Drawing on Aristotle and Hegel, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor & Michael Walzer disputed Rawls' assumption that the principal task of government is to secure and distribute fairly the liberties and economic resources individuals need to lead freely chosen lives. Few accept the label "communitarian" w/o caveat.
Methodological claims about the importance of tradition and social context for moral and political reasoning
Liberal universalism vs. communitarian particularism.
Universalist presuppositions of Rawlsian liberalism, tempered in Political Liberalism & The Laws of the People.
Taylor and MacIntyre: moral & political judgement depend on the very interpretive dimension Rawls wants to abstract away from.
Walzer: such abstraction, even if metaphysically unproblematic, will fail to resonate in any thinking about actual distributions.
Recent East Asian "cosmopolitan-communitarian" arguments: cultural factors can affect the priority of rights; the justification of rights (cf. Walzer); & can provide foundations for distinctive political institutions & practices.
Taylor: overlapping consensus on human rights (agree on norms while disagreeing about why they are the right norms)
Debate over the self
Taylor and Sandel: Rawls' overly individualistic conception of the self. Self constituted in ties & commitments.
Unfair to accuse Rawls of endorsing atomism, though perhaps he does not give proper weight to constitutive non-chosen attachments etc.
Appearance of Heideggerean motifs. Background of everydayness.
"It is only when things break down from the normal, everyday, unchosen mode of existence that we think of ourselves as subjects dealing with an external world, having the experience of formulating various ways of executing our goals, choosing from among those ways, and accepting responsibility for the outcomes of our actions. In other words, traditional intentionality is introduced at the point that our ordinary way of coping with things is insufficient."
Cf. Habermas's lifeworld & (??).
Ought moral outlooks to be the product of individual choice?
Tacit social world orients individuals in moral space?
Conditions for autonomy rest on self-determination w/r/t what we value? Relationship b/w tacit "value" (?) & judgement disclosed in consciousness -- cf. ideology, false consciousness, critical theory, the human.
Autonomy = choice w/i unchosen framework.
Choice not intrinsically good? Deliberation not intrinsically good? Liberal answer (Dworkin?): principle of autonomy strengthens community; individuals following community-determined norms possess different moral & psychological content depending on whether they have the choice not to.
Constitutive attachments?
Policy-driven communitarian critique of de facto atomisation
"[...] political communitarians blame both the left and the right for our current malaise. The political left is chastised not just for supporting welfare rights economically unsustainable in an era of slow growth and aging populations, but also for shifting power away from local communities and democratic institutions and towards centralized bureaucratic structures better equipped to administer the fair and equal distribution of benefits, thus leading to a growing sense of powerlessness and alienation from the political process. Moreover, the modern welfare state with its universalizing logic of rights and entitlements has undermined family and social ties in civil society by rendering superfluous obligations to communities, by actively discouraging private efforts to help others (e.g., union rules and strict regulations in Sweden prevent parents from participating voluntarily in the governance of some day care centers to which they send their children), and even by providing incentives that discourage the formation of families (e.g., welfare payments are cut off in many American states if a recipient marries a working person) and encourage the break-up of families (e.g., no-fault divorce in the US is often financially rewarding for the non custodial parent, usually the father) [...]"
Habits of the heart. Communities of place. Communities of memory. Pyschological communities.
Et cetera.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Held on pluralism and Dahl
Key features of pluralism: government by minorities, constitutional resistance to faction.
Who has power? Classic: diverse overlapping groups; neo: bias to corporate interests.
What is the state? Classic: a mediator; neo: the state, and even individual departments, have their own interests.
What is the nature of political resource? Classic: various, distributed, and fluid; neo: endogenously unequal.
Involvement of the citizenry? Classic: minimal enough to ensure stability; neo: goverment is not permeable to most citizens, apathy is compulsory.
Role of the international? Classic: by and large helps to uphold pluralist, free market societies; neo: dominated by multinationals and the particular interests of powerful states.
Early Dahl (1956)
For many contemporary societies, Dahl claims a deep underlying consensus, which effectively winnows down "politics" into an area of technics and details.
Dahl abstracts the constitutional form of so-called liberal democracies as "polyarchy." But for Dahl, the formal polyarchic constitutional content is trivial compared with the substantive social prerequisites of democracy. Early Dahl claims that these criteria are more or less met de facto.
Criticism: Dahl is surrendering "the rich history of the idea of democracy to the existent."
Criticism: Empirical research drew the idea of an underlying consensus into question. There seemed to be systematic ideological differentials with a significant class structure. The political polarisation during the 60s and 70s in Europe and the US was difficult to account for within the classical pluralist framework.
The classical pluralist analysis of power, as influence by A over B's action, was also criticised. Power was assigned a role previously belonging to representation. Cf. Henry Parker (the people and their parliament both are sovereign) vs. Thomas Hobbes (the body politic is so much a fiction it cannot even contract with the sovereign, only constitute itself as a fiction by contracts among its members). Cf. perhaps Sieyes, representation as constitutive of social relations. For the classical pluralists, de-juridified power in a well-behaved polyarchy could tick some of the same boxes because of overlapping membership, and the diversity, fluidity and transitivity of that power. Cf. balance of powers.
Bachrach and Baratz (1962): A's power may mobilise bias to establish / defend structures ("social and political values and institutional practices") of political process which exclude any issues whose resolution may frustrate A's interests. Cf. triangulation, social choice theory, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, agenda setting, saliency theory (competition of emphasis), hegemony, transforming positional issues into valence issues, politics conducted in a register of morality (Mouffe).
Late Dahl
Dahl (1985): threat to liberty is not from equality (as Tocqueville suspected it would be) but from liberty of a certain kind - namely, liberty to accumulate unlimited economic resources and organise production in hierarchically governed enterprises. INEQUALITIES.
Corporate capitalism produces sharp inequalities in social and economic resources sufficient to undermine political equality and therefore democracy.
Furthermore: the capacity for Western goverments to act in the ways desired by many groups is systematically constrained by the requirements of private accumulation. Governments must ensure the prosperity of the private sector.
Democracy is embedded in a socioeconomic system which systematically privileges business interests. Dahl now argues that the normative content of democracy demands the priority of the right to self-government over the right to private property.
Political liberty requires democratisation of the workplace and a widespread system of cooperative forms of ownership.
Sectors of the state are locked into the interest structures of private corporations.
Some neo-Marxist theories of the state
Miliband (1969): the state is a crucial instrument in the maintenance of the structure of power and privilege inherent in capitalism, which routinely separates itself from ruling class factions.
Poulantzas: Miliband is humanist and subjectivist, reproducing bourgeois categories of thought. Direct participation of the capitalist class in government is unnecessary. The state is a condensation of class interests. It participates in class contradictions. It is nonetheless the subsystem which oversees the organisation of class fractions, and the political disorganisation of the working classes. It regroups the economically and politically marginal. The state bureaucracy and electoral leadership involuntarily construct national unity and simultaneous atomise the body politic.
Offe: the state is constitutively contradictory. The arbitration of interests is key to its legitimation, and tax revenue from a particular interest (accumulation), key to its material reproduction. Intervention in the economy is inevitable, yet it risks challenging the traditional basis of liberal social order.
The liberal democratic capitalist state (a) is excluded from accumulation; (b) is necessary for the function of accumulation; (c) is dependent on accumulation; (d) functions to conceal a, b & c.
The state is a reactive mechanism. Contra Miliband and Poulantzas, it is not functionally interlocked (in the long term) with the needs of capital. The manouevres of constellations may benefit the working class. The most vulnerable suffer.
Cf. Habermas in Legitimation Crisis.
Schmitter (theorist of corporatism) argues that at the very least, the validity of an unspecified number of voluntary self-determined categories is deeply questionable.
Some more on corporatism:
Financial liberalisation
Labour market liberalisation
Professionalisation and bureaucratisation of large sections of the labour movement
Contemporary corporatism: a system of interest representation organised into limited "singular, compulsory, hierarchically ordered" & functionally differentiated categories, licensed by the state to a representational monopoly.
Tripartite relation between state, employees and labour
Is tripartism displacing traditional political representative institutions? Extraparliamentary policy origins?
To be fair, it's mainly macroeconomic policy so far
It's also limited by the degree to which the trade unions produce a legitimate elite that is both amenable to corporatism
Final thoughts
Non-Marxists have come to appreciate the limits placed on popular sovereignty by massive concentrations of ownership of productive property. Vulgar marxism is marginalised, with few Marxist theorists arguing for the reduction of state activity to class categories.
- Citizenship rights: one-person-one-vote, freedom of expression and association.
- Constitutionalism, checks and balances, division of powers.
- Competitive electoral system.
Who has power? Classic: diverse overlapping groups; neo: bias to corporate interests.
What is the state? Classic: a mediator; neo: the state, and even individual departments, have their own interests.
What is the nature of political resource? Classic: various, distributed, and fluid; neo: endogenously unequal.
Involvement of the citizenry? Classic: minimal enough to ensure stability; neo: goverment is not permeable to most citizens, apathy is compulsory.
Role of the international? Classic: by and large helps to uphold pluralist, free market societies; neo: dominated by multinationals and the particular interests of powerful states.
Early Dahl (1956)
For many contemporary societies, Dahl claims a deep underlying consensus, which effectively winnows down "politics" into an area of technics and details.
Dahl abstracts the constitutional form of so-called liberal democracies as "polyarchy." But for Dahl, the formal polyarchic constitutional content is trivial compared with the substantive social prerequisites of democracy. Early Dahl claims that these criteria are more or less met de facto.
Criticism: Dahl is surrendering "the rich history of the idea of democracy to the existent."
Criticism: Empirical research drew the idea of an underlying consensus into question. There seemed to be systematic ideological differentials with a significant class structure. The political polarisation during the 60s and 70s in Europe and the US was difficult to account for within the classical pluralist framework.
The classical pluralist analysis of power, as influence by A over B's action, was also criticised. Power was assigned a role previously belonging to representation. Cf. Henry Parker (the people and their parliament both are sovereign) vs. Thomas Hobbes (the body politic is so much a fiction it cannot even contract with the sovereign, only constitute itself as a fiction by contracts among its members). Cf. perhaps Sieyes, representation as constitutive of social relations. For the classical pluralists, de-juridified power in a well-behaved polyarchy could tick some of the same boxes because of overlapping membership, and the diversity, fluidity and transitivity of that power. Cf. balance of powers.
Bachrach and Baratz (1962): A's power may mobilise bias to establish / defend structures ("social and political values and institutional practices") of political process which exclude any issues whose resolution may frustrate A's interests. Cf. triangulation, social choice theory, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, agenda setting, saliency theory (competition of emphasis), hegemony, transforming positional issues into valence issues, politics conducted in a register of morality (Mouffe).
Late Dahl
Dahl (1985): threat to liberty is not from equality (as Tocqueville suspected it would be) but from liberty of a certain kind - namely, liberty to accumulate unlimited economic resources and organise production in hierarchically governed enterprises. INEQUALITIES.
Corporate capitalism produces sharp inequalities in social and economic resources sufficient to undermine political equality and therefore democracy.
Furthermore: the capacity for Western goverments to act in the ways desired by many groups is systematically constrained by the requirements of private accumulation. Governments must ensure the prosperity of the private sector.
Democracy is embedded in a socioeconomic system which systematically privileges business interests. Dahl now argues that the normative content of democracy demands the priority of the right to self-government over the right to private property.
Political liberty requires democratisation of the workplace and a widespread system of cooperative forms of ownership.
Sectors of the state are locked into the interest structures of private corporations.
Some neo-Marxist theories of the state
Miliband (1969): the state is a crucial instrument in the maintenance of the structure of power and privilege inherent in capitalism, which routinely separates itself from ruling class factions.
Poulantzas: Miliband is humanist and subjectivist, reproducing bourgeois categories of thought. Direct participation of the capitalist class in government is unnecessary. The state is a condensation of class interests. It participates in class contradictions. It is nonetheless the subsystem which oversees the organisation of class fractions, and the political disorganisation of the working classes. It regroups the economically and politically marginal. The state bureaucracy and electoral leadership involuntarily construct national unity and simultaneous atomise the body politic.
Offe: the state is constitutively contradictory. The arbitration of interests is key to its legitimation, and tax revenue from a particular interest (accumulation), key to its material reproduction. Intervention in the economy is inevitable, yet it risks challenging the traditional basis of liberal social order.
The liberal democratic capitalist state (a) is excluded from accumulation; (b) is necessary for the function of accumulation; (c) is dependent on accumulation; (d) functions to conceal a, b & c.
The state is a reactive mechanism. Contra Miliband and Poulantzas, it is not functionally interlocked (in the long term) with the needs of capital. The manouevres of constellations may benefit the working class. The most vulnerable suffer.
Cf. Habermas in Legitimation Crisis.
Schmitter (theorist of corporatism) argues that at the very least, the validity of an unspecified number of voluntary self-determined categories is deeply questionable.
Some more on corporatism:
Financial liberalisation
Labour market liberalisation
Professionalisation and bureaucratisation of large sections of the labour movement
Contemporary corporatism: a system of interest representation organised into limited "singular, compulsory, hierarchically ordered" & functionally differentiated categories, licensed by the state to a representational monopoly.
Tripartite relation between state, employees and labour
Is tripartism displacing traditional political representative institutions? Extraparliamentary policy origins?
To be fair, it's mainly macroeconomic policy so far
It's also limited by the degree to which the trade unions produce a legitimate elite that is both amenable to corporatism
Final thoughts
Non-Marxists have come to appreciate the limits placed on popular sovereignty by massive concentrations of ownership of productive property. Vulgar marxism is marginalised, with few Marxist theorists arguing for the reduction of state activity to class categories.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Chantal Mouffe on pluralism and democracy
Liberal democracy is a regime, a distinct symbolic organisation of social relations. It results from the articulation of political liberalism (rule of law, separation of powers, individual rights) with democratic tradition of popular sovereignty.
Emphasising the fact of pluralism (Rawls) tends to obscure how pluralism constitutes the political dimension in modern democracies. It is an axiological principle we should celebrate and enhance.
Mouffe's postmodern gloss: "difference" must be construed as the condition of possibility of being. Then a radical democratic project informed by pluralism can be formulated.
Main forms of liberal pluralism start with de facto difference and look for procedures to make those differences irrelevant.
Valorizing all differences - anti-democratic, because it doesn't recognise that some (!) differences are constructed as relations of subordination.
Extreme pluralism, by refusing a "we," partakes in the liberal evasion of plurality.
After Derrida: social objectivity has "constitutive outside," traces of the acts of exclusion. Cf. Schmitt. Every identity purely contingent.
No social agent therefore can legitimately claim mastery of the foundation of society. Relations among agents are democratic only inasmuch as they (1) "accept" the particularity of their claims; which is also (2) "recognising" ineradicable power in their mutual relations.
Tacit institutional elaborations of these epistemological interventions? Or to do with subject formation, i.e. these "recognitions" are those of a subject for whom the Friend/Enemy distinction is an ineradicable feature of democracy, & who are reconciled to moderate viciousness as civic virtue?
"To negate the ineradicable character of antagonism and to aim at a universal rational consensus" -- this, supposedly, is the real threat to democracy. Mouffe ascribes it to Habermas. But cf. Habermas's (a) call for the defense of the lifeworld against systems; (b) sophisticated fallibilism (consensus, even were it "universal and rational," would not be incontrovertible); (c) rather impressive collection of rationality concepts (systems vs. lifeworld rationalization), whose qualitative distinctions rule out the kind of dogmatic idealism Mouffe is hinting at. Habermas's concepts for the analysis of rationality encompass greater difference than Mouffe's appeal to difference.
Cf. Hart: assume that each party has the discretion to provide “perfunctory” rather than “consummate” performance – we refer to this as shading – and that such behavior cannot be
observed or penalized by an outsider (e.g., a court).
Emphasising the fact of pluralism (Rawls) tends to obscure how pluralism constitutes the political dimension in modern democracies. It is an axiological principle we should celebrate and enhance.
Mouffe's postmodern gloss: "difference" must be construed as the condition of possibility of being. Then a radical democratic project informed by pluralism can be formulated.
Main forms of liberal pluralism start with de facto difference and look for procedures to make those differences irrelevant.
Valorizing all differences - anti-democratic, because it doesn't recognise that some (!) differences are constructed as relations of subordination.
Extreme pluralism, by refusing a "we," partakes in the liberal evasion of plurality.
After Derrida: social objectivity has "constitutive outside," traces of the acts of exclusion. Cf. Schmitt. Every identity purely contingent.
No social agent therefore can legitimately claim mastery of the foundation of society. Relations among agents are democratic only inasmuch as they (1) "accept" the particularity of their claims; which is also (2) "recognising" ineradicable power in their mutual relations.
Tacit institutional elaborations of these epistemological interventions? Or to do with subject formation, i.e. these "recognitions" are those of a subject for whom the Friend/Enemy distinction is an ineradicable feature of democracy, & who are reconciled to moderate viciousness as civic virtue?
"To negate the ineradicable character of antagonism and to aim at a universal rational consensus" -- this, supposedly, is the real threat to democracy. Mouffe ascribes it to Habermas. But cf. Habermas's (a) call for the defense of the lifeworld against systems; (b) sophisticated fallibilism (consensus, even were it "universal and rational," would not be incontrovertible); (c) rather impressive collection of rationality concepts (systems vs. lifeworld rationalization), whose qualitative distinctions rule out the kind of dogmatic idealism Mouffe is hinting at. Habermas's concepts for the analysis of rationality encompass greater difference than Mouffe's appeal to difference.
Cf. Hart: assume that each party has the discretion to provide “perfunctory” rather than “consummate” performance – we refer to this as shading – and that such behavior cannot be
observed or penalized by an outsider (e.g., a court).
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Some notes on Hirst
Modern Western states are narrowly plebiscitarian "democracies" (cf. Schumpeter) wherein elites espouse roughly the same economic ideas (cf., say, Poulantzas).
Materialism -- the kind which involves having swimming pools and special shoes -- is the dominant but unsatisfying ideology (cf. Habermas on civil privatism and familial-vocational privatism. Fatalism and an orientation towards immediate gratification for low- and high-income demographics, acquisitive abstinence for the middle. Cf. food).
Social theory is attenuated. Your options are: postmodern ironism, rationalism / game theory, or a metadiscourse of concern for academic enquiry as such (wherein falls Political Sociology. The compulsory mixture of analytic and contintental styles creates a huge burden for a kid who is trying to trace connections between ideas simultaneously with interventions among authors. It does seem to force you into a historical narrative to resolve it all though). A retreat, anyway, from social generality into issue-specificity / identity-centrism.
Can we reason from existing institutions? Cf. Habermas on democratic incrementalism.
Associative democracy -- a third way between collectivist state socialism & laissez faire capitalism.
Contra utopianism:
Prevailing forms of governance are difficult to apply to de facto social conditions. One of associative democracy's strengths is to generate standards, not just coordinate action (cf. of course communicative reason vs. steering media).
The prevalent methods of governance are:
(1) hierarchy and imperative
(2) exchange and contract
(3) bargaining and deliberation
Central planning suffers where product mixes change rapidly and there is an emphasis on customization. We see a drive towards decentralisation, devolution and complex, multi-centred methods of monitoring product quality and productive performance.
The collapse of state socialism is connected with central planning's failure to address the increasing complexity and localization of social action. The audit explosion originated in the imperative first to protect then to replace administrative coordination of action.
Modern capitalism diverges from perfect competition inasmuch as it is characterised by large corporations, complex division of labour. Cf. "natural monopolies," monopolistic and oligopolistic competition & Habermas's "great concerns."
Weakly regulated markets are not always prosperous and efficient (let alone substantively egalitarian). With the marketization of labour, certain costs of social stabilisation are transferred to the state in the form of income maintenance, retraining etc. Typically the state has also been obliged to set up a powerful bureaucracy to counteract the very incentive structure created in these activities, policing illegitimate use of benefits and politely coercing the unemployed into seizing undesired opportunities. Streeck argues that the costs proliferate even into the category of biological reproduction, as "flexible" and uncertain work disincentivises child birth in key demographics. The structure of familial-vocational privatism coexists with a new ideology combining achievement orientation in the vocational dimension with fatalism in the familial.
Materialism -- the kind which involves having swimming pools and special shoes -- is the dominant but unsatisfying ideology (cf. Habermas on civil privatism and familial-vocational privatism. Fatalism and an orientation towards immediate gratification for low- and high-income demographics, acquisitive abstinence for the middle. Cf. food).
Social theory is attenuated. Your options are: postmodern ironism, rationalism / game theory, or a metadiscourse of concern for academic enquiry as such (wherein falls Political Sociology. The compulsory mixture of analytic and contintental styles creates a huge burden for a kid who is trying to trace connections between ideas simultaneously with interventions among authors. It does seem to force you into a historical narrative to resolve it all though). A retreat, anyway, from social generality into issue-specificity / identity-centrism.
Can we reason from existing institutions? Cf. Habermas on democratic incrementalism.
Associative democracy -- a third way between collectivist state socialism & laissez faire capitalism.
Contra utopianism:
- Marxism's ideal of a stateless society without a complex division of labour is an unattainable "institutionlessism" which legitimated brutality as pragmatism, so.
- Modern laissez-faire ignores issues of governance and institutions to purify markets ... its foci imaginarii is a social order sustained exclusively by production and transaction.
Prevailing forms of governance are difficult to apply to de facto social conditions. One of associative democracy's strengths is to generate standards, not just coordinate action (cf. of course communicative reason vs. steering media).
The prevalent methods of governance are:
(1) hierarchy and imperative
(2) exchange and contract
(3) bargaining and deliberation
Central planning suffers where product mixes change rapidly and there is an emphasis on customization. We see a drive towards decentralisation, devolution and complex, multi-centred methods of monitoring product quality and productive performance.
The collapse of state socialism is connected with central planning's failure to address the increasing complexity and localization of social action. The audit explosion originated in the imperative first to protect then to replace administrative coordination of action.
Modern capitalism diverges from perfect competition inasmuch as it is characterised by large corporations, complex division of labour. Cf. "natural monopolies," monopolistic and oligopolistic competition & Habermas's "great concerns."
Weakly regulated markets are not always prosperous and efficient (let alone substantively egalitarian). With the marketization of labour, certain costs of social stabilisation are transferred to the state in the form of income maintenance, retraining etc. Typically the state has also been obliged to set up a powerful bureaucracy to counteract the very incentive structure created in these activities, policing illegitimate use of benefits and politely coercing the unemployed into seizing undesired opportunities. Streeck argues that the costs proliferate even into the category of biological reproduction, as "flexible" and uncertain work disincentivises child birth in key demographics. The structure of familial-vocational privatism coexists with a new ideology combining achievement orientation in the vocational dimension with fatalism in the familial.
Friday, April 4, 2008
Chantal Mouffe on citizenship
"Modern citizenship was formulated in a way that played a crucial role in the emergence of modern democracy. But it has become an obstacle to making it wider and more pluralistic." Postmodern citizenship: acknowledging the particular, the heterogeneous and the multiple.
What is it to be a citizen in a pluralistic society? How can individual and political liberty be reconciled? How many different communities can be accommodated in the political community? What conception of social justice will regulate their claims?
Liberal view of citizen as bearer of rights is inadequate.
Communitarians (Sandal) vs. liberals (Rawls) debate: "civic republican" idea of citizenship.
Civic activity, public spiritness and political participation in a community of equals: since the C19th, seen by liberalism as pre-modern or dangerous ("common good" implies totalitarianism: cf. Hayek). The "liberties of the moderns" require the renunciation of the "liberties of the ancients" (cf. Constant, & Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty). Indeed some civic republicanists do want to renounce pluralism in the name of a substantive idea of the common good -- v. dangerous obv.
Skinner: synthesises individual & political liberty. Idea of a common good is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of individual liberty. Cf. Habermas.
"The defence of pluralism, the emergence of the individual, the separation of church and state, and the development of civil society, are all crucial elements of modern democracy. They require that we distinguish today between the domain of the private and the domain of the public, the realm of morality and the realm of politics. As a consequence, the common good cannot be conceived of in a way that implies the acceptance of one single substantive idea of the good life in all fields of society. It must be understood to refer exclusively to to the shared political ends of a democratic political community, i.e. the principles of freedom and equality for all. Citizenship concerns the way those principles are embodied in different institutions and practices, the way the political community is constructed."
Common good never actualised. Always debate over exact nature of citizenship.
Hurd's citizenship: voluntary acts of moral responsibility; privatised conception of citizenship that whisks away the notion of political community.
Democratic citizenship could provide the organising principle of a new politics of the left.
Feminist critique: Pateman. Generality and homogeneity of public sphere based on exclusion of women.
Transformation of public/private distinction so as not to relegate all plurality, all difference to the private?
New rights being claimed by women or ethnic minorities cannot be universalised? Expressions of specific needs which should be granted only to particular communities? (Cf. rule of law, decisionism).
Citizenship and social justice
Rawls' distributive justice. Defence of individual liberty, commitment to equality. Does not necessitate private property in the means of production (unlike Hayek and Nozick?). Citizenship as capacity to form, pursue & revise conceptions of the good (cf. autonomy). No place for community: precludes conceptions of the good life in which it is necessary to join with others beyond contract.
Walzer (Spheres of Justice) idea of justice. Egalitarian ideal not "simple equality" but "complex equality" -- diff. social goods distributed in accordance with a variety of criteria reflecting diversity of these goods and their social meanings. Different spheres of justice & different distributive principles: free exchange and need.
Democratic and pluralistic citizenship
Reverse-engineer concept of citizenship from democratic demands found in a variety of movements.
Democratic rights.
Welfare benefits shifted from assistance to the rights of citizenship.
E.g.: universal grants.
"A pluralistic and democratic citizenship is not concerned with indivudal questions of morality but with our obligations as fellow members of a political community"
What is it to be a citizen in a pluralistic society? How can individual and political liberty be reconciled? How many different communities can be accommodated in the political community? What conception of social justice will regulate their claims?
Liberal view of citizen as bearer of rights is inadequate.
Communitarians (Sandal) vs. liberals (Rawls) debate: "civic republican" idea of citizenship.
Civic activity, public spiritness and political participation in a community of equals: since the C19th, seen by liberalism as pre-modern or dangerous ("common good" implies totalitarianism: cf. Hayek). The "liberties of the moderns" require the renunciation of the "liberties of the ancients" (cf. Constant, & Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty). Indeed some civic republicanists do want to renounce pluralism in the name of a substantive idea of the common good -- v. dangerous obv.
Skinner: synthesises individual & political liberty. Idea of a common good is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of individual liberty. Cf. Habermas.
"The defence of pluralism, the emergence of the individual, the separation of church and state, and the development of civil society, are all crucial elements of modern democracy. They require that we distinguish today between the domain of the private and the domain of the public, the realm of morality and the realm of politics. As a consequence, the common good cannot be conceived of in a way that implies the acceptance of one single substantive idea of the good life in all fields of society. It must be understood to refer exclusively to to the shared political ends of a democratic political community, i.e. the principles of freedom and equality for all. Citizenship concerns the way those principles are embodied in different institutions and practices, the way the political community is constructed."
Common good never actualised. Always debate over exact nature of citizenship.
Hurd's citizenship: voluntary acts of moral responsibility; privatised conception of citizenship that whisks away the notion of political community.
Democratic citizenship could provide the organising principle of a new politics of the left.
Feminist critique: Pateman. Generality and homogeneity of public sphere based on exclusion of women.
Transformation of public/private distinction so as not to relegate all plurality, all difference to the private?
New rights being claimed by women or ethnic minorities cannot be universalised? Expressions of specific needs which should be granted only to particular communities? (Cf. rule of law, decisionism).
Citizenship and social justice
Rawls' distributive justice. Defence of individual liberty, commitment to equality. Does not necessitate private property in the means of production (unlike Hayek and Nozick?). Citizenship as capacity to form, pursue & revise conceptions of the good (cf. autonomy). No place for community: precludes conceptions of the good life in which it is necessary to join with others beyond contract.
Walzer (Spheres of Justice) idea of justice. Egalitarian ideal not "simple equality" but "complex equality" -- diff. social goods distributed in accordance with a variety of criteria reflecting diversity of these goods and their social meanings. Different spheres of justice & different distributive principles: free exchange and need.
Democratic and pluralistic citizenship
Reverse-engineer concept of citizenship from democratic demands found in a variety of movements.
Democratic rights.
Welfare benefits shifted from assistance to the rights of citizenship.
E.g.: universal grants.
"A pluralistic and democratic citizenship is not concerned with indivudal questions of morality but with our obligations as fellow members of a political community"
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Marcuse on pluralism
Denunciation of the oppressive capabilities of the Welfare State thus serves to protect the oppressive capabilities of the society prior to the Welfare State. At the most advanced stage of capitalism, this society is a system of subdued pluralism, in which the competing institutions concur in solidifying the power of the whole over the individual. Still, for the administered individual, pluralistic administration is far better than total administration. One institution might protect him against the other; one organization might mitigate the impact o the other; possibilities of escape and redress can be calculated. The rule of law, no matter how restricted, is still infinitely safer than rule above or without law.
However, in view of prevailing tendencies, the question must be raised whether this form of pluralism does not accelerate the destruction of pluralism. Advanced industrial society is indeed a system of countervailing powers. But these forces cancel each other out in a higher unification -- in the common interest to defend and extend the established position, to combat the historical alternatives, to contain qualitative change.
The reality of pluralism becomes ideological, deceptive. It seems to extend rather than reduce manipulation and coordination, to promote rather than counteract the fateful integration.
Neither the growing productivity nor the high standard of living depend on the threat from without, but their use for the containment of social change and perpetuation of servitude does. The Enemy is the common denominator of all doing and undoing. And the Enemy is not identical with acual communism or actual capitalism -- he is, in both cases, the real spectre of liberation.
Once again: the insanity of the whole absolves the particular insanities and turns the crimes against humanity into a rational enterprise.
However, in view of prevailing tendencies, the question must be raised whether this form of pluralism does not accelerate the destruction of pluralism. Advanced industrial society is indeed a system of countervailing powers. But these forces cancel each other out in a higher unification -- in the common interest to defend and extend the established position, to combat the historical alternatives, to contain qualitative change.
- The countervailing powers do not include those which counter the whole.
The reality of pluralism becomes ideological, deceptive. It seems to extend rather than reduce manipulation and coordination, to promote rather than counteract the fateful integration.
- Free institutions compete with authoritarian ones in making the Enemy [cf. Schmitt, Mouffe] a deadly force within the system.
Neither the growing productivity nor the high standard of living depend on the threat from without, but their use for the containment of social change and perpetuation of servitude does. The Enemy is the common denominator of all doing and undoing. And the Enemy is not identical with acual communism or actual capitalism -- he is, in both cases, the real spectre of liberation.
Once again: the insanity of the whole absolves the particular insanities and turns the crimes against humanity into a rational enterprise.
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Samantha on civil society
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.
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.
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?
Monday, January 15, 2007
Notes on crisis
Horkheimer:
"But the critical theory of society is, in its totality, the unfolding of a single existential judgment. To put it in broad terms, the theory says that the basic form of the historically given commodity economy on which modern history rests contains in itself the internal and external tensions of the modern era; it generates these tensions over and over again in an increasingly heightened form; and after a period of progress, development of human powers, and emancipation for the individual, after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism."
"But the critical theory of society is, in its totality, the unfolding of a single existential judgment. To put it in broad terms, the theory says that the basic form of the historically given commodity economy on which modern history rests contains in itself the internal and external tensions of the modern era; it generates these tensions over and over again in an increasingly heightened form; and after a period of progress, development of human powers, and emancipation for the individual, after an enormous extension of human control over nature, it finally hinders further development and drives humanity into a new barbarism."
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
Samantha's notes on Critical Theory
‘Critical Theory’ is a term used to refer to a tradition divided by generation. Contemporary theorists include Habermas, Offe, Apel, writing broadly in the tradition as redefined by Habermas. The early theorists included Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Lowenthal, Neumann, Benjamin. What unites them is a concern to provide a systematic and critical analysis of social phenomena and the tendencies of modern societies with the aim of achieving a more rational society. The project contains empirical, theoretical and philosophical themes, and draws on Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as (esp. Habermas), Durkheim and Weber.
The ‘Frankfurt School’ was established as an institute of orthodox Marxian studies in 1923. In 1930 Max Horkheimer became its director; from this time a distinct tradition emerged. Basic questions and issues:
Why was there no revolution after 1917 in the West?
How to explain the phenomenon of alienation?
Why did people consent to fascism?
Why does exposure to culture, commonly seen as civilising, not guard against barbarism?
Dispute with positivists and concern to oppose instrumental reason.
Disenchantment with orthodox Marxism
Saw tendency for Marxism to become scientistic socialism, creating a void in which the right could take control. Engaged in a critical re-examination of Marx’s ideas for early c20, using the argument that historical materialism by definition anticipates its own constant reformulation – c20 Marxism must be distinct from c19 Marxism due to changed historical circumstances.
Dealing with political upheavals in Europe in the first decades of the c20, and influenced by the publication of Marx’s early writings at the time. Focused on the need for interdisciplinarity and on the dangers of closure/assuming a totalising explanation (reality incomplete, therefore to effect closure implies domination).
Therefore not orthodox Marxists. Class conflict and economic forces important, but did not give a complete picture. Need to examine a more general historical dynamic (in which Marxism itself ensnared). That general dynamic was one of enlightenment and domination. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment argued that Enlightenment was destroying itself from within. With increased knowledge, humans had gained increased mastery over both external nature and human subjectivity. Both were increasingly subordinated to technical control and manipulation. Taking up Weber’s account of rationalisation as producing an ‘iron cage’, they argued that as instrumental reason became increasingly dominant the space for criticism closed down. Enlightenment was returning to myth and to more absolute forms of domination.
Central question was therefore how to maintain a space for criticism. This lead them to examine the political and sociological aspects of culture, understanding mass media as an assimilating force for capitalism.
Three sets of ideas helped in the reformulation of Marxism:
1. Work of Korsch and Lukacs. Former argued that orthodox Marxism was a form of ‘contemplative materialism’ – waiting for the revolution as an inevitable event meant neglect of subjectivity. Latter argued that the main barrier to realisation of revolutionary agency was reification. Critical theorists use these ideas to break open Marxism from within.
2. Nietzsche’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. Suspicion of any claim to totality/truth – completeness always out of reach. Marxism had reached a premature closure. Need for continuous criticism. Idea that one must move backwards toward the truth as something is missing in the present.
3. Psychoanalysis. Important in critical theorists attempt to understand fascism. Argument that weakening of the ego and assumption by social forces of the role of the superego had reduced the role of the family in late bourgeois society. Vacuum of authority in family meant that individuals were more receptive to authority figures outside the family, e.g. in culture industry and fascist demagoguery.
Critique of positivism
Dialectic of Enlightenment gives an account of Enlightenment as a project aimed at liberating people from fear and establishing sovereignty of human reason, but describes a process whereby reason becomes a fetter. Instrumental reason, technical control over humans and nature, comes to dominate. This is identified as positivism:
1. treats human agents as facts/objects – determinism
2. conceives world only as it is immediately given – no distinction appearance and essence
3. establishes an absolute division between fact and value – separates knowledge from human interests
The critical theorists opposed this with dialectical theory. Mediation of facts and values and appearance and essence as part of one totality, a contradictory and moving dialectical process. No value freedom – the intellectual is part of what they study. Positivism is tied to increased domination and control over people and things; it dissolves the possibility of criticism. This even reaches the aesthetic realm – affirmative culture works to erase the possibility of criticism and produces increasing uniformity – mass culture for mass society, with only pseudo individuality. A kind of psychoanalysis in reverse.
Possibilities for change
Autonomous art – that which refuses standardisation and familiarity could be a repository of difference and new values
Negative dialectics – resistance to orthodoxy, continual and immanent criticism.
Problems
Link between theory and practice? Believed society not ripe for revolution – no agent in this period, therefore task centred on maintaining the possibility of criticism through darkness (Habermas describes this as a ‘politics of hibernation’)
Obscurity – attempt to develop fragmentary writing as a way of resisting closure, but this makes their work difficult.
Contributions
- Stressed interdisciplinary character of social inquiry – resistance to disciplinary boundaries.
- Worked to maintain Marxism as a form of ethical critique at a time of positivism and Stalinism.
- Historical materialism as open-ended – opposed dogmatism.
- Recognition that capitalism had changed since c19, and the need to rework ideas in the light of this.
- Emphasised that social and political theorists need to understand culture, and emphasised the relationship between aesthetics and politics.
- Relation of humans and nature – critique of instrumental reason is also a critique of the domination of nature, something most Marxist accounts accept.
The ‘Frankfurt School’ was established as an institute of orthodox Marxian studies in 1923. In 1930 Max Horkheimer became its director; from this time a distinct tradition emerged. Basic questions and issues:
Why was there no revolution after 1917 in the West?
How to explain the phenomenon of alienation?
Why did people consent to fascism?
Why does exposure to culture, commonly seen as civilising, not guard against barbarism?
Dispute with positivists and concern to oppose instrumental reason.
Disenchantment with orthodox Marxism
Saw tendency for Marxism to become scientistic socialism, creating a void in which the right could take control. Engaged in a critical re-examination of Marx’s ideas for early c20, using the argument that historical materialism by definition anticipates its own constant reformulation – c20 Marxism must be distinct from c19 Marxism due to changed historical circumstances.
Dealing with political upheavals in Europe in the first decades of the c20, and influenced by the publication of Marx’s early writings at the time. Focused on the need for interdisciplinarity and on the dangers of closure/assuming a totalising explanation (reality incomplete, therefore to effect closure implies domination).
Therefore not orthodox Marxists. Class conflict and economic forces important, but did not give a complete picture. Need to examine a more general historical dynamic (in which Marxism itself ensnared). That general dynamic was one of enlightenment and domination. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment argued that Enlightenment was destroying itself from within. With increased knowledge, humans had gained increased mastery over both external nature and human subjectivity. Both were increasingly subordinated to technical control and manipulation. Taking up Weber’s account of rationalisation as producing an ‘iron cage’, they argued that as instrumental reason became increasingly dominant the space for criticism closed down. Enlightenment was returning to myth and to more absolute forms of domination.
Central question was therefore how to maintain a space for criticism. This lead them to examine the political and sociological aspects of culture, understanding mass media as an assimilating force for capitalism.
Three sets of ideas helped in the reformulation of Marxism:
1. Work of Korsch and Lukacs. Former argued that orthodox Marxism was a form of ‘contemplative materialism’ – waiting for the revolution as an inevitable event meant neglect of subjectivity. Latter argued that the main barrier to realisation of revolutionary agency was reification. Critical theorists use these ideas to break open Marxism from within.
2. Nietzsche’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. Suspicion of any claim to totality/truth – completeness always out of reach. Marxism had reached a premature closure. Need for continuous criticism. Idea that one must move backwards toward the truth as something is missing in the present.
3. Psychoanalysis. Important in critical theorists attempt to understand fascism. Argument that weakening of the ego and assumption by social forces of the role of the superego had reduced the role of the family in late bourgeois society. Vacuum of authority in family meant that individuals were more receptive to authority figures outside the family, e.g. in culture industry and fascist demagoguery.
Critique of positivism
Dialectic of Enlightenment gives an account of Enlightenment as a project aimed at liberating people from fear and establishing sovereignty of human reason, but describes a process whereby reason becomes a fetter. Instrumental reason, technical control over humans and nature, comes to dominate. This is identified as positivism:
1. treats human agents as facts/objects – determinism
2. conceives world only as it is immediately given – no distinction appearance and essence
3. establishes an absolute division between fact and value – separates knowledge from human interests
The critical theorists opposed this with dialectical theory. Mediation of facts and values and appearance and essence as part of one totality, a contradictory and moving dialectical process. No value freedom – the intellectual is part of what they study. Positivism is tied to increased domination and control over people and things; it dissolves the possibility of criticism. This even reaches the aesthetic realm – affirmative culture works to erase the possibility of criticism and produces increasing uniformity – mass culture for mass society, with only pseudo individuality. A kind of psychoanalysis in reverse.
Possibilities for change
Autonomous art – that which refuses standardisation and familiarity could be a repository of difference and new values
Negative dialectics – resistance to orthodoxy, continual and immanent criticism.
Problems
Link between theory and practice? Believed society not ripe for revolution – no agent in this period, therefore task centred on maintaining the possibility of criticism through darkness (Habermas describes this as a ‘politics of hibernation’)
Obscurity – attempt to develop fragmentary writing as a way of resisting closure, but this makes their work difficult.
Contributions
- Stressed interdisciplinary character of social inquiry – resistance to disciplinary boundaries.
- Worked to maintain Marxism as a form of ethical critique at a time of positivism and Stalinism.
- Historical materialism as open-ended – opposed dogmatism.
- Recognition that capitalism had changed since c19, and the need to rework ideas in the light of this.
- Emphasised that social and political theorists need to understand culture, and emphasised the relationship between aesthetics and politics.
- Relation of humans and nature – critique of instrumental reason is also a critique of the domination of nature, something most Marxist accounts accept.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Adorno
ADORNO
** REASON **
The dialectic of enlightenment
(1) There is a linear component to the dialectic. Enlightenment’s roots are antiauthoritarian, in a sense which encompasses even divine authority.[1]
Enlightenment reverts to myth: according to a linear understanding, enlightenment’s domination over nature, which is initially liberating, gradually turns into domination over the natural substrate of the human.[2]
This manifests as man’s self-domination (alienation), and the domination of men by men:[3]
• Enlightenment reverts to scientism / positivism: concepts become formulae, causes become rule and probability, quality becomes quantity.
• This cognitive domination is the basic cause of sociotechnical domination (the domination of man by man).[4] Enlightenment reverts to instrumentalization / technicity: science does not arbitrate its ends.
What enlightened thought represents as superstition, and tries to purge, is already a form of cognition. (Cf. heuristics). Myth is already enlightenment inasmuch as identificatory thinking is inalienable to thought.
Classification, i.e. subsumption as specimens, has an interest in domination, but is different from it. One corollory is that domination and capitalism are not coterminous[5] (cf. Marx[6]).
• The modern reception of Nietzche which emphasises his attack on enlightenment nihilism leads to an irrationalist glorification of pre-rational immediacy, which in fact already contains ingredients of modern rationality.
The entanglement of enlightenment with myth, and reason with domination, is nowhere absent from this account. But the quality of the entanglement has changed, indicating that it’s not a transhistorical invariant:
• In particular, unlike sacrifice,[7] magic and mimesis do not mystify difference. They are not prior to reason or domination, but they are prior to the unity of subject (internalised self-sacrifice).
• Mimesis, the impulse to resemble, is displaced by identification – the attempt to classify, to subsume particulars as specimens.
(2)
In a non-linear vein (sic), myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth, in the sense that the “enlightened” concept of enlightenment is not enlightened enough.[8] It is unenlightened to the extent it fails to reflect on its own ineradicable mythical dimension:
• Reason tries to rid itself of discrimination. But to aggregate what is like means necessarily to segregate it from what is different. There is a qualitative moment in all quantification.
• Reason tries to rid itself of the non-identical. In doing so it upholds irrational violence, and surrenders its own ineradicable imaginative element to superstition, charlatanism, and madness.
Does this mean that enlightenment and myth are one-and-the-same, albeit historically variable, phenomenon? No. The two theses in Dialectic of Enlightenment have shifting, dialectical priority:
• “Myth is already enlightenment” must not be taken to permanently equate power with knowledge (this might be the thesis that enlightenment is “always already” myth – cf. perhaps Foucault).
• “Enlightenment reverts to myth” must not be understood to permanently entail a failure of enlightenment, such that it should be completed (cf. Habermas) or reversed (however meanderingly and however locally – cf. perhaps Foucault).
Adorno and Horkheimer would balk at defining the relationship b/w the theses as methodology. (Cf. Adorno: “It’s very likely that under the spell of the latter the individuated and the concrete do not even exist yet. Through the word pluralism, utopia is suppressed, as if it were already here; it serves as consolation. That is why however dialectical theory, which critically reflects on itself, may not for its part install itself domestic-style in the medium of the generality”). Nonetheless, their relationship is best made sense of through the figure of an embodied inquirer, successively drawing these contradictory stances from one another and responding ethically, imaginatively and critically within the confines of each phase.
** THEORY OF SOCIETY **
Adorno & Marx
Marx, praxis. Although Adorno shares many of Marx’s anthropological intuitions, he thinks that a twentieth-century equation of truth with practical fruitfulness, capitalist or communist, had disastrous effects. Negative Dialectics begins by making two claims:
• First, although obsolete, philosophy remains necessary because capitalism has not been overthrown.
• Second, Marx’s interpretation of capitalist society was inadequate and his critique is outmoded. Hence, praxis no longer serves as an adequate basis for challenging (philosophical) theory. In fact, praxis serves mostly as a pretext for shutting down the theoretical critique that transformative praxis would require.
Marx requires revisions in a number of other areas: the dialectic between forces of production and relations of production; the relationship between state and economy; the sociology of classes and class consciousness; the nature and function of ideology; and the role of expert cultures, such as modern art and social theory, in criticising capitalism and calling for the transformation of society as a whole.
Although in agreement with Marx’s analysis of the commodity, Adorno thinks his critique of commodity fetishism does not go far enough. Marx “had it easy.” Society has come to be organised around the production of exchange values for the sake of exchange value (which, of course, always already requires a silent appropriation of surplus value). Adorno refers to this nexus of production and power as the “principle of exchange.” A society where this nexus prevails is an “exchange society.”
A caution on totality: while still pretending to grasp the whole, philosophy fails to recognise how thoroughly it depends upon society as a whole, all the way into philosophy’s “immanent truth” (ND 4). Cf. aporetic approach, immanent critique, negative dialectics, atonal philosophy, constellations.
Cf. Adorno: “The inflated bluster over concepts such as ‘imperialism’ or ’monopoly,’ without taking into consideration what these words factually entail [Sachverhalten], and to what extent they are relevant, is as wrong, that is to say irrational, as a mode of conduct which, thanks to its blindly nominalistic conception of the matter at hand [Sachverhalten], refuses to consider that concepts such as exchange-society might have their objectivity, revealing a compulsion of the generality behind the matter at hand [Sachverhalten], which is by no means always adequately translated into the operational field of the facts of the matter [Sachverhalte].”
Adorno & state capitalism
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1968/late-capitalism.htm
1930s controversies concerning crisis, immiseration, spontaneity and flexibility / robustness of capitalist system. Cf. Luxembourg. Revolutionary or constitutional socialism?
Pollock: monopolistic capitalism, corporatism, capital concentration. Ferocious accumulation, unconstrained by relations of production.
Pollock: Nazism didn’t just mystify material interests, it changed them. Adorno’s lukewarm reception of this analysis – it suggests non-antagonistic economic relations were possible in the antagonistic society of Fascist Germany.
Neumann: see Behemoth. Rejects the state capitalism thesis. Was Nazism then a glorified confidence trick? Adorno: no, it was a real illusion.
Adorno: industrial society in forces of production; late capitalism in relations of production.
While acknowledging with Pollock that political and economic power have become more tightly meshed, Adorno does not think the fundamentally economic character of capitalist exploitation has changed. Economic exploitation has become even more abstract than it was in Marx’s day, and therefore all the more effective and pervasive. The market permeates all areas of human life. Capital is so concentrated as to appear the expression of the entire society.
The problematic Adorno faces is the priority of industrial society (i.e. relations of production) vs. that of productive forces (i.e. late capitalism). The problematic is produced by the thoroughness of the dialectical interpenetration of the two theses. He dissolves this false dilemma with the paradox that “contemporary society is above all an industrial society according to the level of its productive forces.” This would appear to be a category error: the industrial society thesis encourages us to discard productive forces as an autonomous explanatory category.
How is this unpacked?
“In the categories of critical-dialectical theory I would like to suggest as a first and necessarily abstract answer, that contemporary society is above all an industrial society according to the level of its productive forces. Industrial labor has become the model pattern of society everywhere and across all borders of political systems. It developed itself into a totality due to the fact that modes of procedure, which resemble the industrial ones, are extending by economic necessity into the realms of material production, into administration, the distribution-sphere and that which we call culture. Conversely, society is capitalism in terms of its relations of production [Adorno’s emphasis]. Human beings are still what they were according to the Marxist analysis of the middle of the 19th century: appendages of machines, not merely in the literal sense as workers, who have to adapt themselves to the constitution of the machines which they serve, but far beyond this and metaphorically, compelled to assume the roles of the social mechanism and to model themselves on such, without reservation, on the level of their most intimate impulses. Production goes on today just as it did before, for the sake of profits. Needs have gone beyond anything Marx could have foreseen in his time, completely becoming the function of the production-apparatus, which they potentially were all along, instead of the reverse. They are totally governed [gesteuert: mechanically steered, governed].”
Class. For Marx, class is an objective concept which relies on a relationship to the means of production. Not susceptible to quantificatory assessment / phenomenal criteria.
Adorno’s response is characteristically double:
• Adorno (Pollock’s influence): relations of production more elastic than Marx suspected. “The ruling class disappears behind the concentration of capital.” They have become largely functions of their own production apparatus. Cf. economies of scale, natural monopolies,[9] irreducible complexity. Immiseration in Marx’s sense is disabled.
• The exploited are less and less able to experience themselves as a class. “One can speak of relative immiseration only in a comic sense.” Yet exploitation remains intact, indeed sharpens and grows in fixity. Unfreedom is not played out as Marx prognosticised, but “one’s dependence on the consciousness of those who serve an uncontrollable apparatus, is spreading universally over humanity.” Class consciousness is less likely in proportion to the strength of economic domination.
(Cf. Q. Skinner’s “neoclassical unfreedom” – dependence on the arbitrary will of another).
An archaic injustice – partiality of the means of production – underlies apparently free and equitable exchange. But Adorno cannot uncover this injustice as an objective concept – as the extraction of surplus labour – as Marx could, by an immanent critique of liberalism. There is a corroborative relationship between the frustrated objectivity of the two concepts: class, and the extraction of surplus labour.
Adorno’s materialism steadies itself by constant reference to bodily pain and actual homicide. But for relations of production, repeated mass death by starvation, etc., are preventable. Adorno maintains a connection between this self-extermination, and the damage done to life everywhere in the relations of production in order to mystify it.
Marx is still supremely relevant.[10] The identity of the forces of production with the relations of production is a socially necessary illusion. Actually, they are dialectically related. Cf. Wendt, “Anarchy is What You Make It.”
Adorno: no priority of forces over production over relation of production can be assumed, since the former are mediated by the latter. It is important that “one does not cast the blame on what critique has time and again been side-tracked by – namely technics, that is to say the productive forces – thereby indulging in a kind of theoretical machine-breaking on an expanded level [cf. idealism]. Technics is not the disaster, but rather its intertwining with the social relations, in which it is entangled.” The relations of production are relatively preponderant, so the Marxist understanding of their reification is the more pertinent account.
** MARX REDUX **
Marx. In exchange, non-identical things and unequal relations represented as abstractly identical (cf. dispositional / relational qualities of objects; Oliver Hart’s “reference points”; fetish character of the commodity). Is this idea true?
Exchange value comes to appear as inherent in commodity – hides “its” source in determinate relationship of domination.
Domination accrues the appearance of a natural series of equivalences.
Lukacs: reification is extension of commodity fetishis to all areas of human consciousness and activity.
Illusory autonomy sought by sociology at the price of immanence / historicity.
Lukacs: the capitalist mistakes himself for a determiner of reification; in praxis the proletariat becomes the identical subject-object of history, whose consciousness is unreified.
For Adorno, materialist thought must realise it is never identical with its objects.
Distinction between capitalist and proletariat experience of experience of reification blurred in Adorno compared with Lukacs.
Anti-semitic anti-capitalism of Fascism was an extension of the logic of late capitalism. The Jews epitomized the sphere of circulation. Strove for egalitarian, mutilating levelling.
Social-pyschological studies: anti-Semitism, authoritarian personality. Cultural studies: television, film, music; also conversations on trains, glimpsed expressions, etc.
Emphasising the Hegelian dimension of Marx, Adorno uses Marxian anti-methodologist critique to rebuke Weber. Marx attacks Left Hegelians and utopian socialists for the “ought” they propose outside of social experience. Likewise, classical political economy begins with illegitimate deductive abstractions.
Immanent critique does not methodologically pre-form its objects. Adorno reads Marx as an immanent critic of political economy – one who starts with the concept in which fact and norm are most acutely implicated, fair exchange, and shows how bourgeois society’s fulfilment of its constitutive normativity would supersede / sublate (aufheben) the bourgeois form of society. “He only needed to ask whether capitalism corresponded in its own dynamic categories to this model, in order to produce, out of the determinate negation of the preexisting theoretical system, a system-like theory in its own right. Meanwhile the market economy has become so honeycombed, that it mocks any such confrontation. The irrationality of the contemporary social structure hinders its rational development in theory.”
Truth is “glimpsed” by determinate negation of the false (so not really a “stance” or “orientation”).
Adorno distances his approach from economism.
Immiseration is a consequence of the autonomous course of liberal political economy, as modified by monopoly capitalism.
Nietzschean moment? Domination reproducting itself in trivially autonomous social and political forms?
Millions starve while food is stockpiled, and nothing apparently can be done.
Cf. aid, moral hazard, additionality, fungibility, selfishness (cf. Peter Singer). Cf. commitment problems. Cf. overlapping consensus.
Materialism which aims to rid itself of illusion entirely risks sensuous dogmatism, endlessly playing out crude involuntary philosophical commitments.
A seamlessly noncontradictory system cannot be materialist. Systematicity is the levelling of the non-identical. Cf. Habermas.
Material has a contradictory relationship with system.
Adorno resists insulating Marx from German philosophy, and from the entire materialist tradition.
Materialism need not be emancipatory / critical. Cf. Hobbes.
Material specificity of minute particulars, not universals, should be the starting point of philosophical interpretation. Cf. Benjamin.
Experience is “sedimented” (cf. Husserl) in abstract concepts.
Systemic character (real illusion) of capitalist society presents systematisation as the unavoidable commitment of any immanent critique. Marx builds a negative system capable of querying the systemic unity which bourgeois society claims for itself.
Contesting political economy’s restrictedly technical redefinition of normative concepts à “free” as “contractually consenting.”
Marx is critical of previous socialist efforts to found political economy in dogmatic anthropology. Where methodological convenience organises the foundational division between needs and wants, the result will be empty moralising. The notion of need emerges coevally with surplus value as a “gift from nature.”
For Smith and Turgot, the question was how is profit possible from fair exchange?
(Cf. Islamic finance).
Marx: theory of surplus value. Price of labour is determined by how much labour goes into the production of labour.
Capital critiques political economy by offering a phenomenology of a systematic and real illusion, whose every category is an identification and misidentification.
Marx’s materialism seeks to avoid political economy’s positivism (in the sense of an exaggerated sense of the nomological); materialist anthropology with a dogmatic doctrine of human needs or interests; and any methodological stance which will betray in advance the specificity of the material.
Nature neither subjected to “dialectical-materialist” expositions (cf. Engels), nor placed under an embarrassed taboo (post-structuralism).
Marx attempts to undo the illusion that all experience is economically / culturally constructed from within, glimpsing nature.
Capitalism does not invent mystification.
For Marx, domination must be deduced economically. He holds a polemic front against the conservative idea that domination is “natural.”
Adorno (influenced by Pollock) wants to correct this tendency: the collapse of capitalism might lead to worse domination / mystification.
Dialectic of Enlightenment: a philosophy of history? “History is the unity of continuity and discontinuity.” That is, history is a real totalisation in natural-historical experience. Cultures are integrated by exchange even as they are beset by furious insistence on altereity.
Positivist / postmodern insistence on discontinuity – recapitulates a teleological fantasy of arrival at pure structure. Adorno: “The fetishism of the facts corresponds to one of the objective laws. Dialectics, which has had its fill of the painful experience of such hegemony, does not hegemonize in turn, but criticizes this just as much as the appearance, that the individuated and the concrete already determine the course of the world hic et nunc.”
Social life is not exhausted by culture.
Ban on philosophy of history – falseness of true antithesis of nature and history – apologetically recapitulates history’s mystification of its natural growth.
Schnädelbach: social myths are generically committed to narrativism, no matter how much good will they demonstrate the unrealised goal of enlightenment.
Myths enlighten, enlightenment mythologises. This is no narrativist nitro, propelling selected facts over the finishing line into timeless wisdom. This is the rebellion of experience against empiricism. Cf. in Adorno the tendency to use, where one might expect a word like “history” or “historicity,” the word “Auschwitz.” Hitler’s barbarism imposes a “new categorical imperative” on human beings in their condition of unfreedom: so to arrange their thought and action that “Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that] nothing similar would happen” (ND 365).
Whereas denying transcendental value would suppress the suffering that calls out for fundamental change, straightforwardly affirming the existence of utopia would cut off the critique of contemporary society and the struggle to change it.
If Homer’s truths are timeless, we needn’t go to Homer for them. If they are insulated by historical incommensurability, we can’t.
What’s the answer? Polymorphous connections, dialectically blurring burlesque and mock-heroic, in a new mode of fractal derision, reveal entangelement of archaic and modern, dominated and rational. Xenophanes’ critique of divine anthropomorphism is characteristic of enlightenment inasmuch as it demystifies, secularises, disenchants.
Drive for empiricism leads to solipsism, an inability to imagine alternatives. (Cf. Adorno on Hegel).
Nothing can be allowed to stand outside thought: “world as giant analytic judgement.”
Language is confined to structure (which cannot “be like” nature) or to image (which cannot “know” nature). Cf. Kant, mimetic function, also Dreyfuss on Heidegger.
Enlightenment is an actually existing wild generalisation (true predictions of it are unfalsifiable?).
Rationality which is invariant over its object set.
** CRITIQUE **
Adorno & Durkheim / Weber
“Max Weber introduced the concept of an ‘interpretative sociology’, believing fundamentally that sociological knowledge consists in understanding the ‘means-end rationality’, the assessment of opportunities made by social agents; whereas Durkheim took the view that sociology differed essentially from psychology (although Max Weber, too, distinguished sharply between them) in that real social facts – faits sociaux – cannot be understood, are impenetrable and opaque and ought, as he put it himself without quite realising the implications of what he said, to be treated as ‘things’, as choses; thus, Durkheim’s sociology was also called chosisme. Traces of this view still survive in French structuralism [...] The second difference is that Max Weber, as you know, rigorously upheld the view that sciology was ‘value-free’ – meaning that value judgements must be absolutely excluded from it. And I should like to say that the vulgar positivism of today has followed him precisely in this, whereas he himself, being still trained in idealist epistemology, refused to have any truck with vulgar sociologism. Durkheim, by contrast, although in some ways a far more unprepentant positivist than Weber, admitted value judgements to sociology. He did so, I believe, because of his more penetrating perception and analysis of the facts themselves. For he had realized that the mere distinction between true and false introduces a value relationship even into pure acts of cognition, which Weber – naively, I would say – thought he could separate from axiological acts, or acts which involve valuations. And indeed, if you read one of Durkheim’s early major works such as The Division of Labour in society, the evaluative tibre is unmistakable. It is very closely related to what I mentioned earlier, the hyypostasis of social facts which, in a process wwhich became more and more prominent in his work, were used normatively and acknowledged as determining values. These two moments, the impenetrable givenness of faits sociaux and their aspect of value latr crystallized out with utmost sharpness in Durkheim’s theory of conscience (consciousness) and of the esprit collectif (collective mind) [...] the old rigid dichotomy of evaluative and value-free knowledge is no longer tenable today. [...] Clearly, the attempt to abolish concepts in sociology and – if I may put it in extreme form – to reduce them to mere tokens, abbreviations for the facts they subsume, devoid of any autonomy, sems to me extremely narrow-minded. There is simply no thought without concepts. [...] Durkheim, in asserting the non-intelligible in chosisme, and thereby stating that sociology really finds its true subject where comprehensibility ceases, hit on a very central moment of socialization: that something originally made by human beings becomes institutionally autonomous in relation to human beings. Only he hypostatizes this point; that is to say, he treats it as if such opacity were ‘second nature’ to the institutions,[11] were inherent in socialization itself. And this tendency is at the origin of the apologia for the existing society which is a decisive trai of Durkheim [...] “
Durkheim: social facts should be treated like things. Society enters each individual as their non-identical compulsion. (Cf. Foucault & grid of intelligibility; communitarianism & non-chosen ties). Moment of truth (alienation). But D. converts prepronderence of collective into an invariant.
[Bernstein: Adorno’s position closer to D.’s than he concedes: for D., the ideal contains the real by way of the wish that it become real.]
Weber: sociology requires a reduction to individual consciousnesses (vs. Durkheim’s restriction to ‘social facts’), and an understanding of the rational and purposive actions of individuals. Action within bourgeois society is not only motivated, but objectively intelligible.
Interpretative[12] Sociology: the intentionality (cf. Bretano) of action allows the sociologist to “accomplish something which is never attainable in the natural sciences, namely the subjective understanding of the action of the component individuals.” Links with methodological individualism – social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors. Contrasted with Durkheim’s third-person perspective.
Ideal Types: social, economic and historical research can never be fully inductive or descriptive as one must always approach it with a conceptual apparatus, which Weber termed “Ideal Type.” This, together with his interpretative, antipositivistic orientation justifies the assumption of the “rational economic man” (homo economicus).
Fact problems and value problems are heterogeneous (Weber admits this is a value position).
Adorno sympathises with W.’s scepticism of homology between natural and social sciences (he attributes the origin its rationale to Freyer: the observer is not external to object of study). But Adorno thinks that in laying stress on the self-understanding of participants of social institutions, W. underestimates the autonomous life of social relations.
Beyond Durkheim vs. Weber: sociology ought to grasp the incomprehensibility which makes relations opaque and autonomous. Autonomy of social relations is a real illusion. (Cf. Marx on fetish character of the commodity).
Adorno rejects the neo-Kantian distinction between nomothetic & ideographic sciences. (Cf. disjunctions b/w structuralism & hermeneutics, and b/w discursive & aesthetic functions of language). Understanding opacities requires philosophical artifice: the qualitative specificity of social theory is likely to go missing if it attempts absolute literalness.
Sociological laws fall into error by implying a domain of purely sociological objects (cf. Schmitt on autonomy of the political). Adorno argues against such fetishised methodology: “People prefer to cling to a pure tautology, to the absolute certainty of the proposition that A = A, rather than importing into the realm of knowledge the risks – of which they are preconciously aware – imposed by an existence liable to be annihilated at any moment.” Of course he connects this with Horkheimer’s instrumental reason.
[Cf. Schmitt: “The dualism of the methods of sociology and jurisprudence ends in a monistic metaphysics.”]
The ideal of methodology is really tautology – its knowledge is determined operationally, since it does no more than fulfil the demands of method, at the expense of the object (vs. immanent critique). Adorno suspects that no relevant truth is not attended by the risk that it might be wrong (cf. Habermasian fallibilism).
“The fetishism of the facts corresponds to one of the objective laws.”
Sociological professionalism ought to be opaque, and ought not to set limits to social inquiry.
Durkheim & Weber lose the philosophical advances of Kant (the transcendental move) and Hegel (dialectical understanding of fact & value (or of facticity & norm)).
The “old rigid dichotomy of evaluative and value-free knowledge is no longer tenable today”. Weberian version of the division buys antipositivism at the cost of “dogmatic hypostasis of universal anthropological values.” Any method posited in advance of its object is idealist. The priorities of sociological method are mistaken for features of social experience.
Kant’s “critical path” between necessarily intelligible world (rationalism – cf. Weber) & necessarily unintelligible world (skepticism – cf. Durkheim).
** REIFICATION **
Lukacs: Building on Max Weber’s theory of rationalization, Lukács argues that the capitalist economy is no longer one sector of society alongside others. Rather, commodity exchange has become the central organizing principle for all sectors of society. This allows commodity fetishism to permeate all social institutions (e.g., law, administration, journalism) as well as all academic disciplines, including philosophy. “Reification” refers to “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” Lukács was especially concerned with how reification makes human beings “seem like mere things obeying the inexorable laws of the marketplace” (Zuidervaart 1991, 76).
Sacrifice – object or creature substituted for one incommensurable with it.
Ego owes its existance to the sacrifice of the present moment to the future.
Archaic bloodlust in bourgeois setting: altar smoke from hearth fire.
Exchange society prohibits any value from incommensurability with others – thus exchange value itself is the master value.
Adorno came to call the reification of consciousness an “epiphenomenon.” Critical social theory needs to address why hunger, poverty, and other forms of human suffering persist despite the technological and scientific potential to eliminate them.
Hatred of social complexity, which might be associated with communitarianism, and the endorsement of disintermediation in the name of bare or honest coercion would make freedom unimaginable.
Identity thinking both opposed to mimesis and is itself mimesis of what is dead.
Death is the inextinguishable remainder of nature in culture. The mimetic nexus strives to become inorganic, object-like.
Self-preservation is intangled with self-extinction.
Marcuse: the classic psychoanalytic formulation of the reality principle, the necessary postponement of gratification, is based an a resource scarcity which the forces of production in principle have overcome. Thus “the fatal enemy of lasting gratification is time.”
By contrast, Adorno’s thought aims at a coercionless synthesis of manifold – reconciliation, not dissolution, of culture and nature. Contra Habermas, only in such reconciliation does an objective concept of communication appear.
Not aesthetics against discourse – these are dialectically contaminated counterconcepts.
Internalisation of sacrifice an aporetic moment.
Accordingly, in constructing a “dialectic of enlightenment” the authors simultaneously aim to carry out a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment not unlike Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Two Hegelian concepts anchor this project, namely, determinate negation and conceptual self-reflection. “Determinate negation” (bestimmte Negation) indicates that immanent criticism is the way to wrest truth from ideology. A dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment, then, “discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from [the image’s] features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth” (DE 18). Beyond and through such determinate negation, a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment also recalls the origin and goal of thought itself. Such recollection is the work of the concept as the self-reflection of thought (der Begriff als Selbstbesinnung des Denkens, DE 32). Conceptual self-reflection reveals that thought arises from the very corporeal needs and desires that get forgotten when thought becomes a mere instrument of human self-preservation. It also reveals that the goal of thought is not to continue the blind domination of nature and humans but to point toward reconciliation.
Adorno & the Culture Industry
Culture industry: The “same thing is offered to everybody by the standardised production of consumption goods” but this is concealed under “the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretense of individualism”. Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. He saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness. More dialectically, under present conditions, the line between false and true needs is blurred altogether.
Adorno argues that the culture industry involves a change in the commodity character of art, such that art’s commodity character is deliberately acknowledged and art “abjures its autonomy” (DE 127). With its emphasis on marketability, the culture industry dispenses entirely with the “purposelessness” that was central to art’s autonomy. Once marketability becomes a total demand, the internal economic structure of cultural commodities shifts. Instead of promising freedom from societally dictated uses, and thereby having a genuine use value that people can enjoy, products mediated by the culture industry have their use value replaced by exchange value: “Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation which they mistake for the merit of works of art— becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy” (DE 128). Hence the culture industry dissolves the “genuine commodity character” that artworks once possessed when exchange value still presupposed use value (DE 129-30).
** AESTHETICS **
Aesthetics: Adorno retains from Kant the notion that art proper (“fine art” or “beautiful art”—schöne Kunst—in Kant’s vocabulary) is characterized by formal autonomy. But Adorno combines this Kantian emphasis on form with Hegel’s emphasis on intellectual import (geistiger Gehalt) and Marx’s emphasis on art’s embeddedness in society as a whole.
The artwork’s necessary and illusory autonomy, in turn, is the key to (modern) art’s social character, namely, to be “the social antithesis of society” (AT 8).
Adorno regards authentic works of (modern) art as social monads. The unavoidable tensions within them express unavoidable conflicts within the larger sociohistorical process from which they arise and to which they belong. These tensions enter the artwork through the artist’s struggle with sociohistorically laden materials, and they call forth conflicting interpretations, many of which misread either the work-internal tensions or their connection to conflicts in society as a whole. Adorno sees all of these tensions and conflicts as “contradictions” to be worked through and eventually to be resolved. Their complete resolution, however, would require a transformation in society as a whole, which, given his social theory, does not seem imminent.
The artwork has an internal truth content to the extent that the artwork’s import can be found internally and externally either true or false. Such truth content is not a metaphysical idea or essence hovering outside the artwork. But neither is it a merely human construct. It is historical but not arbitrary; nonpropositional, yet calling for propositional claims to be made about it; utopian in its reach, yet firmly tied to specific societal conditions. Truth content is the way in which an artwork simultaneously challenges the way things are and suggests how things could be better, but leaves things practically unchanged: “Art has truth as the semblance of the illusionless” (AT 132).
Negative dialectics. Effort “to use the strength of the [epistemic] subject to break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity” (ND xx).
In insisting on the priority of the object, Adorno repeatedly makes three claims: first, that the epistemic subject is itself objectively constituted by the society to which it belongs and without which the subject could not exist; second, that no object can be fully known according to the rules and procedures of identitarian thinking ; third, that the goal of thought itself, even when thought forgets its goal under societally induced pressures to impose identity on objects, is to honor them in their nonidentity, in their difference from what a restricted rationality declares them to be. Against empiricism, however, he argues that no object is simply “given” either, both because it can be an object only in relation to a subject and because objects are historical and have the potential to change.
First, a long Introduction (ND 1-57) works out a concept of “philosophical experience” that both challenges Kant’s distinction between “phenomena” and “noumena” and rejects Hegel’s construction of “absolute spirit.”
Then Part One (ND 59-131) distinguishes Adorno’s project from the “fundamental ontology” in Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Two (ND 133-207) works out Adorno’s alternative with respect to the categories he reconfigures from German idealism.
Three (ND 209-408), composing nearly half the book, elaborates philosophical “models.” These present negative dialectics in action upon key concepts of moral philosophy (“freedom”), philosophy of history (“world spirit” and “natural history”), and metaphysics.
Kant. What makes possible any genuine experience cannot simply be the “application” of a priori concepts to a priori intuitions via the “schematism” of the imagination (Einbildungskraft). Genuine experience is made possible by that which exceeds the grasp of thought and sensibility. Adorno does not call this excess the “thing in itself,” however, for that would assume the Kantian framework he criticizes. Rather, he calls it “the nonidentical” (das Nichtidentische).
Contra Kant: “Consciousness, rational insight, is not simply the same as a free act. We cannot flatly equate it with the will. Yet this precisely is what happens in Kant’s thinking.” The addendum, “the rudiment of a phase in which the dualism of the extramental and intramental was not thoroughly consolidated yet, neither volitively bridgeable nor an ontological ultimate”, is lumped with the res cogitans, regardless of the difference which separates it.
(Cf. Schmitt: “The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juridical formal element: the decision in absolute purity.”)
Kant’s transcendental subject is unintelligible: we can think of an object that is not a subject, but not vice-versa. Likewise, qualities subjects attribute to objects are “borrowed from the objectivity of the intentio recta.” [direct intention]
Hegel. The concept of the nonidentical, in turn, marks the difference between Adorno’s materialism and Hegel’s idealism. Although he shares Hegel’s emphasis on a speculative identity between thought and being, between subject and object, and between reason and reality, Adorno denies that this identity has been achieved in a positive fashion. For the most part this identity has occurred negatively instead. That is to say, human thought, in achieving identity and unity, has imposed these upon objects, suppressing or ignoring their differences and diversity. Such imposition is driven by a societal formation whose exchange principle demands the equivalence (exchange value) of what is inherently nonequivalent (use value). Whereas Hegel’s speculative identity amounts to an identity between identity and nonidentity, Adorno’s amounts to a nonidentity between identity and nonidentity.
“The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject … “ (ND 17-18). The resources available to philosophy in this regard include the “expressive” or “mimetic” dimensions of language, which conflict with “ordinary” (i.e., societally sanctioned) syntax and semantics. In philosophy, this requires an emphasis on “presentation” (Darstellung) in which logical stringency and expressive flexibility interact (ND 18-19, 52-53). Another resource lies in unscripted relationships among established concepts. By taking such concepts out of their established patterns and rearranging them in “constellations” around a specific subject matter, philosophy can unlock some of the historical dynamic hidden within objects whose identity exceeds the classifications imposed upon them (ND 52-53, 162-66).
Under current conditions the only way for philosophy to give priority to the object is dialectically, Adorno argues. He describes dialectics as the attempt to recognize the nonidentity between thought and the object while carrying out the project of conceptual identification. Dialectics is “the consistent consciousness of nonidentity,” and contradiction, its central category, is “the nonidentical under the aspect of identity.”
To think is to identify, and thought can only achieve truth by identifying. The semblance of total identity is mingled with thought’s truth.
The only way to break through the semblance of total identity is immanently, using the concept. Accordingly, everything that is qualitatively different and that resists conceptualization will show up as a contradiction.
Contradictions cannot be neatly ascribed to either thought or reality. “To proceed dialectically means to think in contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction already experienced in the object [Sache], and against that contradiction. A contradiction in reality, [dialectics] is a contradiction against reality” (ND 144-45).
Rousseau: socially legitimated domination, formulated contractually, i.e. communicatively.
Nietzsche: idea of a right the ruse of the dominated.
Hegel (cf. “recognition”): to posit either the originary purity of either domination or communication (cf. PoS, 1977, pp. 111-19) is more mythical, and more mystified, than the (ir)rational entangelment of domination and communication.
Rationalistic insistence that domination must be fully clarified makes itself oblivious to its own implicatedness with domination.
Ruling against skepticism is declaring the world rational.
Vagueness of domination cannot be undone merely for the convencience of social theory. It testifies to a real illusion.
Social theorist would have to claim access to rationality free from domination to make domination fully intelligible.
Honneth: intersubjective domination is modelled, in Adorno, on inauspiciously nomological domination.
But for A.’s materialism, to dominate humans is either to dominate nature or to falsely free humans from nature.
Only a theory which presupposes mastery of nature can regard intersubjectivity as a separate sphere.
Idealism. The somatic realisation of the object world disintermediated from corpus of imagery. Corresponds with the theological ban on graven images: the resurrection of the flesh! Cf. Negative Dialectics, 207.
Ad. & Hork.: contra Hab., theory of entanglment of domination & communicative rationality.
Materialist theory of subjectivity cannot accept procedural separation between theory of communication and model of social conflict.
Only in a state of reconciliation will the objective concept of communication come into view. The existing concept betrays the best that there is – the potential for agreement between people and things – to an interchange between subjects according to the requirements of subjective reason.
[1] Domination over nature: knowledge is scientific if it is pragmatic.
[2] Humans are already nature. The instrumental attitude towards nature is directed inward. Alienated nature strikes back in the practice of self-reification. Mimetic strata of self tries to adapt itself to all that is left of nature in culture – death.
[3] Capturing both senses: power over nature is paid for with subjection to social divisions.
[4] Or, repression of social class accompanies repression of psychic rational layer among the opressed.
[5] Division between spiritual and manual labour pre-dates capitalism.
[6] Implicated in corrective to what A. & H. saw as Marxian economism. Domination is not the same as alienation. There can be domination without alienation. Subject and class domination prefigure capitalism and could outlast it.
[7] Sacrifice substititution anticipates commodity fetishism, subsumptive thinking, constitution of subject, mystified class division.
[8] Enlightenment is not as enlightened as the dialectic of enlightenment and myth; myth is not as mythical as the dialectic of enlightenment and myth.
[9] “Such a process happened in the water industry in nineteenth century Britain. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, Parliament discouraged municipal involvement in water supply; in 1851, private companies had 60% of the market. Competition amongst the companies in larger industrial towns lowered profit margins, as companies were less able to charge a sufficient price for installation of networks in new areas. In areas with direct competition (with two sets of mains), usually at the edge of companies’ territories, profit margins were lowest of all. Such situations resulted in higher costs and lower efficiency, as two networks, neither used to capacity, were used. With a limited number of households that could afford their services, expansion of networks slowed, and many companies were barely profitable. With a lack of water and sanitation claiming thousands of lives in periodic epidemics, municipalisation proceeded rapidly after 1860, and it was municipalities which were able to raise the finance for investment which private companies in many cases could not. A few well-run private companies which worked together with their local towns and cities (gaining legal monopolies and thereby the financial security to invest as required) did survive, providing around 20% of the population with water even today. The rest of the water industry in England and Wales was reprivatised in the form of 10 regional monopolies in 1989.”
[10] “According to this [industiral society] thesis, the world has been so thoroughly determined by an unimaginably-extended technology [Technik: technics], that the corresponding social relations which once defined capitalism, the transformation of living labor into commodities and therein the contradiction of classes, is becoming irrelevant, insofar as it has not become an archaic superstition.”
[11] There are sparks of a kind of (negative) radical individualism in Adorno, focussed on the authoritarian and repressive essence of all institutions.
[12] Twentieth-century philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer have criticized what they considered to be the romantic and subjective character of Verstehen in Dilthey. Dilthey and the early Heidegger were interested in the “facticity” and “life-context” of understanding, and sought to universalize it as the way humans exist through language on the basis of ontology. Verstehen also played a role in Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz’s analysis of the “lifeworld.” Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel further transformed the concept of Verstehen, reformulating it on the basis of a transcendental-pragmatic philosophy of language and the theory of communicative action.
KANT: SOME BASIC IDEAS
Transcendental idealism à go beyond empiricist-rationalist stalemate:
Hobbes’s determinist empiricism
Hume’s empiricist scepticism extended to freedom & even causation itself
Rationalists like Descartes, Leibniz à superstitious
Internal connection b/w reason, maturity, “democracy” (constitutionalism, self-government) and critique
Critique
Reason
Private vs. public reason à cf. Habermas’s strategic vs. communicative reason
Democracy
Opposed direct democracy
Constitutional republics à ideally w/ sovereignty invested in elected legislature
Suffrage for propertied / professional men
Liberty
Different b/w right and virtue
Moral law cannot be based on any empirical good (e.g. happiness). “There is only one innate right […] Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law […]”
Classical liberalism
Democratic peace theory à cosmopolitan right of hospitality
Enlightenment
On PATERNALISM: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another.”
On REPRESENTATION: “It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all.”
On REVOLUTION: “There is more chance of an entire public enlightening itself […] a public can only achieve enlightenment slowly. A revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism and to rapacious or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking […]”
On PUBLIC / PRIVATE REASON: “The public use of man’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men; the private use of reason may quite often be very narrowly restricted, however, without undue hindrance to the progress of enlightenment. But by the public use of one's own reason I mean that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public. What I term the private use of reason is that which a person may make of it in a particular civil post or office with which he is entrusted.”
& “[…] a clergyman is bound to instruct his pupils and his congregation in accordance with the doctrines of the church he serves, for he was employed by it on that condition. But as a scholar, he is completely free as well as obliged to impart to the public all his carefully considered, well-intentioned thoughts on the mistaken aspects of those doctrines […]”
KANT AND ADORNO
Similarly for Adorno, maturity entails “the power to resist established oponions and, one and the same, also to resist existing institutions, to resist everything that is merely posited, that justifies itself with its existence.”
Adorno thinks enlightenment was broken off too early. Lack of rationality. Kant blamed critique for being improper, wanted to punish reason for exceeding its bounds, bridle its use. (Hegel, who sometimes equates thinking w/ negativity and therefore w/ critique, wants to punish those who rely on their own understanding, because they refuse to subordinate themselves to the totality).
** REASON **
The dialectic of enlightenment
(1) There is a linear component to the dialectic. Enlightenment’s roots are antiauthoritarian, in a sense which encompasses even divine authority.[1]
Enlightenment reverts to myth: according to a linear understanding, enlightenment’s domination over nature, which is initially liberating, gradually turns into domination over the natural substrate of the human.[2]
This manifests as man’s self-domination (alienation), and the domination of men by men:[3]
• Enlightenment reverts to scientism / positivism: concepts become formulae, causes become rule and probability, quality becomes quantity.
• This cognitive domination is the basic cause of sociotechnical domination (the domination of man by man).[4] Enlightenment reverts to instrumentalization / technicity: science does not arbitrate its ends.
What enlightened thought represents as superstition, and tries to purge, is already a form of cognition. (Cf. heuristics). Myth is already enlightenment inasmuch as identificatory thinking is inalienable to thought.
Classification, i.e. subsumption as specimens, has an interest in domination, but is different from it. One corollory is that domination and capitalism are not coterminous[5] (cf. Marx[6]).
• The modern reception of Nietzche which emphasises his attack on enlightenment nihilism leads to an irrationalist glorification of pre-rational immediacy, which in fact already contains ingredients of modern rationality.
The entanglement of enlightenment with myth, and reason with domination, is nowhere absent from this account. But the quality of the entanglement has changed, indicating that it’s not a transhistorical invariant:
• In particular, unlike sacrifice,[7] magic and mimesis do not mystify difference. They are not prior to reason or domination, but they are prior to the unity of subject (internalised self-sacrifice).
• Mimesis, the impulse to resemble, is displaced by identification – the attempt to classify, to subsume particulars as specimens.
(2)
In a non-linear vein (sic), myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to myth, in the sense that the “enlightened” concept of enlightenment is not enlightened enough.[8] It is unenlightened to the extent it fails to reflect on its own ineradicable mythical dimension:
• Reason tries to rid itself of discrimination. But to aggregate what is like means necessarily to segregate it from what is different. There is a qualitative moment in all quantification.
• Reason tries to rid itself of the non-identical. In doing so it upholds irrational violence, and surrenders its own ineradicable imaginative element to superstition, charlatanism, and madness.
Does this mean that enlightenment and myth are one-and-the-same, albeit historically variable, phenomenon? No. The two theses in Dialectic of Enlightenment have shifting, dialectical priority:
• “Myth is already enlightenment” must not be taken to permanently equate power with knowledge (this might be the thesis that enlightenment is “always already” myth – cf. perhaps Foucault).
• “Enlightenment reverts to myth” must not be understood to permanently entail a failure of enlightenment, such that it should be completed (cf. Habermas) or reversed (however meanderingly and however locally – cf. perhaps Foucault).
Adorno and Horkheimer would balk at defining the relationship b/w the theses as methodology. (Cf. Adorno: “It’s very likely that under the spell of the latter the individuated and the concrete do not even exist yet. Through the word pluralism, utopia is suppressed, as if it were already here; it serves as consolation. That is why however dialectical theory, which critically reflects on itself, may not for its part install itself domestic-style in the medium of the generality”). Nonetheless, their relationship is best made sense of through the figure of an embodied inquirer, successively drawing these contradictory stances from one another and responding ethically, imaginatively and critically within the confines of each phase.
** THEORY OF SOCIETY **
Adorno & Marx
Marx, praxis. Although Adorno shares many of Marx’s anthropological intuitions, he thinks that a twentieth-century equation of truth with practical fruitfulness, capitalist or communist, had disastrous effects. Negative Dialectics begins by making two claims:
• First, although obsolete, philosophy remains necessary because capitalism has not been overthrown.
• Second, Marx’s interpretation of capitalist society was inadequate and his critique is outmoded. Hence, praxis no longer serves as an adequate basis for challenging (philosophical) theory. In fact, praxis serves mostly as a pretext for shutting down the theoretical critique that transformative praxis would require.
Marx requires revisions in a number of other areas: the dialectic between forces of production and relations of production; the relationship between state and economy; the sociology of classes and class consciousness; the nature and function of ideology; and the role of expert cultures, such as modern art and social theory, in criticising capitalism and calling for the transformation of society as a whole.
Although in agreement with Marx’s analysis of the commodity, Adorno thinks his critique of commodity fetishism does not go far enough. Marx “had it easy.” Society has come to be organised around the production of exchange values for the sake of exchange value (which, of course, always already requires a silent appropriation of surplus value). Adorno refers to this nexus of production and power as the “principle of exchange.” A society where this nexus prevails is an “exchange society.”
A caution on totality: while still pretending to grasp the whole, philosophy fails to recognise how thoroughly it depends upon society as a whole, all the way into philosophy’s “immanent truth” (ND 4). Cf. aporetic approach, immanent critique, negative dialectics, atonal philosophy, constellations.
Cf. Adorno: “The inflated bluster over concepts such as ‘imperialism’ or ’monopoly,’ without taking into consideration what these words factually entail [Sachverhalten], and to what extent they are relevant, is as wrong, that is to say irrational, as a mode of conduct which, thanks to its blindly nominalistic conception of the matter at hand [Sachverhalten], refuses to consider that concepts such as exchange-society might have their objectivity, revealing a compulsion of the generality behind the matter at hand [Sachverhalten], which is by no means always adequately translated into the operational field of the facts of the matter [Sachverhalte].”
Adorno & state capitalism
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1968/late-capitalism.htm
1930s controversies concerning crisis, immiseration, spontaneity and flexibility / robustness of capitalist system. Cf. Luxembourg. Revolutionary or constitutional socialism?
Pollock: monopolistic capitalism, corporatism, capital concentration. Ferocious accumulation, unconstrained by relations of production.
Pollock: Nazism didn’t just mystify material interests, it changed them. Adorno’s lukewarm reception of this analysis – it suggests non-antagonistic economic relations were possible in the antagonistic society of Fascist Germany.
Neumann: see Behemoth. Rejects the state capitalism thesis. Was Nazism then a glorified confidence trick? Adorno: no, it was a real illusion.
Adorno: industrial society in forces of production; late capitalism in relations of production.
While acknowledging with Pollock that political and economic power have become more tightly meshed, Adorno does not think the fundamentally economic character of capitalist exploitation has changed. Economic exploitation has become even more abstract than it was in Marx’s day, and therefore all the more effective and pervasive. The market permeates all areas of human life. Capital is so concentrated as to appear the expression of the entire society.
The problematic Adorno faces is the priority of industrial society (i.e. relations of production) vs. that of productive forces (i.e. late capitalism). The problematic is produced by the thoroughness of the dialectical interpenetration of the two theses. He dissolves this false dilemma with the paradox that “contemporary society is above all an industrial society according to the level of its productive forces.” This would appear to be a category error: the industrial society thesis encourages us to discard productive forces as an autonomous explanatory category.
How is this unpacked?
“In the categories of critical-dialectical theory I would like to suggest as a first and necessarily abstract answer, that contemporary society is above all an industrial society according to the level of its productive forces. Industrial labor has become the model pattern of society everywhere and across all borders of political systems. It developed itself into a totality due to the fact that modes of procedure, which resemble the industrial ones, are extending by economic necessity into the realms of material production, into administration, the distribution-sphere and that which we call culture. Conversely, society is capitalism in terms of its relations of production [Adorno’s emphasis]. Human beings are still what they were according to the Marxist analysis of the middle of the 19th century: appendages of machines, not merely in the literal sense as workers, who have to adapt themselves to the constitution of the machines which they serve, but far beyond this and metaphorically, compelled to assume the roles of the social mechanism and to model themselves on such, without reservation, on the level of their most intimate impulses. Production goes on today just as it did before, for the sake of profits. Needs have gone beyond anything Marx could have foreseen in his time, completely becoming the function of the production-apparatus, which they potentially were all along, instead of the reverse. They are totally governed [gesteuert: mechanically steered, governed].”
Class. For Marx, class is an objective concept which relies on a relationship to the means of production. Not susceptible to quantificatory assessment / phenomenal criteria.
Adorno’s response is characteristically double:
• Adorno (Pollock’s influence): relations of production more elastic than Marx suspected. “The ruling class disappears behind the concentration of capital.” They have become largely functions of their own production apparatus. Cf. economies of scale, natural monopolies,[9] irreducible complexity. Immiseration in Marx’s sense is disabled.
• The exploited are less and less able to experience themselves as a class. “One can speak of relative immiseration only in a comic sense.” Yet exploitation remains intact, indeed sharpens and grows in fixity. Unfreedom is not played out as Marx prognosticised, but “one’s dependence on the consciousness of those who serve an uncontrollable apparatus, is spreading universally over humanity.” Class consciousness is less likely in proportion to the strength of economic domination.
(Cf. Q. Skinner’s “neoclassical unfreedom” – dependence on the arbitrary will of another).
An archaic injustice – partiality of the means of production – underlies apparently free and equitable exchange. But Adorno cannot uncover this injustice as an objective concept – as the extraction of surplus labour – as Marx could, by an immanent critique of liberalism. There is a corroborative relationship between the frustrated objectivity of the two concepts: class, and the extraction of surplus labour.
Adorno’s materialism steadies itself by constant reference to bodily pain and actual homicide. But for relations of production, repeated mass death by starvation, etc., are preventable. Adorno maintains a connection between this self-extermination, and the damage done to life everywhere in the relations of production in order to mystify it.
Marx is still supremely relevant.[10] The identity of the forces of production with the relations of production is a socially necessary illusion. Actually, they are dialectically related. Cf. Wendt, “Anarchy is What You Make It.”
Adorno: no priority of forces over production over relation of production can be assumed, since the former are mediated by the latter. It is important that “one does not cast the blame on what critique has time and again been side-tracked by – namely technics, that is to say the productive forces – thereby indulging in a kind of theoretical machine-breaking on an expanded level [cf. idealism]. Technics is not the disaster, but rather its intertwining with the social relations, in which it is entangled.” The relations of production are relatively preponderant, so the Marxist understanding of their reification is the more pertinent account.
** MARX REDUX **
Marx. In exchange, non-identical things and unequal relations represented as abstractly identical (cf. dispositional / relational qualities of objects; Oliver Hart’s “reference points”; fetish character of the commodity). Is this idea true?
Exchange value comes to appear as inherent in commodity – hides “its” source in determinate relationship of domination.
Domination accrues the appearance of a natural series of equivalences.
Lukacs: reification is extension of commodity fetishis to all areas of human consciousness and activity.
Illusory autonomy sought by sociology at the price of immanence / historicity.
Lukacs: the capitalist mistakes himself for a determiner of reification; in praxis the proletariat becomes the identical subject-object of history, whose consciousness is unreified.
For Adorno, materialist thought must realise it is never identical with its objects.
Distinction between capitalist and proletariat experience of experience of reification blurred in Adorno compared with Lukacs.
Anti-semitic anti-capitalism of Fascism was an extension of the logic of late capitalism. The Jews epitomized the sphere of circulation. Strove for egalitarian, mutilating levelling.
Social-pyschological studies: anti-Semitism, authoritarian personality. Cultural studies: television, film, music; also conversations on trains, glimpsed expressions, etc.
Emphasising the Hegelian dimension of Marx, Adorno uses Marxian anti-methodologist critique to rebuke Weber. Marx attacks Left Hegelians and utopian socialists for the “ought” they propose outside of social experience. Likewise, classical political economy begins with illegitimate deductive abstractions.
Immanent critique does not methodologically pre-form its objects. Adorno reads Marx as an immanent critic of political economy – one who starts with the concept in which fact and norm are most acutely implicated, fair exchange, and shows how bourgeois society’s fulfilment of its constitutive normativity would supersede / sublate (aufheben) the bourgeois form of society. “He only needed to ask whether capitalism corresponded in its own dynamic categories to this model, in order to produce, out of the determinate negation of the preexisting theoretical system, a system-like theory in its own right. Meanwhile the market economy has become so honeycombed, that it mocks any such confrontation. The irrationality of the contemporary social structure hinders its rational development in theory.”
Truth is “glimpsed” by determinate negation of the false (so not really a “stance” or “orientation”).
Adorno distances his approach from economism.
Immiseration is a consequence of the autonomous course of liberal political economy, as modified by monopoly capitalism.
Nietzschean moment? Domination reproducting itself in trivially autonomous social and political forms?
Millions starve while food is stockpiled, and nothing apparently can be done.
Cf. aid, moral hazard, additionality, fungibility, selfishness (cf. Peter Singer). Cf. commitment problems. Cf. overlapping consensus.
Materialism which aims to rid itself of illusion entirely risks sensuous dogmatism, endlessly playing out crude involuntary philosophical commitments.
A seamlessly noncontradictory system cannot be materialist. Systematicity is the levelling of the non-identical. Cf. Habermas.
Material has a contradictory relationship with system.
Adorno resists insulating Marx from German philosophy, and from the entire materialist tradition.
Materialism need not be emancipatory / critical. Cf. Hobbes.
Material specificity of minute particulars, not universals, should be the starting point of philosophical interpretation. Cf. Benjamin.
Experience is “sedimented” (cf. Husserl) in abstract concepts.
Systemic character (real illusion) of capitalist society presents systematisation as the unavoidable commitment of any immanent critique. Marx builds a negative system capable of querying the systemic unity which bourgeois society claims for itself.
Contesting political economy’s restrictedly technical redefinition of normative concepts à “free” as “contractually consenting.”
Marx is critical of previous socialist efforts to found political economy in dogmatic anthropology. Where methodological convenience organises the foundational division between needs and wants, the result will be empty moralising. The notion of need emerges coevally with surplus value as a “gift from nature.”
For Smith and Turgot, the question was how is profit possible from fair exchange?
(Cf. Islamic finance).
Marx: theory of surplus value. Price of labour is determined by how much labour goes into the production of labour.
Capital critiques political economy by offering a phenomenology of a systematic and real illusion, whose every category is an identification and misidentification.
Marx’s materialism seeks to avoid political economy’s positivism (in the sense of an exaggerated sense of the nomological); materialist anthropology with a dogmatic doctrine of human needs or interests; and any methodological stance which will betray in advance the specificity of the material.
Nature neither subjected to “dialectical-materialist” expositions (cf. Engels), nor placed under an embarrassed taboo (post-structuralism).
Marx attempts to undo the illusion that all experience is economically / culturally constructed from within, glimpsing nature.
Capitalism does not invent mystification.
For Marx, domination must be deduced economically. He holds a polemic front against the conservative idea that domination is “natural.”
Adorno (influenced by Pollock) wants to correct this tendency: the collapse of capitalism might lead to worse domination / mystification.
Dialectic of Enlightenment: a philosophy of history? “History is the unity of continuity and discontinuity.” That is, history is a real totalisation in natural-historical experience. Cultures are integrated by exchange even as they are beset by furious insistence on altereity.
Positivist / postmodern insistence on discontinuity – recapitulates a teleological fantasy of arrival at pure structure. Adorno: “The fetishism of the facts corresponds to one of the objective laws. Dialectics, which has had its fill of the painful experience of such hegemony, does not hegemonize in turn, but criticizes this just as much as the appearance, that the individuated and the concrete already determine the course of the world hic et nunc.”
Social life is not exhausted by culture.
Ban on philosophy of history – falseness of true antithesis of nature and history – apologetically recapitulates history’s mystification of its natural growth.
Schnädelbach: social myths are generically committed to narrativism, no matter how much good will they demonstrate the unrealised goal of enlightenment.
Myths enlighten, enlightenment mythologises. This is no narrativist nitro, propelling selected facts over the finishing line into timeless wisdom. This is the rebellion of experience against empiricism. Cf. in Adorno the tendency to use, where one might expect a word like “history” or “historicity,” the word “Auschwitz.” Hitler’s barbarism imposes a “new categorical imperative” on human beings in their condition of unfreedom: so to arrange their thought and action that “Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that] nothing similar would happen” (ND 365).
Whereas denying transcendental value would suppress the suffering that calls out for fundamental change, straightforwardly affirming the existence of utopia would cut off the critique of contemporary society and the struggle to change it.
If Homer’s truths are timeless, we needn’t go to Homer for them. If they are insulated by historical incommensurability, we can’t.
What’s the answer? Polymorphous connections, dialectically blurring burlesque and mock-heroic, in a new mode of fractal derision, reveal entangelement of archaic and modern, dominated and rational. Xenophanes’ critique of divine anthropomorphism is characteristic of enlightenment inasmuch as it demystifies, secularises, disenchants.
Drive for empiricism leads to solipsism, an inability to imagine alternatives. (Cf. Adorno on Hegel).
Nothing can be allowed to stand outside thought: “world as giant analytic judgement.”
Language is confined to structure (which cannot “be like” nature) or to image (which cannot “know” nature). Cf. Kant, mimetic function, also Dreyfuss on Heidegger.
Enlightenment is an actually existing wild generalisation (true predictions of it are unfalsifiable?).
Rationality which is invariant over its object set.
** CRITIQUE **
Adorno & Durkheim / Weber
“Max Weber introduced the concept of an ‘interpretative sociology’, believing fundamentally that sociological knowledge consists in understanding the ‘means-end rationality’, the assessment of opportunities made by social agents; whereas Durkheim took the view that sociology differed essentially from psychology (although Max Weber, too, distinguished sharply between them) in that real social facts – faits sociaux – cannot be understood, are impenetrable and opaque and ought, as he put it himself without quite realising the implications of what he said, to be treated as ‘things’, as choses; thus, Durkheim’s sociology was also called chosisme. Traces of this view still survive in French structuralism [...] The second difference is that Max Weber, as you know, rigorously upheld the view that sciology was ‘value-free’ – meaning that value judgements must be absolutely excluded from it. And I should like to say that the vulgar positivism of today has followed him precisely in this, whereas he himself, being still trained in idealist epistemology, refused to have any truck with vulgar sociologism. Durkheim, by contrast, although in some ways a far more unprepentant positivist than Weber, admitted value judgements to sociology. He did so, I believe, because of his more penetrating perception and analysis of the facts themselves. For he had realized that the mere distinction between true and false introduces a value relationship even into pure acts of cognition, which Weber – naively, I would say – thought he could separate from axiological acts, or acts which involve valuations. And indeed, if you read one of Durkheim’s early major works such as The Division of Labour in society, the evaluative tibre is unmistakable. It is very closely related to what I mentioned earlier, the hyypostasis of social facts which, in a process wwhich became more and more prominent in his work, were used normatively and acknowledged as determining values. These two moments, the impenetrable givenness of faits sociaux and their aspect of value latr crystallized out with utmost sharpness in Durkheim’s theory of conscience (consciousness) and of the esprit collectif (collective mind) [...] the old rigid dichotomy of evaluative and value-free knowledge is no longer tenable today. [...] Clearly, the attempt to abolish concepts in sociology and – if I may put it in extreme form – to reduce them to mere tokens, abbreviations for the facts they subsume, devoid of any autonomy, sems to me extremely narrow-minded. There is simply no thought without concepts. [...] Durkheim, in asserting the non-intelligible in chosisme, and thereby stating that sociology really finds its true subject where comprehensibility ceases, hit on a very central moment of socialization: that something originally made by human beings becomes institutionally autonomous in relation to human beings. Only he hypostatizes this point; that is to say, he treats it as if such opacity were ‘second nature’ to the institutions,[11] were inherent in socialization itself. And this tendency is at the origin of the apologia for the existing society which is a decisive trai of Durkheim [...] “
Durkheim: social facts should be treated like things. Society enters each individual as their non-identical compulsion. (Cf. Foucault & grid of intelligibility; communitarianism & non-chosen ties). Moment of truth (alienation). But D. converts prepronderence of collective into an invariant.
[Bernstein: Adorno’s position closer to D.’s than he concedes: for D., the ideal contains the real by way of the wish that it become real.]
Weber: sociology requires a reduction to individual consciousnesses (vs. Durkheim’s restriction to ‘social facts’), and an understanding of the rational and purposive actions of individuals. Action within bourgeois society is not only motivated, but objectively intelligible.
Interpretative[12] Sociology: the intentionality (cf. Bretano) of action allows the sociologist to “accomplish something which is never attainable in the natural sciences, namely the subjective understanding of the action of the component individuals.” Links with methodological individualism – social phenomena must be explained by showing how they result from individual actions, which in turn must be explained through reference to the intentional states that motivate the individual actors. Contrasted with Durkheim’s third-person perspective.
Ideal Types: social, economic and historical research can never be fully inductive or descriptive as one must always approach it with a conceptual apparatus, which Weber termed “Ideal Type.” This, together with his interpretative, antipositivistic orientation justifies the assumption of the “rational economic man” (homo economicus).
Fact problems and value problems are heterogeneous (Weber admits this is a value position).
Adorno sympathises with W.’s scepticism of homology between natural and social sciences (he attributes the origin its rationale to Freyer: the observer is not external to object of study). But Adorno thinks that in laying stress on the self-understanding of participants of social institutions, W. underestimates the autonomous life of social relations.
Beyond Durkheim vs. Weber: sociology ought to grasp the incomprehensibility which makes relations opaque and autonomous. Autonomy of social relations is a real illusion. (Cf. Marx on fetish character of the commodity).
Adorno rejects the neo-Kantian distinction between nomothetic & ideographic sciences. (Cf. disjunctions b/w structuralism & hermeneutics, and b/w discursive & aesthetic functions of language). Understanding opacities requires philosophical artifice: the qualitative specificity of social theory is likely to go missing if it attempts absolute literalness.
Sociological laws fall into error by implying a domain of purely sociological objects (cf. Schmitt on autonomy of the political). Adorno argues against such fetishised methodology: “People prefer to cling to a pure tautology, to the absolute certainty of the proposition that A = A, rather than importing into the realm of knowledge the risks – of which they are preconciously aware – imposed by an existence liable to be annihilated at any moment.” Of course he connects this with Horkheimer’s instrumental reason.
[Cf. Schmitt: “The dualism of the methods of sociology and jurisprudence ends in a monistic metaphysics.”]
The ideal of methodology is really tautology – its knowledge is determined operationally, since it does no more than fulfil the demands of method, at the expense of the object (vs. immanent critique). Adorno suspects that no relevant truth is not attended by the risk that it might be wrong (cf. Habermasian fallibilism).
“The fetishism of the facts corresponds to one of the objective laws.”
Sociological professionalism ought to be opaque, and ought not to set limits to social inquiry.
Durkheim & Weber lose the philosophical advances of Kant (the transcendental move) and Hegel (dialectical understanding of fact & value (or of facticity & norm)).
The “old rigid dichotomy of evaluative and value-free knowledge is no longer tenable today”. Weberian version of the division buys antipositivism at the cost of “dogmatic hypostasis of universal anthropological values.” Any method posited in advance of its object is idealist. The priorities of sociological method are mistaken for features of social experience.
Kant’s “critical path” between necessarily intelligible world (rationalism – cf. Weber) & necessarily unintelligible world (skepticism – cf. Durkheim).
** REIFICATION **
Lukacs: Building on Max Weber’s theory of rationalization, Lukács argues that the capitalist economy is no longer one sector of society alongside others. Rather, commodity exchange has become the central organizing principle for all sectors of society. This allows commodity fetishism to permeate all social institutions (e.g., law, administration, journalism) as well as all academic disciplines, including philosophy. “Reification” refers to “the structural process whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society.” Lukács was especially concerned with how reification makes human beings “seem like mere things obeying the inexorable laws of the marketplace” (Zuidervaart 1991, 76).
Sacrifice – object or creature substituted for one incommensurable with it.
Ego owes its existance to the sacrifice of the present moment to the future.
Archaic bloodlust in bourgeois setting: altar smoke from hearth fire.
Exchange society prohibits any value from incommensurability with others – thus exchange value itself is the master value.
Adorno came to call the reification of consciousness an “epiphenomenon.” Critical social theory needs to address why hunger, poverty, and other forms of human suffering persist despite the technological and scientific potential to eliminate them.
Hatred of social complexity, which might be associated with communitarianism, and the endorsement of disintermediation in the name of bare or honest coercion would make freedom unimaginable.
Identity thinking both opposed to mimesis and is itself mimesis of what is dead.
Death is the inextinguishable remainder of nature in culture. The mimetic nexus strives to become inorganic, object-like.
Self-preservation is intangled with self-extinction.
Marcuse: the classic psychoanalytic formulation of the reality principle, the necessary postponement of gratification, is based an a resource scarcity which the forces of production in principle have overcome. Thus “the fatal enemy of lasting gratification is time.”
By contrast, Adorno’s thought aims at a coercionless synthesis of manifold – reconciliation, not dissolution, of culture and nature. Contra Habermas, only in such reconciliation does an objective concept of communication appear.
Not aesthetics against discourse – these are dialectically contaminated counterconcepts.
Internalisation of sacrifice an aporetic moment.
Accordingly, in constructing a “dialectic of enlightenment” the authors simultaneously aim to carry out a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment not unlike Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Two Hegelian concepts anchor this project, namely, determinate negation and conceptual self-reflection. “Determinate negation” (bestimmte Negation) indicates that immanent criticism is the way to wrest truth from ideology. A dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment, then, “discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from [the image’s] features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth” (DE 18). Beyond and through such determinate negation, a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment also recalls the origin and goal of thought itself. Such recollection is the work of the concept as the self-reflection of thought (der Begriff als Selbstbesinnung des Denkens, DE 32). Conceptual self-reflection reveals that thought arises from the very corporeal needs and desires that get forgotten when thought becomes a mere instrument of human self-preservation. It also reveals that the goal of thought is not to continue the blind domination of nature and humans but to point toward reconciliation.
Adorno & the Culture Industry
Culture industry: The “same thing is offered to everybody by the standardised production of consumption goods” but this is concealed under “the manipulation of taste and the official culture’s pretense of individualism”. Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. He saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness. More dialectically, under present conditions, the line between false and true needs is blurred altogether.
Adorno argues that the culture industry involves a change in the commodity character of art, such that art’s commodity character is deliberately acknowledged and art “abjures its autonomy” (DE 127). With its emphasis on marketability, the culture industry dispenses entirely with the “purposelessness” that was central to art’s autonomy. Once marketability becomes a total demand, the internal economic structure of cultural commodities shifts. Instead of promising freedom from societally dictated uses, and thereby having a genuine use value that people can enjoy, products mediated by the culture industry have their use value replaced by exchange value: “Everything has value only in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish, and the fetish—the social valuation which they mistake for the merit of works of art— becomes its only use value, the only quality they enjoy” (DE 128). Hence the culture industry dissolves the “genuine commodity character” that artworks once possessed when exchange value still presupposed use value (DE 129-30).
** AESTHETICS **
Aesthetics: Adorno retains from Kant the notion that art proper (“fine art” or “beautiful art”—schöne Kunst—in Kant’s vocabulary) is characterized by formal autonomy. But Adorno combines this Kantian emphasis on form with Hegel’s emphasis on intellectual import (geistiger Gehalt) and Marx’s emphasis on art’s embeddedness in society as a whole.
The artwork’s necessary and illusory autonomy, in turn, is the key to (modern) art’s social character, namely, to be “the social antithesis of society” (AT 8).
Adorno regards authentic works of (modern) art as social monads. The unavoidable tensions within them express unavoidable conflicts within the larger sociohistorical process from which they arise and to which they belong. These tensions enter the artwork through the artist’s struggle with sociohistorically laden materials, and they call forth conflicting interpretations, many of which misread either the work-internal tensions or their connection to conflicts in society as a whole. Adorno sees all of these tensions and conflicts as “contradictions” to be worked through and eventually to be resolved. Their complete resolution, however, would require a transformation in society as a whole, which, given his social theory, does not seem imminent.
The artwork has an internal truth content to the extent that the artwork’s import can be found internally and externally either true or false. Such truth content is not a metaphysical idea or essence hovering outside the artwork. But neither is it a merely human construct. It is historical but not arbitrary; nonpropositional, yet calling for propositional claims to be made about it; utopian in its reach, yet firmly tied to specific societal conditions. Truth content is the way in which an artwork simultaneously challenges the way things are and suggests how things could be better, but leaves things practically unchanged: “Art has truth as the semblance of the illusionless” (AT 132).
Negative dialectics. Effort “to use the strength of the [epistemic] subject to break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity” (ND xx).
In insisting on the priority of the object, Adorno repeatedly makes three claims: first, that the epistemic subject is itself objectively constituted by the society to which it belongs and without which the subject could not exist; second, that no object can be fully known according to the rules and procedures of identitarian thinking ; third, that the goal of thought itself, even when thought forgets its goal under societally induced pressures to impose identity on objects, is to honor them in their nonidentity, in their difference from what a restricted rationality declares them to be. Against empiricism, however, he argues that no object is simply “given” either, both because it can be an object only in relation to a subject and because objects are historical and have the potential to change.
First, a long Introduction (ND 1-57) works out a concept of “philosophical experience” that both challenges Kant’s distinction between “phenomena” and “noumena” and rejects Hegel’s construction of “absolute spirit.”
Then Part One (ND 59-131) distinguishes Adorno’s project from the “fundamental ontology” in Heidegger’s Being and Time.
Two (ND 133-207) works out Adorno’s alternative with respect to the categories he reconfigures from German idealism.
Three (ND 209-408), composing nearly half the book, elaborates philosophical “models.” These present negative dialectics in action upon key concepts of moral philosophy (“freedom”), philosophy of history (“world spirit” and “natural history”), and metaphysics.
Kant. What makes possible any genuine experience cannot simply be the “application” of a priori concepts to a priori intuitions via the “schematism” of the imagination (Einbildungskraft). Genuine experience is made possible by that which exceeds the grasp of thought and sensibility. Adorno does not call this excess the “thing in itself,” however, for that would assume the Kantian framework he criticizes. Rather, he calls it “the nonidentical” (das Nichtidentische).
Contra Kant: “Consciousness, rational insight, is not simply the same as a free act. We cannot flatly equate it with the will. Yet this precisely is what happens in Kant’s thinking.” The addendum, “the rudiment of a phase in which the dualism of the extramental and intramental was not thoroughly consolidated yet, neither volitively bridgeable nor an ontological ultimate”, is lumped with the res cogitans, regardless of the difference which separates it.
(Cf. Schmitt: “The exception is that which cannot be subsumed; it defies general codification, but it simultaneously reveals a specifically juridical formal element: the decision in absolute purity.”)
Kant’s transcendental subject is unintelligible: we can think of an object that is not a subject, but not vice-versa. Likewise, qualities subjects attribute to objects are “borrowed from the objectivity of the intentio recta.” [direct intention]
Hegel. The concept of the nonidentical, in turn, marks the difference between Adorno’s materialism and Hegel’s idealism. Although he shares Hegel’s emphasis on a speculative identity between thought and being, between subject and object, and between reason and reality, Adorno denies that this identity has been achieved in a positive fashion. For the most part this identity has occurred negatively instead. That is to say, human thought, in achieving identity and unity, has imposed these upon objects, suppressing or ignoring their differences and diversity. Such imposition is driven by a societal formation whose exchange principle demands the equivalence (exchange value) of what is inherently nonequivalent (use value). Whereas Hegel’s speculative identity amounts to an identity between identity and nonidentity, Adorno’s amounts to a nonidentity between identity and nonidentity.
“The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject … “ (ND 17-18). The resources available to philosophy in this regard include the “expressive” or “mimetic” dimensions of language, which conflict with “ordinary” (i.e., societally sanctioned) syntax and semantics. In philosophy, this requires an emphasis on “presentation” (Darstellung) in which logical stringency and expressive flexibility interact (ND 18-19, 52-53). Another resource lies in unscripted relationships among established concepts. By taking such concepts out of their established patterns and rearranging them in “constellations” around a specific subject matter, philosophy can unlock some of the historical dynamic hidden within objects whose identity exceeds the classifications imposed upon them (ND 52-53, 162-66).
Under current conditions the only way for philosophy to give priority to the object is dialectically, Adorno argues. He describes dialectics as the attempt to recognize the nonidentity between thought and the object while carrying out the project of conceptual identification. Dialectics is “the consistent consciousness of nonidentity,” and contradiction, its central category, is “the nonidentical under the aspect of identity.”
To think is to identify, and thought can only achieve truth by identifying. The semblance of total identity is mingled with thought’s truth.
The only way to break through the semblance of total identity is immanently, using the concept. Accordingly, everything that is qualitatively different and that resists conceptualization will show up as a contradiction.
Contradictions cannot be neatly ascribed to either thought or reality. “To proceed dialectically means to think in contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction already experienced in the object [Sache], and against that contradiction. A contradiction in reality, [dialectics] is a contradiction against reality” (ND 144-45).
Rousseau: socially legitimated domination, formulated contractually, i.e. communicatively.
Nietzsche: idea of a right the ruse of the dominated.
Hegel (cf. “recognition”): to posit either the originary purity of either domination or communication (cf. PoS, 1977, pp. 111-19) is more mythical, and more mystified, than the (ir)rational entangelment of domination and communication.
Rationalistic insistence that domination must be fully clarified makes itself oblivious to its own implicatedness with domination.
Ruling against skepticism is declaring the world rational.
Vagueness of domination cannot be undone merely for the convencience of social theory. It testifies to a real illusion.
Social theorist would have to claim access to rationality free from domination to make domination fully intelligible.
Honneth: intersubjective domination is modelled, in Adorno, on inauspiciously nomological domination.
But for A.’s materialism, to dominate humans is either to dominate nature or to falsely free humans from nature.
Only a theory which presupposes mastery of nature can regard intersubjectivity as a separate sphere.
Idealism. The somatic realisation of the object world disintermediated from corpus of imagery. Corresponds with the theological ban on graven images: the resurrection of the flesh! Cf. Negative Dialectics, 207.
Ad. & Hork.: contra Hab., theory of entanglment of domination & communicative rationality.
Materialist theory of subjectivity cannot accept procedural separation between theory of communication and model of social conflict.
Only in a state of reconciliation will the objective concept of communication come into view. The existing concept betrays the best that there is – the potential for agreement between people and things – to an interchange between subjects according to the requirements of subjective reason.
[1] Domination over nature: knowledge is scientific if it is pragmatic.
[2] Humans are already nature. The instrumental attitude towards nature is directed inward. Alienated nature strikes back in the practice of self-reification. Mimetic strata of self tries to adapt itself to all that is left of nature in culture – death.
[3] Capturing both senses: power over nature is paid for with subjection to social divisions.
[4] Or, repression of social class accompanies repression of psychic rational layer among the opressed.
[5] Division between spiritual and manual labour pre-dates capitalism.
[6] Implicated in corrective to what A. & H. saw as Marxian economism. Domination is not the same as alienation. There can be domination without alienation. Subject and class domination prefigure capitalism and could outlast it.
[7] Sacrifice substititution anticipates commodity fetishism, subsumptive thinking, constitution of subject, mystified class division.
[8] Enlightenment is not as enlightened as the dialectic of enlightenment and myth; myth is not as mythical as the dialectic of enlightenment and myth.
[9] “Such a process happened in the water industry in nineteenth century Britain. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, Parliament discouraged municipal involvement in water supply; in 1851, private companies had 60% of the market. Competition amongst the companies in larger industrial towns lowered profit margins, as companies were less able to charge a sufficient price for installation of networks in new areas. In areas with direct competition (with two sets of mains), usually at the edge of companies’ territories, profit margins were lowest of all. Such situations resulted in higher costs and lower efficiency, as two networks, neither used to capacity, were used. With a limited number of households that could afford their services, expansion of networks slowed, and many companies were barely profitable. With a lack of water and sanitation claiming thousands of lives in periodic epidemics, municipalisation proceeded rapidly after 1860, and it was municipalities which were able to raise the finance for investment which private companies in many cases could not. A few well-run private companies which worked together with their local towns and cities (gaining legal monopolies and thereby the financial security to invest as required) did survive, providing around 20% of the population with water even today. The rest of the water industry in England and Wales was reprivatised in the form of 10 regional monopolies in 1989.”
[10] “According to this [industiral society] thesis, the world has been so thoroughly determined by an unimaginably-extended technology [Technik: technics], that the corresponding social relations which once defined capitalism, the transformation of living labor into commodities and therein the contradiction of classes, is becoming irrelevant, insofar as it has not become an archaic superstition.”
[11] There are sparks of a kind of (negative) radical individualism in Adorno, focussed on the authoritarian and repressive essence of all institutions.
[12] Twentieth-century philosophers such as Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer have criticized what they considered to be the romantic and subjective character of Verstehen in Dilthey. Dilthey and the early Heidegger were interested in the “facticity” and “life-context” of understanding, and sought to universalize it as the way humans exist through language on the basis of ontology. Verstehen also played a role in Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz’s analysis of the “lifeworld.” Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel further transformed the concept of Verstehen, reformulating it on the basis of a transcendental-pragmatic philosophy of language and the theory of communicative action.
KANT: SOME BASIC IDEAS
Transcendental idealism à go beyond empiricist-rationalist stalemate:
Hobbes’s determinist empiricism
Hume’s empiricist scepticism extended to freedom & even causation itself
Rationalists like Descartes, Leibniz à superstitious
Internal connection b/w reason, maturity, “democracy” (constitutionalism, self-government) and critique
Critique
Reason
Private vs. public reason à cf. Habermas’s strategic vs. communicative reason
Democracy
Opposed direct democracy
Constitutional republics à ideally w/ sovereignty invested in elected legislature
Suffrage for propertied / professional men
Liberty
Different b/w right and virtue
Moral law cannot be based on any empirical good (e.g. happiness). “There is only one innate right […] Freedom (independence from being constrained by another’s choice), insofar as it can coexist with the freedom of every other in accordance with a universal law […]”
Classical liberalism
Democratic peace theory à cosmopolitan right of hospitality
Enlightenment
On PATERNALISM: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another.”
On REPRESENTATION: “It is so convenient to be immature! If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all.”
On REVOLUTION: “There is more chance of an entire public enlightening itself […] a public can only achieve enlightenment slowly. A revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism and to rapacious or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking […]”
On PUBLIC / PRIVATE REASON: “The public use of man’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men; the private use of reason may quite often be very narrowly restricted, however, without undue hindrance to the progress of enlightenment. But by the public use of one's own reason I mean that use which anyone may make of it as a man of learning addressing the entire reading public. What I term the private use of reason is that which a person may make of it in a particular civil post or office with which he is entrusted.”
& “[…] a clergyman is bound to instruct his pupils and his congregation in accordance with the doctrines of the church he serves, for he was employed by it on that condition. But as a scholar, he is completely free as well as obliged to impart to the public all his carefully considered, well-intentioned thoughts on the mistaken aspects of those doctrines […]”
KANT AND ADORNO
Similarly for Adorno, maturity entails “the power to resist established oponions and, one and the same, also to resist existing institutions, to resist everything that is merely posited, that justifies itself with its existence.”
Adorno thinks enlightenment was broken off too early. Lack of rationality. Kant blamed critique for being improper, wanted to punish reason for exceeding its bounds, bridle its use. (Hegel, who sometimes equates thinking w/ negativity and therefore w/ critique, wants to punish those who rely on their own understanding, because they refuse to subordinate themselves to the totality).
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