Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge

83 Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge James J. Chriss1 Abstract: Jürgen Habermas has spent a long career developing a critical theory of reasoned communication, following Weber’s idea concerning the negative aspects of rationalization in western society which places emphasis on technocratic or engineering solutions to problems in society. As the state gathers more power and resources to intervene in the lives of citizens (presumably for their beneit), citizens are less able to act on their own behalf to solve problems locally (i.e., the problem of the system colonizing the lifeworld). To assure reasoned communication and to preserve the lifeworld against the onslaught of instrumental rationality, Habermas locates the condition of reasoned communication within talk itself (by way of the validity claims). He extends this idea into political participation with the idea of deliberative democracy, whereby only the weight of the beter argument prevails. Although primarily commited to critical theory, Habermas nevertheless borrows from Talcot Parsons’ structural functionalist theory for its indispensable conceptualization of systems and normative solidarity. This tensionful mix of critical and technocratic-functional elements has been subject to criticism over the years, including the rise of postmodern theory which brings into doubt all modernist metanarratives seeking to conceptualize society in its totality. The paper ends with a consideration of how and to what extent Habermas’s project withstands this postmodernist challenge. Epistemology, Ontology, and Crisis he history of human relection on the nature of the social world has been and continues to be punctuated with epochal theories which posit master trends or fundamental transformations of society. These are T 1 James J. Chriss is Professor in the Department of Criminology, Anthropology, and Sociology at Cleveland State University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Pennsylvania in 1994. His main areas of research are social control, policing, sociological theory, and criminological theory. His latest books are Social Control, 2nd ed. (Polity, 2013) and Confronting Gouldner (Haymarket Books, 2017). 84 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) often couched in the language of ‘crisis’, the crisis itself occurring either at the epistemological, ontological, or even axiological level of theoretical analysis.2 ‘Ontological crisis’ would refer to a general perception among observers of the social world—theorists and laypersons alike—that the world is, in some demonstrable way, changing, and usually for the worse. Examples of such ontological crises would be revolutions, the rise and fall of dynasties, bureaucratization, secularization, the collapse of communism or state socialism, and so forth. ‘Epistemological crisis’, on the other hand, refers to those instances in which a sizable group of practitioners within an academic discipline come to share a sense of the inability of currently sanctioned theories or paradigms to provide adequate explanations of present circumstances or phenomena of interest. Hence, a general feeling that the traditional or orthodox theories of the discipline are faltering or close to intellectual bankruptcy.3 The crisis of epistemology is certainly not new to sociology. Robert K. Merton speaks in fact of the natural state of afairs in sociology as being in a ‘chronic crisis’, or rather, the sentiment that sociology has throughout its history been typiied as being in a state of oscillating between extreme optimism and extreme pessimism.4 Wolf Lepenies has illustrated a di2 An axiological crisis would, as Alan Sica explains, amount to a crisis in the ethical content of interpretation. In other words, since axiology is the study of how values and value commitments interpenetrate theoretical discourse, there arise now and again certain topics of study which seem inexorably bound up in questions of ethical and moral interpretation (e.g., abortion, assisted suicide, the death penalty, or even the extent to which researchers allegedly objectify and hence tend to ‘dominate’ their subjects). Although the later topic has, as Cliford Geerz has discussed, ramiied into the postmodern question in particular and the study of culture in general, I will not here overtly be concerned with the axiological dimension. See Alan Sica, ‘Hermeneutics and Axiology: The Ethical Contents of Interpretation’, pp. 142-157 in M.L. Wardell and S.P. Turner (eds) Sociological Theory in Transition (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1986), and Cliford Geerz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 3 See Ben Agger, Socio(onto)logy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), and Alvin W. Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York: Basic Books, 1970). 4 Robert K. Merton, Sociological Ambivalence and Other Essays (New York: Free Press, 1976). Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 85 mension of this oscillation, namely sociology’s continuing batle over its own self-identity. The eternal question has been, is sociology a science of society in the truest positivistic, nomothetic sense, or is sociology closer to literary analysis where intuition and ideographic method are more appropriate for capturing the essence of human social life? Phrased alternately, this represents the classic dialectic between the scientiic and ameliorative impulses of sociology.5 It could be argued that extreme optimism is the starting point of the discipline. For example, Comte envisioned sociology as the culmination of an evolutionary trend in scientiic thought which, just so long as its practitioners stayed true to the dictum of positivism and the scientiic method, held the promise of ultimately discovering the laws of the social universe. Beyond the early optimism of Comte, Merton notes also Georges Gurvitch’s ‘crisis of sociological explanation’, Sorokin’s ‘fads and foibles in modern sociology’, Homans’ admonition to ‘bring men back in’, and Gouldner’s ‘crisis of western sociology’. Additional uses of the language of ‘crisis’ could include Habermas’s ‘legitimation crisis’, Seidman’s plea to fellow sociologists to take the ‘postmodern turn’ toward the ‘end of sociological theory’, Brunkhorst’s crisis of democracy and capitalism, and McVay’s crisis of the public sphere. 6 However it may be phrased, the crisis sentiment of cognitive revolt within the discipline is fundamentally the same. The continuities are that symptoms of crisis are couched in terms of a change and clash of doctrines 5 See Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), and Stephen P. Turner and Jonathan H. Turner, The Impossible Science (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990). 6 See Hauke Brunkhorst, ‘Democracy and Capitalism in Crisis’, Berlin Journal of Critical Theory 1 (2): p. 79-99 (2017); Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); George C. Homans, ‘Bringing Men Back In’, American Sociological Review 29 (5): pp. 809-818 (1964); Christine B. McVay, ‘Public Sphere in a Time of Crisis’, Berlin Journal of Critical Theory 1 (2):101-117 (2017); Steven Seidman, ‘The End of Sociological Theory: The Postmodern Hope’, Sociological Theory 9 (2): pp. 131-146 (1991); and Pitirim Sorokin, Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976). 86 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) which is summarily accompanied by deepened tensions and conlict among (seemingly) disparate practitioners of the trade, especially in terms of the sentiment that the dominant paradigms are no longer suiciently able to address the problems they purport to explain. The movement toward an idea of postmodernism is indicative of such crisis language. What is Postmodernism? What are some manifestations of recent ‘historical times of trouble’ (Merton’s term) that have come to be understood as, or indicative of, ‘postmodernism’? An early response to this question was put forward by Stephen Crook who suggested that The 1980s witnessed a growing sense among social theorists and cultural critics that the complex phenomenon of social and cultural modernity had entered a period of crisis, that decisive thresholds were about to be crossed.7 Postmodernism thus stands for what looms over the horizon of the modern, especially with respect to the social and cultural changes which are believed to be occurring within this phase of modernism. A good example of such a postmodern sensibility is Bo Reimer’s test of Ronald Inglehart’s theory of value change in the western world. The basic thesis is that over the last several decades Western societies have undergone a change from materialist to postmaterialist values. (For purposes of Reimer’s argument, ‘postmaterialism’ is assumed to be roughly equivalent to ‘postmodernism’.) As Reimer explains, ‘Thus, in comparison with older generations, post-Second World War generations that have never felt material insecurity put higher priorities on postmaterialist values, such as freedom of speech, than on traditional materialist values, such as economic growth. And as long as prosperity continues, each new generation will be more postmaterialistic than generations preceding it’. Reimer concludes from the data, however, that persons’ value-orientations are simply too diverse 7 Stephen Crook, Modernist Radicalism and its Aftermath (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 3. Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 87 to allow one to easily categorize respondents as displaying either a materialist or postmaterialist (i.e., postmodernist) nexus of values. In the end, Reimer suggests that at best there exists what we might call a loose coupling between social structure and practice, a social space or ield of lifestyles—such as Bourdieu’s notion of the ‘habitus’—within which persons forge a distinct set of tastes and concrete social practices.8 Besides general theories of value change within Western society, postmodernism has also been examined through the lens of popular culture. Frederic Jameson, in an early and inluential postmodern cultural analysis, focused on the realm of architecture and the modiications in aesthetic production of buildings and other lived and social spaces which have occurred over the last twenty ive years. These structures—such as the great free-standing wall of Wells Fargo Court in downtown Los Angeles—exhibit certain ‘postmodern’ characteristics, such as an efacement of the previously existing frontiers between high culture and mass culture; a new ‘depthlessness’, wherein in depth is replaced by the latness of surface(s); and an overall ‘waning of afect’. Like the great monolith in Kubrick’s ‘2001’, Wells Fargo Court ‘confronts its viewers like an enigmatic destiny, a call to evolutionary mutation’.9 This mutation in the sphere of culture has rendered our older systems of perception—of the city in architectural terms, but also of the whole of society in theoretical terms—somehow ‘archaic and aimless’. As Ben Agger has discussed, beyond its ‘legitimate’ form as originating in literary criticism and as currently embodied in the humanities and social sciences, postmodernism has become a veritable cotage industry within the American cultural establishment as well. As Agger explains, 8 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); and Bo Reimer, ‘Postmodern Structures of Feeling: Values and Lifestyles in the Postmodern Age’, pp. 110-126 in J.R. Gibbins (ed.) Contemporary Political Culture (London: Sage, 1989), p. 111. For a thorough critique of postmodernist tendencies within the human sciences, see John O’Neill, The Poverty of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1995). 9 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 13-14. 88 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) Here I consider the tendencies of a glizy, Manhatanized postmodernism to monopolize the terrain of cultural production and reception, as well as of the capitalist built environment. ne inds postmodernism as an identifying slogan in nearly every avant-garde bookstore, magazine, television show and movie as well as in the buildings and malls housing cultural producers and consumers.10 Hence one manifestation of postmodernism within American popular culture is that of a consumer movement, an untheorized postmodernism whose only distinct cultural atitude is the rejection of politics. This may be viewed, according to Agger, as a sort of ‘post-Watergate’ loss of certitude regarding the eicacy or even veracity of politics as a form of collective, societal representation. This form of ‘New York Times postmodernism’ is neoconservative—as Jürgen Habermas has for years argued—because of its emphasis on consumerist individualism and political cynicism.11 With the theorized loss of epistemological certitude which Jean-Francois Lyotard envisioned as a concomitant to the generalized critique of the grand and totalizing modernist metanarrative of Enlightenment rationalism, it was only natural that the initially intellectualized ‘loss of certitude’ would wend its way down to the level of capitalist popular culture, thereby becoming appropriated as a faddish and uncritical slogan among the mass of consumers.12 This ‘postmodernization of everyday life’ is, in fact, emblematic of the powerful ideological 10 Ben Agger, A Critical Theory of Public Life (London: Falmer, 1991), p. 198. 11 See the following from Habermas: The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, translated by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1984); The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987b); ‘A Reply’, pp. 214-64 in A. Honneth and H. Joas (eds.) Essays on Jurgen Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action, translated by J. Gaines and D.L. Jones (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); ‘Further Relections on the Public Sphere’, pp. 421-461 in C. Calhoun (ed.) Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). 12 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Both Lyotard and Habermas emphasize language as a central feature in creating and organizing social worlds, yet their difer- Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 89 machinery of popular culture and the American mass media which, as Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of the ‘culture industry’ indicates, exists ‘in large measure to represent capitalism as a rational social order, hence perpetuating the very commodiication of all experience that gives the lie to the postulate of substantive rationality’.13 The position of Horkheimer and Adorno is of course not shared by Habermas. As pointed out by Wagner and Zipprian, as he is dedicated to explicating foundations of a critical theory as well as to preserving the Enlightenment project of relexive reason and rationality, Habermas views their project as an ‘unchecked skepticism of reason’, which thereby cannot adequately deal with the concept of communicative, much less substantive, rationality. Yet, as Amirhosein Khandizaji has argued, Habermas’s break from Horkheimer and Adorno and their central focus on the culture industry leads Habermas to an elision of culture writ large (but see below for clariication) to the extent that, for Habermas, language already contains the essential elements of shared cultural knowledge (i.e., the validity claims) needed for the development of a theory of modern social solidarity.14 Habermas, Culture, and the Rise of Postmodernism One of the tasks set forth here has been to trace the rise of postmodernism within sociology back to the empirical social world, that is, back to the ontological precipitates of the current epistemological and methodences far outweigh points of agreement. For a summary, see Mark Poster, ‘Postmodernity and the Politics of Multiculturalism: The Lyotard-Habermas Debate over Social Theory’, Modern Fiction Studies 38 (3), pp. 567-580 (1992). 13 Agger, A Critical Theory of Public Life, p. 203, and M. Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972). 14 Gerhard Wagner and Heinz Zipprian, ‘Habermas on Power and Rationality’, Sociological Theory 7 (1), pp. 102-109 (1989). See also James J. Chriss, ‘Habermas, Gofman, and Communicative Action: Implications for Professional Practice’, American Sociological Review 60, pp. 545-565 (1995); Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society, translated by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979); and Amirhosein Khandizaji, ‘The Culture Industry and the Consumer Society’, Berlin Journal of Critical Theory 1 (1), pp. 57-79 (2017). 90 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) ological critiques highlighted above. I have therefore identiied certain events, trends, or phenomena occurring in the social world which have led large groups of social scientists to speak of a postmodern ‘turn’ or ‘crisis’. A cultural analysis of this process is especially crucial because of the complex ways in which social agents perceive, make sense of, and act upon larger sociohistorical events. The interface between epistemology and ontology—between ways of knowing and reality or the world ‘out there’—is always mediated by and through culture. Having said this, however, we must be cautious about falling too easily into a reiied conception of culture as a mediating force through which persons simply come to know the world. Paul Hochstim illustrates the shortcomings of ‘cultural historical’ models which atempt to explain the emergence of certain ideational or material products based upon the ways in which cultural, sociohistorical and/or biographical factors inform the agent(s) or producer(s) of the innovation. Hochstim states that ‘culture exists as culture not in the sense of appearance but in the sense of incorporation within the processes of social interaction’. Additionally, ‘No amount of reference to culture historical facts can explain the fact that one speciic individual at a particular time and place decided to study and combine the various ideas of previous thinkers into a new physical or ideational element’.15 With this caveat in mind, we may consider the prevailing deinition of culture in current sociology textbooks, namely, all those things, both material and nonmaterial (i.e., ideational), which are a product of human social organization and activity. In his ongoing work in social theory and communicative action, Habermas has chosen to concentrate primarily on the nonmaterial aspects of culture. Borrowing heavily from both Talcot Parsons and phenomenology, Habermas deines culture as ‘the stock of knowledge from which participants in communication supply themselves with interpretations as they come to an understanding about something in the world’.16 15 Paul Hochstim, The Functional Prerequisites Generic to the Inception and Institutionalization of Positivistic Sociological Epistemology (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1986), pp. 50 and 55. 16 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, translated by T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), p. 138. Besides evidence of Haber- Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 91 Margaret Somers chastises Habermas for his uncritical appropriation of Parsons’ ‘depoliticized’ conception of culture. However, Habermas clearly distinguishes between culture, in the broader sense here being discussed, and political culture. As Amy Gutman explains, ‘Habermas distinguishes between culture, broadly understood, which need not be shared by all citizens, and a common political culture marked by mutual respect for rights’. In this sense, Habermas’s view of culture and political liberalism is at odds with that of John Rawls, insofar as Rawls sees political liberalism as moving ‘within the category of the political and [leaving] philosophy as it is’. Although not acknowledging it overtly, Somers seems to be working from a distinctively Rawlsian perspective regarding culture and her own theory of citizenship.17 This is not, however, simply a continuation of the storied tradition of German idealism which, as many have argued, tends to downplay material factors in its avowed quest for the cognitive foundations of rationality, reason, enlightenment, democracy, and the essence or quiddity of group life (e.g., the nature and explication of intersubjectivity). Even while borrowing from Parsons’ systems formulation which designates mas’ atention to Parsons in his own writings, biographical resources reveal they occasionally crossed paths. One such instance was at the annual meeting of sociologists commemorating Max Weber’s 100th birthday which was held in Heidelberg in 1964. Both men presented papers in a plenary session chaired by Horkheimer, with Habermas reading his paper ‘Wertfreiheit und Objektivität’, which ironically was a criticism of American structural functionalism but also Weber’s decisionism. See Stefan Müller-Doohm, Habermas: A Biography, translated by D. Steuer (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2016). 17 For Habermas, see: ‘Struggles for Recognition in the Democratic Constitutional State’, pp. 107-148 in A. Gutman (ed.) Multiculturalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); ‘Reconciliation through the Public Use of Reason: Remarks on John Rawls’s Political Liberalism’, Journal of Philosophy 92 (3):109-31 (1995); Between Facts and Norms, translated by W. Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). See also Amy Gutman, ‘Preface’, pp. ix-xii in A. Gutman (ed.) Multiculturalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. x; John Rawls, ‘Reply to Habermas’, Journal of Philosophy 92 (3), pp. 132-80 (1995); and Margaret R. Somers, ‘What’s Political or Cultural about Political Culture and the Public Sphere? Toward an Historical Sociology of Concept Formation’, Sociological Theory 13 (2), pp. 113-44 (1995). 92 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) the three analytical categories of culture, personality, and society, Habermas atempts to build upon and go beyond Parsons through the distinction between system and lifeworld, explaining how and in what ways the former colonizes the later.18 Lifeworld What is this system-lifeworld split, and how does it pertain to Habermas’s theory of communicative action? First of all, the term ‘lifeworld’ is appropriated from standard phenomenology, and Habermas distinguishes it from the ontological concept of ‘world’. We need, argues Habermas, to distinguish between ‘world’ and ‘lifeworld’ for analytical reasons: as human beings we rely, often unrelectively and in taken-for-granted fashion, on a cultural stock of knowledge which, because it is already intersubjectively shared, both forms the background for communicative action and provides the foundation for our routine social doings. That is to say, we refer to something in the ‘world’ on a diferent level than the objects to which our atention is drawn. The ‘lifeworld’ is an unthematized realm which, sufused as it is with tacit, shared cultural knowledge, allows us to refer thematically to something in the ‘world’. This also touches upon the troublesome material-ideal split. Parsons tried to solve this by speaking of cultural symbols and values as being on the same general level as cultural objects. Parsons’ point was merely that what is crucial in the culture-personality-social system analytic is the efect of cultural symbols or objects on actors, that is, the elicitation of speciic orientations of action to these cultural objects or symbol-complexes. Hence, Parsons’ value-orientation schema is consistent whether the action-orientation is motivated externally (by cultural, social or physical objects) or internally (by the cultural stock of knowledge, be they values, norms, or the like). 19 18 See James J. Chriss, ‘The Young Parsons and the Mature Habermas’, American Sociologist 27 (4): pp. 38-40 (1996), and James J. Chriss, ‘Gofman, Parsons, and the Negational Self’, Academicus 11, pp. 11-31 (2015). 19 Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 82, and Talcot Parsons and Edward A. Shils, ‘Values, Motives, and Systems of Action’, pp. 45-275 Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 93 This atention to the lifeworld as the locus of unthematized cultural knowledge is crucial to Habermas’s theory of communicative action insofar as social actors in their everyday lives routinely assert facts, appeal to norms, and claim to be sincere in their actions. These everyday activities in turn produce and reproduce our cultural and private worlds, thereby making the lifeworld appear naturalistic, as a putative or inevitable condition of human existence. Habermas derives a ‘universal pragmatics’ based on the general standards which routinely govern communication in everyday discourse. As suggested above, the everyday acts of asserting facts, appealing to social norms, or claiming sincerity in speech correspond to three basic value spheres, described by Habermas as the theoretic/scientiic, the moral/ practical, and the expressive/aesthetic. The concept of rationality is crucial here because Habermas suggests that each value sphere utilizes its own peculiar criteria for the rational adjudication of such validity claims. But since this discourse necessarily occurs within a lifeworld whereby actors are informed by an unthematized cultural knowledge, the validity claims of normal discourse are adjudicated not necessarily with recourse to reasoned or communicative means, but often by strategic action, by appeals to customs, or by standards of evaluation which are not appropriate to the value sphere encompassed by the particular speech act or claim being raised. This allows then for the systematic distortion of reasoned communication, and Habermas is concerned with shoring up the Enlightenment program of reason aimed at achieving human liberation and the amelioration of oppressive social conditions. As Dmitri Shalin explains, ‘It is the task of universal pragmatics to render these unrelexive validity claims problematic, to help setle them by rational means’.20 in T. Parsons and E. Shils (eds.) Toward a General Theory of Action (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1951), pp. 159-167. 20 Jürgen Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, M. Cooke (ed.) (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998). Dmitri Shalin, ‘Critical Theory and the Pragmatist Challenge’, American Journal of Sociology 98: pp. 237-79 (1992), p. 250. 94 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) System The ‘system’ aspect of Habermas’s system-lifeworld analytic is that dimension of human agency constituting the realm of scientiic/administrative activity. Through the very act of philosophical relection, that is, by this atempt to look at the world through the totalizing lens of systems theorization, the previously unthematized lifeworld is opened to relection and investigation, thereby exposing certain fundamental underlying components of the cultural tradition. As Habermas explains, in thematizing the lifeworld actors must ‘thereby adopt a relective atitude toward cultural paterns of interpretation that ordinarily make possible their interpretive accomplishments’.21 Habermas has atempted to make this position clear beginning in his 1971 work, Knowledge and Human Interests. We may grasp Habermas’s position on culture in general and knowledge and human interests in particular by analyzing his critique of Dilthey and Peirce. These two thinkers believed that the cultural sciences could be distinguished from other (i.e., natural) sciences insofar as the former is conceived as having arisen from a ‘community of life unities’—that is, the double dialectic of the whole and the part which exists on two levels. First, there is the totality of a linguistic community which, through the sharing of a common communicative heritage allows for intersubjective understanding of individual diferences, that is, whereby individuals are allowed to assert their ‘non-identity’ against each other. Second, there is the temporal dimension in which the totality of life history is in dialectical relation to the singular experiences and life relations of individuals, this of course giving rise to the totality of life history. This ‘community of life unities’ is postulated by Dilthey, then, as providing the foundation for the objective framework of the cultural sciences. (Peirce, employing a similar analytical strategy, identiies a diferent set of factors which provide the objective framework of the natural sciences.) Dilthey and Peirce believed they 21 Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 82, and Steven Vaitkus, How is Society Possible? (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 95 had solved the problem of the relation between the universal and the particular by noting the ways in which a community of thinkers is structured both historically and linguistically. This is all seemingly well and good, and the position actually comes quite close to that of hermeneutics which, as Alvin Gouldner has described, leads to a new relexive sociology whereby the ‘theorist is regarded as being more like an art or architectural critic than a physicist’. But Habermas rightly notes that hermeneutic understanding must itself employ ‘inevitably general categories to grasp an inalienably individual meaning’. The problem is, according to Habermas, that we cannot make the distinction between cultural and natural sciences based upon the postulate that cultural phenomena owe their ‘unrepeatable historical meaning’ to the individualizing value-relations which Dilthey and even Gouldner saw as unfolding from the universal-speciic or totality-fragment dialectic. Habermas therefore wants to deal with culture primarily on the level of the ideational (i.e., of ideas or of the ‘stock of knowledge’) because to do otherwise would be to risk reifying culture as in the above so-called objectifying frameworks of the cultural sciences.22 Further, the ‘rationalization of the lifeworld’ has, according to Habermas, created a bifurcated view of cultural knowledge, one which, following Weber, leads to two distinct cultural spheres of values: the cognitive and the noncognitive, corresponding with such dichotomies as subjective and objective knowledge, science versus technology, morality versus law, and even criticism versus art. This also leads to a split between distinct traditions of action theory, such as utilitarianism which views actors as marshaling objective criteria for the evaluation of possible choices of action (e.g., exchange theory, rational choice theory), and non- or anti-utilitarian action theories, such as those of Parsons’ earlier ‘volunta22 Jürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by J.J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 158 and 159. Alvin W. Gouldner, ‘The Politics of the Mind’, Social Policy 2 (6), pp. 5, 15, 13-21, 54-58 (1972),. These issues are expanded upon in James J. Chriss, Alvin W. Gouldner: Sociologist and Outlaw Marxist (London: Ashgate, 1999) and James J. Chriss, Confronting Gouldner: Sociology and Political Activism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). 96 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) ristic action’, Erving Gofman’s dramaturgy, or even Harold Garinkel’s ethnomethodology, all of which stress to varying degrees the normative or nonrational dimensions of social action.23 The lifeworld is organized on the basis of mutual understanding (achieved primarily through talk), while the system is organized around functional diferentiation of parts and steering media (such as power, inluence, money, and value commitments) for purposes of controlling outcomes in an orderly or eicient fashion. The lifeworld is typiied by communicative rationality while the system is typiied by instrumental rationality. Because the system is organized around bureaucratic organization giving rise to law, administration, and other aspects of formal social control, it is able to secure predictability of outcomes at a higher level relative to the slapdash and openness of lifeworld outcomes which must rely on the multitudes of everyday actors applying informal sanctions (frowns, glares, raised eyebrows, the silent treatment, avoidance, and withholding of expected rewards) against deviants within primary and secondary group relations. Over time, through the process of rationalization (Habermas draws primarily from Weber here) there are pressures to import these aspects of control and predictability from the system into the lifeworld, thereby colonizing the lifeworld and disempowering the communicative activities of interacting lifeworld subjects.24 Interestingly enough, Habermas believes that the great strides forward in human emancipation of the liberal human subject embodied in the development of the democratic (or republican) constitutional state, were chimera from the perspective of critical theories (here, speciically the Frankfurt School), to the extent that thick strands of racism, sexism, 23 See Harold Garinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Clifs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967); Erving Gofman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1959); and Talcot Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: Free Press, 1937). 24 James J. Chriss, Social Control: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Polity Press, 2013), and James J. Chriss, ‘Political Violence in Historical Perspective’, pp. 1015-1029 in Sage Handbook of Political Sociology, edited by W. Outhwaite and S.P. Turner (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2018). Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 97 homophobia, economic inequality, and lack of recognition persisted across all western democracies. This skepticism of state, systems, and the political (with Carl Schmit being a key voice here) also gave those who push postmodern agendas an opening to decry all philosophical and political systems of thought which were shown to be impotent in the face of such theoretical failures. Habermas is boxed in on both sides: He begins squarely within the optimism of Marxist critique of modern western capitalism but, realizing also that no proletarian revolution is to come (the gravitational pull of neoliberalism is too great), he must also guard against sliding into postmodern hyperskepticism of metanarratives (whether emancipatory or scientiic) which completely abandon hope that concerted human efort can make the world a beter or more just place.25 Habermas believes the only place to go to rescue critical theory while retaining the Enlightenment goals of human emancipation and the expansion of reason, nonviolence, and recognition of the ‘other’ is the lifeworld, still precariously held together by mutual understanding by way of the three validity claims (propositional truth, subjective truthfulness, and normative rightness) embedded in and retrievable from talk itself. Yet going to the lifeworld to seek analytical refuge there is never a clean or pure move, because any sociologist worth his or her weight would argue that persons are created, or at the very least inluenced, by the broader social system within which they live and operate on a day-today basis. There is always the specter of system haunting even the most micro-oriented aspects of sociological theorizing and concept formation. Habermas realizes this as well, and this is why he was atentive to systems elements bearing down on the lifeworld, whether through colonization or other more benign efects. 25 See Carl Schmit, The Concept of the Political, translated by G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 [1932]). On the problems of postmodern thought, see Jürgen Habermas, ‘Equal Treatment of Cultures and the Limits of Postmodern Liberalism’, Journal of Political Philosophy 13 (1), pp. 1-28 (2005). For useful analyses of Habermas and postmodernism, see Gérard Raulet, ‘Jürgen Habermas and the Discourse of Postmodernity’, Thesis Eleven 23, pp. 64-84 (1989), and Kenneth MacKendrick, ‘The Moral Imaginary of Discourse Ethics’, pp. 280-306 in Critical Theory after Habermas, edited by D. Freundlieb, W. Hudson, and J. Rundell (Leiden: Brill, 2004). 98 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) The systems side of Habermas’s thinking, including his three-world model and three validity claims, is atributable to Parsons and, before him, the early American sociologist Franklin Giddings as well as philosophers who in turn inluenced Giddings and other American sociologists such as Herbert Spencer and John Earle.26 Earle’s discussion of the concept of ‘mind’ (from 1881) is in fact the template for later conceptualizations of the linkages between the micro-realm of persons and their subjective endowment and the macro-realm of systems, culture, and social structure. Habermas works with an implicit theory of mind and subjectivity which seeks to go beyond the (Cartesian) philosophy of the subject to a ‘postmetaphysical’ subject whose subjectivity and identity are secured neither through the political body (e.g., nationalism) nor through tribal solidarity (i.e., Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity).27 An examination of these elements is in order before discussing Habermas’s validity claims analytic and the prospects of its withstanding postmodern skepticism. But irst, a brief discussion of Habermas’s formalism is necessary. Habermas’s Formalism Just as I have been arguing that Habermas atempts to deal with culture though an analytical program which does not succumb to the temptations of totalizing systems narratives (e.g., Marx, Parsons), many have nevertheless suggested that Habermas’s approach is itself overly formalistic. I speciically consider the critical analysis of Craig Calhoun, who perceives Habermas’s commitment to the Enlightenment project of achieving the ‘good life’ through the assurance of reasoned communication—and in so doing, hoping to avoid a slide into solipsism and 26 See, e.g., Risto Heiskala, ‘Economy and Society: From Parsons through Habermas to Semiotic Institutionalism’, Social Science Information 46 (2): pp. 243-272 (2007). 27 See Habermas’s discussion in his Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, pp. 58-60, as well as Dieter Freundlieb, ‘Why Subjectivity Maters: Critical Theory and the Philosophy of the Subject’, pp. 212-232 in Critical Theory after Habermas, edited by D. Freundlieb, W. Hudson, and J. Rundell (Leiden: Brill, 2004). Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 99 postmodern skepticism of modernist metanarratives (in the guise of universal or formal pragmatics)—as being cut from the same cloth as the empty or ‘bloodless’ formalism which produced the horriic ‘dust bowl’ empiricism of bourgeois or conventional science. Although there is truth to the suggestion that Habermas relies on Enlightenment universalism in explicating the criteria of communicative action, it is also the case that Habermas is aware of the reifying tendencies of positivistic modernist systems of thought. Habermas states that ‘A complementary error of modernity is the utopianism which thinks it possible to derive the “ideal of a completely rational form of life” directly from the concepts of a decentered world understanding and of procedural rationality’. In his own analytical program, then, Habermas is careful to avoid many of the pitfalls of modernist thought which Calhoun illustrates. It will become quite apparent as well that this line of criticism dovetails with the more general postmodernist sentiment, even while proponents of this critique of Habermas (such as Calhoun) claim to reject, or at least choose not to overtly support, the tenets of postmodernism.28 Calhoun advocates what he calls ‘cultural sensitivity’, this being the atentiveness by social theorists to ‘problems of diference’. The idea is that as heirs to Enlightenment rationalism many modernist social theorists tend toward an uncritical and nonrelexive acceptance of the universality of decontextualized truth claims as discoverable through the sheer force of reason. This scientistic over-commitment to a ‘culturally insensitive Enlightenment universalism’ has produced a tradition of normative theory (e.g., Parsons) which shares many of the problems of the 28 Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 73. Craig Calhoun, ‘Culture, History and the Problem of Speciicity in Social Theory’, pp. 244-88 in S. Seidman and D.G. Wagner (eds.) Postmodernism and Social Theory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). Habermas formulated this position in the crucible of the dispute over positivism in German sociology beginning in the early 1960s. See especially Jürgen Habermas, ‘The Analytical Theory of Science and Dialectics’, pp. 131-162 in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, with contributions from T.W. Adorno, H. Albert and others (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976). 100 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) type of empirical theorizing (e.g., utilitarianism, behaviorism, rational choice theory) which the former has atempted to displace. Here, Calhoun atempts to distance himself from the postmodernists by claiming that tacit or unquestioned assumptions of Enlightenment individualism pervade both normative and empirical theoretical traditions, stating that ‘In this sense, both that branch of modernity which has lately traveled under the name of postmodernism and the explicit Enlightenment modernism proclaimed for example by Habermas sufer from weaknesses of cross-cultural sensibility’.29 The impoverished cross-cultural outlook of Enlightenment universalism does away with diference with a simple analytical sleight of hand. Because, as Calhoun argues, universalist thought tends toward the position that there is only one set of fundamental values, the importance of fundamental diferences of value (especially as realized in cross-cultural studies) is forever lost (or at least obfuscated, barely visible) within the mazes of Enlightenment analytical thought. Calhoun claims that Habermas’s atempted delineation of the normative foundations of a critical theory derives these essential concrete norms by way of a convenient iat, this being Habermas’s suggestion that the norms are held to be implicit in the validity claims of all speech. The main problem here, according to Calhoun, is that Habermas’s universalization of validity claims is highly decontextualized. In the end, Calhoun argues that although Habermas claims to stress the importance of viewing human beings and the modes of communication being employed as an intersubjective accomplishment, his theory still has not advanced beyond outmoded modernist understandings of morality and the possibilities for communicative (i.e., noncoerced) action. ‘Rather’, writes Calhoun, ‘[Habermas] returns moral judgment to a Kantian realm of decontextualized individuals’. Admitedly, Habermas’s proceduralist view of democracy is derived from a Kantian-like discourse theory whose guiding principle states that 29 Calhoun, Culture, History and the Problem of Speciicity in Social Theory, pp. 247248. Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 101 ‘Just those action norms are valid to which all possibly afected persons could agree as participants in rational discourse’. However, contra Calhoun, I believe that Habermas successfully averts the problem of the decontextualized individual as seen, for example, in Habermas own rendering of the weaknesses of the totality-individual dialectic developed by Dilthey, Peirce, and others.30 The Concept of Mind Across society and the contemporary social sciences the word ‘mind’ is invoked so frequently that there is seemingly litle doubt as to its meaning.31 The mind is the storehouse of thought, reasoning, consciousness, the intellect; in sum, the creative aspect of the functioning brain. Modern language is illed with references to the mind. One can be out of one’s mind, or lose it, or even give someone a piece of it. One can seek peace of mind, or see things from the mind’s eye, stressing the ready ability to engage in introspection, to take vision back to its locus or seat, to the functioning brain and the ephemeral realm of thoughtful relection and contemplation that is somehow connected to it. A famous anti-drug commercial proclaimed that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, just as former Vice President Dan Quayle famously botched the slogan by saying, ‘What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is’. People in love are presumably able to read each other’s minds. One may be asked to keep or bear something in mind, but one can also call things to mind. One can have a mind to do something, or at the very least 30 Calhoun, ibid., p. 249. For a defense of Habermas’s ‘Kantian constructivism’, see Thomas McCarthy, ‘Kantian Constructivism and Reconstructivism: Rawls and Habermas in Dialogue’, Ethics 105, pp. 44-63 (1994). 31 For the most part this discussion of mind will remain at the folk psychology level, that is, at the level at which the typical human being uses and understands the concept of mind. The study of mind and consciousness can get very complex, but as Keith Frankish notes, sciences of human behavior such as sociology and economics need not get into the details of the structure of sub-personal cognition, the unconscious, or such concepts as Frankish’s own ‘supermind’. See Keith Frankish, Mind and Supermind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 46. 102 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) a half a mind. One can make up one’s mind, or if undecided or uncertain, be of two minds. On the other hand, you and others with whom you agree could be described as being of one mind. You can also have a meeting of the minds. And two minds are beter than one. You can have or put something in mind, or just as readily take one’s mind of something. You can tell someone to never mind, and another person to mind his own business. If you keep something out of sight you may also be able to keep it out of mind. The power of the mind is said to be so great it reigns supreme even over the physical world (mind over mater). And when all is said and done, one can always change one’s mind. The point of all this is that today, we routinely invoke the word mind. But this has not always been so. Although a full analysis of the etymology of the word ‘mind’ would take us too far aield, a brief summary is in order. One such useful summary appeared in 1881 in an article titled ‘The History of the Word “Mind”’. John Earle shows how what we now understand as the word ‘mind’ has deep roots in religious thought, deriving from the early dichotomy of body and spirit. The spirit, understood as the vital source (soul) that resides in all living human beings, becomes an early object of atention, relection, and worship, especially among a group of like-minded believers (the church) who come together to commemorate the dead (Vico being a lead voice here). Remembering and commemorating those who have come before us provides a irst glimpse into the notion of a group mind (or general mind, or collective mind, or social mind, or even psychic unity). For eons the church was the overseer, purveyor, and interpreter of the collective will, unity, or solidarity of a group of people (the congregation). Nevertheless, an inexorable secularization of this idea had begun to compete with the religious notion of congregation or community, and by the early sixteenth century, in his revisions of the translation of the New Testament (beginning in 1525), William Tyndale started adding other elements that went beyond religious remembrance or memorial per se. For example, at All Saints Church in Bristol, a yearly custom existed whereby a list of Founders and Benefactors was recited, and this ceremony went by the Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 103 name of the General Mind. By this time, both in terms of liturgical practice and biblical interpretation and translation, the General Mind was understood as the place where thought and memory reside. As Earle explains, ‘Mind is coextensive with the capacity for experience, coextensive with consciousness, even with the faculty of sensation; but it has a special relation to Ideas, and when the word is used acutely, it means the faculty of Ideas’. Secularization of this notion was accelerated with the Reformation, and especially with the move to abolish services commemorating the dead. The second half of the sixteenth century saw the word being used much more freely in everyday usage, torn as it was from its religious moorings. It is especially prevalent in the works of Shakespeare, and the way mind was being used by then was as a catchall for capturing the inner side of human conduct and experience. Beyond simple thought or relection or remembrance or experience, mind now encompasses feeling, sentiment, opinion, inclination, fancy, temper, humor, and disposition. The original dichotomy of soul and body becomes secularized as well, transmuted into the notion of mind and body, especially as embodied in the philosophy of Descartes. At about the same time in Britain, Hobbes was secularizing the group mind via his concepts of the social contract and especially the Leviathan. Earle explains that, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, The time was come for the Mind as the intellectual region and organ of ideas to win recognition and to be individualized in its turn. The whole upheaval of new thought in the ifteenth and sixteenth centuries was, not less in word than in deed, for the establishment of Mind. Earle goes on to make a further provocative point. If Soul served as the region and organ of ideas for the collective understanding and solidarity of a people, Mind does not merely replace soul with the coming of secularization, but touches upon a new or emergent aspect of the progression of human thought and experience. Indeed, if we take the Good, the Beautiful, and the True as a convenient summary of the chief heads 104 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) of Ideas, then the church or religion represents the Good, and the newly burgeoning era of science ushered in with the Enlightenment represents the True. The Beautiful is then left to the aesthetic realm, the realm of theater arts, poetry, plays, music, and the drama of everyday life. In fact, Earle’s notion of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True align remarkably well with the validity claims underlying all speech and the three analytical worlds (social, subjective, and objective respectively) as developed a century later by Habermas.32 Although modern English makes a clear distinction between the terms ‘spirit’ and ‘mind’, the German word Geist incorporates both of these ideas seamlessly. Furthermore, even as we take for granted that persons are endowed with their own unique minds, we should be aware that the idea of a collective or social mind was developed prior to the widespread acceptance of something called ‘culture’. There are two distinct ways of talking about and conceptualizing the social mind. First, there is the notion of the socialized mind, that is, the line of thinking that argues that the mind is socially constructed, or similarly, that emphasizes the social character of thinking. Cognitive psychologists as well as some philosophers and sociologists (such as John Dewey, George H. Mead, Josiah Royce, and Pierre Janet) operate to varying degrees with this version of the social mind. The primary focus of this version of the social mind is on the human person, seeking to explain how individuals comes to be endowed with minds—as distinct from the physiological realities of the brain—that are said to be created through interaction with human beings and other objects in the social world. In early psychology especially, the social mind was developed to counter psychological behaviorism, which assumed that mind is biologically given. Where the behaviorists favored a biogenic explanation for the human mind, cognitive psychologists and some sociologists (such as Lester Ward George H. Mead, Charles Cooley, 32 John Earle, ‘The History of the Word “Mind”’, Mind 6 (23), pp. 301-320 (1881), pp. 315, 319, 320. See also Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman, American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Religion and Their Direction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 105 and Max Weber to name a few)—favored a sociogenic explanation. It is these later developments, more or less synonymous with phenomenology, the social construction of reality, the deinition of the situation, and interpretivism more generally that are more congenial to Habermas as opposed to the earlier analytical philosophy of mind.33 As mentioned above, even though Habermas was inluenced by an incipient notion of a three-world model evident in the writings of the young Parsons, Parsons was by no means the irst person to conceptualize this. Writing in 1899, early American sociologist Franklin Giddings argued that ‘Every human being is at once an animal, a conscious individual mind, and a socius. As an animal he is studied by the anatomist and physiologist; as a conscious mind he is studied by the psychologist; as a socius, loving and seeking acquaintance, forming friendships and alliances with other socii like himself, imitating them and seting examples for them, teaching them and learning from them, and engaging with them in many forms of common activity,—he is studied by the sociologist’. Among sociologists, Giddings should receive proper credit for being the innovator of this three-world concept.34 Some of Parsons’ papers from his undergraduate days at Amherst University in 1922 were published in the journal American Sociologist in 1996. In his paper titled ‘The Theory of Human Behavior in Its Individual and Social Aspects’ we see an explicit statement on this three-world model. Railing against unilinear models such as institutional economics and utilitarianism, Parsons wrote that ‘there is no reason to make any radical distinction in kind between habits of thought and technological habits. We are one organism, not two, and viewed from one angle we are physical, from another mental, from another moral. Also society is made up of individuals so that there is no absolute distinction between society viewed as a whole and as 33 See James J. Chriss, ‘Giddings and the Social Mind’, Classical Journal of Sociology 6 (1), pp. 123-144 (2006); Harold N. Lee, ‘Social Mind and Political Order’, Ethics 84 (1), pp. 70-77 (1973); and Jaan Valsiner and Rene Van der Veer, The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 34 Franklin H. Giddings, The Elements of Sociology (New York: Macmillan, 1899), p. 10. 106 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) a collection of individuals’. These worlds—the objective, subjective, and social—irst articulated by Giddings, play a prominent role in Habermas’s three world model and the validity claims lying behind all speech.35 Three Worlds and Three Validity Claims Habermas’s theory of communicative action is concerned with the problem of overcoming curtailed, distorted, or coerced communication. Although modern industrial society has made great advances in assuring rights and just treatment for all citizens, primarily as a result of democratization and the freedom-guaranteeing juridiications embodied in welfare state law, certain social or culture structures—such as class and family systems, racism, sexism, age discrimination, and so forth—continue to support inequality and diferential power. These oppressive structures or cultural codes thereby efectively serve to cut of the possibility of consensus or intersubjective understanding through fair discussion or argumentation. The ultimate goal of communicative action is the institutionalization of the ideal speech situation, whereby only the weight of the beter argument would prevail. In such an egalitarian environment, it is understood by all participants that no claim can be dismissed outright, but also that, since no claim is privileged, all can be challenged on their merits. This means that through fair argumentation and discussion, all participants are free to negotiate the conditions of their existence and eventually setle upon what is right, proper, or just for all. In order for the ideal speech situation to be realized in concrete setings, all persons in talk would have to understand, and be granted access to, the validity claims associated with each of the three analytical worlds. The ideal speech situation is the condition of communicative action, the later deined as ‘the interaction of at least two subjects capable of speech and action who establish interpersonal relations’.36 Through their uterances, 35 See Talcot Parsons, ‘The Theory of Human Behavior in Its Individual and Social Aspects’, American Sociologist 27 (4): pp. 13-23 (2006), p. 23, and James J. Chriss, ‘The Young Parsons and the Mature Habermas’. 36 Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 86. Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 107 persons make claims about the world, and each claim may be challenged or evaluated with regard to the appropriate validity claim connected with each world. Speciically, through talk actors make reference to the validity claims of (1) propositional truth, whereby a hearer can deny or contest that certain objective conditions hold in a situation (associated with the objective world); (2) subjective truthfulness, whereby a hearer can challenge whether a speaker really means what he or she is saying or implying (associated with the subjective world); and (3) normative rightness, whereby a hearer can contest the appropriateness of the aims of the speaker based upon prevailing normative standards (associated with the social world). The process of responding to the uterances of others draws from the validity claims associated with each of the respective worlds. For example, suppose a manager in an upholstery shop of a major airplane manufacturing company has been told by upper management that the work coming out of his shop has been substandard of late, and that he needs to ‘take care of it’. According to Habermas’s model, the manager has three supervisory actions or options at his disposal. First, the manager could cite to his staf statistics concerning the hours of work that will have been lost and the work that will be duplicated because of having to remove the faulty seats from the planes (i.e., the validity claim of propositional truth associated with the objective world). Second, the manager could present himself in such a way as to claim certain subjective states have been aroused, for example, telling his staf how ‘disappointed’ he is at the shoddy workmanship on the seats, and that he knows they can do a beter job (here, atempting to elicit feelings of guilt; this is the validity claim of subjective truthfulness associated with the subjective world). Third, the manager could argue from the perspective of the aesthetic values and normative expectations of the typical airline passenger, for example, that passengers don’t want to see frayed and shoddy-looking upholstery on their seats (i.e., the validity claim of normative rightness associated with the social world).37 37 James J. Chriss, ‘Management and Supervisory Practice in the Organization: The Relevance of Gofman and Habermas’, Sociological Imagination 36 (4), pp. 217-237 (1999). 108 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) Forms of Action The concept of the three analytical worlds points to the following observation. Since human beings are carbon-based life forms moving about in a natural world, an observer may choose to account for social phenomena only on the basis of instrumental rationality. That is to say, one may assume that the human organism engages in a decision calculus that takes into account the elements of his or her action options in relation to the constraints and exigencies of only the objective world. Hence, from the perspective of the objective world and taking into account only the validity claim of propositional truth, the human person’s actions can be judged a success or failure according to criteria of truth and eicacy. The implication of such teleological action is that human behavior, as realized through the cognitive processes of a knowing subject, is represented only as a relation between the actor and a world.38 Habermas goes on to point out, however, that human beings are not merely physical entities operating and moving about in an objective world. Far beyond the utilitarian model of rational actors calculating the best means for achieving particular ends, human action also involves subjective and social considerations of the actions to be taken and their possible efect on other actors. That is, action also can have meaning in relation to a subjective world (in terms of an actor’s internal sentiments, thoughts, atitudes, disposition, etc.), and a social world (in terms of judgments of the justness or appropriateness of an actor’s actions based upon prevailing normative standards). Beyond what is variously described as strategic, instrumental, goal-oriented, or teleological action, which takes into account only an actor and the objective world, normatively regulated action presupposes relations between an actor and two worlds. Actors depicted in the normatively regulated concept of action are endowed with a ‘motivational complex’ in addition to teleological action’s lower-level ‘cognitive com38 Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 87. Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 109 plex’.39 The motivational complex makes norm-conformative behavior possible in that actors judge whether or not actions are in accordance with existing norms. Beyond providing judgments of the extent to which actions are successful or unsuccessful in relation to the objective world, the normatively regulated model of action also provides for judgments of an actor in his or her relation to the social world, insofar as the actor is able to comply with (or is unable or chooses not to meet) the normative expectations of the members of his or her social group. Here, actors distinguish the factual or objective from the normative elements of an action situation, or, stated diferently, they distinguish between conditions and means, on the one hand, and values, on the other.40 This distinction between the objective and social worlds, and the parallel distinction between the lower level cognitive complex and the higher order motivational complex, is a good way of explaining why indings from animal studies may not be applicable or appropriate to explanations of human behavior and society. When interpretations of the world are circumscribed by recourse only to propositional truth and instrumental rationality, ‘success’ becomes the sole criterion for judging, understanding, or responding to one’s or other’s behavior. Hence, the Darwinian notion of evolution leads to bald explanations of the world in terms of, say, species survival (at the phylogenetic level), or reproductive success (at the ontogenetic level). In the animal kingdom, there are no judgments made as to the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the activity. This is because only humans have culture, norms, values, and stocks of knowledge. This cultural heritage overlays a social world onto an objective world, and raw success (for example, in the areas of procreation or food quests) as interpreted through a cognitive complex often gives way to a higher order motivational complex where actions can be judged to be appropriate or inappropriate in relation to that social world. For example, in the human world infanticide or nonconsensual sex are deemed ‘wrong’ in most cultures, while in the animal kingdom they are simply facts of life. 39 Habermas, ibid., p. 88. 40 Habermas, ibid., p. 90. 110 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) In addition to the objective and social analytical worlds, Habermas suggests it is useful to conceive of a subjective world. The validity claim appropriate to this subjective world is subjective truthfulness. That is, through their uterances actors may make claims regarding any number of subjective states (‘I am happy, sad, worried’, etc.). The primary form of action relevant to the subjective world is dramaturgical action. Diplomacy, tact, and politeness—such as making an overt show of being interested in or caring about our fellow human beings—are the sorts of behaviors that are part and parcel to dramaturgical action. As Habermas suggests, dramaturgy assumes a two-world model insofar as actors strive to make certain subjective states visible to their audience (that they are caring, or a nice person, or interested in what you have to say, etc.). Most of these dramaturgical actions occur in the form of accounts, apologies, and requests, and they are presumed to be connected to demonstrable subjective states of speakers (as we saw above in the case of the manager). Parsons and Cybernetics As is well known, Talcot Parsons developed a functionalist theory of social systems which designates at any level of reality the operation of four functions (adaptation, goal-atainment, integration, and latent patern-maintenance) which must be fulilled in order to maintain any system or its subsystems as a going concern. Additionally, Parsons discovered that Norbert Wiener’s work on cybernetics could be used to conceptualize and clarify the interrelation among the four functions themselves.41 The cybernetic principle states that ‘things high in information control things high in energy’. Think of the rider on a horse, or the helmsman steering a ship at sea, or the thermostat controlling the 41 The single best source for an overview of Parsons’ four-function or AGIL schema is the technical appendix in Talcot Parsons and Gerald M. Plat, The American University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). For the seminal work on cybernetics, see Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics; Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press, 1948). Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 111 temperature of a room, or DNA determining the form and composition of a biological entity. As far as the four functional problems are concerned, the cybernetic hierarchy of control always goes in the direction of L => I => G => A, which means that the L-function is highest in information relative to the other functions while the A-function is highest in energy. At the level of Parsons’ action system, culture (L), which is high in information, sits at the pinnacle of the cybernetic hierarchy as it is high in information relative to the next subsystem down, namely the social system. The social system (I) is in turn higher in information than the personality system, while in turn the personality (G) system is higher in information than the organism or, as Parsons dubs it, the behavioral system (A). Finally, in turn, the behavioral system is lowest in information but highest in energy. In addition, with regard to interpreting the three analytical worlds and their interrelation, we may say that the social world is the highest in information among the three worlds, bounded above by the cultural subsystem and below by the social system, then similarly for the subjective and objective worlds which are bounded above and below accordingly.42 Habermas was aware of Parsons’ application of Wiener’s work on cybernetics to the sociocultural realm, but was much less sanguine than Parsons was concerning its potential for meaningful contributions to sociological explanation. Cybernetics has lurking within it a highly dystopian vision of technocratic domination of the lifeworld, of capitulation to ‘self-regulated subsystems of the man-machine type’ toward the ultimate realization of the ‘cybernetic dream of the instinct-like self-stabilization of societies’.43 Nevertheless, by the time of his Theory of Communicative Action Habermas had discovered the indispensability of Parsons’ func42 I cover this in more detail in my paper ‘Gofman, Parsons, and the Negational Self’. For an application of Parsons’ AGIL schema to the criminal justice system, see James J. Chriss, Beyond Community Policing: From Early American Beginnings to the 21st Century (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013). 43 Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, translated by J.J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), p. 118. 112 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) tionalist theory of social systems for his own work. Parsons’ cybernetic theory of control is in full view when considering the validity claims. As depicted in Figure 1, the functional signii-cance of the three validity claims are ordered cybernetically according to their relevance to the objective, subjective, and social worlds. For example, propositional truth fulills the A-function for the system of validity claims because it gears into a world of ‘bald’ assertions of ‘fact’ which can be challenged by interlocutors in a yes or no fashion. Subjective truthfulness fulills the goal-atainment function for the system, as person put on dramaturgical displays for an audience, in the process claiming certain subjective states atain in eforts to create the appearance of an authentic presentation of self. Indeed, subjective truthfulness within the validity claim subsystem fulills the same goal-atainment function that the personality system fulills for the broader action system. Finally, normative rightness gears primarily into the social world and performs the work of integration for the validity claim system. Normative rightness is higher in information that either subjective truthfulness or propositional truth, to the extent that notions of the ‘ought’ or ‘propriety’ often outweigh bald statements of fact or subjective claims such as feelings, emotions, self, or identity.44 (See igure on the opposite page.) Siting atop the cybernetic hierarchy of the validity claims is a fourth one which up to this point has not been discussed. The goal of assuring an ideal speech situation, that is, of reaching mutual understanding through discourse, is not at all possible if participants in talk are not speaking the 44 There is an adage that the truth is always the best defense, or will win out in the end. But this is very often not the case. Consider the case of a waiter and a very heavy customer who has just completed a three-course dinner. The dining patron requests the dessert menu, to which the waiter replies ‘You are very heavy but I will bring the menu anyway’. The patron would likely be shocked by this afront and would call over the manager to complain. In all likelihood, this would result in the iring of the waiter. The fact that the waiter was factually correct about the weight of the customer—a scale could easily determine whether the customer is indeed ‘heavy’—would be irrelevant in the face of the violation of tacit norms of propriety regarding the treatment of dining patrons. Analy�cal Validity Primary Forms “controls” Worlds Claims of Ac�on Intelligibility (L) SOCIAL Norma�ve Norma�vely- Rightness (I) Oriented Subjec�ve Dramaturgical SUBJECTIVE Truthfulness (G) OBJECTIVE Proposi�onal Truth (A) Instrumental Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge Informa�on Energy “condi�ons” 113 Figure 1: The Func�ons of the Validity Claims 114 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) same language to begin with. The validity claim of intelligibility or comprehensibility is a tacit or latent claim which rarely gets explicitly raised in talk, but forms the background of all possible communication which may occur.45 Intelligibility is easily the highest in information relative to the other validity claims because without a minimal fulillment of the requirement of the mutual intelligibility of talk, no other claims-making is possible. It is, however, a deep, latent, or tacit claim because it is rarely explicitly raised in talk, and indeed, it comes to the surface only when someone says, ‘I don’t understand’. Conclusion: The Validity Claims and Postmodern Skepticism I have been concerned with identifying an aspect of the crisis sentiment within the social sciences, namely the rise of postmodernism within sociology and the ways in which culture mediates between ontology and epistemology. Within this culture/postmodernism milieu I have analyzed the analytical program of Jurgen Habermas and how these factors have contributed to the development of his theory of communicative action. As summarized above, a number of analysts complain of the overly formalistic nature of Habermas’s work, and have proceeded to marshal the arguments of deconstruction (poststructuralism) and constructivism (postmodernism) to literally ‘deconstruct’ Habermas’s atempt to rescue Enlightenment reason toward his ultimate goal of completing the project of modernity. As much as I have atempted to defend Habermas against his detractors, I realize also that Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’ seems somewhat detached from the realities of the empirical social world. In his defense, however, it should be noted that Habermas has increasingly distanced 45 Here I use the term intelligibility for the fourth validity claim. Mark Gould uses ‘comprehensibility’, but otherwise his description of the functional signiicance of the validity claims is the same as mine. See Mark Gould, ‘The Generalized Media of Communication and the Logic of Cultural Intelligibility: Macro and Micro Analyses in Luhmann, Habermas and Parsons’, pp. 119146 in Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action and Contemporary Debates, edited by G. Pollini and G. Sciortino (Milan, IT: FrancoAngeli, 2001). Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 115 himself from his original notion of the ideal speech situation and now speaks more carefully of the strong idealizations of ‘discourses’. The latter refers to forms of argumentation that not only satisfy the idealizations of everyday talk, but also point to a rationally motivated consensus on the universality of the validity claims of propositional truth (‘constatives’), normative rightness (‘regulatives’), and subjective truthfulness (‘expressives’).46 In this inal section I consider the viability of Habermas’s project in light of the various postmodern criticisms raised above. We can begin by considering Simon Susen’s explication of ten key assumptions of postmodernism.47 Postmodern social theory is: • an interdisciplinary endeavor; • a foundationless endeavor, which rejects the totalizing metanarratives of modernist science and questions the grounds upon which any system of knowledge or ideology (including religion) purports to legitimate its claims; • a directionless endeavor, which basically rejects teleology and other modernist projects which had some speciic endpoint in sight (e.g., liberation, utopia, egalitarianism)48; 46 Much of this is contained in Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms where a more explicit shift to a Kantian framework is evident in the development of his discourse theory of law. Also see Chriss, ‘Habermas Gofman, and Communicative Action’, and Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Cooke contends that Habermas’s linguistic account of solidarity in postconventional society—namely, the bonds that hold members of a democratically self-regulated lifeworld together via a rationally motivated agreement to reach understanding—is on its own unconvincing. But Cooke also warns that abandoning Habermas’s project gives at least tacit approval to the postmodernist position that stresses that there is no basis for deriving normative standards in a postmodern world where universally-shared notions of the good life no longer seem possible. 47 Simon Susen, The Postmodern ‘Turn’ in the Social Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 48 Although clearly not a defender of Habermas, the critical rationalist Hans Albert is nevertheless on target when he describes the ‘big three’ social evils which socialists seek to eradicate as ‘poverty, oppression, and war’. See Hans Albert, Between Social Science, Religion and Politics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), p. 196. 116 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) • a public endeavor, which seeks to avoid elitism and scholarly monasticism by connecting with everyday citizens and giving them voice (e.g., public sociology); • a situationist endeavor, which favors the particular over the general or universal; • a pragmatic endeavor, which draws atention to the existential signiicance of social practices in all their variety and circumstances; • an ethno-conscious endeavor, which guides social observers toward foregrounding the cultural speciicity of their epistemic claims to validity, thereby guarding against ethnocentrism; • a socio-conscious endeavor, which places emphasis on the relational contingencies underlying human agency, thereby favoring indeterminacy and intersectionality; • a pluralist endeavor, which is the critical exploration of heterogeneous struggles of everyday persons on the basis of class, gender, age, disability, or other sociological variables; • a historicist endeavor, which denies the quest for the search for universal covering laws and rejects claims of the appropriateness of deductive-nomothetic (that is, causal) theory for the social sciences. Some of these projects represent boilerplate leftist politics—especially those of historicism, pluralism, and raised socio-conscious awareness— while others obviously are not. For example, Habermas’s program would collapse if the postmodern preferences for foundationlessness or directionlessness were applied to his universal pragmatics, ideal speech situation, or deliberative democracy. The tension that Habermas describes between system and lifeworld and the paradigm clashes associated with them within sociology—speciically positivism vs. postpositivism, whether of the evaluative or the interpretive strand—is embodied in his own work as a sociologist (as opposed to his role as a philosopher, which would bring to bear a different set of intradisciplinary tensions vis-à-vis postmodernism). 49 As 49 To be more precise, within sociology there are three paradigms. The oldest is positivism, while the other two could be considered ‘postpositivist’ Rescuing the Enlightenment Project: Habermas and the Postmodern Challenge 117 Susen argues, the focal point for postmodern critique within sociology proper is the challenge of the ‘cultural turn’. Susen presents a rather complex argument to justify this, and nearing the end of this paper I cannot give it the coverage it is due. But suice to say, this idea of a postmodern ‘cultural turn’ as a challenge to conventional (or mainstream, or scientiic, or modern) sociology has to do with the growing sentiment of the ‘implosion’, ‘death’, or ‘crisis’ of the social. That is to say, sociology cannot legitimately take society in its totality as its object of study: irst, because society is too massive and its study cannot be contained solely within one discipline; and second, modernist notions of a stable ‘thing’ or object, namely society or the social, are nothing but chimera because, since the establishment of sociology in the late 1800s, societies have gone through so many fundamental changes—at the structural, interpersonal, and sociopolitical levels to name a few—that the inherited notions of the social that contemporary sociologists (including Habermas) work with are antiquated and irrelevant.50 The cultural turn, as something that lies beyond sociology, is understood more in line with a hermeneutical ‘cultural sociology’ rather than the old, tired status-role, or structuralist understanding of culture. For example, it is clear that Parsons—and by extension Habermas—took culture seriously, as it sits at the pinnacle of the cybernetic hierarchy of control, fulilling the function of latent patern-maintenance for the action system. But culture cannot act in such limited, steering capacity, as is evbecause their axiological, ontological, and epistemological commitments are incompatible (to varying degrees) with positivism. These other two are the evaluative paradigm (e.g., Marxism, feminism, critical race theory, and queer theory) and the interpretive paradigm (e.g., symbolic interactionism, ethnomethodology, dramaturgy, and some strands of phenomenology). See Helmut Wagner, ‘Types of Sociological Theory: Toward a System of Classiication’, American Sociological Review 28 (5):735-742 (1963). 50 Susen’s argument is close to that of Bruno Latour. But whereas the anarchic tendency of the postmodern critique is to throw the baby (sociology) out with the bathwater (its antiquated notions of the social), Latour seeks to salvage sociology by way of his actor-network-theory toward the goal of ‘reassembling the social’. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007). 118 Berlin Journal of Critical Theory | Vol. 2, No. 1 (January, 2018) ident with ongoing globalization and glocalization (the dictum that one should ‘think globally, act locally’). This idea of culture being already always everywhere kills two birds with one stone—for example, bridging the global-local or universal-particular divide—so that the system-lifeworld distinction can be jetisoned. This also causes massive damage to any critical theory that takes seriously—even if present merely as an unthematized, background assumption—Marx’s notion of a base-superstructure distinction. In this scenario of the cultural turn’s postmodern challenge, both positivism and evaluative theory take it on the chin. Interpretive theory is spared somewhat because of its atention to the self and subjectivity, but it now operates in a mineield strewn throughout the sociological landscape. This sorrowful ending is something akin to a Greek tragedy, the culmination of Hegel’s ‘bad ininity’. Adorno’s loss of faith in the Promethean task undertaken by critical theorists toward the unity of theory and practice is the epitome of ‘resignation’, punctuated by Adorno’s missive aimed at Korsch among others: The call for unity of theory and practice has irresistibly degraded theory to a servant’s role, removing the very traits it should have brought to that unity. The visa stamp of practice which we demand of all theory became a censor’s placet. Yet whereas theory succumbed in the vaunted mixture, practice became nonconceptual, a piece of the politics it was supposed to lead out of; it became the prey of power. 51 51 See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, translated by E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 143. I expand on this issue in my Confronting Gouldner, pp. 111-112.