Mimesis and Reason: Habermas's Political Philosophy

3. The Subject in Communicative Action: Habermas and George Herbert Mead

Chapter 3 The Subject in Communicative Action Habermas and George Herbert Mead The author, the artist, must have his audience; it may be an audience that belongs to posterity, but there must be an audience. —George Herbert Mead (1934, 324) As we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, Habermas posits communicative rationality as a moral alternative to mimetic power. These two modes of interaction are asymmetrically opposed in Habermas’s account because communicative rationality requires that speech participants retain a decisive DXWRQRP\ WR PDNH UHàHFWLYHO\ FRQVFLRXV PRUDO GHFLVLRQV WR SDUWLFLSDWH in communicative action on the basis of principle (U). Habermas follows .DQWÖV GHßQLWLRQ RI DXWRQRP\ WKH VXEMHFWLYH IUHHGRP WR ZLOOIXOO\ ELQG oneself morally.1 Mimesis, to the contrary, would seem to describe a state of possession, the substitution of conscious autonomy for the authority of another, an unconscious submission, or, in an active sense, to act as another, to speak in another’s voice, to imitate body and gesture, such that this masquerade could, in time, become one’s own gesture, one’s own voice. We saw that for Plato, mimesis cannot be done away with. It is endemic WRHGXFDWLRQIRUFKLOGUHQEXWDOVRWKURXJKRXWWKHFRXUVHRIDKXPDQOLIH 69 70 Mimesis and Reason 7KHUHLVQRUHSODFLQJPLPHVLVE\VHOIVXIßFLHQF\2 for the proper care of the soul by the philosopher, the lover, the citizen comes through dialectic that demands an affective submission before a model. It is a directed and disciplined mimesis that Plato advocates. Plato demands that political institutions and authority limit and focus mimesis, not excommunicate it. Plato expels mimetic poets so as to reserve the control of mimesis for philosophers. Although Plato’s mythic formulation of mimesis in Phaedrus links erotic love, philosophy, and recovered memory of perfect Forms, Habermas’s mimesis, as I construe communicative action, does not seek to recover nor reproduce a mimetic unity in Forms, but rather, it works through language to pragmatically bring about shared understanding. Habermas wishes to grant the status of rationality to the process of coming to understanding . As I have stated, it is my intention to challenge Habermas’s self-understanding, not to dismiss communicative action’s rational aspect, but to put into question Habermas’s rhetorical move of strictly opposing communicative rationality to mimesis, and thereby to question the nature of rationality anew. Rationality and mimesis stand opposed only from the vantage of the philosophy of the subject. Habermas’s paradigm shift (from subjective reason to communicative reason), which takes as its object of analysis the intersubjective, pragmatic use of language, actually works to overcome the opposition between rationality and mimesis, such that self-consciousness admits mimetism as its mode of becoming. Habermas’s philosophical apparatus points in this direction, yet he remains stubbornly insistent in wishing to disarticulate reason from mimetic power. The question we must pose to Habermas is whether the paradigm shift from the philosophy of consciousness to intersubjectivity can, as he ZLVKHVLWPLJKWVWDYHRIIWKHVDFULßFHRIVXEPLVVLRQDQGVHOIORVVFKDUDFteristic of the mimesis he condemns. Habermas insists that it must, for he puts great emphasis on the autonomy of will in the application of moral insight. Identity-formation through self-loss characterizes traditional views of mimetic power. These characteristics pose problems for the demands RI+DEHUPDVÖVFULWLFDOWKHRU\RIYLJLODQFHDQGUHVLVWDQFHWRWKHFODLPVRI dogmatic authority, of reasoned argument against a mimesis conceived of as submission to aesthetic spectacle. Divine and aesthetic mimesis swamps autonomy and yields a concept of reason akin to myth, a surrender to other-worldly authority. Divine mimesis to the side, it is a prosaic pantomimesis that Plato condemns and Habermas endorses. As we saw in Chapter 2, for Plato, pantomimesis is the mode of being of the protean soul. Does Habermas’s turn away from divine mimesis run him into the arms of Proteus? If, as 71 The Subject in Communicative Action I argued above, principle (U) stands in an external relation to the event of understanding in communicative action, then what happens within the actual process of taking the attitude of the other—within the fence (U) SURYLGHVEXWXQLQàHFWHGFRQWHQWZLVHE\LWVFRQFHSWXDOFODULW\DQGPRUDO UHFWLWXGH" ,V 3ODWRÖV ZRUU\ LQGHHG MXVWLßHG RU LV WKHUH VRPHWKLQJ WKDW is neither metaphysical like the Forms, nor quasi-metaphysical like (U), which nonetheless prevents selves...