Dialectics of public opinion

In 1991 the translation of Habermas' Structural transformations introduced a term that became immensely popular, that of the public sphere. Critics pointed out that Habermas missed some rather obvious historical facts, namely exclusion of a large majority from political opinion forming processes and the embeddedness of communicative exchanges in relationships of power. This critique is at once correct and misses the point completely. Habermas was very much aware of exclusion, but argued - rather awkwardly - that the interests of the bourgeoisie coincided with the universal interest to such a degree that the identification of bourgeois reason with reason as such was feasible. Later this aporia was formulated more explicity with a resurrection of Kant's regulative ideal in the form of the "ideal speech situation" that is a purely communicative situation in which the speakers do not act instrumentally but communicatively, that is with the sole aim of establishing common understanding. As with Kant autonomy and freedom this regulative ideal is a curious chimeric creature. While both Kant and Habermas nominally treat it as pure counterfacticity, that is as something that is not empirically realised nor realisable, they use it as a supposition, that is as something empirically existing. Habermas tries to save the normative potential of public opinion by sundering it from its flawed manifestation in empirical reality. This path was left opened by his critics that were not radical enough in their critique, they questioned the historical accuracy of Habermas' account but did not go on to show how the negative side of public opinion - power, exclusion, dominance - is a constitutive moment of the phenomenon. What we are left with as a result is a sterile theory of public opinion - sterile, because it proceeds abstractely, not from actually existing individuals, to borrow a phrase from Marx - and an thoughtless praxis of public opinion polling that simply - as elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has done - denounces the normative ideal of public opinion because it does not correspond to empirical reality. What is needed is an immanent critique which would not abstract away the empirical foundation of opinion, but would keep the idea of public opinion it to its word, that is develop dialectically the tension between its pretense to rationality and its constitutive irrationality.

Ontology and dialectics

The crucial difference between Heidegger and Adorno, or between affirmative and critical thinking, is that the former hypostizes Being while the latter sees it dialectically as mediated through empirical being, or as a note Adorno wrote in the last year of his life reads: "There is no transcendence without that which is transcended."

Empty signifier(s)

Building on structuralist theories of language Laclau wants to convince us that in language there exist "empty signifiers". These are not signifiers without signifieds, which would not be signifiers at all, but signifiers which signify the constitutive impossibility of signifying. If - so Laclau argues - all identities in language are differential identities then the signifying of the borders of signifying would imply a distinction between language and non-language, would become another distinction and therefore part of language. But, as Hegel noted, to think the borders of a phenomenon is to go beyond these borders - and the signifying of the borders of language is therefore a signifying beyond the field of language - so there is an inherent impossibility of closure of language as a system, which is expressed in empty signifiers. There are a couple problems with such a formulation. First of all Saussure never claimed that all of language is based on purely differential identity, merely the signifier (the only identity the word "dog" has is that it is neither "god" nor "hog" nor "drag" nor "empiricism" ...) and even in this form the argument is problematic, as Plato had already shown in Kratylos (and as Poe demonstrated in the onomatopoeic lines: "A silken, sad uncertain rustling"). To top it of Saussure's "la langue" is an abstraction, a system of language that the linguist constructs, not an empirically existing system. It is already a concept, abstracted from the origins of language in mimesis (that the Greek alphabet was in its most archaic form mimetic bears testimony to that, so do the many instances of hieroglyphic writing). If there is an inherent impossibility of signifying to fully constitute itself, it is an impossibility the linguist, not the speaker faces. To add to the confusion Laclau has been unable to give a satisfactory example of an empty signifier. His examples include "emancipation" and "democracy", but these are merely contested and ambiguous concepts, they are by far not "empty".

The solution of the riddle of the empty signifier is provided by Adorno. In his lectures on Ontology and dialectics he also comes upon the inherent impossibility of signifying. But for him it is not a problem of the linguist, he sees this inherent impossibility in the fact that the concept, which is an abstraction, can never fully grasp, can never fully represent, or signify, its object. In Kant this impossibility is pushed aside in the idea of the infinitely heterogeneous "Ding an sich" - and the price he has to pay is that the object and the subject are radically sundered, objects becoming merely the infinitely malleable raw material for mind to work with - Hegel on the other hand relegates the problem to totality. But it was Heidegger who tried to solve the problem with reference to an empty signifier. As Adorno argues in his lectures, the concept of Being is at once the ultimate concept, aiming to signify everything - nuomena as well as phaenomena - thereby erasing the distance between concept and object, but at the same time it is the ultimate anti-concept, beacause as the highest form of abstraction it is the least able to signify anything particular. The concept of being is the empty signifier. Laclau erroneously talks about empty signifiers in the plural and he has an instinctive understanding of the matter, because the examples he gives are very much abstract. What he fails to see is that his examples represent only a move toward the empty signifier, the signifier signifying the limits of signification, which is to be found only at the highest level of abstraction in the concept of Being as Heidegger formulated it. But the limits of signification are not inherent to language as a sytem, they spring from the relationship between subject and object (Laclau's philosophy knows neither), the grinding of mind on matter, which it can never fully grasp. It is no wonder then that Laclau in a lecture he had on Saturday here in Ljubljana, tried to erase both nuomena and the Frankfurt school from the history of modern philosophy.

Mein Kampf

One of the most destructive myths of the twentieth century is the one about Hitler's pathological personality. There is an almost unanimous consensus that the man was a monster, less human than any other historical persona, save only perhaps count Dracula, who had to relinquish his real existence to be fully incorporated into myth. Hitler remains firmly rooted in both myth and history and that is no coincidence. That the myth of his personal monstrosity is probably correct does not render it less problematic. It is the apology of society which refuses to acknowledge its own monstrosity. Hitler erroneously called the untrue society by its true name. The myth of Hitler today is merely an inversion of his personality cult, an explanation of totality via the particular, when in fact fascism was the manifestation of radical subordination of the particular under totality. It is the form that makes the true myth a lie. Adorno made a similar point in Minima Moralia 94 - Staatsaktion:

[Drama] interprets the seizing of power by the most powerful harmlessly as machination of rackets outside of society, not as the self-realization of society by itself.

Marx and natural science

When Immanuel Wallerstein gave a talk titled "The heritage of sociology. The promise of social sciences," he identified six "challenges" to the traditional thinking of the social sciences. The fourth of them, so Wallerstein, stems from the natural sciences, specifically from the chemist Ilya Prigogine, who claimed that Newtonian physics had a limited applicability, it was applicable only to integrable systems, which are an exception among existing systems. In The end of certainty Prigogine claimed that most systems include "deterministic processes (between bifurcations) as well as probabilistic systems (in the choice of branches)".

What does this imply for one of the central postulates of Marxism, namely that "all of history is the history of class struggle." At first glance this would imply a completely deterministic social system, functioning according to objective laws. A second glance, especially one informed by the aforementioned "challenge", helps us to interpret Marx in a more productive way. If we were to accept that all history is the product of the dialectics between relationships and means of production, what would that imply for Marx' own intervention? Would it not mean that it was according to its own postulates futile, a mere reflection of the real base of society, which itself functions according to its inherent internal laws, unperturbed by the phantoms spooking the superstructure? Marx was of course not so naive to blindly saw off the branch he was sitting on, his intention was far more ambitious: the whole tree had to go, because it is - if we paraphrase Hölderlin - obscuring the young blossoming life underneath. The distinction between deterministic and probabilistic systems can help us to distinguish two types of history. One is the history of "business as usual", when a certain mode of production is dominant and a ruling class successfully maintains its hegemony. These stages of history can be analysed with a reference to the laws of class struggle. These are the stages between bifurcations. But there are also points when deterministic laws are not applicable, these are the moments of revolutions. The outcomes of revolutions are not arbitrary, or as Marx put it at the beginning of the Eighteenth brumaire: "People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, not under self-selected circumstances, but under found, given and inherited circumstances." The important point though is that people do make their own history, that is, the outcome of revolutionary upheavals is not determined by the laws of history. Adorno seized upon the implications of this fact in Minima Moralia 100 - Sur l'eau: "As the inevitable question [of how an emancipated society would look like] is illegitimate, so is the answer inevitably repulsive and arrogant". The question is illegitimate precisely because the outcome of revolutionary upheavals is not determined, but springs from freedom. This freedom at once implies that the choice for a return to slavery is always a viable outcome of emancipation. A determined emancipation is no emancipation at all.

Ways of living

Cultural studies decided - quite arbitrarily - to sever the descriptive idea of culture as "a whole way of life" from its normative dimension and focus exclusively on the former. It was already Adorno who during a lecture on Kant urged his students to take a more reflexive stand towards ideas:

I believe these fractures and contradictions to be far greater than uniformity, because in these fractures and contradictions truth manifests itself, while smoothing of contradictions, superficial synthesising, is easily achieved

As Lukacs before him, Adorno knew full well that the crests and crevices of theory are really a topography of the world. It is not carelessness of authors that causes contradictions to find their way into their thinking, contradictions are rather the necessary effect of mind grinding against the object. Every valid theory is contradictory, since the world itself is contradictory. In the double moments manifested in the idea of culture, at once descriptive and normative, the dialectics of the world shine through: the contradiction between particular class rule and the universalistic ideas it must necessarily develop to achieve hegemony.

Immanent critique

I just came across a brilliant article:

Jones, Paul. 2007. Beyond the Semantic ‘Big Bang’: Cultural Sociology and an Aesthetic Public Sphere. Cultural sociology Vol 1(1): 73–95.

The author attributes to Habermas' Structural transformation the method of immanent critique:

He wishes to immanently acknowledge the utopian prospect of an ideology (broadly, liberalism) while remaining fully aware of both its dramatic failure as an empirical account of ‘realpolitik’, and its possible success as a means of legitimation of ongoing domination. But he also wishes to acknowledge that such unfulfilled promise retains a normative potential as a court of appeal. The space so provided, the gap between ideal and reality, is the crucial point of recovery for normative discussion.

I would disagree that this description holds for Habermas at any point of his career, even when he was working at the Institute, but most certainly it does not hold for Structural transformations. The confusing nature of the work stems exactly from a deviance from immanent critique: Habermas is starting on his path of uncritical and undialectical acceptance of liberalism by stating that a public sphere actually existed in the 19. century. This claim goes against all historical evidence and contrary to popular belief Habermas was fully aware of it when writing the book. The problem was that he did not at the time have at his disposal nebulous concepts like "regulative idea" to obscure the inconsistencies of such an approach.

Enough about Habermas though, what I want to do is return to a classical text to shed some light on the logic underlying immanent critique. In the German Ideology Marx and Engels take a stand against a history, which analyses ideas abstracted from their material base:

This conception of history, which is common to all historians, particularly since the eighteenth century, will necessarily come up against the phenomenon that increasingly abstract ideas hold sway, i.e. ideas which increasingly take on the form of universality. For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society; it appears as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.

This is a passage that Althusser obviously missed when writing about ideology, but one that the Frankfurt school understood perfectly. Ruling ideology is, according to Marx and Engels, paradoxical: at one point it is the ideal expression of the rule of a certain social class, but at the same time it is a critique of this same rule: because the ruling class came to dominance in class struggle it was forced to make concession to other classes, represent itself as the manifestation of universal values, and thereby its ideology by its universalist tendency necessarily opposes its particularist rule.