Mirror Sites:
CSUDH Habermas UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: April 24, 2001
Latest update: April 24, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

Knowledge is freedom. Knowledge is power. And knowledge is also self-destructive. This essay is prompted by my recollections of first reading Horkheimer and Adorno. They were so disillusioned by the crumbling of their world (around the time of the Second World War - the 30s and 40s) that they experienced, as I understand it, terrible depression. They had believed, like most others, in the enlightenment, in modernism, as the path to a utopian future in which science and technology brought new understanding and would provide a world so knowledgable and so advanced there would be "enough" for everyone to live a utopian life. The Second World War proved to be the destruction of that dream.

Convinced that the vanquishing of the Nazis and Hitler would permit us back onto the road to enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno (of the Frankfurt school - and today, Habermas) sought some understanding of what went wrong. How could all the positive advances of modernism result in the destruction, violence, and horror that was World War II?

Susan and I want to remind you at this point that we are asking similar questions. This essay does not provide the answers. Sorry, we don't have them. Neither did Horkheimer and Adorno. Neither does Habermas. Neither do the postcolonialists or the postmarxists or the neoconservatives or the moderate republicans. We are all today pondering these questions, across philosophy, history, psychology, sociology, literature, even those of us who have totally rejected the possibility of metanarrative and have turned in desperation to the praxis of the local narrative.

We could be depressed over that, and despair, as have past generations, over our failure to discover "the" answers, or we could choose a postmodern alternative and admire the beauty of a world that continues to offer the human such agency and such challenge unendingly. Susan and I are going to share with you in this essay our understanding of the postmodern world in which we live, its beauties and its dangers, in our lived experience. We do not have answers where great thinkers before us remain perplexed and confused, but we do have some practical advice on how to fit your education into lived experience and still see the beauty of this world.

Our practical advice is based on our entire experience of social theory. But we are teachers, not major theorists. So you should temper our advice with the reading of the theories we indicate, if you want solid academic precedents. These are our interpretations, and you now have the agency and the training to put together your own interpretations.

The Social Problem: Awarenesss and Denial

The problem, as jeanne understands it for this draft, is that our academic explorations increase our awareness tremendously. But at these first stages of encountering theory, especially across many disciplines, it's hard to grasp the theories in all their complexity. I think that happened in the Enlightenment and Modernism, too. People became slowly aware of the power of science, of the possibility of using "objectivity" to get at many perspectives and to grasp a picture of the whole scene instead of just one person's personal and lived experience. In the process of discovering science as a tool for understanding, most of our effort was turned to selling the new tool to the world in understandable bits and pieces.

Only later did we come to understand that "objectivity" was founded on unstated assumptions that limited our imaginary and shaped the "truth" we learned to the world we lived and knew. Only much later did we come to understand that the "voices" of many had never been included. Today, Susan and I teach "alterity," almost as if it is a new discovery, for it is a postmodern concept.

I was amazed last week when one of Susan's students suggested that we wanted to get rid of "alterity." Goodness, I thought, we've just barely gotten you to see that there are "Others," please don't get rid of the concept yet! But I slowly came to see that what she meant was that in that perfect utopian world that failed to evolve from enlightenment there should be no Others, for there should be no exclusion. In that sense, yes, our goal would be not to need to consider the voice of the "Other" for there would no longer be any excluded voice. In my lived experience of the world today, that perspective is truly utopian, and we are not there.

Where Susan and I and our students are, we are pleased to get the basic concepts of structural violence, agency, interdependence, and alterity to a point where they are genuinely a part of our own intellectual database. We are reading widely on the interpretation of these concepts over the disciplines on which social theory depends. But as we acquire the concepts, and make them our own, we experience the same dilemma Horkheimer and Adorno addressed with the enlightenment. In our enthusiasm to understand "alterity" we forget that it is the underlying exclusion we hope to eliminate. In identifying structural violence, we heighten our awareness to the moments in which we experience such violence, but we forget Fellman's caution that our situatedness and the dominant discourse have limited our imaginaries, inured us to obsessive adversarialism, and we are unaware of the extent to which we use the tool of structural violence from which we have suffered so much.

That's what we want to address in this essay. In what subtle and out-of-awareness ways to do I turn the tool of structural violence against others?

I have to go to school now. But I'm going to put up several messages on structural violence that came in recently, and then analyze in detail incidents in which we have turned to the problem of structural violence by being structurally violent ourselves. I'll try to get this up this evening. Meanwhile, I've begun uploading some theoretical references for you.

Theoretical References:

• Kurt Lewin - psychological life space - how on earth do things get so out of perspective?

  
  You'll find this graph a little more than half-way down the file in Kurt Lewin's theory - general review.

  "As early as 1912 Kurt Lewin foresaw that a scientific psychology would have to make use of 'topology' and of the dynamics which could be conceived in a topological structure (cf. Lewin 1969: 9). Lewin's central idea was that of a 'psychological life-space' (psychologischer Lebensraum). Life-space is constituted by the individual and a situation relevant for the individual at a given moment. The life-space of an individual has two aspects:

  • Every partial domain of an individual's life-space corresponds to a 'psycho-domain', containing the person, structures of the life-space specifically relevant for the person (individual situations) and structures of the life-space which are constituted independently from the person (standard situations).

  • Psychic 'locomotion', i.e., paths in the life-space with preferred routes, barriers and obstacles."

  jeanne's visual version of life space will be up in a day or so.
• Herbart - apperceptive mass - communication across age differences, situational differences - jeanne's visual version of life space up soon.
• Fellman - obsessive adversarialism and obsessive mutuality
• Stuart Henry and Dragan Milovanovic - constitutive theory
• Shane's e-mail on "How shall I live?" Advice is not a prescription. Advice is a definitive statement against which you are expected to react and ponder.
• Lear and "knowingness"