From a Genealogyof Reason to Aesthetic Theory/. 13 Aesthetic Individuality in DemocraticAmerica/ . NINE AESTHETIC INDIVIDUALITY AS A DEMOCRATIC.
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There is a sickening gall in Jameson's remarks that "Marxist literary criticisms For my part, the term modernity needs legitimation. It can easily conceal real phenomena -- social relations and institutions, values rooted in material interests, intellectual and social ideals, existential traditions -- in short, much that can be bypassed by "radical" ideologues.
It has an onus of abstraction that renders the neutralization of key social and cultural issues possible. How shrewdly modernity can be stretched or contracted is suggested by Habermas' description of the "Enlightenment project" as an effort "to develop objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art, according to their inner logic.
At the same time this project intended to release the cognitive potentials of each of these domains to set them free from their esoteric forms. When one turns to the Enlightenment, however, it is astonishing what crucial issues Habermas' level of abstraction permits him to omit: By the same token, all of this naive progressivism existed in sharp tension with its sentimentalism, simplistic anthropology, and a "cognitive potential" for authoritarianism. This mix of Enlightenment features is not meant so much to criticize Habermas' definition of the "project" as to disqualify modernity and the proclivity of "leftist intellectuals" to accept a terminology that lacks particularity and contact with existential conditions.
But here one encounters a key problem in Habermas' "project," which even his most troubled critics share: Although Habermas has based this theory of late capitalism on a theory of the state, he has abandoned the analysis of the commodity form as the basic unit of social analysis.
As a result, the state is a force sui generis and the relationship between state and society is conceived as reducing it, ultimately to the question of the legitimacy of the state. This makes it impossible to ask if the separation of the political sphere from the socio-economic, and the relative autonomy of the state is real or merely apparent.
The problem Rose raises is not simply one of socio-economic reductionism, but of a failing in Habermas that Adorno called "conceptual fetishism" and a "surplus of method" which, "compared with the substance, is abstract and false. Nor is the difference between deinstitutionalization and delegitimation merely terminological.
The former is bound to a living practice while the latter simply reduces the issues to mere sociology. In Legitimation Crisis , Habermas mystifies deinstitutionalization by rendering it almost completely conceptual. He has infused the problem of legitimation with systems theory, abstract normative categories, an "action theory" that itself becomes a category adorned with flow diagrams, charts, and an annoyingly abmbiguous jargon, a shallow recitation of evolutionary "social formations," surprisingly traditional "theorems of economic crises," a notion of "counter-culture" that is more Bohemian than populist, and a general analytical strategy that is bereft of dialectic.
It lacks so much of what Adorno called "nuance" that it reads more like a manual that a coherent interpretation. This failing is as acute as his dualism, his lack of a natural history, his inability to deal seriously with any "precognitive experience", his gross lack of esthetic insight,and his remoteness to the particularity of social and cultural problems.
His "surplus" is not only one of method but of concepts at the expense of concreteness. Habermas can certainly think and schematize, but he is surprisingly pallid as a generalizer. This may seem like an overstatement. But coherence is not necessarily congruent with building systems from countlessly unrelated blocks; building systems is not congruent with flow diagrams and flow diagrams are not congruent with dialectics.
by Murray Bookchin
The point is that the reality from which Habermas draws is so intellectualized, so thinned of its living substance, particularity, and potentialities that formal schemata become substitutes for dialectic and organic development. Habermas' stupendous project is, in McCarthy's words, to formulate a critical social theory that will "be empirical and scientific without being reducible to empirical-analytic science, philosophical in the sense of critique but not of presuppositionless 'first philosophy,' historical without being historical, and practical in the sense of being oriented to an emancipatory political practice but not to technological-administrative control.
He uses communication theory as his groundwork. One may wonder why so few neo-Marxists embraced this wondrous resource a generation or two ago, when even "night schools" were troubled by the failure of proletarian socialism. That we must all communicate with each other, however, seemed Iike a banality and that freedom presupposes the absence of speech constraints would have been assumed, Habermas' theory of communicative action is so shadowy, fiat, and pretentiously unfulfilling in its claims to consequence and insight that one is often led to believe that he has something to say simply because his dense prose is finally penetrated.
The mere relief one feels from the pain of trying to understand what he has to say is mistaken for the belief that, he really has said something significant. Habermas totally betrays the old Frankfurt School, however much he professes to deal with the unresolved problems that haunted it. In giving the "linguistic turn" in Anglo-American positivism an "Emancipation interest," he essentially separates the problem of communication from the institutional issues of emancipation, only to struggle, the problems of the Frankfurt School back in a linguistically reified form.
After we agree that communicative competence rests on understandable utterances, truthful propositions, the sincerity of speech partners, and the appropriateness of a speech performance, we cannot evade the fact that the consensus required to fulfill these requirement must be grounded not in linguistics or communicative action, but in institutions.
Either our priorities must be ordered in this fashion or Habermas must ground the conditions for ideal discourse in a depth linguistics that contains not only an innate human "grammar" but the potentiality for an innate rational society. Habermas seems to have already produced a rather contourless metalinguistics which merely recycles the problem of normative validity without resolving it. Stated baldly, it is his belief that the concept of truth so essential to an ideal speech situation is implied in communication itself -- a claim that begs the question 11 The grounding for ideal speech lurks like a utopian potentiality in distorted communication.
It beckons us toward ideality just as the "pleasure principle" beckons us toward sensual fulfillment. Here, Habermas' analysis drifts toward the "idealism" his claims to scientific rigor profess to transcend. But his attempt to straddle two conflicting , strategies of analysis leads to a theoretical limbo.
This unfulfilled ideality latent in communicative action becomes a mere seed that lies on concrete; it requires a social medium in which to sprout -- one that is repeatedly diluted by the importance Habermas ascribes to systems of ideas. How Habermas deals with "new social movements" beleaguering his world of communicative competence bears directly on the promise his system holds. On this score, few works more clearly reveal the extent to which a contemporary "dichotomy" exists in his own mind between "normative structures" and "substratum categories" -- that is, the extent to which he has reduced "action theory" itself to a category -- than an interview dealing with "The Crisis of Late Capitalism and the Future of Democracy" and the conclusion of his most recent book.
Habermas' response is revealing for its remarkable remoteness from reality. From the ideological viewpoint, it can be placed among the great movements oriented toward universalistic values, at least partly. This is not true of the other movements [i. The interviewer is startled "But women go beyond the demand for equality and here this movement meets critiques of Marxism as a simple theory of social equality. They speak of liberation. His elaboration, however, is even worse than his initial answer. We learn that there "are obvious similarities [between the women's movement] and neo-populism [i.
In his survey of "new social movements," Habermas is as au courant as he can be: To understand the "new social movements" we must go beyond the "bourgeois liberation movements" and the "workers' movements" to the "social-romantic movements of early industrialism, led by craftsmen, plebeians, and workers; in the defensive movements of the populist middle class; in the attempts to escape motivated by bourgeois critiques of civilization undertaken by reformers, Wandervogel , and so on.
And if Whitebook's vision of Habermas as a bastion against "anti-modernism" is sound, this revival of "archaic" social and cultural tendencies should be dismissed, nay, attacked, as reactionary! But Habermas, possibly troubled by the bad name he would receive, waffles: The remaining movements -- "the anti-nuclear and environmental movement; the peace movement.
After some chit-chat about problems of the "life world" and "problems of over-complexity," Habermas begins to snipe at "undirected explosions of youthful disturbances,. Never to be accused of having a firm opinion about contemporary reality, Habermas retreats into a "domain" of best wishes: There is no reason to believe that any of these vements are important to Habermas, except as an intellectual excercise.
Indeed, their "challenges are largely abstract," which is to say that Habermas, who can only "reconstruct" them in terms of global planning by bureaucratic means, has intellectualized them to a point where they are simply coherent, indeed, atavistic. To intermix the "peace movement," alternative energy and community movements, homosexuality and itizens' initiative movements with "religious fundamentalism" and even neo-fascism reflects a breakdown in Habermas' reality rinciple.
The unifying potentialities that provide the best of thee movements with radical possibilities elude this man.
Habermas suffers from an incurable intellectual illness: Every phase of a development must be frozen its fecundity ignored, its components rendered static and cross sectional. In point of fact, the "older" Habermas here stands very much at odds with the "younger" in more ways than Whitebook suggests at the close of his article. If the Habermas of "Technology and Science as 'Ideology'" in the late s was to advance the need for "reflection" that will "penetrate beyond the level of particular historical class interests to disclose the fundamental interests of mankind as such," the Habermas of the late s stimatizes the very generalization of particular interests.
The absence of "particularity" seems to earn them the odium of being defensively "neopopulist. Enough has been written often inaccurately about the turn from an emancipatory critical analysis "of an economy based on exchange" and "bathed in bitter reality itself' the words are Horkheimer's to a strategy of the immanent critique of reason and culture in a world where "ideology means society as appearance" and even immanent critique "is dragged into the abyss by its object" 16 Adorno's words Dallmayr sees in Adorno's Negative Dialectics "the debunking of anthropocentric pretensions which are not synonymous with the elimination of reflection in favor of objectivism ," a debunking that "involves an effort to break open subjectivity in the direction of non-subjective reality, an effort guided not by a desire to control or manipulate the world, but an attitude of attentive care and a willingness to respect diversity.
So conceivcd, it is not clear that Adorno's perspective can be dismissed as irredeemably pessimisitic. His effort is much closer to our times than Habermas' "universal pragmatics" with its collection of unredeemed "promissory notes. To dismiss, as Mendlsohn dots, this "eschatological notion of a reconciliation with nature" as abstract, "moralizing" a terrifying term!
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To simply designate Adornoo as "pessimistic" is a cheap snot. Adorno was a transitional figure whose pulsating contrariety and focus on the non-identity of the object with the concept advanced a powerful perspective for clearing the air of ossified notions of reason, history, progress, conformity, and conceptual fixity. It is ironical that this perspective has been developed in radical social ecology rather than in the sterile world of neo-Marxism.
Unfortunately, Adorno did not advance his dialectic of domination into a dialectic of hierarchy -- for here he would have had to embrace those haunting "ghosts" of anarchism against which he cautioned the New Left. Yet no thinker in the Frankfurt School was more anarchic. The real theme of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is simply not reduciblc to a self-negation of reason into instrumental rationality.
It was, above all, a critique of " 'progress' in reason, which, failing a revolution in the socio-economic structure , began to duplicate the characteristics of that structure and fell back into myth. It is part of the perversity of our time that Habermas has staked out a claim to this work of consummation with text books in sociology and the history of ideas.
Gillian Rose has summed up this dessicated endeavor with admirable succinctness: He accuses Adorno of confusing the critique of ideology with a theory of late capitalist society; of making theory impossible by basing it on 'the whole is the false,' a proposition which precludcs any determinate negation. Habermas, furthermore, denies the possibility of 'immanent critique' because late capitalist society no longer offers any norms, values, or cultural forms to which an 'immanent critique' might appeal. Habermas interprets Adorno's critique of identity as Hegelian, and understands his thought as based on ideas of reconciliation and 'the resurrection of nature.
He grants no validity to Adorno's generalization of Marx's theory of value to produce a sociology of illusion in late capitalist society. He does not see that Adorno's critique of identity is not Heglian, and that far from defining a problem of the resurrectin of nature, Adorno redefines 'nature' to mean 'the history of culture,' and emphatically rejects any reconciliation in history or any apotheosis of nature. For Habermas, the "resurrection of fallen nature" is actually an implicit imputation rather than an explicit formulation.
Humanity's relation to nature is primarily a problem of evolutionary theory, a substantive nature philosophy, technics and sensibility -- not Jewish and Protestant mysticism. Bloch's more appropriate formulation -- "that the human house stands not only in history and on the ground of human activity; it stands primarily on the ground of a mediated natural subjectivity" -- more solidly reflects the aspirations of a new science and an ecological technics than the formless language of Hebraic and pietistic mysticism.
It is tragic that Adorno could not remove what Buck-Morss calls "the taboo against positivity. Contrariety is preserved in the vision of an alternative possibility: Hence, "attentive care and a willingness to respect diversity" is grounded objectively in natural diversity itself and the ecological constellations it forms. The previous examination of Habermas' views on "new social movements" is indispensable for responding to Whitebook. Critical as he may be, Whitebook has entered into a curious symbiotic relation with Habermas. Ever respectful and scrupulously prudent, he has sought thus far to point out the incompleteness of Habermas "project" rather than systematically criticizing it.
Habermas himself may not realize how clever he is until he has read Whitebook's "critique. There is no irony in Whitebook's tone. Quite to the contrary, it is the advice of a friend who reduces the "theoretical intentions" of Central European Jews to a form of pastoral nostalgia. Actually, Whitebook shows Habermas how easily they can be waylaid, vulgarized and dispatched. Whitebook warns that, "all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, a nostalgic yearning informs the utopian sensibility: Whitebook's technique is divinely simple.
By merely describing a situation, he thinks he has proffered an explanation -- and his descriptions of almost everyone other that Habermas are crude and insensitive. Even mere "nostalgia" becomes a social desideratum. Accordingly, when I describe the destructive impact of the capitalist market on the "highly textured social structure" of procapitalist societies, Whitebook immediately concludes that I want to return to the Athenian polis , presumably the medieval commune, or whatever bounces around his head. Should I insist that no return is possible, Whitebook the psychoanalyst replaces Whitebook the social theorist.
Lest my assertions fail to fit conveniently into his preconceptions, he guards himself with such clinical caveats as "all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. As if pop psychoanalysis were not enough, Whitebook descends to the level of caricature when he discusses my notion of decentralized ecocommunities.
Here, it is important for Whitebook to cast my views in the most atavistic terms he can muster. So Whitebook goes to work: Whitebook would almost certainly view my plaudits in the book for the Athenian polis and my critique of the modern cosmopolis such as Los Angeles and New York as patently "atavistic. But these are trifles.
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Whitebook soon leaps for the jugular. Accordingly, "It is not accidental that Bookchin advocates the establishment of a network of decentralized 'ecocommunities' as part of the solution to the problems of the modern world" -- no less! Self -mangement is meaningless unless it rests on a fully developed and autonomous self. For Whitebook to ignore the fact that for me decentralization is a function of individu ation, of a comprehensible public sphere that fosters authentic personal autonomy and empowerment, indicates intellectual dishonesty.
Habermas, on the other hand, is so well ajusted to contemporary "social complexity" and global centralization that his solutions to gigantism whatever they may be become a problem in the sociology of organization. One thing is certain avoid slipping back into Wandervogel romanticism and a "populist" form of neo-Luddism, solutions "must be planned globally and implemented by administrative means.
Not that Habermas wants to go either backward or forward in time; rather, he essentially appropriates the status quo in industry and technics as given -- as a datum; he has "entered into the strength" not merely of hermeneutics, systems theory, positivism, and the like, but of a dehumanizing gigantism that totally disempowers the individual, while designating "new social movements" as "defensive" and "petty bourgeois.
Hegel’s Twilight
Happily oblivious to Habermas' reactionary adjustment to the status quo , Whitebook argues that I am so atavistic that I want to go back behind the modern division of labor. The possibility that one could want to go forward beyond the "modern division of labor" is simply not entertained by Whitebook. What renders his remark so objectionable is that only a few pages earlier, Whitebook mocks Marx's views on "cooperation" as "especially bizarre" and "misleading" for failing to recognize on the one hand that a highly rationalized modern or "sophisticated" division of labor constitues cooperation rather than "reginmentation," while on the other hand Marx believed that the factory, by virtue of this very regimentation, "would produce revolutionary consciousness!
Whitebook prudently ignores the fact that it is none other than "Bookchin" who has taken up this contradiction. Indeed, I have emphasized it and criticized it. By the same token, I raised a key question which Whitebook, again in bad faith, fails to discuss: What technologies can supplant the hierarchical mobilization of labor into factories? What is interesting here is the ide logical rationale that guides Whitebook's "critique" of Habermas. He is faced with three alternatives if he wishes to "save the subject" rather than lose it completely.
Either he must go " behind the modern division of labor" or settle down with Habermas and live with it by planning it in accordance with a vaporous sociology of organization, or go beyond the modern division of labor. If he goes " behind the modern division of labor," he will become a Paleolithic food-gatherer or maybe a contented craftsman dependent on the "modern division of labor" for the very tools he uses.
His solution is simple: What is intriguing about Whitebook's article are the number of questions it raises but does not answer. Whitebook places a Habermasian taboo on almost every aspect of his community that is suggestive of mutualism, possibly even cooperation, so that his notion of the "subject" is cast in such neurotically monadic terms that even "identification" or "symbiosis" smacks of Gemeinschaft in the pejorative sense of the term.
This raises the other question of the superego. If "paternal authority" which the democratic Athenian polis challenged to disembed its young citizens from parochial kinship ties "creates a vacuum which is filled by outside society," are alternate "modes of socialization possible through which autonomy can be achieved without renouncing "'reason, reflection, and individuation' as norms, as some of our more avant-garde culture critics and feminist theoreticians more or less implicitly do"?
Here, once again, Whitebook begs the question that he has a very demanding - and curiously unstated - notion of subjectivity, individuality, reason, reflection, even paternity that renders any alternate mode of socialization atavistic. The existence of a "vacuum" created by the decline of "paternal authority" is placed on a par with the renunciation of "reason, reflection, and individuation. If "maternal authority" were to fill this "vacuum," would we create subjects who renounce "reason, reflection, and individuation"? Are "reason, reflection and individuation" linked with tortured personalities like Ivan Karamazov?
Is his caring, "passive-receptive" brother Alyosha a mute dolt, the creature of a Gemeinschaft tradition like Gertrude in Goethe's Faust? Indeed, what would happen if a free, ecological society based on reason were to fill the vacuum created by the decline of "paternal authority" the way the Athenian democracy did when it tried to edge out the Bronze-Age agonistic and competitive sensibility of the patriarchal kinship group with a civic and cooperative sensibility? What if radical communities less erratic, unstable and purposeless than so many communes of the Gaskin's "Farm"?
Whitebook would probably exploit these extremes at the expense of creatively imaginative alternatives which may already exist - even in this insane society. A case can be made for a conclusion that we followed a male-oriented social pathway, perhaps sharply departing at some remote time from a dialectic of individuation nourished by ecological differentiation to one nourished by domination. It is remarkable how close Horkheimer and Adorno came to an understanding of this forgotten past.
That the "model of emerging individual is the Greek hero," as Horkheimer observes, the warrior whose calling card is "daring," self-reliance, and freedom "from tradition as well as the tribe," - these origins describe the ambiguities of individuality as we "normatize" them today rather than the triumph of individuality. From the start, the heroic ego was fragile because it was rootless, imperiled because it continually faced physical annihilation, dangerous in its capacity for destruction as well as creation.
Glorious Germany, which gave us Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Goethe, Marx, Beethoven, and yes, Wagner, also gave us Hitler and Himmler, It is a problematic of the male's ascendency over a human evolution that precluded woman in society's image of the superego and yielded a vacuum that has replaced the warrior's spear and the sword by the impersonal killing power of the neutron bomb. With the ascent of capitalism , nature becomes "stingy," but so does man - and so does the ego.
The comradeship of the warrior's camp gives way to "possessive individualism," the "intersubjectivity" of accumulative competition, mean-spirited predation, and rationalized subjugation. Only remote traces remain today in shattered preliterate cultures and ghostly myths of an alternative pathways for social evolution in which personality and autonomy could have found rounded fulfillment as a result of mutualism rather than parasitism, harmony rather than antagonism, reconciliation rather than conflict. Social ecology, which was unknown to the Frankfurt School except in a very technical form, could have provided the mediations that would have spared nature philosophy and a naturalistic ethics from the stigma it acquired as a result of a static Hellenic ontology, National Socialist "folk philosophy" and Marxism's "diamat.
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Whitebook does not consider this possibility, except perhaps, ironically. With some justification, he points to my emphasis on technical development and post-scarcity as evidence of my "latent Marxism. For my own part, I have modified my views on "post-scarcity" in the sense that capitalism has given "scarcity" a unique character. The need for material abundance is means to exorcise bourgeois notions of scarcity and "stingy nature" from our conceptual framework, indeed, to establish the right to choose needs as the only libertarian way of demystifying need itself and thereby rendering it rational, not as a "normative" second material force that seems to control us.
In this regard, the technological "telos" Whitebook imputes to me is grossly misleading.
The crux of the Habermas problem is the shift from a substantive to a procedural tradition in social theory - a shift from Hegel and Marx's phenomenological strategy to the formal strategy so much in vogue in the academy. Whitebook finds this laudable evidence of Habermas' "modernity," although the "night school" world of socialism might have used a less favorable and more juicy term. Actually, Habermas' "formal procedures" permeate his entire theoretical universe, including institutions. Taken as a whole, this universe consists of a highly formalized theory of procedures that rest in part on a "meta-norm" called "ideal-speech situation" which, as Benhabib observes, defines "the immanent presuppositions of theoretical discourse aiming at the attainment of truth.
What is most disquieting in this whole "graduate seminar" rigmarole is that Habermas forecloses the possibility of determining the institutions that will materialize the norms for an "ideal-speech situation" by presupposing that under existing conditions of constraints of discourse it is impossible to discursively formulate the very substantive details for Habermas' emancipatory ideals. This was because the Western educational paradigm was imposed upon the conquered, colonized peoples during the period of colonisation.
Unlike Hegel, Kimmerle took African philosophy seriously and engaged, initially, in dialogues with African philosophy. Underlying this are recognition and respect for other modes of doing philosophy as manifestations of intercultural philosophy. To deny dialogues, if you prefer, polylogue among world philosophies, is to reject the very basis of philosophy. More Options Prices excl. Contents About Restricted Access. Way of thinking, thinking of way s Pieter Boele van Hensbroek: Beyond crossing borders, beyond intercultural philosophy Sybrandt van Keulen: Aesthetics of Gikuyu proverbs Henk Haenen: About hospitality in philosophy Murray Hofmeyr: Model synthesis as a meta-heuristics for realistic descriptive models Martin Odei Ajei: