Murray Bookchin
FINDING THE SUBJECT: NOTES ON WHITEBOOK AND "HABERMAS LTD."
"For a whole series of reasons, the reputation of Karl Marx has
been reborn in a new form, the form of Marx as a sociologist. I
believe that this is error: that Marx neither was -- nor in a very
important sense intended to be -- a sociologist..."
Donald G. Macrae (1)
Whitebook has known for years that I reject the very use of the word
"modernity." So his attempt to dissociate me from it is quite gratuitous. (2) He
also knows that I reject it for reasons that have nothing to do with a desire to
return to "premodernity." I also reject "sociology" and most of the reified
jargon of the Habermas Establishment -- a jargon open to the same irony Adorno
deployed against the Heideggerians. (3) This is part of my conscious endeavor to
retain Marx's combative nomenclature, just as Habermas' reified jargon is part
of a conscious commitment to an academically conformist one, The contrast
between socialism and sociology-- including sociologese -- has been conveniently
forgotten by a generation of "leftist intellectuals", whose ideological
apparatus was pierced together in class rooms, institutes, and the New School
cafeteria. There is a sickening gall in Jameson's remarks that "Marxist literary
criticisms... of the 1930s... was of a relatively untheoretical, essentially
didactic nature, destined more for use in the night school than in the graduate
seminar." Which is to say that Marxism generally is no longer sullied by the
"burning issues of those days -- anti Nazism, the Popular Front, the
relationship between literature and the labor movement, the struggle between
Marxism and anarchism." (4) Readers of Habermas' excursion into "new social
movements" can judge whether Marxist "graduate seminars" have made contact with
such "night school" issues as ecology, feminism, the anti-nuclear movement,
homosexuality, and communalism. (5)
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."
(6)
When one turns to the Enlightenment, however, it is astonishing what
crucial issues Habermas' level of abstraction permits him to omit: the
Enlightenment's "project" to dominate nature which fed into its mechanistic
vision of the world, its highly behavioristic psychology which, in turn, formed
the premises of its pedagogical strategies, and its myth of unceasing progress.
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: a tendency to categorize, schematize, and
abstract that, as Gillian Rose observes of Adorno, "provides no account of those
social forms which would have to be specified prior to any account of
corresponding political forms." Rose further notes that "This is also true of
the work of Habermas. 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." (7)
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."
(8) What is "original" in Habermas' Legitimation Crisis is not a crisis in
institutional "legitimacy." The issue of deinstitutionalization produced by the
counter-culture, blacks and feminists was raised a decade before Habermas began
to mummify it. 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. (9)
While Adorno's "concrete particular" stands in dialectical opposition to the
concept, Habermas' proclivity for conceptual "reductionism" tends to dissolve
the concrete. 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. 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." (10) The
question is whether Habermas has closed the gaps between an empirical science,
critical philosophy, and emancipatory practice or is merely straddling them by
remaining twice or thrice removed from the reality that alone can relieve him
from such a terribly demanding posture. 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 ...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Go to the beginning of the document
Go to previous page
Go to next page
Go to the end of document
