What Habermas has done to hermeneutic philosophy is important nonetheless. He suggests that it has overemphasized the likelihood of fully mutual and consensual understanding of the spontaneous exercise of rational control. Actors are imbedded in social arrangements that systematically distort communication in ways of which they cannot be fully aware. On these grounds, Habermas argues that rational understanding must also be exercised, and often is, in a more self-conscious and less spontaneous way than through the exercise of understanding alone. This leads Habermas from hermeneutics as such -- even when it is rightly understood -- to a historically grounded advocacy of social science theory. In pursuit of theory, Habermas rephrases Gadamer's approach to traditional rationality in a manner that emphasizes its impersonality. Because `reflexivity and objectivity are fundamental traits of language,' he writes, hermeneutics is actually suggesting that `pre-understanding can be thematized.' Through self-reflection, `interpretive schemes ... are formulated in everyday language ... which both enable and pre-judge the making of experiences.' Self-reflection, thematization, and interpretive schematization are interpretive practices that will at some point be applied to themselves: `The rational reconstruction of a system of linguistic rules ... is undertaken with the aim of explaining linguistic competence' (1987: 177-9).
Derrida and Foucault supply the deep justification for such poststructural argument. Whereas Bourdieu seems blithely to exempt himself from his own relativizing strictures, Derrida (1981) has insisted that the knower is simply a literate bricoleur. Reality, in turn, can be nothing other than a text, a symbolic construction that is itself related to other texts -- not to history or social structure -- in arbitrary ways. Indeed, texts cannot themselves be accepted as representations, even of arbitrarily signified referents. Composed not just of presences but of absences, texts do not exist as complete wholes.
Foucault's second critique is an analytical one. In his later work he insists on the virtually complete identity of knowledge, or discourse, with power. In doing so, the very possibility of decentered experience is denied. The subject, Foucault is fond of repeating, is completely constituted by discourse. In this way, discourse becomes both the basis for power and merely its manifestation in another form. Because truth is relative to discourse, it is impossible to appeal to universalizing standards against worldly power: `Truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power.... Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true' (Foucault 1980: 131). To set about rationally to evaluate the logical consistency, theoretical implications, or explanatory value of a given discourse is obviously a waste of time.
The simple and dangerous dichotomy is firmly set. The only alternative to the fallacy of absent reason, to positivism, is a thoroughly relativist sociology of knowledge, an archeology of the historical conditions of discourse.
Alexander J.C. (1995) General Theory in the Postpositivist Mode: The Epistemological Dilemma and the Search for Present Reason by Jeffrey C. Alexander, in Fin de Siecle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of Reason. [by] (Verso, New York, NY). pp. 90-127.
Alexander resorts to post positivism? to escape the dilemma/crisis of materialism v absolute relativism
Is the dilemma a product of language games not of actual lived experience...
As all there are are language games...
Will language evolve in the direction of responsibility in a closer representation of the self similar complementary aspects of our multileveled nature... i.e. beyond the excluded middle...
Eagletons discussion of Ideology in "What is Ideology?" where he dismisses the deconstructionists attempts to avoid closure as not practical gives us an insight into the problems with language and capital... some of us are getting paid to produce and move language , some are getting paid to produce and move objects ..(not necessarily the same amounts)
Yet it is clear that forcing closure can be an ideological tool used to repress and trap people into the instrumental when driven by an economic system detached from social needs. A response to this is derive.(Debord)..
Space for public discussion of rationality (Habermas,) that includes, not excludes it's complimentary opposite 'limb' for example the derive (Debord) *is an example of the extension of rationality (Derrida) ( away from the imposed reductionist flat plane, a simplification convenient to the coders/coding of the flat binary database** and those who 'benefit' from their implementation), in the direction of the complimentary, self similar, natural...
the (extension of) the dialectic?
perhaps it could be argued the 'irrational' inevitably finds its way through the logical exclusions and boundaries*(), but the well financed efforts to construct walled enclosures around various 'expert communities' perhaps suggest many believe otherwise...
* similar to the way the bWo (Deleuze) mirrors the 'oWb' that is a culture driven by the hegemony of instrumental rationality (See notes on this post)
**a simplification but the tendency towards classification via binary categories is an issue with potentially serious consequences in the context of fixing (arbitrary and profitable) oppositional subject positions...
*** Eagleton (ibid) offers a discussion of those theorists who believe discourses have boundaries and those (Lacal and Mouffe) who do not....?
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