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Re: [xmca] Intransitivity and Intransigence
David,
I'm in general agreement with your perspective on Habermas. On the
positive side his work shows just how important an understanding of
ontogenesis is for any kind of critical analysis: a critical theory,
emancipatory inquiry, etc. To put it simply, how people act now
depends not only on their current circumstances but also on their past
experiences, so any sort of emancipatory effort, whether it is
psychotherapy or political organization, needs to be able to
comprehend the impact of those experiences.
At first Habermas, like Horkheimer and Adorno, turned to Freud for an
account of ontogenesis, specifically an account of the ways traumatic
experiences in childhood lead to distortions in adult communication.
But this got him into trouble and the kind of approach to ontogenesis
that Habermas has been drawing on since then has been structuralist:
Piaget for an account of the ontogenesis of instrumental knowledge,
Kohlberg for moral knowledge, and Selman for social knowledge. I have
respect for each of those three, but their work rests on assumptions
that I have trouble with. For Habermas they offer a kind of rational
reconstruction of ontogenesis that he believes is able to separate
what is contingent from what is necessary and universal. I am
skeptical. They also, as you point out, downplay what goes on 'below'
the level of concepts, and consider the abstract to be a transcendence
of the concrete and actual rather than a transformation of it.
It is ironic, and disappointing, that Habermas has never turned his
attention to LSV.
Martin
On Oct 22, 2009, at 9:02 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
Martin and Wolff-Michael:
Thanks for taking the time to patiently explain some Heidegger to a
philosophical neophyte. Wolff-Michael is right when he suspects I
have not studied it. First of all, my German is nowhere near good
enough. Secondly, I am Jewish (despite a goyische surname which my
maternal grandmother always suspected meant "kill hog") and, despite
our well known inclination to take suffering and even existence
rather unsentimentally, I share with other Jews a strong
disinclination to make our continued existence a topic of discussion.
But thirdly, my real interest is not Heidegger at all, but Adorno; I
started reading Heidegger only in order to understand Adorno's
consuming distaste for him. It's Adorno, not I, who says that
Heidegger's view of language is unmediated. But now I really AM
quite interested in understanding what that means.
I think Adorno does NOT mean that Heidegger's view of language is
unmediated in some ontological sense; that "language is" in the
sense that "being is" or "death is". It seems to me that what he's
arguing is a lot more subtle: it's that the statement that "being
is" or "death is" IMPLIES, although it does not explicitly state,
that "language is", because "being" and "death" are "given to
us" (to use a somewhat unfortunate Andyism) not by experience but
only by language. That is an argument with which I think I am in
full agreement.
(The more I read of Adorno the more I find I disagree with him at my
peril, and so like Tony I am quite uneasy about his views on jazz,
which he considers "slave music". I suppose in a sense he is right,
but it seems to me that the choice we are then given is a choice
between the music of slaves and that of slave masters, and I am more
than a little surprised that he prefers the latter.)
Adorno provides an antidote to Habermas, whose views on psychology
are almost pure Piagetianism (though Adorno himself is a little two
inclined to Freudianism for my taste, he uses Freud to great effect
in his critique of fascist aesthetics.) Habermas' affinity for
Piaget means "communicative rationality" is basically something laid
on top of the other forms of rationality, rather the way that formal
thinking rises out of concrete operations. That leads to a really
miserable kind of ethnocentrism, where the bit that I am interested
in, the part Habermas calls "evaluative" rationality involved in
aesthetic judgment, gets utterly short shrift.
On the one hand, Habermas has the problem of explaining how cultures
which are supposedly lacking in cognitive-instrumental discourses
(teleological rationality) nevertheless appear to have fully
develped forms of evaluative discourse (dramaturgical rationality).
On the other, Habermas is left in a world where Western myths about
the "invisible hand" of the market and the sovereign individual are
considered forms of rationality while Azande myths about magic
spells and the sovereignty witches are not.
All of this could EASILY have been avoided, if Habermas had just
bothered to read and take seriously Vygotsky's critique of Levy-
Bruhl and other early ethnographers and his observation that a lot
of what we consider "adult" thinking takes place BELOW the level of
concepts, and probably OUGHT to keep doing so. For example, as a
jazz lover, I am quite unwilling to give up my musical affinity for
concrete and factual links between ideas, and as a painter I am
positively wedded to them.
All of which renews my appreciation for Chapter Five of Thinking and
Speech, and also Paula and Carol's work on "Wolves and Other
Vygotskyan Constructs". I started reading their work convinced that
Chapter Six, where Vygotsky champions "leaving complexes at the
school door" and teaching a school curriculum entirely aimed at
concept development, represented the "real" Vygotsky. Now, I am not
at all sure; it seems to me that in the field of aesthetic education
at least Chapter Six represents a concession to educational
Stakhanovism, a concession far too far.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
PS: Andy, it seems to me that a question we really need to ask is
whether or not childhood has been made artificially long in so-
called modern societies, all of which suffer from capitalist
overproduction and consequently chronic under-employment. The
Michael Jackson phenomenon, the peculiarly Western phenomenon of
great children's lit written by pedophiles (Lewis Carroll, J.M.
Barrie, etc) and (most recently) the obsession with the "balloon
boy" hoax all suggest that in so-called modern societies, it is not
children who are hurried so much as adults who are retarded,
There's a good article by Suzanne Gaskins on Mayan children who (she
argues) do not actually play, but only engage in various forms of
legitimate peripheral participation on the fringes of adult
activity. She makes a good case that this is a perfectly valid way
of life, far better suited to this environment than what you and I
call "childhood".
Gaskins, S. (1999) Children's Daily Lives in a Mayan Village: A Case
Study of Culturally Constructed Roles and Activities. In Goncu, A.
Children's Engagement in the World, pp. 25-61. CUP.
d
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