On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> I'm no fan of Habermas, but if we take ideal speech conditions to mean a
> society without hierarchical social relations, isn't Tony Roberts' question
> moot, in that in such a society, neither 'Herr Doktor' nor a 'crack whore'
> is likely to exist?
As somebody else said, such a society couldn't exist--but that doesn't
matter, as far as Habermas is concerned. As long as the conditions of
ethico-political discourse are such that they are not "distorted" by power
(i.e., discourse isn't turned into a strategic game), things are all
right (at least, as right as possible). Of course, the obvious
objection from a Foucauldian standpoint is that talk of "distortion" by
power doesn't even make any sense because *all* discourse is suffused with
power ... but this objection, however important in its own right, misses
Habermas's point, because Habermas (pointedly) does not mean "power" in
the same way that Foucault does. For Habermas, under proper conditions
for discourse, "all force is to be excluded except the force of the better
argument"; that's what it means, for Habermas, for discourse to be
undistorted by power. From a Foucauldian perspective, however, "the force
of the better argument" is precisely the force one is concerned about.
By the way, as Vunch pointed out, it is true that Habermas became
embarrassed by the phrase "ideal speech situation" and renounced it,
because he thought it had fostered the kind of misreadings of his project
as the kind of utopianism which Foucault attributes to him in the
interview found in The Final Foucault. Methinks, though, that Habermas
protests too much on this point. It's a usefully succinct term, if one
makes an effort to understand what Habermas is actually up to.
Matthew
---Matthew A. King---Department of Philosophy---York University, Toronto---
"Strange as angels / Dancing in the deepest ocean"
-------------------------------(The Cure)----------------------------------