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Praxis and Ideology

25/06/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"If we want a Marxist theory of ideology… we must first make sense of the distinction between relations and forces. This means that we need a concept of praxis. In the vocabulary of Habermas, praxis includes both instrumental action and the structure of symbolic interaction. Ideology will appear as a distortion affecting one of the components of praxis. For Habermas, the concept of praxis is an attempt to recover the density of the Fichtean concept of action (Tathandlung) within a Marxist vocabulary. Labor is the source of synthesis, but human labor is always more than instrumental action because we cannot work without bringing in our traditions and our symbolic interpretation of the world. Our work also includes the institutional framework of society, because our work is defined by contrasts and other stipulations. When we work, we work within a system of conventions. We cannot define praxis only in terms of the labor techniques that we apply. Our praxis itself incorporates a certain institutional framework. Once again we see that the distinction between super-structure and infrastructure is not appropriate, because we include something of the so-called superstructure within the concept of praxis. We have then a complete reshaping of the vocabulary ordinarily used to describe praxis. We can no longer say that people first have a praxis and then have some ideas about that praxis, which is their ideology. Instead, we see that praxis incorporates an ideological layer; this layer may become distorted, but it is a component of praxis itself" (Ricoeur 1986:223).

Ricoeur, Paul
1984 Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. George H. Taylor, ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Hermeneutics and its Critique of a Positivist Unity of Science

23/05/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"For both Habermas and Apel the importance of hermeneutics lies in its critique of a positivist 'unity of science' that attempts to reduce all forms of knowledge to the model of the natural sciences. On their view, Gadamer’s merit is to have provided an account of hermeneutic understanding that both indicates the extent to which it deviates from natural scientific explanation and justifies it as an unavoidable component of social scientific inquiry. In this regard, Gadamer’s insights into effective history and the force of prejudice are crucial. They show the way in which all forms of knowledge adhere to a set of historically produced norms and conventions and hence the naivety of the claim that the natural sciences provide an unconditioned 'objective' view of their subject-matter which it is the task of the social sciences to emulate. Moreover, these insights indicate an important difference between the natural and the social sciences in so far as they reveal the 'double hermeneutic' characteristic of the latter, which Gadamer describes as an encounter or dialogue between two sets of prejudices or historical horizons. The successful conclusion of such dialogue is a mutual understanding of the subject-matter at issue that goes beyond both the views of one’s text or text-analogue and one’s own initial assumptions, prejudices and aims. In stressing this new understanding, Gadamer’s hermeneutics attempts to move beyond both the conservatism of simply adopting the views of the 'text' and the subjectivism of interpreting it as a verification of one's own prejudices. Hermeneutic understanding rather participates in the self-formation of an interpretive tradition in which each new effort to understand reflects a new education and a new form of the tradition itself.

Both Habermas and Apel criticize this analysis of tradition for its failure to reflect on the possibility of ideological distortion within the tradition's self-formation. …the problem they see is really two-fold. On the one hand, that which we are trying to understand may systematically obscure its connections to social relations of power and domination. Hence, in appropriating it hermeneutically as possibly true we may deform our own development, as, it could be argued, women did. On the other hand, our own understanding—that is the way we appropriate or take seriously that which we are trying to understand—may itself reflect the influence of ideology. In this case, what we learn from others will be deformed by the very language and categories in terms of which we understand it" (Warnke 1987:139-140).

Warnke, Georgia
1987 Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (Key Contemporary Thinkers) at Amazon.com

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Ricoeur and Historiography

01/05/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"A hypothesis then comes to mind. Does the historian, insofar as he does history by bringing it to the level of scholarly discourse, not mime in a creative way the interpretive gesture by which those who make history attempt to understand themselves and their world? This hypothesis is particularly plausible for a pragmatic conception of historiography that tries not to separate representations from the practices by which social agents set up the social bond and include multiple identities within it. If so, there would indeed be a mimetic relation between the operation of representing as the moment of doing history, and the represented object as the moment of making history.

Furthermore, historians, little habituated to situating their historical discourse in terms of the critical prolonging of personal and collective memory, are not led to bringing together these two uses of the term 'representation' in relation to what I have called a more primitive one, unless it is in the order of thematic reflection, at least as regards the constitution of the relation to time, that is, in terms of the act of remembering. This too has its ambition, its claim, that of representing the past faithfully. The phenomenology of memory, from the time of Plato and Aristotle, has proposed one key for the interpretation of the mnemonic phenomenon, namely, the power of memory to make present an absent thing that happened previously. Presence, absence, anteriority, and representation thus form the first conceptual chain of discourse about memory. The ambition of the faithfulness of memory would thus precede that of truth by history, whose theory remains to be worked out.

Can this hermeneutic key open the secret of the represented object, before penetrating that of the operation of representing?

Some historians have thought about this, without leaving behind the framework of the history of representations. Fro them, what is important is actualizing the reflective resources of social agents in their attempts to understand themselves and their world. This is the approach recommended and practiced by Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures, where as a sociologist he confines himself to conceptualizing the outlines of self-understanding immanent to a culture. The historian can also undertake to do this. But can he do so without providing the analytic instrument that this spontaneous self-understanding lacks? The answer can only be negative. Yet the work thus applied to the idea of representation does not surpass the privilege of conceptualization that the historian exercises from one end to the other of the historiographical operation, hence from reading the archives to writing the book, in passing through explanation/understanding and its literary organization. Therefore there is nothing shocking in introducing into the discourse on the represented object fragments of analysis and of definition borrowed from another discursive domain than history" (Ricoeur 2006:228-229).

Ricoeur, Paul
2006[2004] Memory, History, Forgetting. Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer, trans. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

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Memory, History, Forgetting at Amazon.com

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The Opposition Between Hermeneutics and Critique

17/04/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"The critique [of ideology] is a process of understanding that advances by means of a detour through a process of scientific explanation. This detour encompasses explanation not only of what has been repressed but of the system of repression, explanation not only of distorted content but of the system of distortion. It is because of this emphasis on systemic analysis, Habermas claims, that critical social science cannot be regarded as an extension of hermeneutics. According to Habermas, hermeneutics tries to extend the spontaneous capacity of communication without having to dismantle a system of distortion. Its concern is only local mistakes, misunderstanding, not the distortion of understanding. The model for hermeneutics is biography and philology. In biography we understand the continuity of a life on the basis of both its self-understanding and the direct understanding of others and not by digging under appearances. In philology we rely on the universal capacity of understanding based on the similarity between minds. The critical social sciences are distinctive because they allow us to make the detour required to explain the principle of distortion, a detour necessary so that we may recapture for understanding and self-understanding what in fact has been distorted.

I do not want to press to far, however, this opposition between hermeneutics and critique. I take this position for two reasons. First, I cannot conceive of a hermeneutics without a critical stage itself. This critical stage is exemplified in the development out of philology of modern structuralism and other objective approaches. Second, the critical sciences are themselves hermeneutical, in the sense that besides tending to enlarge communication they presuppose that the distortions of which they speak are not natural events but processes of desymbolization. The distortions belong to the sphere of communicative action. I try to minimize the discrepancy between a twofold and threefold division of the sciences, then, by saying that a division within the practical introduces the distinction between hermeneutic and critical social sciences. As the argument developed in the last lecture maintains, the element of critique is itself the key to the process of reestablishing communication; excommunication and the reestablishment of communication therefore belong to the practical. I do not agree with the threefold division, which tends to identify the practical with the third kind of science and isolates the second as a distinct sphere. I am therefore more and more inclined to take the conflict between Habermas and Gadamer as a secondary one. There is, of course the difference of their generations and also of their political stands. For Habermas, Gadamer is an old gentlemen who must vote on the right, and so hermeneutics represents the conservation of the past in a kind of museum. Gadamer, on the other hand, sees Habermas as the radical who made concessions to the students and was punished for it. I no longer find interesting this opposition between the two figures, because I do not see how we can have a critique without also having an experience of communication. And this experience is provided by the understanding of texts. We learn to communicate by understanding texts. Hermeneutics without a project of liberation is blind, but a project of emancipation without historical experience is empty" (Ricoeur 1984:235-237).

Ricoeur, Paul
1984 Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. George H. Taylor, ed. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Lectures on Ideology and Utopia at Amazon.com

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Functional Ideologies

22/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“Positivism is undoubtedly the most extreme manifestation of traditional theory wrapped in modern garb. Its adherence to scientism and objectivism ruthlessly excises both morality and philosophy from the domain of meaningful knowledge. Theoretically (if not practically) speaking, this exclusion is paradoxical. For positivism itself is a philosophy of science, and, as distinguished from science, it appears to be meaningless and without truth according to its own criterion of meaning and truth. Furthermore, when presented as the only philosophical legitimation of meaning and knowledge, positivism-as meaningless philosophy-fails to justify science.

This theoretical ‘crisis’-the incapacity of science to philosophically legitimate its own faith in reason, logic, meaningfulness, and methodical value-free inquiry-also has a practical (moral) dark side: nihilism. As used by Nietsche, nihilism (from the Latin nihil or nothing) refers to two interrelated phenomena: On the one hand, it refers to the apparent meaninglessness and nullity of our mundane experiences and belief in contrast with the highest and most transcendent philosophical realities-God and Reason. This contrast, however, is susceptible to a dialectical reversal once it is understood that the highest metaphysical realities are themselves utterly empty and meaningless. A similar understanding, as we have seen, is advanced by positivism. On the other hand, nihilism refers to the positive elevation fo the will to the highest reality and supreme nihilating force of being. Here Nietzsche rejects positivism: all being is illusory; nothing that presents itself in experience-not even ‘atomic facts’ possesses intrinsic meaning. In short, meanings and values are tools that the will creates and imposes on reality in its struggle to gain power over it. The positive affirmation of nihilism is therefore therapeutic: it liberates the will from all ‘presumed’ determinations and conditions; even the past is reduced to an illusion. So conceived, the supreme overcoming of limits-moral, cognitive, objective, and subjective-allows the will to embrace life as a never-ending work of art.

…critical theorists saw Nietzche’s celebration of the ‘will to power’ as a sinister harbringer for a new, all-encompassing affirmation of scientific and technological social engineering. Fascism and communism, they observed, were but the most extreme manifestations of a general totalitarian attempt to remake society ‘as a work of art.’ As in Nietzche’s philosophy, there exists a categorical distinction between the artistic ‘over-men,’ who have overcome conventional moral limits, and their subaltern subjects. The revolutionary recreation of society is a top-down affair. The administrative regimentation of modern life demands passive conformism and authoritarian deference to technological and scientific elites. Indeed, as Habermas himself has remarked on more than one occasion, in an age in which we increasingly turn to the state for securing our welfare, science and technology themselves become ideological. Seeking leeway to manage a complex capitalist economy without aggravating class conflicts, the welfare state cannot afford to risk a divisive debate on the moral justice of its redistribution of wealth. Accordingly, the positivist elimination of morality and the accompanying reduction of practical problems to technological problems become, in their own way, the functional ideologies by which the masses are maintained in their passivity” (Ingram 2010:41-42).

Ingram, David
2010 Habermas: Introduction and Analysis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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