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I. General introduction:
1. a student of Theodor Adorno, and a member of the
Frankfurt School of critical theory.
2. Habermas is decidedly Kantian in his dedication to reason, ethics,
and moral philosophy.(source)
3 . The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
(1962; Trans. Thomas Burger; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989)". . . . In that
work and arguably since then as well, Habermas' political intent was to
further 'the project of Enlightenment" by the
reconstruction of a public sphere in which reason might prevail, not the
instrumental reason of much modern practice but the critical reason that
represents the best of the democratic tradition. Habermas defined
the public sphere as a domain of uncoerced conversation oriented toward
a pragmatic accord. (Poster)
4. His position came under attack by
-- poststructuralists like Lyotard who questioned the emancipatory
potentials of its model of consensus through rational debate.
-- Nancy Fraser 'gender blind.'
-- Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge -- articulating the notion of an
oppositional public sphere, specifically that of the proletariat.
5. The "Modernity" essay:
"The occasion of the essay aligns
Habermas with Adorno; yet the content of the lecture aligns him with
precicely that rationalist tradition in Enlghtenment of which Adorno was
enormously sceptical. Here, as in his later work of the 1980s, Habermas
sees the possibility of salvaging Enlightenment rationality. The project
of modernity done by eighteenth-century philosophers 'consisted of their
efforts to develop objective science, universal morality and
law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic', their aim
being, according to Habermas here, 'the rational organization of
everyday social life.' (Thomas Docerty Postmodernism 95)
Modernism "... held the extravagant
expectation that the arts and sciences would further not only the
control of the forces of nature but also the understanding of self and
world, moral progress, justice in social institutions, and even human
happiness."
II. Main Idea &
Questions for Discussion:
Main Idea: Habermas thinks that
the problems of cultural modernity lies more in social modernization
than in the modernity's project. Although the latter has its aporia
(failure to connect with the lifeworld), it cannot be continued with
proper appriation of expert cultures.
1. How does Habermas defined social modernization
and cultural modernity, and their relations to modernity? How does "neoconservatism"
misunderstand the relation between cultural modernity and social
modernization?
2. Do you agree with Habermas that the modernity
project is unfinished, but not a thing of the past? What is his way of
carrying on the project? Is there any other way for it to be further
developed in the postmodern society?
3. In other words, is 'public sphere' or rational
differentiation possible today?
III. Outline
Habermas'
questions: 'Is modernity as passe as the postmodernists claim it is?'
<Defining modernity in terms of
its relations to the past and--in aesthetic modern mentality--its changed
sense of time and space.>
The Old and The New
1. The 'modern'--change from the old to the new--
is not necessarily a rejection of the past.
-- "With varying contents, the term modernity
repeatedly expresses the consciousness of an era that relates itself
to the past of classical antiquity in order to conceive itself as the
result of a transition from the old to the new.
-- Antiquity as a normative model --> until "querelle
des anciens et des modernes" -- dispute between the ancient
[philosophers] and the modern [philosophers]
-- Enlightenment and 19th century rojmanticism--
". . . this romanticism produces a radicalized consciousness of
modernity that detached itself from all historical connections and
retained only an abstract opposition to tradition and history as a
whole."
-- "Classical has always meant what survives
through the ages. The emphatically modern no longer derives this force
from the authority of a past age; it derives it soley from the
authenticity of a contemporary relevance that is now in the
past."
The Aesthetic Modern Mentality
1. "aesthetic modernity"
-- characterized by an altered
consciousness of time.
-- "This consciousness is expressed in the spatial metaphor of a
vanguard --that is, an avant-gatrde that scouts unknown
territory, exposing itself to the risks of sudden and
shocking encounters, conquering an as-yet uninhabited future, and
orienting itself in an as-yet unsurveyed terrain." (159)
-- the foraward orientation, the anticipation of an undefined,
contingent future, and the cult of the New mean the
glorification of a present that repeatedly gives birth to new,
subjectively defined pasts.
-- in the celebration of dynamism is the longing for an immaculate and
unchanging present."As a self-negating moment,
modernism is a 'yearning for true presence.'" (159)
--> abstract opposition to history, which is no
longer structured as an organized process of transmission that
guarantees continuity.
--> [Aesthetic Modern Mentality] rebels against
everything normative bestowed from Tradition; "explodes" the continuum
of history.
2. the failure of avant-garde art
Daniel Bell locate the origins of the crisis
manifested in advanced Western societies -- "a split
between culture and society, between cultural modernity and the
demands of the economic and administrative systems.'
-- Bell thinks that avant-garde art has
"penetrated the values of daily life and infected the lifeworld with
the modernist mentality. "
-- "the seductive force" of Modernism --
1. the dominance of the principle of
unrestricted self-realization, 2. the demand for authentic
expression of the self, 3. the subjectivism of an overstimulated
sensibility, 4. unleashing hedonistic motives that are incompatible
with the discipline of professional life . . .
<the mistaken view of neomodernism>
Cultural Modernity and Social Modernization
1. Cultural Modernity
(oppositional mentatlity) misunderstood and connected with its opposite
p. 161; blamed for the consequences of social modernization;
2. the consequences of social
modernization: altered attitudes towards work, consumer habits,
levels of demand, leisure-time orientation--> the crisis of motivation,
lack of social identification, incapacity of obedience, narcissism,
withdrawal from competition for status.
<aporias within cultural modernity, or
modernity's project>
The Project of Enlightenment
1. modernity's project:
-- rational differentiation: separation of the
substantive reason expressed in religious and metaphysical worldviews
into three moments: science and scholarship, morality and art, or the
cognitive-instrumental, the moral-practical, and the
aesthetic-expressive. (162)
-- differentiation means both specilization and detachment from the
stream of tradition. (163)
--optimistic: applying expert cultures to
rational organization of living conditions and social relations:
"a release of the cognitive potentials thus accumulated from their
esoteric high forms and their utlization in praxis" (162)
-- e.g. differentiated reason: Karl Popper
(scientific criticism), Paul Lorenzen (artificial language), Adorno
(critical content in art).
-- negative consequences: growing distance between
these expert culture and the general public. --> the lifeworld
impoverished.
--> attempts to 'sublate' the expert cultures.
* Habermas thinks that while the optimism
surrounding the Enlightenment project has waned, the problem which
motivated the project remains. What problem is that?
<example of autonomy and sublation in art>
Kant and the Autonomy of the Aesthetic
-- In the aesthetic domain, there is the judgement
of taste, the free play of the imagination,
-- in terms of enjoyment -- disinterested pleasure: "a
state of mind evoked by the play of -- in terms of artistic production
-- the genius or artist 'gives authentic
expression to what he experiences in his concentrated dealings with a
decentered subjectivity that is released from the constraints of
knowledge and action." the representational capacities, a state set in
motion aesthetically."
-- two conditions for aesthetic autonomy:
-- 1. the institutionalization of art production
independent of the market and of a nonpurposeful enjoyment of art
mediated by criticism;
-- 2. aestheticist self-understanding: 'the
media of representation and the techniques of production advance . . .
become aesthetic objects in their own right.'
e.g. l'art pour l'art -- art for the sake of art
<detachment --> lack of reconciliation>
The False Sublation of Culture
1. Surealism p. 165 'at tempts to eliminate the
discrepancy between art and life, fiction and practice, and illusion and
reality. . . " Theodor Adorno: surrealism "renounces art, without,
however, being able to shake it off"
2. the "double errors" of false sublation:
-- 'When the containers of an autonomously
developed cultural sphere are shattered, its contents
disintegrate. When meaning is desublimated and form
destructured, nothing is left."
-- replaces one form of onesidedness and one
abstration with another:
The process of reaching understanding in the lifeworld require the whole
breadth of cultural transmission. Hence a rationalised everyday life
could not be redeemed from the rigidity of cultrual
impoverishment. . .
--e.g. to aestheticize politics
3. sublation of philosophy -- -->
--e.g. to replace politics with moral rigorism or
to subjugate politics to dogmatic doctrines
Alternatives to the False
Sublation of Culture
1. art criticism as a bridge between expert
culture and lifeworld-- criticism concerned with life-problems, or used
to illuminate a life-historical situation. ". . . revitalises the
need-interpretations and normative expectations and alters the way in
wihch these moments refere to one another." (167)
2. appropriation of expert culture e.g. Paul
Weiss; a group of German workers;
In examples like these, where the expert culture
is appropriated from the perspectives of the lifeworld, something of the
intention of the doomed Surrealist revolt, and . . .has been preserved.
3. social modernization be guided into other,
noncapitalist directions, and if the lifeworld can develop, on its own,
institutions that will lie outside the borders of the inherent dynamics
of the economic and administrative systems.
Three Conservatisms p. 168
-- "young conservatives" -- "transpose the
spontaneous forces of the imagination, the experience of the self, and
affectivity onto the sphere of the distant and archaic; set up a
dualistic opposition between instrumental reason and a principle
accessible only through evocation. . .(e.g. Derrida)
--"old conservatives" -- a return to positions
prior to modernity with the use of Aristotle or a renewal of
cosmological ethics; e.g. Leo Strauss
-- "new conservatives" -- welcome the development
of modern science as long as it overstep its own sphere only to further
technical progress, capitalistic growth, and rational administration.
For the rest, they advocate a politics of defusing the explosive
contents of cultural modernity.
Charles Jencks, The Postmodern
Reader, pp. 158-169.
The Jurgen Habermas Web Resource
http://www.msu.edu/user/robins11/habermas/
Habermas Online
http://www.habermasonline.org/
Essays:
Poster, Mark. "CyberDemocracy: Internet
and the Public Sphere."
http://www.hnet.uci.edu/mposter/writings/democ.html
Does Internet Create Democracy "http://www.zip.com.au/~athornto//thesis_1996_alinta_thornton.doc"
(external)
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