in its emancipation from powers which have become hypostatised as invariants of social action.
Linked w/ Socratic emancipation from doxa through dialogic self-reflection.
Zweckrationalita(:)t.
Adorno and Horkheimer generalise Zweckrationalitat by interweaving it with Marx's alienation and Lukacs's Marxian-Hegelian reification. They approach the Heideggerean (!) concept of "Gestell", enframing. Their dialectics are read as wavering, the priority of negativity read as "totalising" or "generalising," and this shift away from critical social theory is a threat to the explanatory-diagnostic function of Critical Theory. Horkheimer: social critical theory unfolds as a single existential judgement.
Critical theory risks regressing to a kind of post-Left Hegelianism, what Marx and Engels called "critical criticism."
Cf. idealism, charismatic function of immanence.
Knowledge and human interests: quasi-transcendental cognitive interests. They are:
(1) technical --> purposive --> work --> fallibilistic empirical sciences
(2) practical --> communicative --> symbolic interaction --> hermeneutic sciences
(3) emancipatory --> power --> critical sciences
Cf. Aristotle (techne (making, poesis) vs. praxis (assoc. w/ lexis: intersubjective practice).
Technical interest: nomological regularities, fallibilism, dissection of object into dependent and independent variables, negative feedback etc. Habermas is sympathetic with Gadamer's expose against tthe scientism which tacitly presupposed all knowledge to be of this type.
Practical interest: associated with understanding meaning and interpreting texts.
Habermas: meaning and understanding are empty concepts without reconstruction of the validity claims made by participants in meaning.
Hidden positivism (cf. symbolic interactionism) in the claim that we can bracket critical rational evaluation. Cf. Weber's interpretive sociology.
The critical interest is a synthesis.
Technical and pratical interests contain an internal demany for non-coercive communication. Cf. Popper's falsification thesis, and Gadamer's resistance to final closure (cf. hermeneutic circle).
The critical interest gives communicative parameters to the Marxian insistence, "the point is to change it."
Such thought can only advance coevally with the realisation of the social conditions for freer communication.
Self-reflection is the framework which determines the validity of propositions in this category. The subject-object of critical thought has an interest in its emancipation from powers which have become hypostatised as invariants of social action.
Linked w/ Socratic emancipation from doxa through dialogic self-reflection.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Habermas on the structural transformation of the public sphere
(1973)
The public sphere:
* where public will and opinion can be formed
* acting neither as commercial parties, nor as state instruments
* political public sphere forms when public discussions concern practices of state
* coercive power of state is its counterpart; state publicness is due to its function of providing for the common good of all legal consociates, in principle unconnected with the public sphere (cf. Hobbes)
The public sphere emerges as a concept in the 18th Century. Cf. Scottish enlightenment, civil society.
Here is an institutionally protected public (civil rights, bourgeois revolutions against absolutism). The thematization of political power develops by virtue of a specific constellation of interests.
History
High middle ages --> status of feudal lord is "a-public"; but the person possessing it represents it publicly. Represents himself as an embodiment of a higher power.
Representative publicness different from "representing interests" or constituents or even the common good.
Cf. Leviathan??
The feudal powers (church, prince, nobility) "are" the land; they represent authority before the people rather than for them.
Cf. Parker, Hobbes, Skinner. Schmitt. Cf. Austin's performative: two pope = infelicity.
Polarized by the end of the 18th Century into public and private aspects.
With the Reformation the tie to divine authority became a private matter.
Bourgeois society developed from occupational groups.
Permanent administration, standing army, permanence of relations, settled in stock market and press. Public power tangibly confronts those originally defined negatively by it, the "private" (cf. privative) persons.
Private persons subsumed publicness under the state form --> highes legally underived power, identtical with legitimate use of force.
Society a matter of public interest inasmuch as the rise of market economy transfers material and living reproduction from the exclusive domain of private domestic power.
Discussion of privatised but publicly relevan action (esp. exchange).
French revolution --> 3rd estate breaks with monarchical mediatization of power. Bourgeois are private; they do not rule. Their opposition to public power is not against de facto concentration in which they deserve shares, but against the principle of public power. Publicness as a principle of control is oriented to a qualitative [emancipatory?] shift, not a glorified cabinet reshuffle.
First modern constitutions: society -> sphere of private autonomy. Public sphere of citizens, convert political authority to rational authority. Then the state level. Cf. Montesqieu.
Second half the 18th century: literary journalism, not yet the medium of consumer culture. In Paris in 1848, 200 political papers were founded between February and May. Cf. blog.
1830s -- press of viewpoints begins to transform into a commercial press.
Public sphere in mass welfare state democracies:
(Cf. Horkheimer) --> liberal model of public sphere still normatively instructive.
Public lost exclusivity, "convivial social intercourse" and relatively high standard of education (and perhaps increasingly its Other, women?).
Public spheres now mediate unmarketizable group needs in strategic confrontation.
Laws correspond to compromises between interests, not consensus.
Refeudalization --> large-scale organisations compete. Corporatism only pauses to secure plebiscitarian approval. Publicity is the systems colonised face of publicness.
Publicness thus is sabotaged by non-linguistic steering media, and how it acquires public prestige for things and persons is determined in a climate of nonpublic opinion.
Public sphere does not emerge from society but is constructed and amended case-by-case.
However, welfare state transforms operations of rights. Requirement of publicness extended to all organisations acting in relation to the state. Extent realised --> public of private persons (broken) replaced by pubic of organised persons.
Public sphere once rationalised authority in the medium of exclusive public discussion is disintegrating.
Could only be realised today as rationalization of the exercise of social and political power under control of rival organisations committed to publicness in their internal structure and dealings with state and one-another.
The public sphere:
* where public will and opinion can be formed
* acting neither as commercial parties, nor as state instruments
* political public sphere forms when public discussions concern practices of state
* coercive power of state is its counterpart; state publicness is due to its function of providing for the common good of all legal consociates, in principle unconnected with the public sphere (cf. Hobbes)
The public sphere emerges as a concept in the 18th Century. Cf. Scottish enlightenment, civil society.
Here is an institutionally protected public (civil rights, bourgeois revolutions against absolutism). The thematization of political power develops by virtue of a specific constellation of interests.
History
High middle ages --> status of feudal lord is "a-public"; but the person possessing it represents it publicly. Represents himself as an embodiment of a higher power.
Representative publicness different from "representing interests" or constituents or even the common good.
Cf. Leviathan??
The feudal powers (church, prince, nobility) "are" the land; they represent authority before the people rather than for them.
Cf. Parker, Hobbes, Skinner. Schmitt. Cf. Austin's performative: two pope = infelicity.
Polarized by the end of the 18th Century into public and private aspects.
With the Reformation the tie to divine authority became a private matter.
Bourgeois society developed from occupational groups.
Permanent administration, standing army, permanence of relations, settled in stock market and press. Public power tangibly confronts those originally defined negatively by it, the "private" (cf. privative) persons.
Private persons subsumed publicness under the state form --> highes legally underived power, identtical with legitimate use of force.
Society a matter of public interest inasmuch as the rise of market economy transfers material and living reproduction from the exclusive domain of private domestic power.
Discussion of privatised but publicly relevan action (esp. exchange).
French revolution --> 3rd estate breaks with monarchical mediatization of power. Bourgeois are private; they do not rule. Their opposition to public power is not against de facto concentration in which they deserve shares, but against the principle of public power. Publicness as a principle of control is oriented to a qualitative [emancipatory?] shift, not a glorified cabinet reshuffle.
First modern constitutions: society -> sphere of private autonomy. Public sphere of citizens, convert political authority to rational authority. Then the state level. Cf. Montesqieu.
Second half the 18th century: literary journalism, not yet the medium of consumer culture. In Paris in 1848, 200 political papers were founded between February and May. Cf. blog.
1830s -- press of viewpoints begins to transform into a commercial press.
Public sphere in mass welfare state democracies:
(Cf. Horkheimer) --> liberal model of public sphere still normatively instructive.
Public lost exclusivity, "convivial social intercourse" and relatively high standard of education (and perhaps increasingly its Other, women?).
Public spheres now mediate unmarketizable group needs in strategic confrontation.
Laws correspond to compromises between interests, not consensus.
Refeudalization --> large-scale organisations compete. Corporatism only pauses to secure plebiscitarian approval. Publicity is the systems colonised face of publicness.
Publicness thus is sabotaged by non-linguistic steering media, and how it acquires public prestige for things and persons is determined in a climate of nonpublic opinion.
Public sphere does not emerge from society but is constructed and amended case-by-case.
However, welfare state transforms operations of rights. Requirement of publicness extended to all organisations acting in relation to the state. Extent realised --> public of private persons (broken) replaced by pubic of organised persons.
Public sphere once rationalised authority in the medium of exclusive public discussion is disintegrating.
Could only be realised today as rationalization of the exercise of social and political power under control of rival organisations committed to publicness in their internal structure and dealings with state and one-another.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Notes on Habermas and communicative reason
Theory of Communicative Action
Two kinds of reflexivity, insufficiently differentiated in Habermas's early, epistemological version:
(1) Neo-Kantian reflection by reason on its own conditions of employment.
(2) Emancipatory self-reflection, associated with the Kantian triptych of maturity, principled non-conformism, and freedom (in "What is enlightenment?"), transformed through Marx & Hegel.
An account of the limits of theoretical and practical reason is necessary to ground intelligible reflection on the socio-material conditionality of enlightenment and autonomy.
[??] Marxian ideology critique and Freudian psychoanalysis are understood to exemplify the critical cognitive interest (2) without the elaboration of the neo-Kantian communicative rationality (1) which they must presuppose.
Unavoidable cognitive interests --> basic structures presupposed by reason. For Kant, they are a priori. But for Habermas, they can only be disclosed by empirical inquiry, which must proceed hand-in-hand with detranscendentalised reconstructive science if it to avoid positivism disguised as fallibilism. [??]
The epistemological orientation of Knowledge and Human Interests depended on a philosophy of the subject.
The linguisttic turn focuses on how subjects are constituted in and through "their" social interactions.
[Difference between Habermas & Adorno's dialectic spirit is that Habermas's revisions are govrned by discrete periods of public feedback, whereas Adorno is concerned with the question of how the suffering subject can constitute himself in the public sphere in the first place without brutally suppressing the non-identical].
Emancipatory self-reflection depends on giving a rational reconstruction of the conditions of possibility of reason.
Reconstructive sciences elucidate the depth grammar of "pre-[reconstructive]-theoretical" knowledge. Cf. Chomsky's generative grammar.
Cf. Ryle's knowing how vs. knowing that, Bourdieu on habitus, Wittgenstein's rule paradox.
Theory of communicative action is a reconstructive science, "formal / universal pragmatics."
All human symbolic competence presupposes the species competence of communication.
Emancipatory critique does not rest on arbitrary norms which we choose. It is grounded in the structures of universal communicative competence.
[Suspicion here of accruing methodological convenience; i.e. the unlimited communication community has a dual character as intersubjective governance and an instrument which creates subjects capable of being governed, and decisions in a form adapted to the possibility of entering the condition of legitimacy.]
[Cf. Maricuse --> "norms" (needs?) must be chosen by the individual, but there must be an interim preoccupation with the false needs, which can only be diagnosed at the collective level, and which interrupt any individual's capacity to autonomously determine his or her real needs.]
[Cf. early CT: norms can be derived from the unrealised potential of the liberal democratic project -- freedom, equality etc.]
[Cf. dogmatic anthropology of utopian socialists. Install real needs in advance.]
[Cf. Adorno on organic composition of labour. Adorno contra Kant: the material element in ideality.]
The starting point of speech act theory is mutual reciprocal meaning.
Communicative action is oriented to understanding (cf. mimesis). Purposive-rational action is oriented to success.
Anyone acting communicatively must raise universal validity claims and suppose that such claims can be discursively redeemed.
[Cf. falsifiability vs. fallibilism].
[Cf. other minds problem.]
Types of validity claim:
INTELLIGIBILITY
TRUTH
SINCERITY / TRUTHFULNESS
NORMATIVE RIGHTNESS
[Could there be others? Theological, prosodic, aesthetic? E.g. discourse of "prosody" = melodious historical ad hominem to suggest the interlocutor's ear is out of tune?].
To resolve a breakdown in any of these dimensions, go to DISCOURSE, that is nonmanipulative, noncoercive argumentation. [Cf. BFN on the legal community, also De Tocqueville on the legal community.]
Aesthetic judgements too --> cognitivist thesis.
No dispute about a validity claim is fundamentally asymmetric.
Anticipation and emulaion of noncoercive and nondistortive discoures is built ino our everyday, heuristically-organised and folk-theoretic communicative interactions.
[Criticism: not an unlimited communication community which is the condition of possibility of communicative reason, but an unlimited identity abbatoir. That is, Habermas supposes the fact of communicative action, inasmuch as it is constitutively coercive in definite gradations, to entail and rely upon a hypothetical condition free of coercive activity. But the converse can be argued: that it entails and relies upon a hypothetical condition of maximum coercive activity, in which identity is infinitely manipulable by power. In this account, understanding is not the immanent telos of language, self-identity is. The "pretheoretic knowledge" structuring communicative coordination of action is the merely arbitrary totality of agents' judgements about the objective collocations of norms which surround them. Either account can explain discourse-avoidance. For Habermas, discourse does not occur either because the communicative context is pathological (in various ways ultimately attributable to the alternative mode of coordinating action), or because understanding takes place. Understanding is not conceived of as cognitive sharing but as a tacit commonality in the way the agents experience a counterfactual claim-redemptive discourse. In the other account, however, agents are identity-parsimonious: they avoid contesting validity if they think their current bundle of interrelated norms would suffer extensive revision. Thus I "understand" you not because I regard your validity claims as redeemable, but because I recognise "not understanding" as more costly in terms of identity effects. The distinction between communicative and strategic action is resolved at a deeper level, as an ensemble of identities which seek to replenish themselves out of one-another's normative repertoires. Cooperation arises out of "communicative" configurations inasmuch as identities minimise confirming themselves out of materials unavoidably associated with alien ingredients. Cooperation arises out of "strategic" configurations inasmuch as agents develop mediating institutions like money and administration which specialised to reduce the flow of information among the normative constitutions of agents.]
The claim to reason is silenced, yet in "fantasies and deeds it develops a stubbornly transcending power," renewed in each unconstrained understanding [truth?], each moment of solidarity [sincerity?], each successful individuation [intelligibility?], each rescue [normative rightness?].
Diachronic dimension of reason.
INSTRUMENTAL ACTION can be RATIONALISED under two aspects.
(1) Empirical efficiency of technical means. RATIONALITY of means: requires empirical knowledge.
(2) Consistency of choice between suitable means. RATIONALITY of decisions: requires inner consistency of value systems.
RATIONALIZATION of COMMUNICATIVE ACTION altogether different:
(1) extirpating relations of force inconspicuously set in communicative structures.
(2) overcoming systematically distorted communication in which action supporting consensus regarding the reciprocally raised validity claims is sustained in appearance only.
Rationaliy debates demand sociological theory discriminate different forms of rationalization.
Wwe cannot conduct hermeneutic inquiry without evaluating the rationality of action and social action systems.
LIFEWORLD-prejudiced sociology: Weberian insistence on intentional stance (Dennett, cf. Bretano, "intentionality") and the creative role of social actors.
SYSTEMS-prejudiced sociology: Durkheimian insistence on social facts; interacting structures, systemic imperatives, dynamic forms of integration and breakdown.
Dialectical synthesis of competing orientations?
[Cf. overdetermination. Maybe --P Marx, both these forms are moments of the conceptual priority of emancipation?? Adorno --> individuated more and more, exclusively designated as moments of the productive apparatus, YET (AND THUS) their specificity is irreducible to their function ascription.]
Systems and lifeworld perspectives presuppose one another.
PARADOX OF RATIONALISATION --> rationalization of the lifeworld is the precondition of systemic rationalization, which progressively becomes autonomous vis-a-vis the normative constraints embodied in the lifeworld.
Rather than a dialectic of enlightenment (rationalisation), a distortive selectivity in the rationalisation process.
Purposive-rational rationalisation encroaches upon lifeworld -- explained by peculiar restrictions on communicative rationalisation originating in capitalist production.
NSMs --> defensive reactions to preserve the integrity of lifeworld communicative structures.
[Or: systemic imperative on the lifeworld traceable to system "recognising" its suffocation of lifeworld resource. Cf. Marcuse and containment; recuperation; Poulantzas vs. Miliband. Recuperation theses: (1) there is an area of sublimation for which idealism is the master concept. Destabilising influences play out harmlessly, especially as the symbolic reconciliation of mass affective wishes. Cf. real illusion. (2) Implicatedness of negativity in material reproduction: Hegelian dimension of Critical Theory. I.e., without concrete countervailing tendencies (not just "space" for them), society would crumble. How to theorise this dissolution? Cessation of autopoeitic maintenance; integration with anthropologial imperative (state of nature)? Or more parsimoniously, the idea that this happens all the time. That is, the system moves to the next-closest configuration which contains sufficient countervailing forces for stability. Cf. the hostis civitas.]
Weber's neo-Kantian differentiation of science, morality/law and art.
Suspicious, in good Critical Theoretical fashion, of neoromantic hope for new wholeness dissolving these spheres and reconciling Man with Himself and with nature, but also whether that cultural differentiation brings unresolvable reification as its inevitable corollary.
[In Adorno, pessimism and defeatism are not elided. Negativity and positivity are inseparable, and giving priority to the latter gives priority to the idealist moment over the materialist. Thought in a negaive mode must produce positivity out of materiality to work uon; thought in a positive mode has a correspondingly reciprocally-generative relationship with existing material negativity.]
[Heideggerean motifs unmistakeably pop up in Critical Theory's reworking of the subject at home in a world of equipment, encountering itself thrown in there yeah, thrown into a world which manifests a preponderance of identity.]
[MARX: 1844 alienation a pre-write of commodity fetishism? -- inasmuch as it stands in the same functional role with respect to anthopologically dogmatic utopianism [?]. Domination is an ineradicable qualitive aspect of the capitalist mode of production. It is not political domination. Sensuous immediacy is levelled out by the expectation of its loss into exchange value. With commodity fetishism, the emphasis is upon the social character of labour only appearing in the act of exchange. Value, which is mythic, cryptonormative, qualitative, & maybe even episodic / narrative / charismatic, is thus "disguised" as what it really is -- exchange value. Alienation is the conceptual unpacking of this paradox which commits "critical criticism," i.e. treats it as an illusion, not a real illusion.]
Two kinds of reflexivity, insufficiently differentiated in Habermas's early, epistemological version:
(1) Neo-Kantian reflection by reason on its own conditions of employment.
(2) Emancipatory self-reflection, associated with the Kantian triptych of maturity, principled non-conformism, and freedom (in "What is enlightenment?"), transformed through Marx & Hegel.
An account of the limits of theoretical and practical reason is necessary to ground intelligible reflection on the socio-material conditionality of enlightenment and autonomy.
[??] Marxian ideology critique and Freudian psychoanalysis are understood to exemplify the critical cognitive interest (2) without the elaboration of the neo-Kantian communicative rationality (1) which they must presuppose.
Unavoidable cognitive interests --> basic structures presupposed by reason. For Kant, they are a priori. But for Habermas, they can only be disclosed by empirical inquiry, which must proceed hand-in-hand with detranscendentalised reconstructive science if it to avoid positivism disguised as fallibilism. [??]
The epistemological orientation of Knowledge and Human Interests depended on a philosophy of the subject.
The linguisttic turn focuses on how subjects are constituted in and through "their" social interactions.
[Difference between Habermas & Adorno's dialectic spirit is that Habermas's revisions are govrned by discrete periods of public feedback, whereas Adorno is concerned with the question of how the suffering subject can constitute himself in the public sphere in the first place without brutally suppressing the non-identical].
Emancipatory self-reflection depends on giving a rational reconstruction of the conditions of possibility of reason.
Reconstructive sciences elucidate the depth grammar of "pre-[reconstructive]-theoretical" knowledge. Cf. Chomsky's generative grammar.
Cf. Ryle's knowing how vs. knowing that, Bourdieu on habitus, Wittgenstein's rule paradox.
Theory of communicative action is a reconstructive science, "formal / universal pragmatics."
All human symbolic competence presupposes the species competence of communication.
Emancipatory critique does not rest on arbitrary norms which we choose. It is grounded in the structures of universal communicative competence.
[Suspicion here of accruing methodological convenience; i.e. the unlimited communication community has a dual character as intersubjective governance and an instrument which creates subjects capable of being governed, and decisions in a form adapted to the possibility of entering the condition of legitimacy.]
[Cf. Maricuse --> "norms" (needs?) must be chosen by the individual, but there must be an interim preoccupation with the false needs, which can only be diagnosed at the collective level, and which interrupt any individual's capacity to autonomously determine his or her real needs.]
[Cf. early CT: norms can be derived from the unrealised potential of the liberal democratic project -- freedom, equality etc.]
[Cf. dogmatic anthropology of utopian socialists. Install real needs in advance.]
[Cf. Adorno on organic composition of labour. Adorno contra Kant: the material element in ideality.]
The starting point of speech act theory is mutual reciprocal meaning.
Communicative action is oriented to understanding (cf. mimesis). Purposive-rational action is oriented to success.
Anyone acting communicatively must raise universal validity claims and suppose that such claims can be discursively redeemed.
[Cf. falsifiability vs. fallibilism].
[Cf. other minds problem.]
Types of validity claim:
INTELLIGIBILITY
TRUTH
SINCERITY / TRUTHFULNESS
NORMATIVE RIGHTNESS
[Could there be others? Theological, prosodic, aesthetic? E.g. discourse of "prosody" = melodious historical ad hominem to suggest the interlocutor's ear is out of tune?].
To resolve a breakdown in any of these dimensions, go to DISCOURSE, that is nonmanipulative, noncoercive argumentation. [Cf. BFN on the legal community, also De Tocqueville on the legal community.]
Aesthetic judgements too --> cognitivist thesis.
No dispute about a validity claim is fundamentally asymmetric.
Anticipation and emulaion of noncoercive and nondistortive discoures is built ino our everyday, heuristically-organised and folk-theoretic communicative interactions.
[Criticism: not an unlimited communication community which is the condition of possibility of communicative reason, but an unlimited identity abbatoir. That is, Habermas supposes the fact of communicative action, inasmuch as it is constitutively coercive in definite gradations, to entail and rely upon a hypothetical condition free of coercive activity. But the converse can be argued: that it entails and relies upon a hypothetical condition of maximum coercive activity, in which identity is infinitely manipulable by power. In this account, understanding is not the immanent telos of language, self-identity is. The "pretheoretic knowledge" structuring communicative coordination of action is the merely arbitrary totality of agents' judgements about the objective collocations of norms which surround them. Either account can explain discourse-avoidance. For Habermas, discourse does not occur either because the communicative context is pathological (in various ways ultimately attributable to the alternative mode of coordinating action), or because understanding takes place. Understanding is not conceived of as cognitive sharing but as a tacit commonality in the way the agents experience a counterfactual claim-redemptive discourse. In the other account, however, agents are identity-parsimonious: they avoid contesting validity if they think their current bundle of interrelated norms would suffer extensive revision. Thus I "understand" you not because I regard your validity claims as redeemable, but because I recognise "not understanding" as more costly in terms of identity effects. The distinction between communicative and strategic action is resolved at a deeper level, as an ensemble of identities which seek to replenish themselves out of one-another's normative repertoires. Cooperation arises out of "communicative" configurations inasmuch as identities minimise confirming themselves out of materials unavoidably associated with alien ingredients. Cooperation arises out of "strategic" configurations inasmuch as agents develop mediating institutions like money and administration which specialised to reduce the flow of information among the normative constitutions of agents.]
The claim to reason is silenced, yet in "fantasies and deeds it develops a stubbornly transcending power," renewed in each unconstrained understanding [truth?], each moment of solidarity [sincerity?], each successful individuation [intelligibility?], each rescue [normative rightness?].
Diachronic dimension of reason.
INSTRUMENTAL ACTION can be RATIONALISED under two aspects.
(1) Empirical efficiency of technical means. RATIONALITY of means: requires empirical knowledge.
(2) Consistency of choice between suitable means. RATIONALITY of decisions: requires inner consistency of value systems.
RATIONALIZATION of COMMUNICATIVE ACTION altogether different:
(1) extirpating relations of force inconspicuously set in communicative structures.
(2) overcoming systematically distorted communication in which action supporting consensus regarding the reciprocally raised validity claims is sustained in appearance only.
Rationaliy debates demand sociological theory discriminate different forms of rationalization.
Wwe cannot conduct hermeneutic inquiry without evaluating the rationality of action and social action systems.
LIFEWORLD-prejudiced sociology: Weberian insistence on intentional stance (Dennett, cf. Bretano, "intentionality") and the creative role of social actors.
SYSTEMS-prejudiced sociology: Durkheimian insistence on social facts; interacting structures, systemic imperatives, dynamic forms of integration and breakdown.
Dialectical synthesis of competing orientations?
[Cf. overdetermination. Maybe --P Marx, both these forms are moments of the conceptual priority of emancipation?? Adorno --> individuated more and more, exclusively designated as moments of the productive apparatus, YET (AND THUS) their specificity is irreducible to their function ascription.]
Systems and lifeworld perspectives presuppose one another.
PARADOX OF RATIONALISATION --> rationalization of the lifeworld is the precondition of systemic rationalization, which progressively becomes autonomous vis-a-vis the normative constraints embodied in the lifeworld.
Rather than a dialectic of enlightenment (rationalisation), a distortive selectivity in the rationalisation process.
Purposive-rational rationalisation encroaches upon lifeworld -- explained by peculiar restrictions on communicative rationalisation originating in capitalist production.
NSMs --> defensive reactions to preserve the integrity of lifeworld communicative structures.
[Or: systemic imperative on the lifeworld traceable to system "recognising" its suffocation of lifeworld resource. Cf. Marcuse and containment; recuperation; Poulantzas vs. Miliband. Recuperation theses: (1) there is an area of sublimation for which idealism is the master concept. Destabilising influences play out harmlessly, especially as the symbolic reconciliation of mass affective wishes. Cf. real illusion. (2) Implicatedness of negativity in material reproduction: Hegelian dimension of Critical Theory. I.e., without concrete countervailing tendencies (not just "space" for them), society would crumble. How to theorise this dissolution? Cessation of autopoeitic maintenance; integration with anthropologial imperative (state of nature)? Or more parsimoniously, the idea that this happens all the time. That is, the system moves to the next-closest configuration which contains sufficient countervailing forces for stability. Cf. the hostis civitas.]
Weber's neo-Kantian differentiation of science, morality/law and art.
Suspicious, in good Critical Theoretical fashion, of neoromantic hope for new wholeness dissolving these spheres and reconciling Man with Himself and with nature, but also whether that cultural differentiation brings unresolvable reification as its inevitable corollary.
[In Adorno, pessimism and defeatism are not elided. Negativity and positivity are inseparable, and giving priority to the latter gives priority to the idealist moment over the materialist. Thought in a negaive mode must produce positivity out of materiality to work uon; thought in a positive mode has a correspondingly reciprocally-generative relationship with existing material negativity.]
[Heideggerean motifs unmistakeably pop up in Critical Theory's reworking of the subject at home in a world of equipment, encountering itself thrown in there yeah, thrown into a world which manifests a preponderance of identity.]
[MARX: 1844 alienation a pre-write of commodity fetishism? -- inasmuch as it stands in the same functional role with respect to anthopologically dogmatic utopianism [?]. Domination is an ineradicable qualitive aspect of the capitalist mode of production. It is not political domination. Sensuous immediacy is levelled out by the expectation of its loss into exchange value. With commodity fetishism, the emphasis is upon the social character of labour only appearing in the act of exchange. Value, which is mythic, cryptonormative, qualitative, & maybe even episodic / narrative / charismatic, is thus "disguised" as what it really is -- exchange value. Alienation is the conceptual unpacking of this paradox which commits "critical criticism," i.e. treats it as an illusion, not a real illusion.]
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Samantha's notes on Habermas - formal pragmatics
Jürgen Habermas and Critical Theory: the emancipatory potential of modernity
Earlier critical theorists
(Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin)
a. unorthodox Marxists - trying to redefine the nature of the Marxist enterprise in changed historical circumstances of c20 (drawing on Marx, Weber, Lukacs, Nietzsche and Freud).
b. explanation - general historical dynamic of enlightenment and domination; increased knowledge has brought increased technical mastery over external nature and human subjectivity - reification.
c. develop framework for understanding fascism, the culture industry, etc.
Habermas is working in this tradition but has redefined it substantially.
Basic premises
1968 (1971) publication of Technology and Science as Ideology. Disputes Marcuse's claim that science and technology are intrinsically oppressive. Science and technology are oriented toward control, but this in itself is not a problem; the problem is that science and technology get out of control and overrun other spheres of action and knowledge.
In The Theory of Communicative Action (1981/1984 &1987) Habermas develops a systematic framework for the analysis of modern societies that avoids the pessimism of the earlier critical theorists. Posits:
a. two types of action:
(i) purposive rational action/action oriented to success;
(ii) communicative action/action oriented to reaching understanding.
b. two processes of rationalisation:
(i) rationalisation of purposive rational action - complexity, bureaucracy and steering capacity;
(ii) rationalisation of communicative action - differentiation of worldviews, growth of criticism, validity claims in speech increasingly open to scrutiny, demands for reasons/justifications for authority. This is the rationality potential of communicative action.
We can understand the distinctive tensions of modernity by examining how (i) and (ii) intersect - rationalisation of (i) threatens to stifle potential of (ii) - this threat is the threat of the 'colonisation of the lifeworld' (see session 12). Habermas takes this up by developing a philosophical and a substantive theme.
The scientisation of politics
Theory and Practice (1963/1974) uses the idea of a dialectic of enlightenment and domination to interpret the nature of politics: politics as praxis, distinct from theoria and techne, was lost c17-c18. Praxis replaced by techne - politics as technical expertise.
Enlightenment provided the way for this, but also produced the possibilities of an alternative in the development of critical reason.
Universal pragmatics and deliberative democracy
Habermas develops an argument that communication itself contains critical potential, and that this is revealed by examining the rationality basis of speech. See 'What is universal pragmatics?' in Communication and the Evolution of Society (1976/1979), also Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1990) and Postmetaphysical Thinking (1992).
Puts forward an argument about speech acts:
a. everyday utterances implicitly and inevitably raise validity claims;
b. some of these are such that they can only satisfactorily be upheld in discourses with the structure of an 'ideal speech situation' (the implicit goal of all communication).
Speech acts raise validity claims, these are internally connected to reasons or grounds - this is the rationality basis of speech. Four types of claim:
(i) intelligibility
(ii) truth
(iii) correctness
(iv) sincerity
If these are called into question, we try to provide grounds for our claims = discourse.
An 'ideal speech situation' (later reformulated as 'unlimited communication community') is a situation with a symmetrical structure, in which there is full participation and the reasoned force of the better argument, rather than power, determines decisions. This ideal is, according to Habermas, implicit in communication; it makes sense of what it would be to resolve a problematic claim in a genuine way, to achieve a rational consensus. This is a counterfactual, an imagined possibility against which we can judge truth and correctness.
This argument is important: Habermas is attempting to tackle the question of how we can have normative grounds for our criticisms by developing this counterfactual. In Between Facts and Norms (1996) and elsewhere, Habermas uses this argument concerning the validity basis of speech to provide a normative foundation for deliberative democratic mechanisms. In particular, in BFN, he develops a theory of law and democracy which emphasises deliberative democracy as an alternative to liberal representative democracy and its model of politics as the aggregation of private individual interests. On Habermas’s account, deliberative discourses of justification and application of norms could enable us to develop just laws that answer to the problems of contemporary constitutionalism (e.g. problems of administrative power, problems concerning the democratic negotiation of difference, etc).
Assessment
a. This account privileges communicative action, it presumes that the primary use of language is to achieve understanding; is it?
b. Can truth adequately be identified with rational consensus?
c. Problem b. is exacerbated in relation to discussion of correct norms and values.
d. Habermas's account of communicative rationality is purely procedural; can this help in practice to resolve disputes?
Earlier critical theorists
(Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Benjamin)
a. unorthodox Marxists - trying to redefine the nature of the Marxist enterprise in changed historical circumstances of c20 (drawing on Marx, Weber, Lukacs, Nietzsche and Freud).
b. explanation - general historical dynamic of enlightenment and domination; increased knowledge has brought increased technical mastery over external nature and human subjectivity - reification.
c. develop framework for understanding fascism, the culture industry, etc.
Habermas is working in this tradition but has redefined it substantially.
Basic premises
1968 (1971) publication of Technology and Science as Ideology. Disputes Marcuse's claim that science and technology are intrinsically oppressive. Science and technology are oriented toward control, but this in itself is not a problem; the problem is that science and technology get out of control and overrun other spheres of action and knowledge.
In The Theory of Communicative Action (1981/1984 &1987) Habermas develops a systematic framework for the analysis of modern societies that avoids the pessimism of the earlier critical theorists. Posits:
a. two types of action:
(i) purposive rational action/action oriented to success;
(ii) communicative action/action oriented to reaching understanding.
b. two processes of rationalisation:
(i) rationalisation of purposive rational action - complexity, bureaucracy and steering capacity;
(ii) rationalisation of communicative action - differentiation of worldviews, growth of criticism, validity claims in speech increasingly open to scrutiny, demands for reasons/justifications for authority. This is the rationality potential of communicative action.
We can understand the distinctive tensions of modernity by examining how (i) and (ii) intersect - rationalisation of (i) threatens to stifle potential of (ii) - this threat is the threat of the 'colonisation of the lifeworld' (see session 12). Habermas takes this up by developing a philosophical and a substantive theme.
The scientisation of politics
Theory and Practice (1963/1974) uses the idea of a dialectic of enlightenment and domination to interpret the nature of politics: politics as praxis, distinct from theoria and techne, was lost c17-c18. Praxis replaced by techne - politics as technical expertise.
Enlightenment provided the way for this, but also produced the possibilities of an alternative in the development of critical reason.
Universal pragmatics and deliberative democracy
Habermas develops an argument that communication itself contains critical potential, and that this is revealed by examining the rationality basis of speech. See 'What is universal pragmatics?' in Communication and the Evolution of Society (1976/1979), also Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1990) and Postmetaphysical Thinking (1992).
Puts forward an argument about speech acts:
a. everyday utterances implicitly and inevitably raise validity claims;
b. some of these are such that they can only satisfactorily be upheld in discourses with the structure of an 'ideal speech situation' (the implicit goal of all communication).
Speech acts raise validity claims, these are internally connected to reasons or grounds - this is the rationality basis of speech. Four types of claim:
(i) intelligibility
(ii) truth
(iii) correctness
(iv) sincerity
If these are called into question, we try to provide grounds for our claims = discourse.
An 'ideal speech situation' (later reformulated as 'unlimited communication community') is a situation with a symmetrical structure, in which there is full participation and the reasoned force of the better argument, rather than power, determines decisions. This ideal is, according to Habermas, implicit in communication; it makes sense of what it would be to resolve a problematic claim in a genuine way, to achieve a rational consensus. This is a counterfactual, an imagined possibility against which we can judge truth and correctness.
This argument is important: Habermas is attempting to tackle the question of how we can have normative grounds for our criticisms by developing this counterfactual. In Between Facts and Norms (1996) and elsewhere, Habermas uses this argument concerning the validity basis of speech to provide a normative foundation for deliberative democratic mechanisms. In particular, in BFN, he develops a theory of law and democracy which emphasises deliberative democracy as an alternative to liberal representative democracy and its model of politics as the aggregation of private individual interests. On Habermas’s account, deliberative discourses of justification and application of norms could enable us to develop just laws that answer to the problems of contemporary constitutionalism (e.g. problems of administrative power, problems concerning the democratic negotiation of difference, etc).
Assessment
a. This account privileges communicative action, it presumes that the primary use of language is to achieve understanding; is it?
b. Can truth adequately be identified with rational consensus?
c. Problem b. is exacerbated in relation to discussion of correct norms and values.
d. Habermas's account of communicative rationality is purely procedural; can this help in practice to resolve disputes?
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