The Aesthetic Judgement
Critique of The Theory of Communicative Action
The aesthetic process of
reflective judgement is the process by which we decide between and agree on
many non-verbal cultural matters and it seems to be the main barrier to the
extension of the Theory of Communicative Action to the process of symbolic
negotiation that energises much cultural production.
Some arguments will be
resolved by the clear demonstration of the superiority of one solution over
another. Judgement in this case is a conscious process with verifiable reasons
and can be known as practical judgement. But other contentious issues cannot
reach a resolution through verbal argument, or the empirical weighing of
alternatives, alone. These are often moral and aesthetic judgements that are a
matter of intuitive syntheses which may not avail themselves of verbal
explication or any demonstrations of pragmatic superiority.
This is an area known as
reflective judgement. A process that relies on our faculties of imagination and
intuition exercised within conditions that are non-coercive, in which people
have a sense of communicative ethics and an intersubjective recognition around
a demonstrable example. This is a way of describing the process of much
artistic production and consumption. People will reach understandings on such
matters as what constitutes a valued movie or part thereof without a verbal
debate. This agreement is not arrived at through an explicit validation of
reasons as demanded by Communicative Action. To a great extent agreement is
reached through a barely perceptible alignment of a collective responses. This
would seem to presuppose a group of viewers that shared a particular set of
cultural codes and public spaces. Does this then not undermine Habermas' claim
to the universality of the rational potential of communicative action?
'Critical power requires a
universal fulcrum'.[1] Habermas's universal claim
is not transcendent as was Kant's, it is a claim worked up from empirical
findings within a pragmatist tradition. Habermas argues this is necessary to
achieve a strongly argued theoretical foundation for a radical democratic
process of liberation that is relevant to a 'global village'.[2]
In the move from the
universal generalisation of theory to a concrete application in a particular
culture the faculty of judgement is necessary.
As we have seen, culture can
be defined as consisting of a set of agreements on meaning attribution. The
process of reflective judgement has clearly worked well in such processes of
coming to agreements even amongst large populations. This implies that if we
are to have a critical framework to assess the rationality of such judgements
we have to fall back on the definition of rationality which asserts that
rational communication is basically the expression of undistorted thinking.
This implies we should put more attention on what distorts thinking as well as
ensuring conditions of fair argumentation and systematic research.
Nevertheless a rich and free
discursive environment in which participants have equal chances to communicate
their thinking clearly could surely improve the capacities for good judgement.
In other words reflective judgements are likely to be improved in conditions in
which such a theory of Communicative Action is esteemed.
Reflective judgements are
fallible; they rely on an ongoing pragmatic feedback with results and are
subject to ongoing re-evaluation. If a group shares a non-rational
psychosomatic character such as a feeling of superiority or inferiority towards
another group then the group's judgement is likely to contain this distortion
in some areas. This may be challenged discursively but formal discursive challenges
do not easily dislodge attitudes that exist as historically embedded
psycho-somatic attitudes such as racism. For reflective judgement to be
rational in areas subject to distortion there has to be a high degree of
reflexivity which extends beyond rational discourses into what Habermas
mentions as the therapeutic.[3]
At critical points in a process of reaching
understanding communicative redemptions of reflective judgements may called
for. These are typified in the critical discourses that arise in the wake of
new art movements. In a way this thesis in itself could be seen as a
communicative redemption of Exploding Cinema's practice.
This allowance for the
redemption of reflective judgements post facto does not answer questions about
the prediscursive production of the subject positions that constitute
reflective judgement. Diana Coole makes the point that our societies are so
'thoroughly encoded with hierarchies of privilege' that our very identities are
produced through these contagious mechanisms.[4]
These already forged
identities then colour all subsequent communication. People outside of the
dominant cultural sphere can never get to participate in the discourses that
Habermas seems to promote. Those who are other are separated from those
discourses by such prediscursive mechanisms as disgust.[5]
Coole reminds us that a
democratic communications theory must include a broad range of discourses on
the reflexive re-evaluation of identity as well as the discussion of issues
external to the subject. The question is, how does such a discourse begin when
the subjects are literally missing? Exploding Cinema's discourse is proclaimed
as open to anyone with a (second-hand) Super 8 camera and a few pounds to spend
on a roll of film. No technical competences, qualifications or cash payments
are required to make or show a film.
Another line of criticism asks whether a separate form of
therapeutic discourse is enough to deal with the question of emotion. Emotion
self-evidently has its place in arguments from the heated debate to an
evocative piece of music. It is a part of most aesthetic judgements. But the
historical construction of academic discourse within the codes of good taste
suppresses emotion as a lower realm, which has been banished and cannot be
reintroduced without appearing as a threat to the rational order.[6]
This rationality conspires to exclude women, amongst others whose cultures
integrate emotion more easily, from the discourses that produce Western
knowledge.[7]
Although
Habermas acknowledges that the body situates and thus contextualises our
knowledge, his discursive redemptions are never the result of an embodied
knowing in this way and so reason's incarnate legacy is not acknowledged by
him. Diana Coole in (D'Entreves and Benhabib 1996 p232)
Habermas'
commitment to a linguistic view of the unconscious is so strong that he is
forced to reject the existence of any putatively prelinguistic domain by
assimilating its apparent prelinguisticality to the linguistic... Habermas ends
up assimilating the realm of drive-related wishes and phantasies to that of
language. (D'Entreves & Benhabib 1996 p22)
He reduces the unconscious
to the verbal commentary and report of the psychoanalyst and avoids the
cathartic experiences of the subjects of 'the talking cure'. These are somatic
processes that are the result of the repressed early traumas (re)surfacing for
some kind of evaluation. Formative childhood experiences are allowed back into
consciousness as often visceral memories for their effects to be evaluated in
the light of an adult present.
In a wider consideration of
democratic discourse in general the same issues turn up to distort processes of
reaching for understandings. As soon as a forum is opened up on any contentious
issue speech becomes animated and debate heated. A theory of communicative
action needs to be able to encompass the heat of discursive process raised by
the somatic dimensions of argument rather than banish them to another
compartment.
Although the linguistic turn
is common to both Habermas and the postmodernists they each emphasise different
functions of language. The postmodernists are said to point to language's
capacity to disclose the world whilst Habermas has based his ideas on its
inherent capacity to allow us to reach understanding and co-ordinate action.
Although these are not, in fact, mutually exclusive positions they are the
polarities around which many of the critiques of Habermas have been conducted.[8]
The critiques in the
authoritative collection edited by D'Entreves and Benhabib (1996) tend to show
disagreements between the two contrasting theoretical approaches. But these
differences of position are not as distant as one might infer from the
vehemence of the discourse. They see Habermas's attempt to find a universal
basis to communication as tending to reduce the fluidity, heterogeneity and
dynamism of human communication and lead to prescriptive certainty, exclusion
and closure.
With regard to language's
function of disclosure Habermas does admit it as one of the functions of
language but categorises this function as being part of the 'background'.[9]
This does not resolve the debate and simply shifts the critique back onto the
Achilles Heel of TCA, reflective judgement. Worse still, reflectively judged
values are argued to play a role in all language and so cannot be constrained
to an area of aesthetic communication.[10]
Habermas does not deny this and can only be said to be guilty of an emphasis on
verbal language and a relative silence on the nonverbal, particularly in TCA.[11]
The alterity of language,
the fact we do not all have the exact same meanings for words and signs in
general, does not seem to impede the reaching of agreements as is evidenced by
the neoterisms of any living language. Language itself would not be possible
without linguistic communities having a dynamic consensus on the words they
use. Social life is dependent on a galaxy of agreements even if many of these
seem to be either fixed in tradition or renewed without discussion. But for
postmodernists alterity seems to be a metaphor for the oppressed and excluded.
This implied exclusion
induces a dissonance with Habermas' sense of the normative and even more with
reference to the 'purified' discourse of an Ideal Speech Situation.[12]
We have seen above how Habermas has called for an inclusive interpretation of
his theory but critics often seem to be more interested in how the tone of his
theory might be interpreted.
Non-verbal expressions in
all sense media are necessary to think about, discuss and validate all things
that are outside of language proper. This sort of communication may be
particularly important to the empowerment of those outside of the dominant
elite and whose culture does not revolve around formal written discourses. The
communicative media of such people is often generalised as oral culture. Although criticism of the exclusive
connotations of Habermas' theory may at best seem to suggest the limits to
critical theory, or renegotiate the definition of rational discourse, this does
not negate the paradigmatic shift that Habermas makes from a subject centered
philosophy of consciousness to a communication concept of reason and
rationality.
As I have pointed out
Habermas does in practice tend to promote a hierarchy of discourses in which
the written is of more importance than the oral and the verbal is of more
interest than the non-verbal and the legislative is more powerful than the
cultural. This emphasis does seem to weaken his theorising of the possibilities
of an inclusive communicative rationality even though this hierarchy is simply
a reflection of the inevitable academic context of the production of critical
theory. Diana Coole suggests that there should be more of a continuum and
interweaving between pre-literary forms of communication - oral culture and all
forms of sensory expression - and the literary forms.[13]
I have already argued that a
full evaluation of Exploding Cinema requires an appreciation of oral culture
using amateur film to illustrate my point. In this sense the framing of TCA
within the discourse of critical theory may grate with the oral framing of such
an event.
To show that Habermas is
aware of the limitation of his position we can remind ourselves of the Weberian
roots of his theory. Following a Weberian sociological tradition he argued that
Modernisation led to cultural differentiation in increasingly separated spheres
of science, morality and art. Each of these developed different rationality
structures (cognitive-instrumental, moral-practical, and aesthetic-expressive)
each of which has a distinct type of validity claim (truth, rightness, and
authenticity). These have each become the preserves of experts who use a
limited subject centered conception of reason. This has led to a cultural
impoverishment made more poignant set as it is against a backdrop of our
escalating technological prowess.[14]
Habermas calls for mediation
between science, morality, art, and everyday life.[15]
Philosophy is seen as suited to this task because it is an international
discourse that has a reflective distance from everyday life. Habermas does not
analyse, illustrate or test his proposal for am 'aesthetic/ expressive
rationality structure' in any detail or theorise how it might become
communicatively rational beyond the small field of art criticism, which by
definition mediates the aesthetic with words.
In The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity (1985) Habermas does concede this but does not elaborate:
In
this case aesthetic experience not only revitalises those need interpretations
in the light of which we perceive our world, but also influences our cognitive
interpretations and our normative expectations, and thus alters the way in
which all these moments refer back and forth to one another.[16]
In the same book Habermas
does also concede the importance of a broad range of nonverbal arts:
The
processes of reaching understanding which transpire in the lifeworld require
the resources of an inherited culture in its entire range.[17]
This is then extended to the
formal arts that he proposes can be of use to the lifeworld, transcending their
enclosure by institutionalised spaces:
Modern
art harbours a utopia that becomes a reality to the degree that the mimetic
powers sublimated in the work of art find resonance in the mimetic relations of
a balanced and undistorted intersubjectivity of everyday life. Habermas in
(Bernstein 1992 P33) [18]
He goes on to give an
example of how expert cultures can be appropriated 'from the perspective of the
lifeworld'. He also argues that lifeworld institutions need to be developed
free from influence from state or commerce.[19]
Aesthetic revelation must
prefigure and accompany the integration of different aspects of rationality in
the verbal form - which seems to reverse the hierarchy of discursive media
implied in TCA. But if the aesthetic cannot be a realm of universal validity
claims as Habermas states,[20] and is then reintegrated
with general communication, as he argues above, then it would seem that the
aesthetic aspect of communication does begin to undermine the universal claims
of TCA. This can be repaired if we consider ways in which aesthetic validity
claims from different places can be made reflexively transparent.
This brings up the important
problem of the supposed incommensurability of different cultures value codes.
But to what extent are different cultures incommensurable? Each of our senses
produces a perception of the world that is incommensurable with any other, yet
the joint effect of the play of the senses produces a prediscursive
synaesthesia - a synthetic appreciation of the manifold of the senses. This
manifold sensation will give us an impression of overall health, ease or well
being - if no pain or threat is implied.
A similar ability may also
allow us to metaphorically weigh up incommensurable cultural differences - at
least to the extent that we are immersed in both cultures. An idea that could
pragmatically be measured by the processes of assimilation between cultures in
the years following displacement and immigration. Processes it must be said
that at present are inevitably distorted by systemic representations.[21]
David Ingram quotes Habermas
as talking about:
A
'free interplay' 'uninhibited and balanced' - between mutually interpenetrating
cognitive interpretations, moral expectations, expressions and evaluations of
the sort capable of grounding the critique of reification. David Ingrams in
(D'Entreves & Benhabib, 1996, p275)[22]
In the end Habermas has to
appeal to aesthetic revelation to give a prefiguration of the intergration of
different aspects of rationality or of different subject positions. Richard
Beardsworth summarises Jean-Francois Lyotard's objection to this:
Habermas's
desire to articulate difference through the hegemony of cognitive judgement is
unjust to the many strands of the social fabric, which resist translation into
a common structure of language. Richard Beardsworth in (Benjamin 1992 p47)[23]
Lyotard challenges
Habermas's implied aesthetic production of an ideal social harmony with
reference to Kant's formulation of the sublime, which is an aesthetics of
dissonance, of incommensurability. For him, in a philosophical tradition in
which reason has been facade for ideological justification, all the talk of
consensus or synthesis is suggestive of tyranny or exclusion whether
totalitarian or majoritarian. It is he argues, more important to talk about
inventive dissensus.
But according to Ingrams,
Lyotard seems to agree with Habermas that:
The
dynamics of postindustrial capitalism exacerbate the problem of the one sided
cultivation of rational competences... the scientific and technological - at
the expense of the moral and expressive. David Ingram in (D'Entreves and
Benhabib 1996 p270)
The argument between Habermas
and the Postmodernists seems to come down to the connotative meanings of theory.
Postmodernists think that these are all important whilst Habermas holds out
for a coherent theoretical argument which proceeds on a denotative level.
The resultant tension seems, however, to be productive.
[1] See Jurgen Habermas' Communication and the
Evolution of Society, (Polity Press
1991 pp202 - 203)
[2] TCA cannot be applied as a formula to build democratic
institutions. See Ricardo Blaug's '7 components of the limit to theory' (Blaug,
1999, p75). A theory of communicative rationality that predefines democratic
structures would be paradoxical so any such theory cannot be prescriptive. This
is a statement that implies a rejection of ideology in the classical Marxist
sense. "I can imagine the attempt to arrange a society democratically only
as a self-controlled learning process." (Habermas 1991 p186)
Habermas is clear that
such design can only be achieved through a process of rational discourse that
includes everyone. "In a process of enlightenment there can only be
participants" (Habermas, 1974 p40) This would seem to be a solid
validation of forms of cultural production like Exploding Cinema that are both
'open access' in a formal sense and permeable to their surroundings in a
network sense.
[3] TCA1 p20. See also Habermas' Knowledge and Human
Interests (1972) for his discussion of
psychoanalysis.
[4] See Maurizio Passerin D'Entreves & Seyla Benhabib,
eds. Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: critical essays on
the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (Polity Press 1996 p240) in which Diane Coole refers to Iris Marion
Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton UP 1990)
[5] See Diana Coole in (D'Entreves & Benhabib 1996
p235). We might also refer to Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction (Routledge 1984 p56):
"In matters of
taste, more than anywhere else, all determination is negation; and tastes are
perhaps first and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral
intolerance of the tastes of others."
[6] Pierre Bourdieu (Routledge 1985 p163) admits,
"One cannot objectify the intellectual game without putting at stake one's
own stake in the game - a risk which is at once derisory and absolute."
[7] D'Entreves and Benhabib (1996 p26)
[8] D'Entreves and Benhabib (1996 p23)
[9] See Habermas' Pragmatics of Communication (1999 p335/6)
[10] D'Entreves & Benhabib (1996 p24)
[11] See Coole in D'Entreves & Benhabib (1996 p228)
[12] The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985 p323)
[13] Diana Coole in D'Entreves & Benhabib (1996 p227)
[14] Habermas in D'Entreves & Benhabib (1996 p45)
[15] TCA2 p398
[16] The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985 p51)
[17] The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985 p49)
[18] Jurgen Habermas, 'Questions and Counterquestions' in
R. Bernstein ed. Habermas and Modernity, (Polity/MIT 1992 p33 & p115-16)
[19] The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985 p52)
[20] TCA1 p42
[21] The 'Bigos, Artists of Polish Origin' project
mentioned earlier was premised on an exploration of cultural assimilation -
making choices between two sets of cultural action. The evidence of systemic
distortion in the process of assimilation are already cited in 'Polish
Migration to Britain: war, exile and mental health' by Michelle Winslow, Oral
History Journal, Spring 1999 pp 57 -
64.
[22] 'The Subject of Justice in Postmodern Discourse:
aesthetic judgement and political rationality' by David Ingram in D'Entreves
& Benhabib (1996 p275)
[23] 'On the Critical 'Post': Lyotard's agitated judgement'
by Richard Beardsworth in Andrew Benjamin, ed. Judging Lyotard (Routledge 1992)