*slowly drifting further and further off topic, in response to random associations*

the crucial theoretical question not to be missed is that of how, within this field of power and the social, resistances are generated in the form of both emancipatory praxis and critical theory? How, in short, does a social field that functions for the sake of its own reproduction come to generate critical potentials transformative of that field? How does the social field come to produce a crack or fissure that would produce something other than that system.

With the issue being, as well, that I would try to thematise, not just the possibility for a break in the abstract, but the possibility for determinate kinds of breaks: this was what I take to have been Marx’s original gamble – that it might be possible for a critical social theory to say something fairly specific about the specific sorts of intellectual, material and social resources generated within a particular context, that somehow pointed beyond that context. I take it that Marx’s “turning Hegel on his head” involved a suggestion that at least the social field characteristic of capitalism was, in certain specific senses, posing itself a “problem” that could be solved only with its own abolition – was generating a range of tensions, shapes of consciousness, forms of being in the world, material resources, practical habits, etc. that in various ways were both bound together with the reproduction of this field, but also sat in tension with it.

You’re correct on Habermas not historicising his normative standards: history does figure in his account, but it does so essentially externally – his account takes the form of a description of the historical realisation of something that he then posits as natural (because embedded in universal structures of communication). He therefore does have an account of why critique comes to be generated at a specific moment in time, but not an account of the constitution of particular critical sensibilities. Instead, the sensibilities are positioned as a latent potential, held back by religious and traditional constraints – and therefore emerge once those constraints have been lifted. In this sense, Habermas’ critical sensibilities are thematised as negations – as what remains behind when arbitrary and artificial social and cultural determinations have been stripped away. This “historical” process that brings these critical sensibilities to awareness is therefore (from my point of view) an anti-historical one – a process of disenchantment – a process of the peeling back of the merely historical, to reveal an underlying universal. {warning: small edits made above, to reduce (or increase) the incomprehensibility of the original ~ 11:45}

So on one level, Habermas spends quite a lot of time talking about the historical emergence of various things (including many things I’m not mentioning here), but the historical explanation never reaches “inside” what he’s trying to explain, to account for its qualitative characteristics (which therefore remain, essentially, naturalised or explained functionally). His account is a bit like watching someone meeting the formal requirements for an immanent theory – addressing the sorts of issues an immanent theory would ordinarily address – but without actually adopting an immanent frame.

But yes, these are the sorts of questions he was raising about Foucault – the sense that the theory was unfolding a conception of social context that didn’t provide any insight as to how that kind of theory would ever arise within that context.

And yes, I suspect that you’re right about the “status”, for want of a better word, of the subject within this sort of immanent critical theory: the subject (its structures, its capacities) becomes one of the potentials generated within a broader relational field (in a sense, the field itself becomes one of the potentials generated – and generating…)

I probably wouldn’t contrast the “fetish” to “reality” (and I’m not taking you to have done this in earnest – I’m just picking up on the expressions you use, in case the point should be confusing to people reading on) . The fetish, in Marx at least, has a “things appear as they are” aspect. In other words, it’s not so much that the fetish is an illusion, as that, in spite of the fact that it isn’t an illusion, it is nevertheless also not a “negation” – not some kind of natural substrate that remains behind when everything else has been stripped away – not “material”. So the argument about the fetish is an attempt to look seriously at how things are, to understand how things are as an affirmation, as a positivity, as something determinate and generative – in a situation in which, for determinate reasons, those shapes of consciousness and forms of practice associated with the fetish form tend to present themselves as a materiality stripped of social determinations – their specific determination, according to Marx, is precisely their active social constitution as material or as abstraction.

Not suggesting that Marx is the only way this sort of analysis could be carried out – but just gesturing at one example of the sorts of analysis involved: an analysis that, without trying to “penetrate” what is being analysed, to poke through illusion to get at an objective conception of truth, nevertheless grasps the constituted character of what is being analysed – and the constituted character of the analysis itself. There is no outside – but this doesn’t mean that there is no transcendence. The key lies in engaging in a form of analysis that moves beyond negation, and explores a social field as complex and determinately conflictual source of potentials – for reproduction and transformation.

This feels a bit murky – I think your version was much clearer… ;-P I’ll blame it in the cold…

I’m entering dangerous water here, as I don’t have a great familiarity with Habermas’ own work and haven’t read this text in over a decade. From what I recall of The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas feels compelled to introduce the normative requirements of dialogue as a sort of a priori regulative ideal of all discourse situations. That is, there’s an idealism embodied in his position that is reflecting in the absence of a historicization of these normative frames. I happy to concede that his position might be more nuanced in this and that he might provide an account of the historical genesis of these norms, but I don’t recall finding it there.

At any rate, this move strikes me as responding to the sort of issue he discerns in Foucault. If I remember the critique correctly, Foucault shows the historical nature of different forms of knowledge and how all discourse is bound up with power, yet speaks as if he himself is free of this problem. How is it, in other words, that Foucault is able to make these sorts of claims? This is an issue where questions of the self-reflexivity of the social field become extremely pertinent. If we adopt an immanentist ontology or epistemology, we’re committed to the thesis that everything (including theorists) have a genesis in space in time, such that there’s no view from the “outside” or “above” where the theorist herself wouldn’t be caught up in the social relations and forces characterizing the field. The social field can be thought as a sort of machine that must reproduce itself from generation to generation and from moment to moment, such that each person in this field is itself an iteration of that field.

Given this vulgar over-simplification, the crucial theoretical question not to be missed is that of how, within this field of power and the social, resistances are generated in the form of both emancipatory praxis and critical theory? How, in short, does a social field that functions for the sake of its own reproduction come to generate critical potentials transformative of that field? How does the social field come to produce a crack or fissure that would produce something other than that system. Or, a put a bit more preciously, how is it possible within such a field and system of individuation to think otherwise? I suspect this question will be missed so long as the focus of questions of self-reflexivity is on the self-reflexivity of the subject as in the case of Descartes, Kant, Fichte, and Husserl for the simple reason that such theoretical orientations abstractly posit the transcendental subject independent of the social field in which it is individuated, thereby confusing a fetish (the reflecting subject) with a reality (the social field and the subjects produced in that field).