A Justice Site
Journal Discussion Thread: Outsider Theory
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP
Caliifornia State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: August 22, 2001
Latest Update: August 25, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Review and Teaching Essay by Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata
Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors: August 2001. "Fair use" encouraged.
Dear Habermas and Outsider Theory
Mitchell Stephens' article, Jurgen Habermas: The Theologian of Talk, is the basis for this essay. It's well and clearly written, and gives a good overview of the dilemma that Habermas has always presented for this site.
Ours is not a particularly global approach to sociology. This weekend at the American Sociology Association Annual Meetings in Anaheim, CA., I met some young people, faculty and graduate students, who had never heard of Habermas. I've never been to one of the elite universities in the U.S., so I'm kind of used to such reactions. The assumption is generally not dismay that I refer to a sociologist as important whose name they do not even know, but more "what's my problem that I'm off on such a tangent."
I teach four classes a semester with an average of 200 students per semester, even when one of those courses is a graduate course. So not until I took partial retirement this Fall, did I have a chance to approach Habermas and social theory and philosophy and critical theory and postmodernism as I think we must. My schedule alone tells you that I am primarily a teacher. So is Susan. And Pat is primarily an academic advising counselor, who teaches through advising. The time to build Dear Habermas comes out of our commitment to teaching and to the belief that listening in good faith in public discourse matters if we are going to learn to live together into a future that doesn't require major evolution.
In 1996, I knew of Habermas, but I had never met him in a sociology department, and few people in my stomping grounds knew or cared who he was. I liked his hope. I'm an incurable optimist who's always looking for clouds with silver linings. The Enlightenment, reason, that all has to be good for something. I like science. No, I don't like the double-edged sword that leads elitists to an arrogance that they "know" definitively. But I'm willing to believe that Horkheimer and Adorno were simply tired and disillusioned when they saw the negative consequences of the enlightenment. The postmodern pessimism that suggests that relativism makes choice impossible seems a tad overdramatic to me.
Oh, I don't discount the evil in the world. And I understand the ugly side of colonialism and imperialism and just plain greed. But I believe in grounded theory, in letting the data tell me their own story in their own voices, before I formulate any hypotheses. And I believe in theory and science and truth that refuses to buy into blatant denial. So I believe that Habermas might be right that we can reestablish public discourse, and that we can salvage both justice and legitimacy on some level if we are committed, as is Habermas, to not letting the dark side blind us.
There are risks, of course. But in Habermas' program there is a glimmer of hope. Even if that's a little unrealistic, as Stanley Fish and others insist, I cannot bring myself to teach people eager and hungry to learn that all is relative, evil exists, and there is no hope. Now all of this is just my own little slice of philosophy. But we teach, whether we know it or not, what we believe. And I had read enough of Habermas to know that I shared his hopes and dreams.
In the little bookstore that used to live right next door to the Whitney in New York, I happened to pick up Habermas's Between Facts and Norms. I handed it to my husband and said I needed to take it home to California. I would need it to teach sociology of law. Home in California, Richard Moncure, my TA at the time, said "You have to use it for a text. You'll never forgive yourself if you don't." Intrigued in spite of myself I picked up the office phone and called Susan Takata at Wisconsin.
"Richard says I have to use it as a text in sociology of law. Tell me that's crazy." There was a moment of silence, and then Susan said, "Well, I'm going to teach sociology of law in the Spring. If you'll use it this Fall, I'll use it in the Spring." Now that conversation alone leads me to disagree with Habermas that all this is rational. That decision was not rational. I had not read Between Law and Facts yet. Susan didn't even have a copy yet. And I doubt that either of us could have given a rational explanation for that decision to use such a difficult text in small four-year state colleges where teaching has been turbulent for years.
Now, just a few years later, we could both give you very specific theoretical justifications for our decision to teach with Between Law and Facts, and to create Dear Habermas. We would cite Freire, and hooks, and Duncan Kennedy, and Rawls, and Nozick, and Hockenberry, and MacKinnon, and Habermas, and Foucault, and Lyotard, and Derrida. But those theorists did not shape the decision to create Dear Habermas. As a matter of fact, I was horrified when Craig Calhoun pointed out to me that Habermas was in fact a critical theorist instead of a postmodernist. Hmmm. Well, you sure could have fooled me. I felt kind of like I did when Anthony Giddens said that he would give Habermas a B in Weber. Hmmm.
Actually, I think it's all grounded theory's fault. We wanted our students to learn, to question, to think critically, and to question authority, all authority. We wanted them to understand social systems so they could function to their best advantage in ours. I always admired Giddens' statement that a sociologist studied the social system or sociology or whatever to teach people to understand it better so they could live more effectively within the system. And once they had learned to understand the system they promptly found ways to change it so it would serve them better, and then the sociologist had to study it all over again to teach people to understand it better . . . and so on. . . .
From that kernel of Giddens' description of sociology, and from Habermas' glimmer of hope, came my vision of theory construction. Theorists have long bemoaned the loss of interest in serious theory construction. But they mean theory construction at the highest scholastic level. I don't believe that theory, living theory that fits with praxis, belongs there, at least not solely there.
That is why I have taken time to explain my arrival at this point. Because I did not get here by the serious study of theory. I came as an "outsider." As a teacher over-loaded with daily curricular concerns and students. But as an "outsider" I wanted very much to learn. I needed theory, and I knew enough of it to know that I needed it. And I never dreamt that I had a role in theory construction. I never dreamt there was any "place" for "outsiders."
Habermas' Between Facts and Norms somehow opened that "place" for me. And when our students began to ask me, that first semester, "What would Habermas say?" I heard, in addition to the needs that set me and Susan to writing our Handbook of Sociology of Law, that the students, like me, needed that theory. It wasn't that they didn't care what I thought or what I would say, but that they recognized Habermas as a thinker, and they wanted to share in those thoughts. They included me. They were willing to trust my interpretation of what Habermas said. But they wanted to catch at least a glimpse of Habermas' cognitive world.
They don't want to compete with Habermas in thinking through the theoretical battle over enlightenment as a metatheory, or whether meta narratives even are more than delusions. But they would like to have an understanding of what the argument is about and how it translates into the concerns of their daily lives. And it does, translate into their daily lives, that is. It strikes me as the utmost arrogance to insist that ordinary folks can't understand our theories, to create jargon that guarantees obfuscated communication, and then to prove our superiority by decrying the "lack of reason, intelligence and culture" of those same ordinary folks.
But this isn't just my imaginary. Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, tells the story of local black folks, men mostly, on the porch of a rural general store, caught up in a discussion of whether it's nature or caution that keeps the child from burning his hand on the iron stove. And surprise, surprise. The discussion mirrors all the debates on nature vs. nurture in academic social psychology.
I know, I know. That's fiction. But Zora Neale Hurston's greatness as a writer in the Harlem Renaissance was her anthropological talent of catching people as they were, of making them live for us. She described their pure joy in living. That is, she saw the stories and reflected the voices outside the structural context of slavery and oppression. She would have made a good postcolonialist. She saw and respected real identities, to the extent they could develop in that structural context. Though I am no literary critic, I think that is what Edward Said would see in her work. My students and I both see and rejoice in her visions.
I hope this not-so-brief introduction gives a sense of how and why I first saw Habermas as postmodern. I had no reason to classify him as a modernist. True, he was delightfully more optimistic than the deconstructionists I encountered. I wanted to deconstruct. Do so all the time with my students. But I didn't want to give up science and all the advantages the last couple of hundred years had given us. I'm not even sure we could if we wanted to. It's very hard to suppress knowledge. And positivism did produce knowledge. Very limiting and constrained knowledge, with many false beliefs in the purity and stability of one's own privileged subjectivity. But, nonetheless, useful knowledge.
Thus, I didn't translate Habermas' defense of reason or his need for some overriding consensus on assessing the validity of differing claims as modernist, or more importantly, as anti postmodern. And so I thought of him as postmodern. Since I don't aspire to writing definitive books on his theory, and don't want to accomplish much more than bringing an understanding of his ideas as they guide us in a real lifeworld, I don't guess it will do any harm to confess that I still consider him a postmodernist. I think we should have learned the lesson of positivism, that no one approach brings us THE TRUTH.
Of course he carries on the critical tradition of the Frankfurt school. My students know that. We speak of Horkheimer and Adorno, and the double-edged sword of enlightenment regularly. We speak also of Said and Spivak and the meaning of colonialism and empire.
But Habermas doesn't lock himself into a single school. He locks himself into a position of politics. A politics that says for Germany "Never again!" and he locks himself into optimism. That's why Susan and I chose him as our mentor. Peace, non-violence, hope.
Mitchell Stephens' article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine is probably one of those that formed my early acquaintance with Habermas. It offers a good beginning for understanding Habermas, at least, as I understand him.
Juergen Habermas: The Theologian of Talk By Mitchell Stephens. Mitchell Stephens, who has also profiled Jacques Derrida for the magazine, heads the journalism and mass communication program at New York University. Los Angeles Times Magazine. October 23, 1994. "The question is whether justice exists and reason can benefit society. It's postmodern to say no, but Jurgen Habermas, a German philosopher, disagrees."
Right off, folks. I want to say that postmodernism does not say "no" to whether justice exists and reason can benefit society. Postmodernism, as I understand it, can't say that, for that would be totalizing and would violate postmodernism's belief that metanarratives lead to the exclusion of validity for local narratives, the relativism argument. And Habermas doesn't say that metanarratives are the be-all and end-all of knowledge. He agrees that the exclusion of local narrative by metanarrative is harmful. I hope he believes that, because I'm daring to say that he does. But I'm not a philosopher, and I only just retired to give myself time to write and read. Those of you who know his work so much better than I are invited to correct me.
But the Habermas I have followed as a mentor, is not arguing against even Horkheimer and Adorno in their understanding of the harm made possible by the enlightenment. He is arguing against the inflexibility of believing that because the enlightenment can produce evil, that it will, and therefore should be abandoned. To me, that's arguing against metanarrative, against totalizing. I think it's totalizing and kind of positivist to have philosophy and social theory degenerate to a level of dualisms. I don't think Habermas is a postmodernist to the exclusion of being a critical theorist. I just don't care much what you call him, and I'm not convinced he'd really care either, if he thought about it.
Now, how does this lead me to theory construction? I think our totalizing attitude to theory has excluded people like me, who had to work for a living, and whose work left no time for theoretical rumination and production. You see, I went right on turning Habermas into a mentor for me and probably a thousand or so students, even though I didn't get invited to the theory sandbox. We are "outsider" theorists. But we didn't choose to be exclusive, to go off and play in our own sandbox, and not share in theory construction at all. One very well-respected sociologist once told me that I was so creative the national group with whom I had established contact didn't know what to do, so they decided it was just best to leave me alone. Gee, thanks. They decided that "outsider status" depended on my remaining "outside." And these were nice men, my mentors through major federal grants. They even genuinely cared about my professional existence.
Now, twenty-five years later, maybe they were right. If I'd been invited into the sandbox, I probably would never have discovered "outsider theory." And I think we need "outsider theory."
And here, Edward Said helped enormously. His secular criticism, "which dispenses with 'priestly' and abstruse specialisation in favour of a breadth of interest and what he calls an amateurism of approach, avoiding the retreat of intellectual work from the actual society in which it occurs." (Routledge, Critical Thinking Series, Edward Said) I know he says it's literary theory he's talking about. But it's social theory, too. It's what I'm trying to teach my students. And so is Habermas!
In Mitchell Stephens' article you will find:
"[Habermas'] writings don't influence masses of blue-collar workers, but they are read by a lot of German party officials and journalists and so on. In this way he is very influential."At that, my hackles rose. "It's masses of blue-collar workers" and those who never had a chance to join the discourse groups of university philosophers - it's women who have six children and whose husband is not there to support them and who genuinely cared about these issues but never had a formal chance to learn - it's the young woman in Zambia with an infant son, who had finished all available education and was searching desperately for more - it's these people who must be part of public discourse if it is to accomplish what Habermas hopes for. In case no one noticed there are more of us workers and street people and peasants than there are "party officials and journalists and so on . . ."
I'm a worker, better off than my parents, but a worker none the less. Don't even get time allowed for research, not with all my academic training. Still teaching four courses, 200 students, even in my semi-retirement.
I'm not making this up, folks.
Hear Seyla Benhabib and Habermas himself in Mitchell Stephens' article:
"As Seyla Benhabib, a professor of political theory at Harvard, explains: 'Habermas believes human social life rests on our capacity to have more or less clear communication with each other.' We communicate -- to paraphrase Descartes -- therefore our society exists."" . . . [Habermas] continues to believe that somewhere behind the better of our attempts to communicate with each other, there have to be some shared values, shared respect and acknowledged equality. He sees the participants in conversations, in other words, as playing on the same teams. And as they talk together, Habermas insists, they make an effort to employ reason.
"'This may not seem like a big deal," Benhabib acknowledges. 'But it has fundamentally changed our way of thinking about society in the last 25 years or so.' Habermas' theory, she explains, calls into question a belief that is widely held by cynical and fashionable thinkers on the right and the left: the belief that human behavior should be seen as a battlefield upon which each of us is merely out for our own strategic interests. In our 'communicative actions,' the right sees selfish individuals struggling to get a leg up on each other; the postmodern left sees the powerful exploiting the powerless; but Habermas sees, of all things, a kind of cooperation. Indeed, he shares with Socrates an almost utopian belief in the wholesomeness of debate and discussion.'
Such a utopian belief does not go with an appeal that is satisfied by reaching party officials and journalists. But workers have not found ready access to Habermas' work. And that I believe is the role of "outsider theorists." Most of us have the academic training to pursue theory. We lack the time and discretion to contribute as can someone whose work and lifeworld coincide with such activity. But our knowledge needs to remain current for our teaching to retain its energy and purpose.
We need the connection, for I began my work in community theory construction with little more than journalistic references and an ability to read many languages. I bought BFN in German. And then I gave up and used my English version when there was just not enough time to spare. Habermas is not light reading. In my day, one simply did not use translations. But my students have picked up some of that respect for the original. They learned terms like Weltschmerz and Weltanschauung and Lebenswelt and many others. And of course Weltschmerz brought up Goethe. And when I passed the German edition around the room of forty or so students, they fingered it with a kind of reverence, even though none of them could read it. I should have translated a paragraph or two and showed them how to find it. I'll do that this Fall. We underestimate the power of learning.
Mitchell Stephens says of Habermas:
" . . . Habermas persists, for example, in maintaining that 'in our everyday knowledge of how language is properly used we find a common ground among all creatures with a human face.' That's called 'humanism.' That's called 'universalism.' These are beliefs any self-respecting postmodernist rejected decades ago. Moreover, Habermas is convinced -- and this really gets the postmodernists calling for the violins -- that through reasoned communication we humans can get beyond our biases."
And here come my hackles again: no, not every self-respecting postmodernist feels that way. That is totalizing and arrogant in itself to think that all of us who try to think philosophically and in terms of social theory are somehow described by any one status characteristic or phrase. And it can't be anti postmodern for Habermas to believe that we can get past our biases. That might depend on your definition of postmodernism. I know this is a popular press article. But that's no excuse for pejoratives that can't be sustained even by journalistic standards. Some of my students might accept your definition of postmodernism, and I would be horrified at that.
Greed is human. Especially in an adversarial society. Social constructivism would remind us of the extent to which structural context encourages greed in the process of identity formation. (Fellman, Gordon. Rambo and the Dalai Lama.) So when we engage in pejorative name calling, we have stooped to the "rhetoric of reaction" which Albert O. Hirschman discovered we all use as an easy substitute for listening in good faith.
The Hab list has been welcoming and kind to me. I'm still intimidated, for as I planned retirement I had very little time to read in depth and update this site which permits "outsider theory." But it is because I followed the Hab list that I came to understand that the work that my students and colleagues and I were doing had a role in theory I do not think Habermas himself would denigrate. Public discourse comes from the "public." It is the public, the workers, the working mothers, the homeless and the exploited we must teach the skills of public discourse. We need the party officials and journalists. It was undoubtedly journalists who first led me to Habermas, since he was never ever mentioned in a sociology gathering of my lifeworld. But we need our "outside theorists" in the classroom, all classrooms, elementary and middle schools, and in the community, and in our churches and synagogues and mosques. And they need to understand how important outside theory is to the future of public discourse and hope, and yes, enlightenment.