4.05 Reason &
Rationality redefined
Once we have extricated
ourselves from Weber's overly negative use of rationalisation it is possible to
look at the Enlightenment ideal of reason in afresh light.
Rationality is redefined as
thinking that is ready to submit to criticism and systematic examination as an
ongoing process. A broader definition is that rationality is a disposition
expressed in behaviour for which good reasons can be given.
Habermas is now ready to
make a preliminary definition of the process of communicative rationality: this
is communication that is "oriented to achieving, sustaining and reviewing
consensus - and indeed a consensus that rests on the intersubjective recognition
of criticisable validity claims".[1]
With this key definition he shifts the emphasis in our concept of rationality
from the individual to the social. This shift is fundamental to the Theory of
Communicative Action. It is based on an assumption that language is implicitly
social and inherently rational.[2]
Argument of some kind is
central to the process of achieving a rational result. Contested validity
claims are thematised and attempts are then made to vindicate or criticise them
in a systematic and rigorous way. This may seem to favour verbal language but
allowance is also give for 'practical discourses' in which claims to normative
rightness are made thematic and pragmatically tested. Non-verbal forms of
cultural expression could often into this category.
The force of a non-verbal
argument will depend on the consensus achieved. In Exploding Cinema there are
no critics leading the audience to selected works but rather this audience are
invited to distrust the professional film critics as gatekeepers. They are
invited to have a more direct and critical relation to the productive base of
culture. With a live audience such a practical discourse may be startlingly
direct.
Habermas proposes three
integrated conditions from which argumentative speech can produce valid
results:
The
structure of the ideal speech situation (which means that the discourse is)
immunised against repression and inequality in a special wayƒ The structures of
a ritualised competition for the better argumentsƒ The structures that
determine the construction of individual arguments and their interrelations.[3]
If we accept such principles
of rational argumentation, Communicative Rationality is:
1. The processes by which different validity claims
are brought to a satisfactory resolution.
2. The relations to the
world that people take to forward validity claims for the expressions they deem
important.[4]
If we assume that a film
shown at Exploding Cinema is a statement that issues a validity claim - Does
showing a film without a detailed discussion or critical debate allow this
claim to be brought to a satisfactory conclusion?[5]
It would seem to depend on the coherence of the statement itself and the degree
to which the audience have a palpably shared response to it. When this
statement authenticates Exploding Cinema norms the film and filmmaker will be
lauded and feedback will make this clear. It should be appreciated that the
'norms' of Exploding Cinema are sometimes an inversion of the conventional
norms, so that which is idiosyncratic or discordant is perhaps more valued. Art
will often play with norms and legitimising procedures which makes analysis of
its forms of argument more complex, as negation and ironising of conventions
are often used.[6]
Habermas then discusses
three further types of discourse that can be used to achieve valid results in
addition to verbal argument: these are the Aesthetic, the Therapeutic and the
Explicative. Because these are not followed through in the Theory of
Communicative Action the impression is given that these are secondary forms of
discourse. This is important for us because the communicative action within
Exploding Cinema occurs more in these modes that it does in terms of formal
verbal discourse.
1. Aesthetic discourses work
by mediators arguments bringing us to consider a work or performance which
itself demonstrates a value.
A
work validated through aesthetic experience can then in turn take the place of
an argument and promote the acceptance of precisely those standards according
to which it counts as an authentic work.[7]
Habermas considers the
mediation of the critic, the curator or the promoter as essential to bring
people to the revelatory aesthetic experience. This mediation is often locked
into economic interests either directly or through state agency. Exploding
Cinema attempts to make a more direct relation between the filmmaker and her
audience.
In Exploding Cinema Films
are shown to an audience who go away with ideas and some will even feel moved
to make their own films. The audience who do not make films may take away
expanded notions of film - which changes their cultural frame work in
unpredictable ways - adding to what Howard Slater has described as 'the common
archive'.[8]
On one level this ongoing production of films and their viewers can be seen as
a 'practical discourse'. But the making of the context in which these films are
seen is also a creative part of cultural production. As Wittgenstein pointed
out no understanding is possible without a shared background.[9]
The Exploding Cinema event
does provide a background onto which an alternative social discourse can occur.
The colourful decor projected onto the walls, the use of MC and performers with
its allusion to musichall, all contextualise the reading of the films
presented. Meaning is shifted from the normal frame of mainstream cinema
towards that of an early cinema, which was more, integrated with the lifeworld.
This background is notably different from that in other official short film
contexts.[10]
When Habermas considers the
question of context he does refer to culture.
Every
process of understanding takes place against the background of a culturally
ingrained preunderstanding... The interpretative task consists in incorporating
the others interpretation of the situation into one's own... this does not mean
that interpretation must lead in every case to a stable and unambiguously
differentiated assignment.[11]
What seems to be missing is
the idea that the context itself is malleable and is as much a part of the
production of communication as any specific speech act. Speech acts are
embedded in contexts that are also changed b them. The relationship is dynamic
and occurs in both directions. To see context as a fixed background or
preunderstanding is to push it out of the sphere of communicative action.
2. Therapeutic discourse is
that which serves to clarify systematic self-deception. Such self-deceptions
typically arise from developmental experiences, which have left certain
rigidities of behaviour or biases of value judgement. These rigidities do not allow
flexible responses to present time exigencies. Habermas sees this in terms of
psychoanalysis but does not expand on this in TCA.[12]
A related aspect of this
discourse is the adoption of a reflective attitude, which is a basic condition
of rational communication.[13]
Adopting a reflective
attitude could be seen to be at the heart of Exploding Cinema. The whole
attitude of opposition on which Exploding Cinema is founded implies a level of
reflection. For some members of the collective this even occurs on the most
formal level such as doing a PhD[14],
but it also happens informally in meetings.[15]
But the claim to be free
from illusions implies a dimension of self-analysis if it is to engage with
change. The most intractable illusions are surely embedded within our subconscious.
There is no such practice within Exploding Cinema, unless the very act of
making self-expressive movies implies a therapeutic process. Almost any art
form might have such a therapeutic value to the producer. At Exploding Cinema
the audience response, be it an emotional abreaction or a spontaneous verbal
response to those around you; may also be considered to be at least partly
therapeutic.
3. Explicative discourse
focuses on the very means of reaching understanding - the means of (linguistic)
expression. Rationality must include a willingness to question the grammar of
any system of communication used to forward validity claims. Exploding Cinema
posits an alternative space in which to view projected media and within this
space there is often experiment with the conventional grammar of moving
pictures. The question of whether visual language can put forward an argument
is not broached by Habermas. Although language is broadly defined as any
communicative action upon which you can be reflective it is verbal discourse
that is prioritised in Habermas' arguments. Verbal language certainly has a
prominent place in his model of human action.[16]
Verbal language does of
course have a place within Exploding Cinema activities. It is used in meetings,
in programme titles and descriptions, on the web site, in telephone messages,
and most of all in the hundreds of murmured conversations that are the buzz of
every show. This last particularly is an oral context. Habermas' arguments
inevitably reflect the discourse in which they are embedded. They are forms
that are essentially literary. Oral contexts of communication have been
relatively little studied and the distinction between oral and literary forms
is not made in Theory of Communicative Action.[17]
I have already noted that as
the System colonises the lifeworld most enterprises are not driven by the
motives of their members.
The
bureaucratic disempowering and dessication of spontaneous processes of opinion
and will formation expands the scope for engineering mass loyalty and makes it
easier to uncouple political decision making from concrete, identity forming
contexts of life.[18]
The system does this by
rewarding or coercing that which legitimates it from the cultural spheres. Such
conditions of public patronage invisibly negate the freedom that is supposedly
available in the cultural field.
It is exactly this illusion
of freedom that Exploding Cinema tries to expose in its most political moments.[19]
As an organisation relatively unrestricted by system interests and indeed
'driven by the motives of its members' it attempts to demonstrate that
patronage is not a necessity of cultural production and in fact it threatens
what I have identified as the central purpose of culture.[20]
The capacity to think freely
about changing conditions and to critically challenge norms and traditions in
the most open way will allow us to respond most appropriately and wisely. This
is my key argument to legitimate Exploding Cinema activity. An open situation
that can respond freely to present conditions will be best to equip us for the
future, exactly because there has not been a selective gatekeeping or a fetish
of control.
NEXT >
[1] TCA1 p17
[2] The use of the word consensus is contaminated by its
use as 'consensus politics' with all the perversion of the democratic ideal
that representation and national majoritorian politics implies. Consensus here
is used as a term stripped of these associations and means a social agreement
reached through a process of dialogue
[3] TCA1 p25
[4] TCA1 p75
[5] We can compare this situation with that of Cinema
Action and other workshops of the Seventies in which it was held as important
that film screenings would be followed by discussion or are even made
specifically as 'triggers' for discussion. (see Dickinson 1999 for references
to such 'trigger' films)
[6] "The linguistic demarcation of the levels of
reality of 'play' and seriousness', the linguistic construction of fictive
reality, wit and irony, transposed and paradoxical uses of language, allusions
and the contradictory withdrawal of validity claims at a metacommunicative
level - all these accomplishments rest on intentionally confusing modalities of
being." (TCA1 p331)
[7] TCA1 p20
[8] See, Howard Slater's 'Canon Blasting for a Living
Culture', Resonance Vol 8 no 1
August 1999
[9] Wittgenstein had the insight that we can only
understand communicative acts because they are embedded in contexts, which are
already orientated towards that understanding (TCA1 p115). See 'Ludwig Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations
(Blackwell 1953 - 2000). E.g. Proposition 539 'Context of a smile' p145.
[10] The short film is often used in the film industry as a
'calling card' to prove one's proficiency in this or that area. See, 'Get
Shorty' by Saul Metzstein, Evening Standard, 27th July 2000. Many of
the festivals reflect this career ritual and are dry if not banal affairs. E.g.
The BBC 'British Short Film Festival' 21 - 28th September 2000.
(www.britishshortfilmfest.com) Or, the Rushes Soho Shorts Festival 24 - 30th
July 1999. (www.rushes-soho-shorts-festival.co.uk)
[11] TCA1 p100
[12] Habermas discusses psychoanalysis in Knowledge and
Human Interests (1972)
[13] TCA p20
[14] Duncan Reekie has been doing a Ph.D. research by
project into underground film and Exploding Cinema at Falmouth Art College in
the South West of England concurrently with my research.
[15] This sort of reflection took two kinds of organised
formats in meetings. The first was in the meeting that followed a show. There
was nearly always a round in which everyone had a chance to air their views on
how things had gone. The second format was usually associated with the AGM in
which the deeper issues of the collective project could be discussed. I attended
AGMs on 28th June 1997 and 5th December 1999 (see, Minute
book pp21 and 151)
[16] Habermas associates with the language action emphases
of Mead, Garfinkel, Wittgenstein and Gadamer. Habermas' case is that his
formulation of Communicative Action makes a full use of languages functions
relating to objective, social and subjective worlds whilst other sociological
models relate to only one or two. (TCA1 p95)
[17] I have discussed this in the previous chapter on
Culture. See, Jahandarie Khosrow's Spoken and Written Discourse, (Ablex 1999) for a good survey of discourse on this
topic.
[18] TCA2 p325
[19] A good example is the collective's intervention at the
ICA Film Biennale of 1995. Reported in detail in the Politics and Policies
section of the narrative account.
[20] "Any practical denial of the relation between
conviction and communication, between experience and expression, is morally
damaging alike to the individual and the common language". (Williams 1958
p293)