Affirmation After Habermas

Jurgen Habermas, it could be said, was someone who outlived many of his ideas, not unlike Claude Levi-Strauss.

Both lived exceptionally long lives. Both enjoyed intellectual celebrity. Both witnessed the impact of their theories beyond the narrow scope of their respective fields. Both produced a body of work that was built to last, with care and rigor and coherence, over the course of decades. Both inspired intellectual movements, schools of thought that brandished labels like “Habermasian” and “Structural Anthropology”.

And both watched as what had seemed like it was here to stay screeched to a halt. The endless flow of doctoral dissertations dedicated to their theories slowed to a drip. Publishing houses were suddenly uninterested in reprinting their works. The proverbial crowns were removed from their heads, and they were relegated to the dustbins of intellectual history, replaced by more relevant voices, more properly postmodern.

Nowadays, if you want to find Jurgen Habermas, the best place to look is used bookstores. Their shelves are lined with his works. Red stickers on their covers announce discount prices. Rearguard professors retire, relinquishing their collections into the world. Enthusiasts who have lost their enthusiasm want to get rid of their tomes, not without a degree of embarrassment. You can find them for a dime a dozen.

Meanwhile, it is very rare to find a dissertation or a conference dedicated to Habermas. He might be conceded footnote status to the seemingly unending flow of conferences and seminars on The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory, which, by way of contrast, still capture of the interest, unabated, of academics and activists. To many people on the left, his insistence on communicative rationality, consensus, and the emancipatory possibilities of the public sphere are embarrassing, not to mention his defense of the enlightenment and the “unfinished project of modernity.” Participants in today’s reading groups are much more comfortable discussing negativity, undecidability, and the impossibility of resolving contradictions. As if he were a disgraced family member, their cheeks flush and they squirm in their seats when his name comes up in conversations. To Marxists, he is derided as a liberal. The liberals, meanwhile, dismiss him as a Marxist. Either way, there are no places in the sun left for him in today’s intellectual landscape.

So, what went wrong? How are we to explain such a sharp change of fortune?

One way to approach this problem is to adopt a diachronic perspective, that is, to historicize the work of Jurgen Habermas.

Situated in their socio-historical context, the key theories of Habermas fall within the period of State Capitalism and the adoption of Keynesian economics throughout much of the West. It was a moment when the steering mechanisms of the political sphere were still capable of tempering the demands of economic interests and offering some basic protection to working people and other vulnerable groups. The long struggles of the labor movement throughout the 19^th and early 20^th centuries seemed to produce some favorable results, some reasonable reforms, within Western liberal democracies. Labor laws offered some degree of protection, albeit inadequate. Compensatory consumerism and the enticements culture industry were another means to welcome the working class back into the fold, so to speak. All in all, there was an undeniable uptick in the quality of life of the working classes.

Marx’s prediction of capitalism’s tendency to produce an all-or-nothing, cataclysmic confrontation between two and only two opposing and mutually annulling classes did not seem to materialize. History, it seemed, had proven the revisionists and gradualists of the Second International right after all. The reform or revolution debate had resolved on the side of the former over the latter. The conception of the proletariat as a purely negative force may have corresponded to capitalism in its industrial and imperialist phases but, as the twentieth century trudged forward, there seemed to be more room for affirmation than originally anticipated.

Habermas theorized the possibility of that affirmation, a path forward, the recovery of a lost sense of agency. Without ditching Marx’s critique of the capitalism, Habermas turned his attention to superstructural issues, in particular to political theory, traditionally a blind spot for Marxism (despite some notable exceptions such as Antonio Gramsci). Throughout his work, he advocated for the creation of social spaces free of alienation and domination, for consensus building over coercion, public reason over reactive irrationality, communicative action over instrumental action, “lifeworld” over “system,” and the unencumbered sociability of the public over the extension of exchange value into all aspects of life.

If the theories of Jurgen Habermas were legible, viable even, towards the end of the era of State Capitalism, when he first elaborated them, they progressively lost purchase as neoliberalism spread its tentacles throughout the world and started squeezing. It is not that he was mistaken per se but, rather, that a large part of this theoretical and practical program rested on a series of preconditions that were increasingly no longer in place. His assessments were tailored to a world that expired faster than anyone expected.

History had refused to stay the course. Once again, it refused to play the role assigned to it by theory. While Fukuyama was proclaiming the End of History and the establishment of an idyllic post-ideological era of seamless and stable (neo)liberal democracy across the globe, History had other plans, plans that involved reasserting itself with all the violence and unpredictability of something forcibly repressed. The long peace that had been heralded never arrived. In its place, new wars. The promises of increased participation and inclusion ended in new forms of exclusion, marginalization and exploitation. The legal protections and guarantees of the state capitalist days went up in smoke like single-ply napkins in the neoliberal bonfire of deregulation and privatization. Many of us who had assumed that the hard-won achievements of past struggles would perdure into the future stood in bewilderment as they came undone before our eyes. In this sense, Habermas wasn’t alone. He wasn’t the only one who failed to admit the possibility of regression, who failed to take it seriously enough.

At present, we find ourselves at the other end of the neoliberal arc. Having already been consummated, already having served its purpose, neoliberalism is currently transitioning into new forms, closer perhaps to those of monopoly capitalism. In many ways, it feels like we have gone back in time to the days of The Gilded Age, monopolies, imperialist war, and fascism, with their explosive coupling of a miniscule and overfed leisure class with a restless and ballooning underclass, subject to a steady diet of austerity and precarity. With the current revival of fascism, new forms of irrationality in public life have begun to resemble the old ones, the ones we thought had been laid to rest. We have come full circle, from the irrationality that was the starting point of The Frankfurt School through the stabilization offered by the epoch of State Capitalism, theorized optimistically by Habermas, and back once again to a mass irrationality in public and political life that bears striking resemblance to its historical antecedents.

One thing is clear: the conflicts and contradictions whose resolution Habermas envisioned have not disappeared nor diminished but in fact intensified. On this point, Marx’s assessment of the unresolvable contradictions at the heart of liberalism resonates more with the current world historical predicament. Habermas’s incursions into political theory and his exploration of the superstructure seem to have come at the price of losing sight of economic factors and class conflicts.

It would be a mistake, however, to write Habermas off so quickly.

In an ostentatiously post-truth era, his emphasis on undistorted communication in public life through the collective establishment of criteria for the validation of truth claims can serve a much-needed reminder that, even if we concede that linguistic propositions cannot ultimately rid themselves of their subjective and narrative dimensions, there are nonetheless degrees of coherence, objectivity, and rationality that indeed matter. The fact that language cannot ultimately be grounded in the empirical world does not mean that all enunciations are equally valid. This is the principle behind the pragmatics of Habermas’s theory of communicative action.

We mustn’t forget either that Habermas’s insistence on rationality was a part of a lifelong struggle against precisely the types of authoritarianism, ideological manipulation, and irrationality that we are experiencing today. To detect irrationality in public discourse and to discern between coercive and non-coercive modes of communication are valuable skills in today’s media environments, characterized as they are by hate speech and rampant irrationality.  

Equally important is his conception of affirmation. Much of the production of The Frankfurt School theorized the aftermath, the damaged lives in the wake of the catastrophe. Today, we find ourselves in a much different position. We are trying to prevent the catastrophe from happening. Thrown into the ring, he must fight our way out. Boat capsized, we must keep our heads above water; we must swim to shore. Such actions require agency. Negativity simply won’t cut it.

Besides, in some cases, negation and alienation do not go all the way down. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to explain social phenomena like punk, The Pink Tide that led much of South America to experiment with 21st century socialism, or any number of aesthetic and political grassroots movements. These margins, where the logic of the center does not hold, are precisely the types of spaces theorized and advocated by Habermas, characterized by modes of interaction and communication that exceed instrumental reason, the will to dominate, and the logic of the market.

This isn’t to say that we must dust off the crown and lead Jurgen Habermas by the hand back to his throne. We might do well, though, to head down to our local used bookstores, pick up some of his works, and read them with the attention they deserve. We might find that they have something to say to us yet.

"Operários" (1933), Tarsila do Amaral