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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Habermas & the force of reason « Previous | |Next »
April 28, 2006

David McInerney, who runs Intervention has sent some interesting material. One article is Warren Montag's 'The Pressure of the Street: Habermas's Fear of the Masses'. He says that Habermas's texts, despite their "reasoned" air, their high serious refusal of the metaphor and the wordplay that characterizes so much writing across the genres, have their own silent spaces.These are gaps that do not interrupt the order of arguments but make that order possible and even believable. And no work exhibits such silences more exorbitantly than early text, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Montag's point of departure is a single sentence: "Laws passed under the "pressure of the street" [dem Druck der Strasse] could hardly be understood any longer as embodying the reasonable consensus of publicly debating private persons" . He says that:

The proposition contained in this utterance is repeated throughout the Public Sphere: that if any force other than the mere force of reason is brought to bear in the public sphere, rational debate ceases, the universal is lost and the necessarily violent rule of the particular is established, with the certainty that one particularism will soon be replaced by others.

At the end of the Public Sphere Habermas describes the rise of particularism in late capitalism. His argument is that the degradation of the public sphere in the post-war period is the outcome of the conflict of two opposing forces: monopoly capital and the labor movement to which it inevitably gives rise and incessantly provokes.

Montag says that Habermas does not take these forces to be equivalent. He says that Habermas argues that:

if the irrational particularity of the monopolies could be curbed by a state itself heeding the directives that issued from rational critical debate and discussion, the rationality of the market could be restored and its wealth socially managed in such a way as to guarantee an "affluent society" in which the harmony of interests would permit the emergence of a genuine universality. The possibility of such a state, however, depends in turn on the existence of a genuine rational-critical public sphere which the monopolies have destroyed through mass media; thus, the impasse at which Habermas arrives at the end of his book, recognizing that of all the critics of the public sphere, it was the great "liberalists" of the nineteenth-century who accurately diagnosed its fatal malady.

The conception of the public sphere is an ideal one: it is understood by Kant in What is Enlightenment to be a realm free from all coercion or the intrusion of force, in which individuals would express their opinions about all things religious, political, economic and social solely in words, refraining from any action, content to submit their arguments to the adjudication of reason alone. Only in this way could a public achieve enlightenment, divesting itself of the dogmas and superstitions that are impediments to progress. The world's rulers would thus be well advised to grant the freedom to argue and to withdraw from the public sphere in the same way that they should allow the market to set wages and prices, no matter how temporarily inconvenient such developments might be.

So what does Habermas make of this contrast between the really existing public sphere and the ideal one?

The server went down from a DOS spam attack from Saudi Arabia.

Whilst I was offline I came down at Victor Harbor for the weekend but I forgot to foward the Montag article down. I'll pick the post up when I return to Adelaide on Monday or Tuesday.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:49 PM | | Comments (0)
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