|
|
|
 by Brian Milstein Submitted originally as a final paper for the course "Critical Theory I: Habermas," Fall 2002, at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, Richard J. Bernstein, Instructor Cite as: Milstein, Brian. "Globalization and the Project of Modernity." Unpublished paper, New School for Social Research, New York (accessed on [DATE] at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/habermas.html).
There have been debates over the past few decades, which have sharpened over the course of the 1990s, over the continued status of the nation-state as the structural building block of the global political system. Traditional international relations theory describes the state system as an assortment of independent rationally-minded actors that interact with each other on a primarily strategic basis, each in pursuit of its own political, military, or economic interests. The international system is a kind of "ordered anarchy," with no centralized locus of authority, but whose members' actions are nonetheless given a semblance of self-regulation through the reciprocal balancing of predictable rational-choice strategies. Yet many are making the claim that this system is heading toward obsolescence. Susan Strange (1996) argues that the state is being forced into "retreat" by the unregulatable expansion of markets across national borders. Innovations in technology and finance have allowed for an unprecedented increase in transnational economic activity, such that capital flows and business practices can no longer be regulated from within the domestic sphere -- on the contrary, Strange argues that it is transnational economic networks that are determining domestic policies: "Where states were once masters of markets, now it is the markets which, on many crucial issues, are masters over the governments of states. And the declining authority of states is reflected in a growing diffusion of authority to other institutions and associations, and to local and regional bodies, and in a growing asymmetry between the larger states with structural power and weaker ones without it" (Strange 1996, 4). Many of the functions entrusted to legitimated governments are being softly usurped by transnational corporations, telecommunications networks, mafia organizations, and international government organizations. From this perspective, the picture of a world neatly jigsawed into an assortment of independent territorial polities no longer suffices. Strange fears that the declining ability of governments to regulate economic matters may undermine democratic legitimacy (Strange 1996, 197). Describing what he calls "the postnational constellation," Jürgen Habermas argues that globalization processes are threatening not just the regulatory powers of the nation-state but the very bases of cultural and political solidarity upon which it is built. Globalization challenges the state's ability to prioritize an equitable domestic policy, its territorial integrity, its collective identity, and its political legitimacy. Like Strange, Habermas sees a danger to the administrative resources (revenues) of state governments in a radical expansion of markets that no longer obey territorial boundaries: "Increased capital mobility makes the state's access to profits and monetary wealth more difficult, and heightened local competition reduces the state's capacity to collect taxes. The mere threat of capital flight touches off a tax-cutting spiral (and hinders national tax enforcement agencies from imposing valid laws)" (Habermas 2001, 69). This loss of regulatory efficiency comes, moreover, in an era where risks of ecological damage and high-tech catastrophe (e.g., Chernobyl) are of increasing importance and by their very nature not always controllable within a territorial framework. To be sure, interdependence implies that people are becoming more and more affected by decisions of collective actors aside from their own government, such as transnational associations and even other states (Habermas 2001, 70-1). "Legitimation gaps" are opening due in part to the frequency with which decisions are being made by actors not accountable to the procedural constraints of democratic legitimation. In addition, globalization processes seem to undermine peoples' understandings of their own collective identities, that is, the forms of social integration and cultural self-understandings that allow a people to see itself as "a nation," which Habermas sees as happening in two ways: first, by the increasing pluralization of societies due to waves of transnational migration, and second, by the culturally leveling effects of global consumerism and mass culture, exported mainly from Europe and America: The same consumer goods and fashions, the same films, television programs, and best-selling music and books spread across the globe; the same fashions in pop, techno, or jeans size and shape the mentalities of young people in even the most far-flung places; the same language, English assimilated in a variety of ways, serves as a medium for understanding between the most radically different dialects. The clocks of Western civilization keep the tempo for the compulsory simultaneity of the non simultaneous. This commidified, homogeneous culture doesn't just impose itself on distant lands, of course; in the West too, it levels out even the strongest national differences, and weakens even the strongest local traditions. (Habermas 2001, 75)Habermas fears that such effects diminish the cultural resources that maintain the historical congruence of national collective identity and democratic solidarity. These processes seem to be wearing away the effectiveness of democratic politics as a means to provide steering for social change; losses in civic solidarity and administrative capacity contribute to the surrender of public consciousness to market imperatives, as money replaces power as the steering medium of societies (Habermas 2001, 78). Habermas does not believe globalization necessarily entails the exhaustion of modernity's political project but rather its transformation. Drawing on Karl Polanyi, he sees the processes of liberal expansion that began in the aftermath of the Second World War as the dawn of a second modernity, burgeoning out of the achievements and liabilities of a "first modernity" organized within the framework of the nation-state (Habermas 2001, 86). Habermas's gaze is from the perspective of the European welfare state in the Western sociological tradition -- the problem is the apparent disintegration of the one-on-one relationship of states to societies that was formerly thought to be guaranteed by the nation-state. This increasing discrepancy between societal boundaries and political steering mechanisms results in a corresponding mismatch of imperatives on the sides of both system and social integration. On the one hand, "functional" integration across national boundaries undermines the administrative efficiency of the nation-state and its ability to make sovereign decisions. On the other, the pluralization of societies, the homogenizing effects of mass culture, and the release of interaction from its territorial confines seem to call into question the forms of social solidarity that were presumed to underlie political legitimacy. The specter of globalization, Habermas fears, is leading to a general loss of trust in the emancipatory power of politics, due to a failure to recognize the new constellation of conflicts as "political challenges" (Habermas 2001, 59-60). In what follows, I would like to characterize the nature and tasks of this new paradigm of modernity, presented in critical light of the work of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas himself seems to recognize that this new constellation, even if perceived as challenges, problematizes even his own work. I would argue nevertheless that Habermas's contribution will continue to play an important role in how we can come to terms with the challenges of the coming age. As a takeoff point for thinking about these challenges, it would be useful to explore what is meant by the term "modernity." | |||
|
It is important to understand how Habermas construes the "project of modernity" as the format of a problem set that came into currency in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The accomplishment of the philosophy of history lies in a distinctive understanding of the present in relation to the relativity of past and future. Modernity is connoted in its self-asserted novelty in relation to a procession of historical time, which "becomes experienced as a scarce resource for the mastery of problems that arise" (Habermas 1987b, 6). Michel Foucault locates the philosophical spirit of modernity in Kant's article on "What Is Enlightenment?," which for Foucault definitively poses "the question of the present as the philosophical event to which the philosopher who speaks of it belongs" (Foucault 1994b, 140). Modernity, as the aftershock of Enlightenment, is offered up as "the problematization of a present" that is at once broken off from its past and opened up to the immanent teleology of an "epochal new beginning" (Foucault 1994b, 141; Habermas 1987b, 6). While differing on small details, both Foucault and Habermas see the philosophical condition of modernity as an experience inebriated by an incorrigible self-reflexivity. For Habermas, this experience takes on a programmatic shape in the philosophy of history: The dynamic concepts that either emerged together with the expression "modern age" or "new age" in the eighteenth century or acquired then a new meaning that remains valid down to our day are adapted to this -- words such as revolution, progress, emancipation, development, crisis, and Zeitgeist. These expressions also became key terms in Hegelian philosophy. They cast conceptual-historical light on the problem posed for the modern historical consciousness of Western culture that had developed in connection with the oppositional concept of a "new age": Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its normativity out of itself. Modernity sees itself cast back upon itself without any possibility of escape. This explains the sensitiveness of its self-understanding, the dynamism of the attempt, carried forward incessantly down to our time, to "pin itself down." (Habermas 1987b, 7)Implicit in the modernity problematic is the relation of the continuity of historical time to the autonomy of the moral person. Normative categories take on a significance not of faithfulness or reaction to tradition -- to the world received -- but of forward-looking world creation. The philosophical discourse of modernity, according to Habermas, is the outcome of the social subject's coming into awareness of its place in the process of a universal history and so acquiring the capacity to become its author. The very "directive" of modernity arises from this self-awareness and dynamism, and those who find themselves implicated in the experience of modernity do so not merely as its subjects but as its participants. Habermas finds this poignantly reflected in the constitution of the aesthetic realm as an autonomous sphere, which casts the artistic endeavor in connection with the practice of art criticism, and so is "explicitly constituted as a project" (Habermas 1997a, 47; Habermas 1987b, 8). Baudelaire is the central figure in Habermas's conception of the aesthetic experience of modernity, which "fuses with the historical": In the fundamental experience of aesthetic modernity, the problem of self-grounding becomes acute, because here the horizon of temporal experience contracts to the decentered subjectivity that splits away from the conventions of everyday life. For this reason, he assigns to the modern work of art a strange place at the intersection of the axes of the actual and the eternal: "Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one-half of art, the other being the eternal and immovable." A self-consuming actuality, which forfeits the extension of a transition period, of a most recent period constituted at the center of the new age (and lasting several decades), becomes the reference point of modernity. The actual present can no longer gain its self-consciousness from opposition to an epoch rejected and surpassed, to a shape of the past. Actuality can be constituted only as the point where time and eternity intersect. (Habermas 1987b, 8-9)The irreducible actuality of the aesthetic experience claims the moment as an absolute, constituting itself through an expression of undeniable authenticity. This radical self-definition of the present opens up a space in which the historical participant can autonomously interpret her relationship to past and future. The experience of the modern becomes bound up with a conception of history as a resource for determining one's expectations for the future out of one's own present. Without relying on a lasting significance as a future tradition, the present immortalizes itself "as the authentic past of a future present," as a moment of time-conscious transformation that embraces its novelty as a decisive break with convention: "It is this consciousness that expresses itself in the spatial metaphor of the avant-garde -- that is, an avant-garde that explores hitherto unknown territory, exposes itself to the risk of sudden and shocking encounters, conquers an as yet undetermined future, and must therefore find a path for itself in previously uncharted domains" (Habermas 1997a, 40). For Habermas, the experience of aesthetic modernity reflects the tone of the normative project of modernity. The disintegration of the unity of knowledge and faith over the course of the Reformation and the Enlightenment is signaled in the reestablishment of the formal unity of knowledge in the critique of reason, first embarked upon by Kant (Habermas 1987b, 18-9). Kant's project illustrates the division of reason into its cognitive, practical, and aesthetic moments, which constitute the value spheres of the modern age. It is Hegel, however, who formulates the "diremptions" of knowing, acting, and expressing as a "fundamental problem" of modern philosophy -- indeed, as the philosophical problem of modernity qua modernity. The concept of subjectivity, Habermas writes, captures for Hegel the problematic of the modern individual's need to reconcile the thoroughgoing autonomy of one's "actually present will" with the experience of an age that has taken upon itself the task of no longer relying on past models -- the need for "self-reassurance" (Habermas 1987b, 16-7). For Habermas, the modern condition is to be sure a kind of task or project, but one which arises out of modernity's epochal situation following the triumph of the power of reason and the diremption into its moments. Foucault rejoins that the epochal opposition Habermas attributes as the defining characteristic of the modern experience cannot be separated from a correlated ethical opposition. Reflecting on Kant's famous essay on Enlightenment, he writes: I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by "attitude," I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the "modern era" from the "premodern" or "postmodern," I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formulation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of "countermodernity." (Foucault 1984a, 39)Like Habermas, Foucault looks to Bauldelaire as an exemplar for this so-called "attitude." But Foucault is hesitant to situate the modernity of the aesthetic expressly through the lens of the philosophy of history. On one hand, he accepts the significance of the debate of the ancients and the moderns, insofar as it posits the question of where the present age is to derive its model; moreover, the axis of past versus present impresses the question of progress or decline: "Are the Ancients superior to the Moderns? Are we living in a period of decline, and so forth?" (Foucault 1994b, 141). But Foucault seems to reverse the relationship that Habermas presents between the character of modernity and its capacity for self-reassurance, by shifting the emphasis from Hegel back to Kant, from the philosophy of history to the spirit of Enlightenment: "It would no doubt be one of the interesting axes for a study of the eighteenth century in general, and of the Aufklärung in particular, to consider the following fact: the Aufklärung calls itself Aufklärung. It is certainly a very singular cultural process that became aware of itself by naming itself, by situating itself in relation to its past and future, and by designating the operations that it must carry out within its own present" (Foucault 1994b, 141-2). Foucault's Nietzschean leanings no doubt inform his hesitancy to appraise modernity as a "meaningful" historical entity as such (see, for example, Foucault 1984b, 56-7). Rather, the historical identity of modernity follows from the ethical -- from the will to confront the present as is but in a way that usurps and transfigures it. He is suspect of the association that Habermas makes between modernity and "fashion," which Foucault asserts "does no more than call into question the course of time; modernity is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of the present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the fleeting present; it is the will to 'heroize' the present" (Foucault 1984a, 39-40). This "heroization," however, does not consist so much in how one receives the present as how one exposes it; Foucault thus states that the heroization is "ironical." The "poetry within history" that Bauldelaire sees as extricable in fashion lies not merely in locating and exploiting the kernel of eternal reality in the contemporary -- as the unification "of the real or true with the ephemeral" (Habermas 1987b, 10) -- but in reappropriating it through a profound act of imagination: "Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it" (Foucault 1984a, 41). Foucault's Baudelaire finds modernity in the articulation of dandysme, in "the man who tries to invent himself." Whereas Habermas identifies the dandy through his relation to the spectator, that is, via a "medium of semblance" that permits the reception of the dandy's expressiveness as an aesthetic object (Habermas 1997a, 47; Habermas 1987b, 10), Foucault's dandy lives in "a mode of relationship that has to be established with oneself" (Foucault 1984a, 41). In short, it is not the work of art as the object of possible criticism, but the ethos self-incurred by the dandy himself that is the reference point of modernity. The significance of the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) as the first era to name itself lies in the introduction of a certain capacity into the history of ideas: simply, the capacity to recognize one's own time as a historical epoch, which is precisely what makes a philosophy of history possible. Yet the philosophy of history, for example, in its Hegelian incarnation, is but one way of addressing the problematization of the present, which for Foucault is what lies at the heart of the "attitude of modernity," the attitude of "a permanent critique of our historical era." At first glance, this seems perfectly consistent with Habermas's own perspective on the project of modernity, and Habermas himself read Foucault's essays on Kant and Enlightenment as signs that the latter had "conceded" to his own position (Habermas 1994). But Habermas wants to restrict the discussion of modernity to its manifestations in intersubjective media -- the work of art, the spoken word, the artifact, the memorable action -- and thus to modernization as a historical process, which entails the compartmentalization of reason into cognitive, practical, and aesthetic moments, the rationalization of the lifeworld, the normative bases of the social sciences, deontological moral theory, and so forth. Foucault, however, wants to maintain a distinction between modernity as the unlimited critique of the present and modernity as an epistemological condition, "as the analytics of truth" (Foucault 1994b, 147-8). This is why what Habermas refers to as "the philosophical discourse of modernity" Foucault calls "philosophy as the discourse of modernity on modernity" (Foucault 1994b, 141, my emphasis). While Foucault never comes close to suggesting that Habermas's approach is by itself invalid, it cannot but tie modernity down to its given historical forms -- forms which Foucault wants to leave open to critique. Intersubjectivity must presuppose an at least weak transcendental basis for a determinate society; indeed, by the end of The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, the intersubjective basis for modernity that Habermas assumes at the beginning turns out to be his own concept of the lifeworld. In any case, it is clear that Foucault is not altogether ready to give up on the question of the subject or ethical ontology as fruitful lines of critical inquiry, lines that Habermas believes to be either exhausted or impractical vis-à-vis his own perspective. | |||
|
The challenge of casting globalization as a "task of modernity" lies in modernity's historical situation. With globalization, we are no longer considering the structures of lifeworld and system that Habermas traces in Western development; rather we are considering, in the first instance, the spread of the structures of first modernity, exported from the West, onto societies that have not experienced (or have yet to experience) modernity as such. These cultures know of no Reformation, no Age of Enlightenment, no French Revolution, no Protestant ethic or legacy of capitalist development. One is pressed for anything analogous to the differentiation of reason into moments or of autonomous value spheres, elements which for Habermas are essential to understanding the modernization process in Western societies. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas assumes lifeworld and system to be coevolutionary features of a given society that interact with a one-to-one complementarity. But this relationship that Habermas traces sociologically in the Western modernization process takes on a much more complex set of dynamics when broadened to include the interrelationships of a plurality of historically closed societies. Traditional international relations theory assumes a more-or-less rigid division of nation-states as self-contained political, social, and economic unities. Interaction among states is in this scheme limited to the action-coordinating possibilities of "delinguistified media" -- money, goods, power, military might, etc. -- and can be interpreted solely from the perspective of strategic action following the rules of rational choice. The principle of "sovereignty" designates the tacit legitimacy by which governments, having secured legitimation within their respective societies, employ such media across frontiers where no cultural basis for linguistically-mediated consensus formation exists. Instead, actions at the international level must be coordinated absent the legitimation imperatives of social integration as "ties that are motivated empirically through inducement and deterrence": Steering media such as money and power attach to empirically motivated ties. They encode purposive-rational dealings with calculable amounts of value and make it possible to exert generalized strategic influence on the decisions of other participants while bypassing processes of consensus formation in language. Because they not only simplify communication in language but replace it with a symbolic generalization of negative and positive sanctions, ...the lifeworld is no longer necessary for coordinating actions. (Habermas 1987a, 280-1; cf. 182-3)The highly "technicized" nature of action in the international system relies on generalizations of these sanctions that have what Habermas calls "structure-forming effects." Absent the lifeworld resources for reaching understanding, international relations are maintained as a system that is nonetheless self-regulating ("ordered anarchy"), but which preserves the lifeworlds that do socially integrate the world's inhabitants through communicative action as so many autonomous enclosures. It is doubtful, of course, that international relations ever functioned so perfectly. But accelerating trends over recent decades have brought about the awareness that the model of world affairs as a system running to the logic of independent rational-choice oriented actors is gradually losing cogency. Major challenges in the international arena are rapidly appearing at the levels of both system and social integration. In The Postnational Constellation, Habermas addresses some of these from the perspective of the Western welfare state model of polity. He does not, however, consider them from the perspective of a worldwide plurality of historically parallel but differently constituted lifeworlds, even though elements of such a critique can easily be extended from his own work. If we assume Habermas's thesis regarding the "uncoupling" of system from lifeworld, such that systems can function independently of their original lifeworld contexts, we can entertain the possibilities of challenges that would arise as action systems coordinated by steering media are extended beyond their native domain (for example, to societies that still hold "religious-metaphysical" worldviews), as seems to be the case in globalization of political institutions and economic technologies: (a) One such challenge stems from the postcolonial universalization of the nation-state itself. We must reckon with the fact that the nation-state model is in the majority of cases not merely imported from the West but imposed. The gradual fusion of "state" and "nation" into two sides of a single coin was a long, conflict-ridden process that played out over several centuries in Europe, and was historically particular to interrelated transformations in economic organization and social integration; here, lifeworld and system evolve together in a way that maintains their cognitive compatibility. Yet the formulation of nation-state solidarity has shown itself to be even more problematic outside of the European "comity of nations." Partha Chattergee, drawing on John Plamenatz, distinguishes an "Eastern" brand of national consciousness-formation: 'Eastern' nationalism...has appeared among 'peoples recently drawn into a civilisation hitherto alien to them, and whose ancestral cultures are not adapted to success and excellence by these cosmopolitan and increasingly dominant standards.' They too have measured the backwardness of their nations in terms of certain global standards set by the advanced nations of Western Europe. But what is distinctive here is that there is also a fundamental awareness that those standards have come from an alien culture, and that the inherited culture of the nation did not provide the necessary adaptive leverage to enable it to reach those standards of progress. The 'Eastern' type of nationalism, consequently, has been accompanied by an effort to 're-equip' the nation culturally, to transform it. But it could not do so simply by imitating the alien culture, for then the nation would lose its distinctive identity. (Chattergee 1986, 2)For Chattergee, the task of Eastern nationalism vis-à-vis the West is embedded with contradiction, for it must accept basic standards set by the alien culture while rejecting that culture as an embodiment of intrusion and domination -- the legacy of Western imperialism must of course not be forgotten. Constitution as a nation-state requires the legitimation of an institutional form adaptable (at minimum) to the terms of both rational action within its borders and empirically motivated interaction beyond them. In these contexts, components of a sociocultural lifeworld must yield to system imperatives that are essentially foreign to its resources and can conflict with familiar forms of understanding. Societies that formerly existed as loose confederations (e.g., of tribes, clans, etc.) must suddenly unify under a single organization of authority; territories inhabited by multiple ethnic societies are often forced to adapt a single, unprecedented collective identity. Cognitive tensions that result from these dissonances give rise to failures of legitimacy, authoritarian takeovers, civil wars, ethnic conflicts, mass atrocities, and separatism. Questions of legitimacy, national identity, and territorial status remain unresolved in many parts of the world. (b) This problem is multiplied by the expansion of market technologies through the very routes formerly monopolized by political communication. Yet while the political problem of integrating the nation-state still preserved its "internal" autonomy, the economic complex further frustrates the former while bringing new difficulties of its own. The "liberalization" of the world economy, propagated by Western powers and by international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, has greatly intensified system integration at the global level. Finance and exchange relations facilitate the media that overtake legal and political edifices entrusted to coordinate action through legitimate exercise of power. Habermas notes how such trends undermine the revenue bases and decision-making capabilities in Western welfare states (Habermas 2001, 79). They create even greater difficulties in states that have yet to acquire the ability to establish social welfare capacity in the first place. Moreover, the system mechanisms are once again imported from without, such that we are not dealing so much with the "uncoupling" as the imposition of a globally expansive system onto a locally-oriented lifeworld -- the former presupposes a form of rationalization and interpretive understanding not necessarily available to the latter, and can prove highly abrasive to sociocultural self-understanding. The systemic constraints of the imported form, reinforced by integrational patterns outside the bounded domain, rival and interfere with the systemic components native to the reproductive functions of the lifeworld. "Leveling" of cultural differences is but one possible effect, as these hermeneutic gaps must be structurally compensated for by a compulsory conformity to global systemic imperatives: "The clocks of Western civilization keep the tempo for the compulsory simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous" (Habermas 2001, 75). But maladaptation is also a possible consequence, facilitating extreme distribution gaps, civil strife, anomie or social paralysis. From the modern standpoint, such areas are often evaluated as "behind," "underdeveloped," "provincial," "backward," or "primitive." (c) In the above cases, dynamics of social integration are introduced in the wake of system integration as a more acute form of lifeworld colonization, which also sets the terms for social integration at the global level. We are rapidly approaching a global environment that can be viewed as a grand society, with remarkable increases in interaction and communication across national boundaries, due largely to innovations in transportation and communications technology. Yet these technologies, upon which global communication is dependent, follow patterns of economic transaction and influence -- they are steered by markets and are coextensive with system-integrative patterns. Access to global communication networks is determined by the would-be participant's socioeconomic position and by the interests of those who control the technology. The romanticism of a "global public sphere" is hindered and turned on its head by the realities of worldwide inequalities, threatening a process of transnational integration that is reflexively lopsided. Patterns of "uneven development" (Tom Nairn) that divide First, Second, and Third Worlds become hardened into variously marginalized levels of a global class society. In their book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri foresee a nightmare situation, descended from modern imperialism, in which globalization emerges as a new form of hegemony that operates according to the logic of the "rule of no-one" -- a Foucauldian police state subservient to the interests of network capitalism. Clearly, the challenges mentioned above are outgrowths of the historical process of modernization. At the same time, the mutual constitution of lifeworld and system follows a different dynamic -- a different "direction of fit" -- as modernization penetrates societies that do not exhibit the formal properties of Western rationality. Whereas system imperatives arose in Western societies out of communicatively achieved consensus within historically rationalized lifeworlds, here the terms of lifeworld rationalization are dictated by already reified steering media imported from without; system precedes lifeworld. It cannot then be said that these societies are participants in the "project of modernity," in the task of an epoch that must "create its normativity out of itself." Quite to the contrary, what Habermas defines as "modernity" is itself encountered as a foreign model that prescribes normative content. It would seem that if modernity is to survive the transition into globalization as an emancipatory force and not merely as a hegemonic one, the formulation of its project will have to be renewed in accordance with the horizons of a very different problem set. | |||
|
(a) The integrational effects of globalization that appear to be superseding the modular form of the nation-state have led some to consider new, supranational forms of government under the heading of "cosmopolitanism." The most well-known formulation of cosmopolitan idealism traces itself back to Kant, who outlined an idea of "cosmopolitan right" in his famous essay "Toward Perpetual Peace" as well as in other works on political philosophy. Writing historically prior to the rise of both nationalist sentiment and the modern bureaucratic state, Kant locates political legitimacy not so much in proceduralist guarantees as in a broad notion of public freedom. For Kant, politics is bound up with a general teleology of "popular enlightenment" guided by the emancipatory power of the public use of reason, and the rightfulness of a societal order can be gauged by its facilitation of and responsiveness to free and open deliberation. This is the insight taken up by James Bohman (1997), who argues that democratic legitimacy can be elevated from the national to the global framework through the promotion of a "cosmopolitan public sphere" that draws upon the interlocking resources of pluralistic democracies at the national level: It is in the exercise of public reason among the citizens of more powerful and civilized nations that "unwritten" but nonetheless universal rights become a public and political reality.... Federalism provides world citizens with the institutional means both to make civil society international and to promote effective public opinion. At the very least, a public forum of nations is needed so that such violations can be publicly acknowledged and the rights and claims of the dispossessed can be recognized and defended. (Bohman 1997, 182)Bohman believes that a semblance of deliberative democracy can be achieved through an international network of governmental and activist organizations, and this in turn establishes the institutional framework for a global public. Bohman uses this framework for envisioning a complex network for cosmopolitan dialogues that connect the local to the global; a network of interwoven deliberative publics that feed into a flourishing public sphere at the global level can then have a transformative effect on our understandings of right and legitimacy beyond the limits of the nation-state: "To make violations of human rights public is precisely to make such a moral appeal that questions the legitimacy and sovereignty of current institutional frameworks. ...Such a politics questions the sovereignty of nations, even if such a politics affirms the sovereignty of citizens, now citizens of the world" (Bohman 1997, 192). Bohman's argument is of course far from sufficient as a programmatic statement for a cosmopolitan society, and it tends to overlook the realities of historical, economic, and even demographic hegemony that persist even as cross-cultural networks of communication and political activism are mobilized (see Milstein 2002b). At the same time, he is far from alone in looking back at Kant and other standard-bearers of Enlightenment for inspiration to meet the challenges of global politics. Political theory in the late twentieth (and now twenty-first) century is becoming colored with visions of a cosmopolitan world order as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were with utopian visions of "commonwealths of reason." The likes of David Held, Daniele Archibugi, and Thomas Pogge could very well find their antecedents in James Harrington's Oceana, Hume's "Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth," or Rousseau's Social Contract. The "alarmist feelings of enlightened helplessness" that Habermas observes under the looming cloud of political globalization -- that is, the loss of faith in modern politics insofar as it depends on the functionality of the nation-state -- are accompanied by a new project in utopian experimentation. The "defensive" and "offensive" strategies outlined by Habermas in reaction to globalization's erosion of the nation-state echo the late-eighteenth century debates between the early modern conservatives and the proponents of the "Rights of Man." Our present environment, on the horizons of political and intellectual innovation, is attuned to notions of acceleration, decline, transformation, pluralization, radicalization, and so on, suggesting an impending historical threshold that severs the prospective future from modernity's epochal self-understanding; the spirit of enlightenment is reawakened and turned against its former incarnation as the dawn of a "postmodern modernity." (b) "The thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment," writes Foucault, "is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude -- that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era" (Foucault 1984a, 42). In "The Art of Telling the Truth," he reflects on what he sees as Kant's attempt to link up the question of Enlightenment with the major historical event of his time: the French Revolution. In "An Answer to the Question: 'What Is Enlightenment?'," Kant dismisses revolution as an effective route to maturity: "A revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism and to rapacious or power-seeking oppression, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking" (Kant 1991, 55). It thus seems contradictory for him to come out in support of the events in France. But Foucault emphasizes that, for Kant, the sign that indicates whether humanity is on a course toward progress or decline does not lie in the Revolution itself, and even less on whether it succeeds or fails. Kant is rather concerned with "the attitude of the onlookers as it reveals itself in public while the drama of great political changes is taking place: for they openly express universal yet disinterested sympathy for one set of protagonists against their adversaries, even at the risk that their partiality could be of great disadvantage to themselves" (Kant 1991, 182). It is made memorable by the feelings of sympathy aroused in those who have no direct stake in the event but cannot deny the authenticity of its expression or the "moral cause" behind its aim. The revolution, for Kant, brought out a moral disposition in humankind that favors the right of all peoples to choose for themselves a civil constitution as they see fit and the moral rightness of a political constitution which by its very nature, avoids aggressive war (Kant 1991, 182-3). It signified that this motivation is ingrained in all humankind, that it always has been so, and it will continue to be so regardless of its outcome: "although the Revolution may have certain questionable results, one cannot forget the disposition that is revealed through it" (Foucault 1994b, 145). The disposition cited by Kant and Foucault reveals what Habermas has termed the emancipatory interest of knowledge, an interest awakened in confrontation between the present and the possibility of its alternative (cf. Habermas 1973, 22). In Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas asserts that interests of knowledge (technical, practical, emancipatory) lie at the fusion of motivation and cognition: "Knowledge-constitutive interests mediate the natural history of the human species with the logic of its self-formative process. ...These basic orientations do not aim at the gratification of immediately empirical needs but at the solution of system problems in general" (Habermas 1971, 196). Human beings are driven to know by the very necessities of being a species bent on self-preservation and reproduction. Habermas understands this drive to be visible only from the perspective of "a history of the species as a self-formative process," in which humans seek understanding through their thoroughly self-reflexive constitution. Underlying the experience of knowledge is the capacity for reflection, which encodes the unification of the power of reason with the will to reason (Habermas 1971, 197-8). Enlightenment emerges at the point of contact of this capacity with a spectacular awareness of the very movement of human history -- what Foucault termed "immanent teleology." (c) If Enlightenment is signified from the standpoint of the observer who confronts one's place in the continual movement of history, modernity emerges when one envisions one's capacity to translate this awareness into an outlook. In Baudelairean terms, the "eternity" unleashed in the heroization of the present moment lies not in the opposition of the spectator to the dandy, but in their moment of conversion -- the moment at which the spectator is compelled to realize dandysme in herself. Modernity is the aspiration of self-reflection. The new task of modernity, then, consists in lifting this aspiration out of the singular opposition of antiqui/moderni -- beyond the bipolarity of an epochal opposition that closes itself within a single ethical standpoint. The difficulty of cosmopolitan theories such as Bohman's is they often rely on a speculative universalism that, while useful for the critical purposes of eighteenth-century Europe at the dawn of the modern period, they are not compatible with the emancipatory needs of the present situation. The current era, rather, is defined by the expansion of modernity's horizons to account for itself not merely in temporal but in "geographic" terms -- in terms of the ethical orientations of a constellation of historically parallel lifeworlds. Modernity's line of questioning must envision the self-formative process of human history not in linear but in "radial" terms, as so many communities of worldview sharing an original human status, now bound to thoroughgoing interaction. This pluralization of modernity does not, however, preclude all basis in a general social theory; on the contrary, the principles of a critical theory of society must be radicalized for the comparative critique of the constitution of ways of knowing and of constructing worldviews. Habermas's insights in Knowledge and Human Interests, as well as in The Theory of Communicative Action, are far from obsolete; the need for "a theory of society conceived with a practical intention" is, if anything, more pressing in the global context than in that of Western civilization. What is required are modes of inquiry that assess the relationship between the development of technical knowledge and interest and the processes of community-formation. Habermas has characterized this in terms of the relations between the technical and the practical knowledge-constitutive interests, while Foucault calls for the study of "practical systems" with technological and strategic aspects (Habermas 1973, 9; Foucault 1984a, 48-9). Yet this line of inquiry must be conducted with an eye to the expansion of new technologies and how they transform or interrupt community integration in both local and global contexts. Second, we need to understand the dynamics of "opening" and "closure" in the constitution of ethical communities. Habermas describes the opening and closure of lifeworlds in terms of their horizons for internal organization and self-understanding, as a dialectic of increasing contingency and expanded possibilities (Habermas 2001, 83-4). On one hand, this involves the question of social solidarity in lifeworld contexts, constitutive of epistemic security vis-à-vis an "outside." But this also involves socio-structural components that negotiate relations between societies (the concept of "sovereignty" in international relations is one example), and how they come to bear on the constitution of societies themselves. Finally, we need to explore the dynamics of forms of self-expression that cross epistemic spaces, thereby having a transfiguring effect. The most obvious example of such communication is made possible through global mass media, which transmits forms of communication to all parts of the globe instantly, attuning its diverse recipients to indentical content simultaneously. We should study the normalizing and the emancipatory, the reassuring and the offensive aspects of such cross-spatial phenomena that gain expression as actions that admit of critique. This will help us to invent for ourselves the attitude of the new modernity, the dandysme of global society, to locate the normativity that the new age is creating out of itself. I think these pursuits point to a route that remains faithful to the project of Habermas, as well as of Foucault and of Baudelaire, and of Kant too. I would like to thank David Jacobus, Jorge Romero León, Seth Graham, Megan Craig, Carlos Montemayor, and Michael Weinman for their helpful presentations of various portions of Habermas's work, which proved indispensable for writing this paper. | |||
|
Bleiker, Roland (2000) Popular Dissent, Human Agency, and Global Politics. Cambridge University Press. Bohman, James (1997) "The Public Spheres of the World Citizen" in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal, edited by James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann. MIT Press. Bohman, James, and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, editors (1997) Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal. MIT Press. Chattergee, Partha (1986) Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? University of Minnesota Press. Claeys, Gregory, editor (1994) Utopias of the British Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel (1984a) "What Is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. Pantheon Books. ----- (1984b) "Truth and Power" in The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. Pantheon Books. ----- (1994a) "Two Lectures" in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, edited by Michael Kelly. MIT Press. ----- (1994b) "The Art of Telling the Truth" in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, edited by Michael Kelly. MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1971) Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Beacon Press. ----- (1973) Theory and Practice, translated by John Viertel. Beacon Press. ----- (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, translated by Thomas McCarthy. Beacon Press. ----- (1987a) The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, translated by Thomas McCarthy. Beacon Press. ----- (1987b) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. MIT Press. ----- (1994) "Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present: On Foucault's Lecture on Kant's What Is Enlightenment?" in Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, edited by Michael Kelly. MIT Press. ----- (1997a) "Modernity: An Unfinished Project" in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, edited by Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib. MIT Press. ----- (1997b) "Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years' Hindsight" in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal, edited by James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann. MIT Press. ----- (2001) The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, translated and edited by Max Pensky. MIT Press. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri (2000) Empire. Harvard University Press. Kant, Immanuel (1991) Political Writings, second edition by Hans Reiss. Cambridge University Press. ----- (1996) Practical Philosophy, translated and edited by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge University Press. ----- (1997) Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge University Press. ----- (2000) Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews and edited by Paul Guyer. Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Michael, editor (1994) Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. MIT Press. Milstein, Brian (2001) "The Unfinished Project of Foucault," online version at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/foucault.html. ----- (2002a) "On 'Postmodern Tyranny,' or conversely: How to Be an Intelligent Globaphobiac" unpublished paper, New School for Social Research (available online at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/goldfarb.html). ----- (2002b) "Critique and Vision in the Body Cosmopolitic," unpublished paper, New School for Social Research (available online at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/cosmopol.html). Passerin d'Entrèves, Maurizio and Seyla Benhabib, editors (1997) Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. MIT Press. Rabinow, Paul, editor (1984) The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books. Strange, Susan (1996) The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. Cambridge University Press.
|