Habermas continued...
Adrian Johnston (rdm9298@jeeves.la.utexas.edu)
Tue, 28 Nov 1995 14:53:30 -0600
Under Habermas' system, it seems very
difficult to determine at all whether "the
Intellectual" speaks for the state (since
the media and opinion-makers have
robbed the government and politicians
of any pure voice) or for the civil society/
masses (they too have had their voices
mutated through the screen of media
image representations). With the lines
of division/struggle so unclear, Habermas
forces a total re-evaluation of conceptions
of intellectuals.
There are several parallels that can
be drawn between Habermas' Kantian
vision of social discourse and Foucault's
notion of the "particular intellectual."
The first similarity has already been de-
veloped; both Habermas and Foucault
overturn the Hegelian dialectic's move-
ment whereby all elements of the social
body consolidate in the idealized Idea of
the State. For both of these authors, such
a pure unity is both too abstract to account
for the multiplicity of forces at work in
social reality, and is simply inapplicable
to contemporary Western societies given
historical shifts since Hegel's time.
Secondly, Habermas' transformation
of concepts such as civil society, the public
sphere, etc. into procedural discursive
structures from their old characterizations
as pre-existent, "real world" phenomena
seems startlingly similar to Foucault's
statements that "the Intellectual" is not so
much an actual type of person who exists
extra-discursively, but is instead the site
of many demands and injunctions put
forth by a plethora of other individuals
and institutions in society. For Habermas,
the public sphere is the ethically necessary
counterpart (in a practically realized form
of the Kantian categorical imperative at
work in public discourse) of the universal-
ization of critical-rational debate. It isn't
an ontological being, but a procedural
process that enables the categorical imper-
ative to move beyond subjective/internal
contemplation to actualized reflection in
its dissemination through a social body.
Foucault's "particular intellectual" arises
from a similar discursive-disseminative
process; the localized struggles and issues
that such an intellectual deals with gain
wider scope and relevance via a vis their
dissolution into a variety of other social
contexts beyond the immediacies
surrounding the site of authorial pro-
duction. Foucault's intellectual moves
closer to Habermas' imperative for public-
ly universalized discourse in that his/her
texts/thinking is capable of generating
effects beyond their necessarily limited
social place as an individual thanks to
such things as the publication and cir-
culation of textual material to a public
beyond the closed academic circle.
Additionally, Habermas' argument
that Kantian discourse ethics automatic-
ally presupposes/creates a public sphere
allows "the Intellectual" to now be viewed
as something more than just the product
of larger social entities (Hegel's intellectal
as a product of the Idea of the State,
Gramsci's "organic intellectual" as the pro-
duct of a socio-economic class, etc.). In-
stead, like Foucault, Habermas perhaps
sees that those called "intellectuals" are
capable not only of being the products of
the interests of others, but can also exert
and/or create these social class interests,
ideas of states, etc. through the power of
their discourse and its dissemination.
This counter-effect to the traditional
shaping of intellectuals by Habermas is
akin to the claims by which he demon-
strates that the media isn't just a transpar-
ent screen-reflector for either the state or
civil society, but instead that it also has the
capacity to shape/define both of these
entities and their corresponding concep-
tions of their identities. Both Habermas
and Foucault struggle to reach a compro-
mise where "the Intellectual" isn't just
either the depersonalized product of larger
social forces (the voice of Reason or of a
class) or the absolute identity of a person,
but instead is the site of a variety of
processes (both a contextualized/shaped
individual, a shaper of others through
disseminated discourse, a term that con-
fers demands and expectations on its sig-
nified individual, etc.).
Just as Habermas can view the public
sphere and rational-critical debate as eth-
ico-philosophical ideals, so too can his
arguments be used to help revise trad-
itional characterizations of intellectuals.
Despite the many differences stressed be-
tween Foucault and Habermas in the sec-
ondary literature, they do share the idea in
common that such terms as "intellectual"
represent more of a demand for the pro-
duction of a certain type/mode of public
discourse (i.e.- procedural/ethical de-
mands), as opposed to a pre-public, onto-
logical status that overdetermines the
personal being of an individual.
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