Commercium: Critical Theory From a Cosmopolitan Point of View
304
Commercium: Critical Theory From a Cosmopolitan Point of View
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| ISBN-13: | 9781783482856 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2015 |
| Series: | Reinventing Critical Theory |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 769 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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Commercium
Critical Theory from a Cosmopolitan Point of View
By Brian Milstein
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Brian MilsteinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-285-6
CHAPTER 1
The Theory of Communicative Action
In 1963, Habermas published an essay titled "Between Philosophy and Science: Marxism as Critique." A metacritique of the state of Marxism in the mid-twentieth century, it is one of his earliest statements on the programmatic requirements of a critical theory of society. Habermas acknowledges that the professionalization of the social sciences has brought tremendous advances in technical knowledge of social organization, but these have taken place at the cost of methodological myopia with regard to both the normative development of society and the place of social science within it. Social science has lost sight of the practical interest inherent in its own enterprise, and theory has sundered itself from social practice. In response, Habermas invokes Horkheimer's original call for a critical theory grounded in a twofold relation of reflection that "comprehends the knowing subject in terms of the relations of social praxis, in terms of its position, both within the process of social labor and the process of enlightening the political forces about their goals."
Habermas finds in Marx an impetus toward conscious historical reflexivity that he thinks has been lost. For Habermas, the key innovation of Marx's concept of critique lay in the way he related it to the historical-philosophical idea of crisis. Marx recognized that critique cannot derive its orientation from a theory that conceives itself as prior to practice, just as it cannot derive its capacities for enlightenment from a practice divorced from theory. It cannot derive its insights from pure reason, but only from the practical interest immanent in the participant's consciousness of being both subject and object of the historical process. In Habermas's view, this was the nexus Marx was trying to achieve under his idea of a "critique of political economy." The proletariat gains its emancipatory insight through its objective place in an alienating process of endless accumulation characterized by "the domination of dead labor over the living." The complex of labor and exchange provided the engine of a history that propelled itself through periodic revolutionary overcomings of self-generated contradictions. Hence Marx came close to successfully grounding an understanding of history "with his thesis that the meaning of history can be recognized theoretically to the degree that human beings undertake to make it true practically." As Habermas explains,
Marx declares the will to make to be the precondition for the ability to know, because he had learned from Hegel to comprehend the "meaning" of history as emancipation from the contradiction of humanity with itself. The meaning of history as a whole is revealed theoretically to the degree to which mankind practically undertakes to make with will and with consciousness that history which it has always made anyhow. In so doing, critique must comprehend itself as a moment within the situation which it is seeking to supercede [Aufhebung].
Habermas believes the deficiencies of the classical Marxist approach stem from two sources. First, Marx did not account for the capacity of political mobilization to coalesce as a force autonomous from the domain of commodity exchange and social labor, a capacity that only really came to fruition in the course of democratization. Marx anticipated the concentration of capital and the oligopolization of economic activity; he did not anticipate the ability of social movements to push the state to intervene in the operation of exchange and labor, making it no longer dependent on economic laws alone but also on political power. This led the further advancement of capitalism to follow a course divergent from the one Marx predicted. Second, however, was the decay of the critical impulse behind Marx's original idea into orthodoxy. For Habermas, once Marxism began to understand itself as a "positive science," it lost its connection from the crisis-complex of history from which alone it could derive its validity as critique: "the ideological character of consciousness had to take on a metaphysical quality. ... The correct ideology was distinguished from the false solely according to the criteria of a realistic theory of knowledge. The socialist Weltanschauung was the only correct one, because it correctly 'depicts' [abbildet] the cosmic law in nature and in history." Habermas believes that Marx may have misunderstood the foundations of his own critique by interpreting it as an overcoming of philosophy tout court instead of a dialectical negotiation of philosophy and science:
Certainly Marx understood the dialectical method well enough not to misuse it crudely in this manner. But that this misunderstanding could arise, under his eyes and provided with the blessings of Engels, and thus become the foundation of an "orthodox" tradition, can be traced back to the failure to reflect on critique as such: namely, not only to justify the scientific elements against philosophy, but also to justify those elements which critique owes to its philosophical origins, against the positivistic limitations of science.
Whether or not Habermas was correct about the flaws of orthodox Marxism, the horizon of problems that critical theory needed to address had shifted dramatically over the 100 years since Marx's time. Whereas then it was the one-sided idealism of philosophy that hindered our critical understanding of history, now it was the one-sided objectivism of the positivistic social sciences. Related to this scientization of the social was the growing awareness that there was more to the modern experience of alienation than could be explained in economic terms alone: the political realm, subdued by technocratic administration and "expert cultures," presented its own arena of reification along with its own crisis tendencies. The dynamic of class struggle as Marx understood it is insufficient to claim a full view over the structure of world history as such.
Almost two decades passed between this early essay and The Theory of Communicative Action, but Habermas's idea of a "two-level concept of society" can still be read along the lines of this metacritique. We can understand Habermas's critical theory in terms of two major moves. First, he claims that labor cannot of itself provide a foundation for social life without a second dimension — interaction — through which physical labor may convert into social labor. Habermas seeks to restore the primacy of the intersubjective processes that make possible the collective mastery of one's environment, and this takes him back from Marx to Hegel's critique of Kant. On the one hand, he finds in the Kantian concept of "mature autonomy" (Mündigkeit) through public use of reason a crucial validity basis for successful critique: "critique understands that its claims to validity can be verified only in the successful process of enlightenment, and that means: in the practical discourse of those concerned." On the other hand, he accepts Hegel's criticism of Kant's formalistic portrayal of a transcendental ego that is "inwardly" developed in abstraction from its surroundings, which Hegel replaces with a situated understanding of autonomy that emerges as the outcome of an intersubjective formative process. Habermas seeks a balance between autonomy and situatedness by locating the necessary conditions for "practical discourse" in the very conditions that make social order possible — that is, in the structures of a communicative action oriented to validity claims that allow for a successful process of social integration.
The second move replaces Marx's distinction between a materialist base and an ideologically organized superstructure with a more general distinction between social integration and system integration, or lifeworld and system. This has two noteworthy implications. First, it is now the level of symbolic reproduction, anchored in communicative interaction, which has theoretical primacy over the level of material reproduction. The lifeworld encompasses the cultural, social, and psychic contents of collective life, which are passed down through traditions, institutions, and socialization practices and reproduced in everyday linguistic communication. Second, by abstracting from commodity exchange to the more general category of system integration, Habermas opens up the object domain of critique to regions of social life other than relations of production. This is reflected in his shift from the Marxist focus on exchange value to a more general interest in "steering media," as we will see below. Thus the system level may include all those forms of institutionalization, like the market and bureaucratic administration, which in modern societies replace the medium of communication to more efficiently fulfill certain tasks of integration: they are "decoupled" from the lifeworld, and from the point of view of everyday life they take on the appearance of a "second nature." For Habermas, contradictions and crisis tendencies emerge when imperatives native to the system drive it to encroach upon activities native to the lifeworld; to the extent that system imperatives impede on the capacities of participants to communicatively reproduce their sociocultural life, they can give rise to a variety of social pathologies.
The critique of reification that results from this double move allows for a broader understanding of how crises emerge in modern society. In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas already noted the inadequacy of theorizing crisis solely in terms of systemic contradictions; it is only at the level of the lifeworld — the level at which social disruption is experienced and can be interpreted — that crises enter social reality as crises. One consequence of this is that crises need not be just economic; the administrative sphere can also become its own source of problems (as can the international sphere, as we shall see later on). Another is that, by tracing societal contradictions to two contrasting modes of sociation instead of shifting relations of production, Habermas's position can better account for symptoms of alienation and reification that penetrate all parts of society instead of a specific social class. Through this twofold increase in generalization — from labor to interaction and from the commodity form to system integration — Habermas sets up a broader understanding of the contradictions of modern society.
My argument in this chapter is that, despite tangible problems, the basic ideas behind Habermas's two-level concept of society remain crucial for any critical theory that seeks to preserve the hermeneutic perspective of participants while targeting structures of power and constraint. I will begin in section A with an overview of Habermas's idea of communicative rationality. In section B, I will show how he develops his lifeworld-system framework into a narrative about the paradoxes of modernity. In section C, I will examine some of the major criticisms that have been leveled at his theory over the years, including his neglect of difference, war, and the international realm. Finally, in section D, I will look at how Habermas has tried to ameliorate some of these problems in subsequent works such as Between Facts andNorms, and I will justify the continuing usefulness of a critical theory that distinguishes between lifeworld and system.
A. COMMUNICATIVE RATIONALITY AND THE GROUNDS OF CRITIQUE
Habermas rejects conceptions of rationality that privilege the perspective of the observer over that of the participant. Purposive rationality is defined according to criteria like "effectiveness"; its paradigm is the knowledge necessary for a successful goal-oriented intervention in the world by an agent. Habermas calls this a "monologically conceived, teleological" conception of reason, and he believes it fails to capture the inescapably social dimension of the rationality of knowledge — its acquisition, its usage, and its availability to criticism. Habermas suggests focusing instead on the communicative nature of rationality, on "how speaking subjects acquire and use knowledge" through the transmission and revision of assertions that are subject to criteria of fallibility:
If we start from the communicative employment of propositional knowledge in assertions, we make a prior decision for a wider concept of rationality connected with ancient conceptions of logos. This concept of communicative rationality carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld.
For Habermas, many of the aporias of social thought stem from a failure to appreciate this communicative dimension. He believes it a mistake to assume that only those aspects of social life that conform to standards of means-ends effectiveness can be said to admit of rational content. Not only does this lead to a narrow and reductionist conception of society, it also leads the social scientist to misconstrue her practical interest in society as an exclusive concern with scientific "fact" or technical know-how. It leads her to assume a position over society instead of a reflective position within it. In contrast, a communicative conception of rationality locates the capacities for reason and critique in the very conditions of human interaction, in the ability of participants to use linguistic speech to decipher meaning and make claims about the world. For Habermas, this ability is necessary for social interaction to generate social cohesion, but it is also a necessary component of valid critique. Social integration requires an underlying consensus — of communicable knowledge, meanings, norms, and practices — that can be made comprehensible in language both to those who observe it and to those who participate in it. Its validity depends on an intersubjective recognition that inheres between actors, not in the judgment of a singular consciousness.
This communicative turn allows Habermas to expand the concept of rationality by linking questions of validity to questions of meaning (1), show how reason plays out in everyday processes of social action (2), ground the epistemic authority of the social scientist in that of the everyday participant (3), and ultimately ground the possibility of social criticism (4).
(1) In contrast to a conception that limits its orientation to the "truth" of a proposition or the "efficacy" of a means to an end, the parameters of communicative rationality are attuned to the necessary conditions whereby rationally accountable participants can move between disagreement and consensus. It is a processual as opposed to substantive conception of rationality: what counts as "valid" must be redeemed in the successful renewal of communicative interaction among those involved. Communicative rationality is thus contextual to the extent that it depends on the perspective of participants rather than of observers. We apply standards of rationality not only in reference to propositions that exhibit claims to truth or effectiveness, but also whenever a person is called upon to justify her actions in light of established norms and expectations, or even when a person simply conveys a desire or feeling and is called to explain herself to a skeptic. Criteria of rationality may be applied whenever an utterance carries with it some claim to validity that the speaker, if questioned, would need to defend with reasons.
Drawing upon a revised version of Michael Dummett's truth-conditional approach to language, Habermas postulates, "We understand a speech act when we know the kinds of reasons that a speaker could provide in order to convince a hearer that he is entitled in the given circumstances to claim validity for his utterance-in short, when we know what makes it acceptable." Maeve Cooke points out the importance of Habermas's use of "acceptability" as a standard. Whereas Dummett relied on a standard of "assertibility" to evaluate the truth conditions of propositional statements, Habermas opts for a more generalized standard that can include questions of normative rightness and subjective truthfulness as well as propositional truth. Moreover, "acceptability" can only be made operative as a standard within the context of an interaction between speaker and hearer. This requires that the speaker have some basic awareness of what would make her utterance acceptable to the hearer, and the hearer must likewise have some explicable standard of acceptability if she is to affirm or challenge the validity of the speaker's utterance in a way to which the speaker may then, in turn, respond. The very process of understanding a speech act presupposes an understanding of the conditions under which the validity claims may be criticized or defended: meaning and validity are inextricably bound up with each other. The success of such an exchange depends on the mutual recognition of acceptability standards that are shared by participants in dialogue.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Commercium by Brian Milstein. Copyright © 2015 Brian Milstein. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd.
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