Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 22:28:36 -0800
Subject: HAB: Re: "Communicative Communism" or whatever


Phil Ryan’s pointed response (3/26) to Ken’s dissociative posting on
“communicative communism” (3.25) was so exactly apt, I was awed.

Bryce’s incredibly thoughtful and thought-provoking response to Ken
today is so *good*, and Ken’s response is so odd (in apparent ignorance
of recent, extended postings about Habermas and language, as well as
being dissociative from Bryce’s brilliant posting), that I feel
compelled to  express my weariness of Ken’s refusal to take others’
efforts very seriously (i.e., thoughtfully, unlike, e.g., Tim Clark,
<Re: Understanding>, 3/25, who gives great credibility to the phrase
“inquiring minds want to know”; or Bryce’s earlier response to Charles
Wright; or Charles’ response to Bryce; or Antti’s responses to Ken;
etc., etc.), while Ken now indicates an exploration (3/26) of an
“alternative” to his sense of Habermas’ work which stays proudly
unaffected by evidence contrary to his posturing.

As an alternative to Ken’s “Habermas,” I--once again--suggest Habermas’
work. I pose this one-time joke of mine as a serious suggestion, in view
of finding in Ken’s attitude toward others--evidenced in so many
postings (certainly not all!!)--again and again the kind of distorting
of communication (by dismissiveness, if not insulting misrepresentation)
that Habermas has been concerned to heal for several decades.

It’s one thing to find Habermas difficult, maybe impenetrable; or to
find his arguments implausible or invalid, based on careful
consideration. It’s something else to persistently posture, as Ken has
often done, as if Habermas’ mistake is that he’s just not able to
recognize what is obvious in passing to Ken. Habermas needs to get in
touch with Ken!  Scholarship can’t match youth’s ethics of conviction.
My god, all those useless, careful phrasings of positions by Habermas
and careful readers of him are rendered simulacra by Ken’s sweeping,
typographically error-ridden opinions? (Recent subscribers to this list
may not be aware that Ken has, for over a year and a half, pretended
stridently that he is writing from previously established evidentiary
stances--he did a thesis on “Habermas”! whoa!--but he is not writing
from a position of careful reading or evidentiary backing). Given the
stridency of his opinions (and the frequency of his postings), Ken’s
lack of time for evidence looks much like symptomatic behavior (clinical
narcissism, to be specific), as if trying to keep a list like this more
like chat than a viable medium for shared genuine efforts of inquiry
(thinking, reading, evidence-based critique, and constructive
speculation).  Indeed, a  “philosophical” listserv subscription is what
you make it, and playboys surely can make engagement seem pointless.

Ken is evidently seeking an expressionist (“emphatic”) process of self
disclosure that Habermas “fails” to provide him (stimulate for Ken). By
expecting topics of Habermas’ work to satisfy concerns that his work was
not designed to address (let alone Ken’s many misrepresentations of what
Habermas *is* Pretending--in a discursive sense--to do), Ken
consistently (systematically) ensures that the processes of reflection
that will dissolve “Habermas” in favor of Habermas don’t happen. Ken’s
subject-centered view of reason must either find itself reflected in the
other or else the other is dismissed in another episode of self
possession.

The appropriate way to see anyone’s work is in terms of the project it
sets for itself and the internal coherence of what it *actually*
pretends to do, relative to the basis of knowledge and experience in
which a project develops itself. And exemplifying appreciation for a
text is good for your career!

The inevitable boundaries of a project should not be seen as an occasion
for dismissiveness (as if an anthropologist is validly opposable for not
being a literary critic), but as an occasion for a coordinative,
collaborative, or cooperative venture of inquiry; and such has *been*
the hallmark of interdisciplinary research in the human sciences and
humanities. And the value of coordinative / collaborative / cooperative
interactions of interests *is* fundamental to Habermas’ sense of
philosophy and reconstructive science.

But I anticipate that Ken is more concerned with being misunderstood
than with understanding the other, i.e., Habermas or others who have so
carefully responded to him. His attitude is likely another episode of
‘I-dare-you-to-affect-my-thinking,’ you fools who are hooked into doing
his work for him.

[I should add that I’m not inviting you, Ken, to respond to this
posting, for I’m not interested in another go-round with you, based on
your general attitude of the past month or so. But, if you can
distinguish polemic directed to your critical performance from an ad
hominem commentary (which emancipatory critique seems to become
precisely when it’s most tenable), then I hope that you get serious
about a profoundly Open and enlightened body of discursive engagement.

Best regards, for real

Gary




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