Chapter
4
Habermas argues that we should refocus a critique of
contemporary society on our human ability to use languages rather than on
economic exploitation. Human communications have evolved to give us broad
systems of symbolic agreement (culture and languages) which were intended to
provide communications media that were to the advantage of our species. The
fundamental purpose of these symbol systems seems to be to coordinate social
action for human survival and flourishing. This evolved ability that humans
have achieved for communications that enhance survival is inherent in all our
languages. It is not lost however obscured it may be by the many examples of
poor communication and their dire results that we see in the world about us.
Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action analyses the
principles of our language to better understand this potential for benign
communication and to become conscious of its potential to generate rational
choices. At the same time he theorises why it has been distorted and effected
or allowed all manner of social pathologies to occur.
My case is that Exploding Cinema
provides a communicative arena that furthers the human communicative potential.
This is an arena in which cultural values can be freely offered and contested
in the media of projected images and live performance. Habermas' theory is used
as a framework within which to view and evaluate Exploding Cinema activity. The
critiques of his theory allow us to give this evaluation a critical edge.
Before examining his theory I will briefly contextualise Habermas within the
broad Western tradition of Marxism.
The
Western Marxist tradition
It
was only after Karl Marx's death in 1883 that his colleague Frederick Engels
wrote systematic expositions of his theory of Historical Materialism that gave
it widespread political influence. Three quarters of Marx's own writing was
unpublished when he died. The next generation of socialist theorists published
these and consolidated Marx and Engels work rather than developing it.[1]
The
period before and during the WW1 saw a great expansion of Marxist discourse
particularly in Austria, Germany and Russia. A Marxist theory of politics
developed in response to the powerful proletarian parties emerging into the
democratic arena and the elemental struggle of the rural Russian populations.
The expanded concept of the
political was not matched by a deeper understanding of the functional modes,
forms of communication and institutional conditions of egalitarian
will-formation. (Habermas, 1996, p478)
Although
the Russian Revolution and Civil War between 1917 - 1921 was successful, in
that it established the first communist state, the West European uprisings of
1918 - 1920 failed in the face of a more powerful and mature capitalism.[2]
As
the idealism and optimism of Marxist theory was being crushed in the wake of
its apparently victorious praxis, so Marxist theorists were retreating to the
safety of academia. The theory/ practice bond of classical Marxism was
gradually severed through the 1930s as Marxist theory was absorbed by the
academy. A new generation of Marxists born from 1885 (Lukacs) to 1918
(Althusser) came to think against this situation.[3]
These
were concentrated mainly in Germany, France and Italy. Georg Lukacs and Antonio
Gramsci (b 1891) were the last active communist party leaders in the West who
were also philosophers. Henceforth Marxist theory was divorced from mass
culture and in effect became a branch of academic philosophy. This shift was
fuelled by the late publication in the Thirties of Marx's early philosophical
work.[4]
Marxism became a theoretical commentary on Marx's work or on his influences.[5]
It developed an esoteric language and a debate with bourgeois theorists rather
than the prior debate with proletarian praxis.[6]
The
Frankfurt Institute was set up in 1923 by Felix Weil
as an independent Institute of Social Research within a quasi-academic
framework. Set up to promote Marxist studies it was endowed by a wealthy grain
merchant. Carl GrŸnberg was director of the Institute
from 1923-1929. In 1930 one of its founders Max Horkheimer (b 1895) took
the directorship of the Institute and created an innovative theoretical
programme that shifted from the 'science of historical materialism' to a
'Critical Social Theory'. CST was to be based on the evidence of empirical
investigations, from powerful new disciplines such as sociology and psychology,
in a unique interaction with philosophical discourse.[7]
Referring
to early Marx on the one hand and Max Weber on the other the Frankfurt
theorists replaced the concept of exploitation with that of domination.
Domination referred to a wider range of social relations and a concept of power
influenced by the post Freudian analysis of Wilhelm Reich in his 'Character
Analysis' (1927) and 'The Mass Psychology of Fascism' (1933).[8]
The
Nazi victory in 1933 forced the institute into exile in the USA where it was
more isolated from working class struggles and forced to publicly adhere to
liberal ideologies. Returning to Germany in 1949 it maintained this general
depoliticisation.[9]
A
central idea of the Frankfurt school, influenced by Max Weber who had died in
1920, was that the instrumental rationality of a science and technology driven
by capitalism had thoroughly penetrated people's subjectivities. Weber, seeing
instrumental rationality as the driving force of modernism, had accepted
bureaucracy, technology and mass culture as an inevitable part of this
progress. Critical Social Theory saw these forms as needing to be criticised
and saw elite forms of art as being the only site in which the spark of human
autonomy could survive. It perceived mass culture in a homogenised form as
being simply and solely 'a new outlet for capitalist investment' (Aronowitz,
1994 p122).
The
masses, once the hope of Marx, are now seen reduced to willing victims of the
capitalist machine.
For critical theory, genuine
high art was the last refuge of critical practice in a world completely dominated
by total administration. Society was marked by a wisened life world in which
entertainment replaced a vital public sphere where citizens are competent
to fully debate political issues and can really control their own affairs.
(Aronowitz, 1994 p124)
[1] An example is G.V. Plekanov who is known for his Art
and Social Life, (Lawrence and Wishart
undated, Orig. c1912)
[2] The ensuing reaction cleared the way for the rise of
fascism and the isolation of the USSR. When Lenin died in 1924 and Jozef Stalin
took the reins of power, class and privilege was reinstated and maintained by
violence and terror. Theorists were invariably silenced, exiled or killed and
little innovative theory came out of the Comintern in the ensuing period.
In spite of the isolation
and internal repression the USSR demonstrated its newly forged industrial power
by halting the Nazi advance. USSR went on to become the pre-eminent power over
Eastern Europe and with its development of nuclear weapons a global super
power. But after WW2 the Western model of liberal democracy became stable for
the first time. Capitalism shifted from its imperialist model to a post
colonialist global consumerism, giving rise to a long capitalist boom. At the
same time the East European Soviet satellites were being throttled by
authoritarian bureaucracies sponsored by the USSR.
[3] Perry Anderson's table in his Considerations on Western
Marxism, (Verso 1979 p23), lists:
Lukacs, Korsch, Gramsci, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Della Volpe, Marcuse, Lefebvre,
Adorno, Satre, Goldmann & Althusser.
[4] Mainly the 1844 manuscripts, Anderson (1979) p52
[5] Influences such as G.W.F. Hegel or Ludwig Feuerbach.
[6] Karl Korsch (b.1886) was one Marxist who kept the
critical edge of Marxism alive in this period. He published his Marxism and
Philosophy in 1923, which put an
emphasis on working class self-activity and continued to be critical of Marxism
from a libertarian viewpoint right into the Sixties. His influence on Habermas,
along with Lukac, is traced by Harry F. Dahms in his 'Theory in Weberian
Marxism: patterns of Critical Social Theory in Lukacs and Habermas' in Sociological
Theory, 15 (3), 1997, pp181 - 214.
[7] This was the period in which Herbert Marcuse and
Theodor Adorno joined the Institute.
[8] The relation of Reich to Adorno's own The
Authoritarian Personality (1950) is
ignored by Anderson and relegated to footnote by Aronowitz. Freud had published
Civilisation and its Discontents in
1930. The Frankfurt school was, of course, permeated with his influence which
is perhaps most evident in Marcuse's Eros and Civilisation. Nietzsche was another non-Marxist with a strong
influence on both Adorno and Marcuse. In other words there was a strong sense
of the irrational, the non-rational and the aesthetic.
[9] It is said that Horkheimer's copies of Zeitschrift
fur Sozialforschung, his journal of
the Thirties, were kept in the basement 'in a crate that was nailed shut'. See
Benhabib, BonB and McCole eds. On Max Horkheimer: new perspectives (MIT Press 1993 p10)