Mimesis and Reason

Gregg Daniel Miller

Description

Complicating the standard interpretation of Habermas as a proceduralist, Mimesis and Reason uncovers the role that mimesis, or imitation, plays as a genuinely political force in communicative action. Through a penetrating examination of Habermas's use of themes and concepts from Plato, George Herbert Mead, and Walter Benjamin, Gregg Daniel Miller reconstructs Habermas's theory to reveal a new, postmetaphysical articulation of reason that lays the groundwork for new directions in political theory.
Preface

Introduction

1. Reason and Mimesis

I. The Postmetaphysical Condition of Reason
II. Mimesis
III. Mimesis Against Disenchantment
IV. Mimesis as Re-Enchantment?
V. Toward a Reconstruction of Communicative Action

2. Mimesis in Communicative Action: Habermas and Plato

I. Modernity and its Anti-Mimetic Cogito
II. Divine Mimesis
III. Prosaic Mimesis
IV. Poetic Mimesis
V. The Manner of Mimesis
VI. The Grammar of Mimesis
VII. Toward the Affective Bond of Understanding

3. The Subject in Communicative Action: Habermas and George Herbert Mead

I. Two Phases of the Self: I and Me
II. The Individuated  Self
III. From Play to Game
IV. From Image to Symbol
V. I the Artist
VI. Mead’s Anti-mimesis
VII. Habermas’ Intersubjective Ego

4. The Experience of Mimesis: Habermas and Walter Benjamin

I. Weberian Pneuma
II. Experience
III. Lament for Experience (Erfahrung) Lost
IV. Shock and Wisdom in Postauratic Experience
V. Postauratic Experience as Mimesis in Language
VI. Habermas’s Benjaminian Experience
VII. Conclusions

Coda: Habermas and the Affective Bond of Understanding

Notes

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Éthique et morale
• Esthétique et philosophie de l'art
• Ethique et morale
• History of philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 23 septembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438437415
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Mimesis and Reason
Habermas's Political Philosophy
GREGG DANIEL MILLER

Cover photo by Gregg Daniel Miller
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2011 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Miller, Gregg Daniel, 1967–
Mimesis and reason : Habermas's political philosophy / Gregg Daniel Miller.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3739-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Political science—Philosophy. 2. Habermas, Jürgen—Political and social views. I. Title.
JA71.M458 2011
320.01—dc22                                                                                                                                                    2011004019
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Preface
Under the broad rubric of modernity, postmodernity, and the democratic imaginary in a postsocialist age, a certain set of normative questions—together with the question of whether normativity can be asserted at all—motivates the studies of many political theorists and philosophers working today: What secular sensibility can govern the legitimate exercise of power in the modern age? Can any particular political body in an age of pluralism have confidence that its moral values are born of more than historical inertia but less than pure will to power? I will take up these questions in providing an assessment and reconstruction of a particular theory of communication found in the writings of Jürgen Habermas.
In doing so, I will work toward refiguring critical theory's self-conception where, presently, a theory of communication is understood to provide a merely procedural account of communication deployed for the purpose of testing the normative validity of speech-acts. Against the conception of communicative action as a principally negative pursuit, I will argue that critical theory needs (and, to a great degree, already has) a theory of reaching understanding that entails not only the testing of the manner of raising validity claims, but in addition, incorporates within it resources to appreciate how the scene of communicating is a vital experience that alters persons so engaged in conversation. This duality of the scene of speech—its negative testing function, and its positive, productive one—has important, cautionary implications for claims concerning the way that the democratic form of conversation is supposed to protect the moral character of its process. It is better, I argue, for critical theory to squarely confront the fundamentally illiberal phenomenology of reaching understanding, an event that esoterically partakes of the mimetic tradition of affective experience as much as it exoterically embraces the rationalist, Enlightenment tradition.
In his major work, The Theory of Communicative Action , and in his subsequent development of a discourse ethics, Habermas has aimed to disclose certain moral intentions posited as always already at work in communication under conditions of modernity, where communication itself offers up the promise of moral engagement in a secular, democratic, postmetaphysical age. It is to the structure of language and the practice of communication that Habermas has turned, for if in modernity the rationality of action cannot pretend to a correspondence with an extra-mundane referent (e.g., God's plan), then the use of reason, which is to say, logos in action, has only itself to fall back on: The practice of language itself must offer up the moral norms that it takes for its own guide. Under the name of “communicative rationality,” Habermas has developed this intuition concerning the productive dialectic between norms and action through an engagement with and consolidation among eclectic theories of language, truth, morality, and action that answers pragmatically to the requirements of democratic mores.
The text that follows addresses both Habermas's principal achievements and shortcomings in an attempt to reconstruct his theory of communicative action. In tracing Habermas's positive contribution concerning the way in which participants are bound to one another in communicative action, I will examine his appropriations and reworkings of themes and concepts from various philosophers and theorists, principally, Theodor Adorno, Plato, George Herbert Mead, and Walter Benjamin. This panel of thinkers represents Habermas's sounding board for developing his theory of the experience of understanding in the process of communication.
In an extended examination of his intellectual sources, I will show that root and branch Habermas's theory of reason is haunted by its constitutive other—the concept of mimesis . 1 Wherever one looks in his massive published output, reason appears either in opposition to mimesis or as a formulation aimed at succeeding and replacing mimesis. Although Habermas is far from unaware of the significance of mimesis posed against his theory of communicative action, he never explicitly probes how consequential an examination of mimesis and communicative action together might prove to be for communicative action.
To the contrary, Habermas's explicit approach (especially in his later work on discourse ethics) has been to sacrifice mimesis to the benefit of the formal and procedural aspect of communication. Indeed, Habermas has been criticized as overly proceduralist, but I believe this criticism is unfounded, and principally true only to the extent that it applies to Habermas's own positioning of his theory. The substance of his theory is another matter, for the binding power of communication falls out of any depiction of communicative action as merely abstract procedure. What remains underdeveloped in Habermas's self-accounting is the specific nature in which a critical theory of communication can rely on a modern normativity in determinate relation with the way that communication binds people to one another politically. What must be pursued in thinking communication, mimesis and normativity together are potential tensions or misalignments between the rationality of the process of argument and its mimetic mode .
This is not, of course, to say that we can forego a theory of argumentative procedure. A theory of argumentative procedure is necessary to articulate the democratic norm to which communicative action answers, but as I shall argue, the legitimacy of power in the modern age concerns not only the giving and taking of reasons in argument. In the course of coming to understanding in argument, participants come to be affectively engaged with one another; conversation itself produces the affect that binds together speakers. The centrality of affective engagement to a concept of understanding, I will argue, shifts the burden of Habermas's program from talk of procedure against affect to an examination of how and to what extent affective engagement is either dependent on or is indifferent to matters of right procedure. If affective engagement takes on a cognitive character, then the merely preparatory conceptual opposition between affect and logos must be transcended in the figure of communicative action.
If talking and arguing have nothing but a critical function, a testing function, then there is little hope that the right practice of communication can address what Habermas has diagnosed, following Max Weber, as modernity's most significant problem, the depletion of meaning in the modern lifeworld. What must be further developed in theoretical terms is the positive and productive force of communicative action which, when understood properly, must be asserted as communicative action's illiberal underside. Only in thinking about the positive, productive character of communicative action can we take seriously the affirmative answer Habermas presumably wishes to give to his rhetorical question “whether or not the social integrative powers of the religious tradition shaken by enlightenment can find an equivalent in the unifying, consensus-creating power of reason” ( Habermas 1985c, 197 ). 2 The necessary, but neglected other side of communication—its action, its communicative power—has been underplayed for good reason, for it poses a significant challenge to the moral status of the critical intent behind the characterization of communicative action as structurally democratic. It then becomes a question for us as to whether and in what way the two aspects of communicative action, its critical and creative energies, interact. I aim to articulate how the ambivalent relation between the critical and creative aspects of communicative action comes to the fore in two conjoined aspects of the practice of communication: in the context of Habermas's theory of the self and in the world-disclosing aspect of language.
A theory of the self and of intersubjectivity is the necessary correlate to Habermas's attempt at developing a theory of communication as the basis for moral action, for the worth of communication as a moral force lies not only in the nature of what is discussed but in the effect discussion has on participants. Habermas's theoretical work on the nature of the self, however, has taken two incompatible directions, a problem that needs to be addressed for any successful reconstruction of his theory. On the one hand, in his more liberal moments, Habermas asserts the inviolability of autonomous speaking subjects, asserting an autonomy that