Social Scientist

Habermas and the Post Modernist Critique of the Enlightenment Author(s): Shaswati Mazumdar Reviewed work(s): Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 20, No. 12 (Dec., 1992), pp. 53-66 Published by: Social Scientist Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3517742 . Accessed: 13/04/2012 04:19
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SHASWATI MAZUMDAR

Habermasand the Post Modernist Critique of the Enlightenment

In Brecht's play Life of Galileo, a young monk explains to Galileo the reasons why he supports the papal decree against the results of Galileo's researches on the planetary system showing that it was not the sun that moved round the earth but the earth that moved around the sun: My parents were peasants in the Campagna, and I grew up there. They are simple people. They know all about olive trees, but not much else ... They are badly off, but even their misfortunes imply a certain order . . . There is a regularity about the disasters that befall them ... They have been assured that God's eye is always on even anxiously-that the whole drama of the them-probingly, world is constructed around them so that they, the performers may prove themselves in their greater or lesser roles. What would my people say if I told them that they happen to be on a small knob of stone twisting endlessly through the void round a second-rate star, just one among myriads? What would be the value or necessity then of so much patience, such understanding of their poverty? What would be the use of Holy Scripture, which has explained and sweat, the patience, the hunger, the justified it all-the now turns out to be full of errors? No: I can see submissiveness-and their eyes wavering, I can see them leffing their spoons drop, I can see how betrayed and deceived they will feel. So nobody's eye is on us, they'll say. Have we got to look after ourselves, old, uneducated and worn-out as we are? The only part anybody has devised for us is this wretched earthly one, to be played out on a tiny star wholly dependent on others, with nothing revolving round it. Our poverty has no meaning: hunger is no trial of strength, it's merely not having eaten: effort is no virtue, it's just bending and carrying. Can you see now why I read into the Holy Congregations decree a noble motherly compassion, a vast goodness of the soul? To this Galileo retorts:
*Delhi University, Delhi

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. . . Your Campagna peasants pay for the wars which the representative of the gentle Jesus is waging in Germany and Spain. Why does he make the earth the centre of the universe? So that the See of St. Peter can be the centre of the earth! That's what it's all about. You're right, it's not about the planets, it's about the peasants of the Campagna.1 A similar noble motherly compassion seems to move some of those who seek to stem the tide of the critique of the European Enlightenment emanating from the philosophical interpretations of theory. God may have been replaced postmodernist/poststructuralist the self-reflexive subject, but the urge to defend a strategic power by once appropriated through the exploits and cunning of Enlightenment 'reason' is not dissimilar to the motives of the Holy Congregation. However well-intentioned it may sometimes be, its origins include among other things an underlying Eurocentrism. It is the critical focus on the Enlightenment common to all theories labeled as postmodernist/poststructuralist, though they may diverge from each other in many significant ways, which has drawn the ire of German philosopher Jiirgen Habermas, who in his entire intellectual career has remained committed to drawing out the potential he is convinced exists in the project of the Enlightenment for developing a more satisfying, enriching and rational organisation of society. The fact is that his faith in Enlightenment reason and the 'project of modernity', which he sees as identical with the project of the Enlightenment, seems somewhat misplaced not only in this age of decadent if not yet decaying capitalism, but even in the founding gesture of the Enlightenment as philosophical legitimation in the process of the establishment of capitalism. Moreover, his inability to find reason to take a position against US intervention in the Gulf in 1991 appears not entirely unrelated to his defence of European Enlightenment and civilization vis-a-vis the non-European world. It is not the purpose of this paper to denigrate the contributions of Habermas, particularly in view of the role he played in countering of Nazism.2 In these interpretations, apologist interpretations German historians attempted to make the past conservative acceptable by describing Nazism as an aberration and projecting socialism as the main enemy against which the West should unite. Ernst Nolte, Habermas's main opponent in the now well-known historians' debate, went so far as to define Nazism as a defensive reaction to the 'Asiatic' threat of Soviet Bolshevism. In Habermas's own words: 'The Nazi crimes lose their singularity by being made comprehensible as the answer to a Bolshevist threat of annihilation (that continues to exist today). Auschwitz is reduced to the format of a technical innovation and is explained as an 'Asiatic' peril by an enemy that is still standing outside our gates.'3

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The historians' debate was sparked off by a political event. In May 1985 German and American generals shook hands at the Bitburg military cemetery which included among the interred fortynine members of the dreaded SS. This was meant to symbolise the laying to rest of past enmity between Germany and the United States and of German responsibility for Nazi crimes. Habermas saw the event as representative of the 'Tendenzwende', the rightward shift in German politics in the eighties. It is in the context of this very Tendenzwende that Habermas sees the impact of postmodernist thinking in German intellectual circles. Two aspects of the German response evidently disturb him: the assault on Enlightenment reason and the cultural relativism threatening the universalist ideals of the German philosophical tradition. It is well worth noting here that the critique of Enlightenment reason and its universalising approach need not be seen as speaking for unreason or for cultural relativism; it could be far more useful and radical when seen as an analysis of a historical phenomenon which sought to usurp the exclusive right to speak in the name of reason and universalism. The former interpretive scheme remains caught in a framework of binary oppositions, of epistemological dependence. Unfortunately, both Habermas and the trends he sought to counter remain limited by such a framework in their perceptions and arguments. Habermas perhaps represents one of the most influential articulations of the defence of the Enlightenment and the 'project of modernity'. Though emerging as the most prominent descendant of the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, he significantly reversed the analysis of the Enlightenment's failure offered by the previous generation in Adorno and Horkheimer's 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' which saw fascism as the logical consequence of the development of Enlightenment reason. Beginning with a speech delivered in 1980 while accepting the Adorno Prize entitled 'Die Moderne-ein unvollendetes Projekt' (subsequently published as 'Modernity versus Habermas followed with a series of lectures Postmodernity'),4 as a collection with the title 'The Philosophical Discourse published of Modernity'. This collection of lectures, of which the first four were originally delivered in March 1983 at the College de France in Paris, were aimed in particular at French poststructuralist thought. As Habermas says in the Preface: 'The challenge from the neostructuralist critique of reason defines the perspective from which I seek to reconstruct here, step by step, the philosophical discourse of 5 Habermas that the various theories of postmodermodernity. argues nity had their ideological origins in a venerated tradition of irrationalist counter-Enlightenment coming down to its contemporary conservative equivalents; Nietzsche and Heidegger were the forefathers of this tradition and fascism was one of its outgrowths.

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It is the contention of this paper that Habermas's political sensitivity and virulent reaction to the critique of the Enlightenment inherent in various postmodernist/poststructuralist theories are linked to his vantage point, his social and historical location-voluntarily or and its assumed-while involuntarily defining modernity consequences. The roots of his anger go back to the manner in which he defines this dawn of a new era and the values and hopes for the future drawn from it which sustain his philosophical theories. In 'The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity', Habermas takes Max Weber as his starting point in defining modernity as being intrinsically linked to a rationalism peculiar to the Occident which set off a process of disenchantment, of a disintegration of religious world views, and led to the functional differentiation of the three relatively autonomous spheres of science, morality and art, each having its inner laws in its pursuit of truth, justice and authenticity respectively and each evolving a specific rationality: cognitiveinstrumental in the sphere of science, moral-practical in the sphere of morality, and aesthetic-expressive in the sphere of art. In Habermas's view, it is this functional differentiation into independent spheres of social activity, each of which develops according to its own inner dynamic and goals, that gave the West such an evolutionary advantage and explains its superiority over the rest of the world.6 According to Habermas, Hegel was the first philosopher to have developed a clear concept of modernity, to have postulated its intrinsic connection to Occidental rationalism; from Hegel to Max Weber this inherent connection remained self-evident. 'Postmodern' critics of the critics Enlightenment fell into two categories. Neo-conservative it had now come to be delinked modernity, or modernisation-as its original cultural roots in Western rationalism and called-from declared the death of the Enlightenment; their critique was aimed not at the process of modernisation, but at the cultural self-understanding of modernity. The other category of critics, including Foucault and Derrida, appeared in a politically very different garb, namely anarchist; while they accepted the link between modernity and Western rationalism, their critique was aimed at modernity in its the second group as young entirety. Habermas designates His thesis is that both these reactions to the conservatives. Enlightenment and modernity cloak themselves as 'postmodern', both pretend to have gone beyond the conceptual horizon linking modernity to Western rationalism, but both belong in fact to a venerable and politically dangerous tradition of counter-Enlightenment. His own political agenda consists in the defence of the still 'uncompleted project of modernity'. In Habermas' own critique of modern capitalist society, he is credited with having restored to Critical Theory the concept of crisis.7 Yet, though he evolved his crisis theory in response to the student

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movements of the 60s and the economic crisis of the early 70s, it has been pointed out that'. . . he never really attributes much of a role to social movements or struggles as factors of social change, and tends to engage in rather abstract theoretical analysis of crisis tendencies, rather than more concrete historical analysis'.8 Equally significant is the fact that Habermas sees the nation state as the ideal unit of analysis, thus failing to take cognisance of the world economic relations which keep contemporary capitalism alive. While characterising modem or late capitalist societies, Habermas distinguishes between system and lifeworld. Crises in such societies are the result of the overbearing interventions of system-integrating forces of money and power into the lifeworld. These system-integrating forces are countered by social-integrating forces which evolve in the lifeworld through a process of intersubjectivity, of communicative action.9 Such a social-integrating forces become effective when they are backed by well-formed collective identities which have to have the ability to undermine their particularism, absorb the normative content of modernity and become the standard-bearers of the Enlightenment's universalist vision of justice and morality. Habermas is of the opinion that so far only the nation state represented such a collective identity: Until now, the democratic, constitutional nation-state that emerged from the French Revolution was the only identity formation successful on a world-historical scale that could unite these two moments of the universal and particular without coercion. The Communist party has been unable to replace the identity of the If not in the nation, in what other soil can nation-state. universalistic value orientations today take root?10 For Habermas, Europe would be the true heir to the legacy of Occidental rationalism, though not the Europe of Adenauer and de Gaulle, of the Common Market and of a militarised NATO, not the Europe which equated happiness and emancipation with power and production and thereby called forth two hundred years of critique of modernity: Modern Europe has created the spiritual presuppositions and the material foundations for a world in which this mentality has taken the place of reason. That is the real heart of the critique of reason since Nietzsche. Who else but Europe could draw from its own traditions the insight, the energy, the courage of vision-everything that would be necessary to strip from the (no longer metaphysical, but metabiological) premises of a blind compulsion to system maintenance and system expansion their power to shape our mentality.11 In an inordinate reaction to Derrida's methodological approach of seeing philosophical texts as much as literary ones and applying

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literary-critical tools in their analysis, Habermas emphasizes that philosophy still continues to see its role 'as the defender of rationality in the sense of the claim of reason endogenous to our form of life' (emphasis added).12 However, he suggests that all philosophical interpretations of modernity, whether in the Hegelian, Marxist or Nietzschean tradition, have not been able to find a resolution to the that is the domination of the dialectic of the Enlightenment, dimension of reason over its emancipatory, instrumental, repressive enlightening one as they have all remained caught within the problematic of a philosophy of the subject. This is because they ignored the dimension of intersubjectivity as a site for consensus building, as a site for the evolution of what he calls communicative reason, the fulfillment of which would be the fulfillment of the project of modernity. Richard Wolin has pointed out that over a period of time Habermas's theory has 'undergone different versions and gone by different names: 'theory of communicative competence', 'consensus theory of truth', 'theory of universal pragmatics'. Common to all elaborations of the theory, however, is a conviction that the utopian ideal of 'communication free from domination' is embodied in every speech-act in the sphere of ordinary language; that is, the telos of ordinary language, is the attainment of a free and unconstrained agreelnent ('Verstandigung').13 Habermas's critique of the Hegelian, Marxist and Nietzschean traditions of philosophy is based on the validity of his theory of intersubjectivity which in turn is based on the validity of his philosophy of language. Habermas extrapolates this philosophy from his understanding that the discourse of modernity was accompanied from the very outset by a counter-discourse with which modernity had to reckon and to which it constantly had to justify itself. The interaction between these two discourses was mediated by language. It is in this sphere of interaction, and particularly as mediated by everyday language, that he locates his concept of noncoercive intersubjectivity and communicative action: it is here that the truth or validity claims put forward by different aspects of modernity are decided upon and mutual understanding and consensus reached. This process of validating claims and evolving consensus is, according to Habermas, intrinsic to language use, making it the befitting environment for reason, that is communicative reason, to accumulate over time. It follows from this that if modern society experiences crises, they can be resolved in the sphere of intersubjectivity, through language use, through communicative action. Habermas evidently makes little of the economic, social, political relations of power which form the context of and control over communication. Moreover, by imputing to ordinary language a transcendental urge for communication free from domination, he himself seems to fall victim to a philosophy of the subject, a subject which has an inherent communicative competence by

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virtue of speaking a language and thus moves along a pre-ordained path to the final pinnacle of complete communicative reason. One criticis has pointed out that this anonymous subject 'does not merely remain an empirically fruitful research hypothesis, but assumes the role of a philosophical narrative of the formative history of the subject of history. Much like Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, reconstructions then begin to speak in the name of a fictional collective 'we' from whose standpoint the story of history is told. This fictive subject appears both as the subject of the past and of the future; it is empirical and normative at once. In Habermas' account too the empirical subject(s), as whose learning process the cultural evolution of modernity takes place, shifts its status, and this process becomes a representative tale in which 'we', the subjects of history, are to discover ourselves.'14 The problem is which collective 'we' is meant and whose identity is to be discovered in this historical tale: '. . . Of men or of women? Of Jews or the Gentitles? Of Westerners or of Africans?'15 The critique of the Enlightenment and of Enlightenment reason has a long tradition going back to the very act of its founding. German Romanticism, which itself came into existence as the expression of the separation of the sphere of art from those of science and morality, was critical of modern society as it emerged after the French Revolution and of what it felt was the one-sided nature of 'reason'. It sought to break down the barriers which it'felt 'reason' had erected between art and life. Yet it remained nostalgic and melancholic in its gesture, seeking to reconcile the social contradictions it was confronted with in utopian images of the past. Jochen Schulte-Sasse has defined it in the following manner: 'Romanticism . . . is anti-capitalistic within its being capitalistic; it is an (imaginary) moment of rest, a timeless moment of fulfillment within the infinite displacement of fulfillment in capitalism.'16 Romanticism remained caught in a fundamental epistemological dependence on the very object of its critique. In 'The German Ideology',17 Marx's critique of the Young Hegelians inability to make a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system also focuses on their epistemological dependence. They each take one aspect of the Hegelian system and turn it against the whole system as well as against aspects chosen by others. The mystification is not only in the answers but even in the questions. They do not differ from the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of a universal principle in the existing world, they only differ in attacking this rule as usurpation. The Young Hegelians see all problems as products of consciousness and demand changes in consciousness. They thus remain the staunchest conservatives. Marx shows how in a conception of history common to historians particularly since the 18th century, ideas were given an independent existence, hiding their class interests behind a garb of universality and

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rationality. History is thus seen as the development of the 'Idea', the 'Concept' to its fulfillment. In like manner, speculative philosophy derives all relations of men from the concept of man, man as conceived, the essence of man, Man. Thus Feuerbach,for all his criticisms of Hegel from a declaredly materialist point of view, develops the view that the being of a thing or a man is at the same time his essence, and that the mode of his life and activity is that in which this 'essence' expresses itself, feels itself satisfied. Feuerbach posits 'Man' instead of 'real historical man', and 'Man' for him is really 'the German'. Speculative philosophy which saw history as the development of 'ideas', of 'essences', of the 'world spirit' to fulfillment distorted history so that later history was made the goal of earlier history. Thus the eruption of the French Revolution was seen as the goal of the discovery of America. For Marx, the transformation of history into world history is no mere abstractact of the furthermovement in time of the 'world spirit', or of any other metaphysical spectre, but a result of empirically verifiable facts such as the invention in England of a machine 'which deprives countless workers of bread in India and China, and overturns the whole form of existence of these empires'. Such events are not merely part of a continuous accumulative process of history, they completely transform the circumstances in which the activity of men takes place. For Marx, the task of the historian was to analyse these transformations and to make visible the space and possibilities of individual and collective action; knowledge of these possibilities would influence the motives and direction of action. What is improtant for Marx is the interpretation of society under the aspect of the possibilities of changing it. A philosophical and historical determinism attributed to Marx in some later interpretationscould not have been furtherfrom his understanding. In 'The Archaeology of Knowledge', Foucault attempts to uncover the principles and consequences of an epistemological mutation in the field of historical knowledge, the first phase of which can be traced back to Marx. This transformationwhich is still going on, signified a shift in the focus of history away from continuities to the phenomenon of rupture, of discontinuity: 'Discontinuity was the stigma of temporal dislocation that it was the historian's task to remove from history. It has now become one of the basic tools of historical analysis.'19Though this transformationoriginate as far back as Marx, it took a long time to have much effect, and, particularly in the history of thought, it has still to be registered and reflected upon. Foucault explains this in the following manner: If the history of thought could remain the locus of uninterrupted continuities, if it could endlessly forge connexions that no analysis could undo without abstraction, if it could weave, around everything that men say and do, obscure synthesis that anticipate

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for him, prepare him, and lead him endlessly towards his future, it of would provide a privileged shelter for the sovereignty consciousness. Continuous history is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has eluded him may be restored to him; the certainty that time will disperse nothing without restoring it in a reconstituted the form of unity; the promise that one day the subject-in once again be able to appropriate, to historical consciousness-will bring back under his sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference, and find in them what might be called his abode. Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and making human consciousness the original subject of all historical development and all action are the two sides of the same system of thought. In this system, time is conceived in terms of totalization and revolutions are never more than moments of consciousness. In various forms, this theme has played a constant role since the nineteenth century: to preserve, against all decentrings, the sovereignty of the subject, and the twin figures of anthropology and the humanism. Against the decentring operated by Marx-by historical analysis of the relations of production, economic determinations, and the class struggle-it gave place, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to the search for a total history, in which all the differences of a society might be reduced to a single form, to the organization of a world-view, to the establishment of a system of values, to a coherent type of civilization. To the decentring operated by the Nietzschean genealogy, it opposed the search for an original foundation that would make rationality the telos of mankind, and link the whole history of thought to the preservation of this rationality, to the maintenance of this teleology and to the ever necessary return to this foundation.20 Habermas has been called a neo-Marxist; he himself claims to bring together the two strands of what he calls Western Marxism. An abstract idea of socialism still hovers at the end of his project of modernity, though he talks about it less and less. However, he himself would not disagree that his theoretical approach represents a significant shift away from Marxism. Intervening in the so-called Habermas-Lyotard debate, the American philosopher Richard Rorty detected in him a partner in the project of the defence of Western parliamentary democracy and bluntly told him what he felt was theoretically unnecessary to this project. But though in his lectures on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity his declared purpose is to show how all past and most present day philosophers from Hegel, through Marx and Nietzsche, down to Foucault and Derrida remain ensnared in the web of a philosophy of the subject, form which one can free oneself only with the concept of communicative rationality, his

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own theoretical elaborations appear not to be so far away from the Young Hegelians in Marx's critique of Foucault's description of the 'historian of ideas'. Habermas has already been accused of gender blindness.22 But it seems that this is not his only blindspot. All differences that might disturb his scheme of a project of emancipation which sees its founding act in the Enlightenment, are either simply ignored or relegated to and thereby dissolved in a continuous, homogenized, bloodless flow of accumulating communicative rationality blissfully unaware of any threats of interruption, of dislocation, or of rupture. Before concluding this paper, a belief look is called for at Habermas's interpretation of the realm of art in modernity and his attempt to mobilise in this endeavour some theoretical propositions of Walter Benjamin. In the context of an essay on Benjamin23 written in 1972, Habermas reflects on the importance of art in the project of emancipation. Habermas refers to Benjamin's analysis of the loss of the ritual character and aura of the work of art in the 'age of its mechanical reproducibility'. This loss of aura surrounding the work of art meant the loss of the illusion of the autonomy, of the authenticity of art. What differentiated modern art from traditional art was the conscious abandonment of this aura. The transcendent character of art was destroyed and it revealed itself as a commodity like other commodities.24 In his essay, Habermas focuses on the dispute between Benjamin and Adoro in the 1930s, comparing Benjamin's affirmation of 'post-auratic' modern art against Adorno's concept of a hermetic, autonomous art as the sole refuge of the utopian potential of the Enlightenment. Habermas's argument against Adorno's position is that it is too negative and exaggerated as it does not recognise any emancipatory potential in works of mass culture. Yet he does not agree with Benjamin either and sticks essentially to a concept of an autonomous sphere for art. His purpose it seems is to vest this sphere with an effective potential of the social and cultural values of the Enlightenment and modernity, not to leave it as a refuge of these values for later discovery. The political thrust of Benjamin's concept of a mass form of art which invaded and burst asunder the private and solitary aesthetic experience did not fit his scheme of things. What Habermas appears to find useful in Benjamin is what he calls the concept of 'redemptive criticism', the impulse for which he finds in Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'. According to Habermas, Benjamin's attempt was to redeem, to save, the emancipatory semantic potential of the experience of past generations which he saw concentrated in works of art. The 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' turned the face of history away from the future towards the past and established an indebtedness, a responsibility of the present to avenge in its own acts the injustices of the past; the role of criticism was to save the memory of these experiences of injustice

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existing in works of art. Habermas has to concede that the political content of the 'Theses' was a critique of the 'Kautskyan reading of progress', a historicist linear concept of ever advancing progress which had become the hallmark of Social Democracy with its most articulate exponents in Germany and which found its logical consequence in the support to imperialist claims and militarism during the First World War. Yet he is exceedingly uncomfortable with this 'antievolutionist conception of history'.25 In Habermas's view, Benjamin's concept of history failed to recognise the evolution and progress made not only in productive forces and social wealth but even in the spheres of legality and morality.26 However, in historical conditions which do not allow for revolutions but for long-lasting processes of change, the concept of revolution itself has to be transformed into the constructing of a new subjectivity and it is here that Benjamin's concept of 'redemptive criticism can play a role in conserving emancipatory semantic energies.27 Clearly, this is a wilful reading of Benjamin. It mobilises Benjamin's concept, divests it of its intended meaning and applies it to a vision of history and progress which Benjamin made the target of his attack. Perhaps it can be attributed to Habermas's inadequate attention to the field of aesthetics and art in modernity. While in 'The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity', he devotes an entire excursus to Derrida's leveling of the genre distinction between philosophy and literature, he declares in the 'Preface' that the theme is limited to the philosophical discourse, and leaves out any treatment of modernism in art and literature. But perhaps his wilful reading of Benjamin can also be seen as another illustration of his basic philosophical scheme. To sum up, Habermas's theory of communicative action presupposes the possibility of communication taking place in a free atmosphere. It does not take cognisance of the social, economic and political conditions which divide the imagined participants of such communication. It neutralises the power relations which control communication at global, continental and national levels. In effect, the theory seems to be as illusory a concept as that of the free market. Even if Habermas' vision of communicative rationality is a privilege restricted to beneficiaries in the advanced capitalist countries of the West-and the suspicion prevails that it is-, it still begs the question of the internal power relations characteristic of these countries. Modern Europe may have many achievements to its credit and no purpose is served in demeaning them. But the costs of its modernity were and continue to be paid both within and beyond its frontiers. No theory which claims to investigate the possibilities of a more just organisation of society can afford to ignore these costs and the experiences of those who paid them.28 The theories which go by the name postmodern or poststructuralist may not be adequate to this task, they are also not immune to interpretation and misuse for conservative

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political purposes, but the critical focus on the Enlightenment common to them has undoubtedly made visible some of the complexities of this product of 'Occidental rationalism' which contribute towards explaining its checkered path. The critique of the Enlightenment provides useful perspectives on the entire period of Habermas's still 'uncompleted project of modernity', the period of the rise, establishment and globalisation of capitalism with its ever more complex forms of exploitation. In particular, the focus on language, the text, the document, as a site of the manoeuvres of 'reason' has opened up new ways of looking at language, texts, documents. Whether such theory can lay claim to being able to change the world, since the need for change is implicit in the critique and also explicit in the statements of several of its enunciators, has yet to be seen. Meanwhile, the results of its analysis are available 'to whomever would like to use them in their struggles against the forms of power they are trying to resist.'29
NOTESAND REFERENCES 1. Bertolt Brecht:Lifeof Galileo, In Brecht,Plays: Three,1987, pp. 65-66. 2. Robert C. Holub in his extremely sympathetic account of Habermas's work published as Jurgen Habermas. Critic in the Public Sphere (London and New York 1991), has summed up the debate in the last chapter under the heading 'National Socialism and the Holocaust: the debate with the historians', pp. 162-189. 3. Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung, Frankfurt1987, 124. The major texts of the debate have been collected in the volume 'Historikerstreit': Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der national sozialistischenJudenvernichtung, Munich 1987. 4. Jirgen Habermas, 'Modernity versusPostmodernity', New German Critique 22 (1981),pp. 3-14. 5. Jurgen Habermas: The PhilosophicalDiscourseof Modernity. Twelve Lectures, Cambridgeand Oxford 1992, xix. The collection was first published in 1985 as Der philosophische Diskurs der Modeme:ZwOlfVorlesungen, Frankfurt/Main. The English translationwas first published in 1987. 6. Willem van Reijen: Miss Marx, Terminals and Grands Recits oder: Kratzt wo Habermas, es nichtjuckt? in: Dietmar Kamperund Willem van Reijen (Hg.): Die unvollendete Moderneversus Postmoderne. 1987, pp. 548-549. Ffm Vernunft: 7. See Douglas Kellner: Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity, Baltimore, Maryland1989,p. 196. 8. Ibid.,p. 200. 9. Like all members of the Frankfurt School, Habermasdistinguishes between two forms of reason: one fostering emancipation and upholding the spirit of the Enlightenment, the other degenerating to instrumental reason. He locates the dividing line between the two forms of reason by making a distinction between 'work' and 'interaction',or 'communicativebehaviour';while 'work' represents instrumental, goal-oriented reason, the field of 'interaction' is the locus of of evolving irttersubjectivity, communicativerationality,of consensus, leading to emancipation and therefore of praxis. This higher consensual rationality is evolved through 'Discourse' which he defines in the following manner: 'discourse . . .is a form of communication in which the participants do not

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

exchange information, do not direct or carry out action, nor do they have or communicate experiences; instead they search for arguments or offer justifications. Discourse therefore requires the virtualizaton of constraints on action. This is intended to render inoperative all motives except solely that of a cooperative readiness to arrive at an understanding ... Solely the structure of this peculiarly unreal form of communication guarantees the possibility of attaining a consensus discursively which can gain recognition a rational.' (Habermas, Theory and Practice, Boston 1973, 18-19]. Habermas' concept of praxis is dependent therefore on an 'apriori categorical distinction' between work and interaction [Richard Bernstein: The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory. Philadelphia 1978, p. 223; quoted in: Wolf Heydebrand and Beverly Burris: The Limits of Praxis in Critical Theory; in: Judith Marcus and Zoltan Tar (eds): Foundations of the Frankfurt School of Social Research. New Brunswick, New Jessey 1984, 401-417]. According to Bernstein, Habermas's 'typical strategy in criticizing previous thinkers is to show that they confuse categorically distinct levels of action . . . the validity of these criticisms is itself dependent on the acceptance of habermas's categorical distinctions. The tables can be turned on Habermas by arguing that he seeks to introduce hard and fast distinctions where there is only continuity.' [ibid., pp. 220-21] Habermas, op.cit., pp. 346-366. Ibid., p. 367. Ibid., p. 409. Richard Wolin, 'Critical Theory and the Dialectic of Rationalism'. New German Critique 41, 1987, 23-52. Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia, a Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York 1986, pp. 330-331. Ibid., p. 407. Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Modernity and Modernism, Postmodernity and Postmodernism: Framing the issue'. 'Cultural Critique', 5, 1986-87, p. 11. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, Moscow 1976. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, New York, 1972, pp. 11-12. Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., pp. 12-13. See Richard Rorty, 'Habermas and Lyotard on postmodernity', in 'Praxis International', 4, April 1984, 32-44. See also Willem van Reijen, 'Miss Marx, Terminals und Grand R&citsoder: Kratzt Habermas, wo es nicht juckt?' Op.cit. See Nancy Fraser, What's Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender, in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Corell (eds), Feminism as Critique, Minneapolis, Minn., 1987, pp. 31-36; and Seyla Benhabib, The Generalized and the Concrete Other', in ibid., p. 76-95. Aktualitat Walter Habermas, Bewufttmachende oder rettende Kritik-Die Benjamins, in: Habermas, Kultur und Kritik, Frankfurt 1973, pp. 302-344. 'For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the authentic' print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice- politics.' Walter Benjamin; The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, New York 1969, p. 224 Aktualitat Walter 'Bewuf3tmachende oder rettende Kritik-Die Habermas, Benjamins', op. cit., p. 332 '. . . in der ubiquitat des Schuldzusammenhangs tauchen unerkennbar jene Evolutionen un.ter, die, bei all ihrer fragwiirdigen Partialitat, nicht nur in der

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SOCIALSCIENTIST dimension der Produktivkrafte und des gesellschaftlichen Reichtums statthaben, sondern sogar in der imension, in der die Unterscheidungen angesichts der Wucht der Repression unendlich schwierig sind: ich meine Fortschritte, gewip prekare und vom Ruckfall permanent bedrohte, in den Produkten der Legalitat, wenn nicht gar in den formalen Strukturen der Moralitat.'Ibid., p. 342. 27. Ibid.,p. 344. 28. In an interview with the New Left Review, No. 151, May 1985, Habermas admits to the possibility of Eurocentrismin his theoretical approach, without however recognising it as a problem: 'NLR: Die gesamte Tradition der Frankfurter Schule hat sich auf die Analyse der entwickeltesten kapitalistischen Gesellschaften konzentriert und dabei den Kapitalismus als globales System auper Betracht gelassen. Haben, Ihrer Meinung nach, sozialismuskonzeptionen, wie sie wahrend der antiimperialistischen und antikapitalistischen Kampfe in der Dritten Welt entwickelt wurden, Auswirkungen auf die Ziele eines demokratischen Sozialismus in der entwickelten kapitalistischen Welt? Und umgekehrt: Enthalt Ihre eigene Analyse des entwickelten Kapitalismus irgendeine Lehere fur die sozialistischen Krafte in der DrittenWelt? HABERMAS: bin versucht zu sagen: weder noch. Aber das Ich mag eine eurozentrisch beschrantkte Sicht sein.' (Reprinted in German in Habermas:Die Neue Uniibersichtlichkeit, Frankfurt/Main1985,pp. 255-256. 29. Paul A. Bove, 'Discourse'.In: Frank Lentricchiaand Tomas Mclaughlin (eds),
Critical Terms for Literary Study, Chicago and London, 1990, p. 62.