Nmherman on Wed, 28 Nov 2001 22:46:01 +0100 (CET)


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[Nettime-bold] Suetzl versus Habermas


++

Kind of showing my stripes here, but one of my determinations with G2K is to solve the problems of utopian thinking.  I was working on this way before G2K in fact.
I think the patch works, as you might say.

I leave that to you all to judge, but saying Habermas has an "overly instrumental" view of technology or reason is plain wrong.  Habermas knows and believes Adorno's great ideas about instrumental reason as discussed in "Dialectic of Enlightenment."  It's actually Foucault and them who are the instrumental ones, and this can be very well proved. 

I read an article in the New Republic about "Walter Benjamin's Failed Messianism," in which the NR dismissed Benjamin as a hysterical wail ultimately no different from the Third Reich's belief in the messianic individual.  (And this was late 1999, this NR article.) 

I essentially spent my grad school days trying to argue that Habermas is not the instrumental one, but rather his "enemies" in the academy USA like Foucault and other postmodernists/poststructuralists. 

Long story short, I think Suetzl is saying that utopianism is instrumental and apologetic, hence morally offensive.  The NR article said essentially the same about Benjamin; the last sentence of the article was more or less "We can't afford utopianism, it's psycho; we need an ethics of responsibility."

The best inroad against S's argument is his accusation of instrumentality against Habermas.  Is Genius 2000 overly or insanely instrumental?  No, and I'll argue that anywhere they don't kick me off.

Cheers,

Max Herman

ps--Suetzl also says Habermas wants to hand everything over to "the experts," and Genius 2000 is definitely not about that.

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Subj: <nettime> Habermas on Faith, Knowledge and 9-11 
Date: 11/28/2001 2:44:55 PM Central Standard Time
From: wolfgang@t0.or.at
To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)




Brian Holmes writes:

> There are then only two alternatives, for those who continue to situate
> themselves in opposition. Either find a politically viable replacement for
> the concept of "global civil society" (with its key reference to universal
> human rights). Or find the political strength to insist on a definition of
> global civil society precisely by its capacity to seriously and
> legitimately critique the dominant judgment (and its technical
> application).
>
> I am very curious to know which option Wolfgang Suetzl chooses, and why.
> And by the way, there is no hostility whatsoever implied in this question.
> It is a genuine question, which has everything to do with what used to be
> called "socialist strategy."

Let me see if I can answer you in terms of the latter ... To me, the
Habermasian notion of a world civil society is too utopian for the 21st
century. For like all modern utopias, it immediately raises the question
of how to get from here to there,
from a "lurking state of war among sovereign nations" (Habermas) to a
well-ordered, democratically endorsed and globally effective rule of
law. This question hands political responsibility over to the experts,
i.e. to people whose actions are not legitimated democratically but by
virtue of their correspondence to technical codes presumed to be
exterior to the political domain. But the expert is not informed by the
utopia (or Kant's "regulative idea") it can only draw on existing
knowledge, i.e. knowledge that is legitimate in the "natural state"
among nations.

Such knowledge therefore classically results in rapid deployment of
high-tech technologies justified by the existing system, combined with
low politics justified by the utopia. The result is the new form of war.
It's what happened in Habermas' argumentation, and this is why I say he
can only put the argument forward because he sticks to an
instrumentalist conception of technology: it is the techno-expert system
that utopia and counter-utopia inseparable. More's "Utopia" was written
before, "1984" after the industrial revolution.

It might therefore befit a new "socialist strategy" to abandon grand
utopian schemes such as the global civil society, because only then its
socialism will be able to avoid the combined rule of the smart engineer
and the political traditionalist. The first step on this way could be a
deconstruction of the linkage between violent interventions and
universal human rights that has effectively silenced opposition to
violence and managed to fool many among the left into militarist
positions. If its violence, it is not serving human rights.

I guess this means I am leaning towards your second option, except with
a much weaker, culturally conscious definition of global civil society.
Or am I not?

Wolfgang Suetzl






 


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