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On the Logic of the Performative Contradiction: Habermas and the Radical Critique of Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Martin Morris
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Extract

Jürgen Habermas levels the charge of performative contradiction as a scathing rebuke of inconsistency in his recent engagements with post-Nietzschean and Frankfurt critical theory. Focusing on this aspect of Habermas's critique of Theodor W. Adorno, the article argues against Habermas that Adorno's radical critique of reason actually pursues consistency in its radical critique of reason. It is contended that while Adorno's radical critique of reason may be total, it is not thereby hopeless and “aporetic” as critique. At root Adorno's critical theory may embody a “performative contradiction,” but this does not mean his project is necessarily incoherent or inconsistent.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 58 , Issue 4 , Fall 1996 , pp. 735 - 760
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1996

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References

1 For a survey collection of recent work on the radical critique of traditional philosophical endeavor and proposals for its transformation, see Baynes, Kenneth, Bohman, James and McCarthy, Thomas, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1987)Google Scholar. For a recent and comprehensive historical treatment of the Frankfurt School, see Wiggershaus, Rolf, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political Significance (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1994).Google Scholar

2 Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Cumming, John (New York: Continuum, 1972 ]1947[).Google Scholar

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4 Knodt has recently examined performative contradiction from the perspective of systems theory in an article that complements the argument presented here. Knodt, Eva, “Toward a Non-Foundationalist Epistemology: the Habermas/Luhmann Controversy Revisited,” New German Critique 61 (1994): 77–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For example, a radical critique of reason purporting to show that there exist no theoretical or philosophical “foundations” that can secure the “rationality” of reason beyond its historical, and therefore particular embodiment, nevertheless performs a “rational” critique by doing so and hence is said to involve a “performative” contradiction of inconsistency.

6 Habermas, Jürgen, “Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity—Self-Affirmation Gone Wild,” in Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983 ]1969[), p. 106.Google Scholar

7 See McCarthy, Thomas, “Rationality and Relativism: Habermas's ‘Overcoming’ of Hermeneutics,” in Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. Thompson, J. B. and Held, D. (London: Macmillan, 1982).Google Scholar

8 Jay, , “Debate over Performative Contradiction,” pp. 264–65, 267.Google Scholar

9 In his recent work Habermas has described this change of theory as a paradigm shift from what he describes as the “philosophy of consciousness” to that of linguistic philosophy or, more accurately, the theory of communicative action. An adequate consideration of this large topic is outside the present focus.

10 See Apel, K-O., “The Problem of Philosophical Foundations in Light of a Transcendental Pragmatics of Language,” in Baynes, et al. , After Philosophy, pp. 250–90, p. 276ff.Google Scholar

11 Ibid; and Apel, , “Is the Ethics of the Ideal Communication Community a Utopia? On the Relationship between Ethics, Utopia, and the Critique of Utopia,” in The Communicative Ethics Controversy, ed. Benhabib, S. and Dallmayr, F. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 23–59.Google Scholar

12 Habermas, Jürgen, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Trans. Lenhardt, Christian and Nicholsen, Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1990), pp. 80–81.Google Scholar

13 Ibid, pp. 93–94; for Habermas's explicit criticism of Apel, see pp. 95–96.

14 The more emphatic distinction between the German überzeugen and überreden compared to that between “convince of” and “talk into” is mentioned in a translation note to Moral Consciousness.

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17 Habermas's social theory, while in some ways reminiscent of Rousseau, is nevertheless opposed to and distinct from the latter in important and essential ways. See Bernstein, J. M., Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), chapter 4.Google Scholar

18 Habermas, , Moral Consciousness, pp. 202–203.Google Scholar

19 Ibid, p. 100.

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22 Ibid, pp. 118, 68–69.

23 McCarthy, Thomas, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. 108.Google Scholar

24 Yet this is a characterization that is mentioned and tacitly accepted by Jay in his essay and by others sympathetic to Habermas's critique of Adorno. See Jay, , “Debate over Performative Contradiction,” p. 263Google Scholar, and Benhabib's, Seyla critique of Adorno in her Critique, Norm and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 169.Google Scholar

25 Horkheimer, and Adorno, , Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 27Google Scholar. Translation altered.

26 Habermas, , Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, p. 379Google Scholar (emphasis added).

27 Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, E. B. (New York: Continuum, 1973 [1966]), p. 177Google Scholar. Translation altered.

28 Ibid, p. 146. Translation altered.

29 Adorno, Theodor W., “Zum Verhältnis vom Soziologie und Psychologie,” in Gesammelte Schriften 8, p. 51.Google Scholar

30 Adorno, , Negative Dialectics, pp. 33–34Google Scholar. Translation altered.

31 Ibid, p. 11. Translation altered.

32 Ibid, p. 163.

33 Adorno, Theodor W., “Introduction,” in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Adey, Glyn and Frisby, David (London: Heinemann, 1976), p. 27.Google Scholar

34 A psychoanalytic dimension is in the background of Adomo's critical theory. But as an indication of Adomo's unwillingness to define substantively repressed subjectivity, he limits himself to references to a “life-force” [Lebendige] or just to plain “life” in many cases.

35 Adorno, , Negative Dialectics, p. 15Google Scholar. Translation altered.

36 Bernstein, Jay, “Art Against Enlightenment: Adorno's Critique of Habermas,” in The Problems of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 55.Google Scholar

37 This claim by Habermas is of course very contentious, since for some avowed post-Nietzscheans like Connolly and Connolly's Foucault, developing a “constructive theory” (distinguished from merely a “deconstructive theory”) is in fact a centrally important task. See Connolly, William E., Identity \ Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 57–63.Google Scholar

38 Habermas, Jürgen, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jürgen Habermas (London: Verso, 1986), p. 156.Google Scholar

39 SeeHabermas, Jürgen, “Philosophy as Stand-In and Interpreter,” in Moral Consciousness, pp. 1–20.Google Scholar

40 Habermas, , Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 1, p. 317.Google Scholar

41 Adorno, , Negative Dialectics, pp. 35–36Google Scholar. Translation altered.

42 Ibid, p. 149. Translation altered.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid, p. 241.

45 “The process in which the individual becomes independent, the function of exchange society, terminates in the abolition of the individual through integration. What produced freedom changes into unfreedom. … On the other hand, in the age of universal social oppression the image of freedom against society lives only in the features of the mistreated or crushed individual. … Freedom becomes concrete in the changing forms of repression: in resistance to these forms” (Ibid, pp. 262, 265). Translation altered.

46 Dallmayr, Fred R., “Appendix: Lifeworld and Communicative Action,” in Polis and Praxis: Exercises in Contemporary Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1984), p. 239.Google Scholar

47 Adorno's concept of “nonidentical subjectivity” is at odds with the Habermasian “intersubjective” subjectivity, despite the latter's quite clear difference to the traditional notion of constitutive subjectivity. Perhaps most importantly, the difference of Adorno's concept has to do with the absence of the need to refer in his theory to the idea of the “ideal communication community.” Honneth has extended the Habermasian concept of intersubjectivity in directions that clearly delineate it from traditional notions, but do not essentially change its dependence on the linguistically-mediated claims of communicative action, that is, on the need for recognition such claims raise. See Honneth, Axel, The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).Google Scholar

48 Adomo, , Negative Dialectics, p. 185.Google Scholar