Performative Contradiction Research Articles

Michel Maffesoli's Sociology of Modernity and Postmodernity: An Introduction and Critical Assessment

This article introduces and criticises Michel Maffesoli's attempt to formulate a post-modern sociology for post-modern times. While arguing that Maffesoli's sociology is suggestive and insightful about many aspects and features of late-modern life this article, nonetheless, questions whether Maffesoli's approach should be accepted as a fruitful sociological paradigm which others should take up uncritically. Moreover, it will be argued that Maffesoli's approach is an ultimately incoherent and one-sided approach to studying the ‘postmodern condition’ in that it does not escape the problem of ‘performative contradiction’ identified by the likes of Habermas, Giddens and Touraine. That is to say, Maffesoli has produced a one-sided and flattened out image of modernity that cannot account for the possibility of social and political critique.

A linguistic contribution to psychoanalysis the concept of performative contradictions

Linguistic philosophy provides conceptual tools by which psychoanalysis can redefine its conditions of productive discourse. In particular, the idea of performative contradictions permits ready noting of obstructions to that discourse. The present paper means to develop an adequate vocabulary defining the conditions of what is essentially analytic and the positive events accompanying them. These conditions can be seen as systematic substitutions for such recommendations as anonymity and neutrality.

Chinese Buddhist Religious Disputation

From about the fourth to the tenth century Buddhist monks in China engaged in formal, semi-public, religious disputation. I describe the Indian origins of this disputation and outline its settings, procedures, and functions. I then propose that this disputation put its participants at risk of performative contradiction with Buddhist tenets about language and salvation, and I illustrate how some chinese Buddhists attempted to transcend these contradictions, subverting disputation through creative linguistic and extra- linguistic strategies.

A Discourse-Theoretic Approach to Aboriginal Rights

A series of recent papers explore aboriginal rights from constitutional contractarian and discourse-theoretic perspectives (Avio 1994a, 1994b, 1995b). The first perspective is based on the work of James Buchanan. The second draws heavily on the lesser known (to economists) Kantianinfluenced moral and social philosophy of Jurgen Habermas (e.g. Habermas 1990, 1993).l The two theories point to similar conclusions with respect to aboriginal property rights, but diverge with respect to aboriginal governance rights. In particular, while constitutional contractarianism prescribes a fiduciary duty for the Crown with no right of exit, ethics suggests the possibility of a reclaimable aboriginal sovereignty if an ongoing discourse of supporting the norm of cultural equality breaks down (Avio 1995b). Here the relevant ideas from Habermas are sketched, discourses of implementation are introduced, and the application to aboriginal governance rights outlined. Habermas specifies a hierarchy of discourses pointed to the justification and application of morally binding norms. Discourses of justification are marked by a practise of communicative rationality, in which parties rely on the consensus-bringing force of argumentative speech to reach conclusions on questions of justice, itself understood to exhaust the moral realm. Such discourses are necessarily mediated through the principle of universalization, an extension of the Kantian Categorial Imperative. This principle, which is legitimated through application of performative contradictions in the context of a logic of argumentation, requires that all relevant parties examine the contested norm from the moral point of view, that is impartiality, and accept only the better argument as grounds for assent. Such an attitude is assured by participants adopting in order the viewpoints of all others. Ideal roletaking becomes the moral touchstone for normative validity. Discourse of justification is the testing grounds for moral principles independent of context. Discourses of application are needed to establish

An un‐Rortyan defence of Rorty's pragmatism

An identification is made of the core metaphilosophical, philosophical, and intellectual history theses in Richard Rorty's pragmatism. Their rationale is displayed and it is argued that his metaphilosophical theses are very much dependent on certain of his non‐metaphilosophical philosophical theses, most centrally his anti‐representationalism. Questions emerge about the status and justification of these theses. Rorty, in his programmatic pronouncements, resists providing a vindication of them. Seeking to avoid what has been called performative contradictions, he regards it as sufficient to provide the best narrative going of what is to be said here. It is argued that a more straightforward defence can be provided that does not depart from his holism or his historicism with its setting aside of claims of necessity.

The Rhetoric of Failure and Deconstruction

Unmasking Deconstruction: Skepticism in Disguise? In this essay I argue that in order to understand the consequences of Jacques Derrida's theory of language, it is essential to rethink the relationship of his philosophy to skepticism.1 strategic return to the question of in the context of Derrida's work requires immediate justification because the very term skepticism is bound to evoke a long series of misreadings not only of deconstruction but also of When deconstruction is perceived as the most extreme manifestation of postmodernity, the very appearance of the term skepticism implies a strong and often reductive value judgment about the impasse, deadlock, or exhaustion of postmodern thinking: postmodernism. . . [is] a continuation of the metaphysical skeptical tradition, reaching its dead end in deconstruction.2 In the aftermath of French poststructuralism, the problem of is persistently raised in both philosophical and literary studies in order to dramatize the paralyzing consequences of the postmodern critiques of reason and the subject.3 Although the charge of is usually dismissed as a misreading of Derrida's thought, the very frequency of this misreading and its persistent recurrence requires critical explanation. I argue that the repetition of in the reception of deconstruction inadvertently points to the crucial and frequently untheorized problem in Derrida's work: to the reinscription of as an ethical, rather than epistemological, problem facing modernity. focus on the critical revision of skepticism, I claim, allows us to move past the endless discussions of the impasse of postmodernity, the exhaustion of subjectivity, and the collapse of reason, and to articulate instead an alternative interpretation of poststructuralist discourse-an interpretation that would account for the crucial role of alterity in language. In order to articulate the stakes of the revision of skepticism, I will contrast two very different ways of broaching the problem of within deconstruction: the first path, followed by many of Derrida's critics, serves the purpose of dismissing the critical force of poststructuralism by assimilating it into the classical skeptical challenge that philosophy knows how to refute; the second path, initiated by Emmanuel Levinas's response to Derrida, implies just the reverse-that the ethical consequences of Derrida's critique of logocentrism and the philosophy of the subject are perhaps incomprehensible without a prior reappraisal of skepticism. Depending on the way it is articulated, the relation between deconstruction and can serve, therefore, two different purposes. In the first case, the problem of sets up the contrast between the traditional picture of language as a reliable means of representation at the disposal of the subject and the deconstructive view in which language relinquishes this representative function and thus leaves the subject without any relationship to the external world. In the second case, is invoked in order to articulate the difference between language understood within the parameters of the subject and language conceived as an exposure to the other. difference between these two ways of articulating the connection between deconstruction and is crucial for understanding Derrida's place within postmodern critiques of reason. In particular, the contrast between representation and exposure to the other allows us to clarify the consequences of Derrida's attempt to dissociate language from the metaphysics of the subject. Thus, what is at stake in raising the issue of is not only a matter of settling a controversy within the reception of deconstruction but also an inquiry into the implications and dilemmas of the postmodern critiques of rationality. One of the most powerful criticisms addressed to deconstruction in particular, and to the postmodern critiques of reason in general, is the Habermasian claim that postmodern thought is caught in the inevitable aporia of the totalizing critique of reason destroying its own foundation--or, what he calls, a performative contradiction: The totalizing self-critique of reason gets caught in a performative contradiction since subject centered reason can be convicted of being authoritarian in nature only by having recourse to its own tools. …

Working in the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

Jurgen Habermas's book on the philosophical discourse of modernity is an original and multilayered work. It is an ambitious synthesis of post-Hegelian philosophy, a self-critique of the tradition of Critical Theory, a decisive rejection of philosophies committed to subject-centered (instrumental) reason, and an energetic defense of a non-totalizing conception of the project of modernity. All of these themes converge in his treatment of the critique of that he associates with the paradoxes of self-referential critique. According to Habermas, the problem of a critique of seriously undermines the Critical Theory of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, and it reaches crisis proportions in the work of postmodernists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In this essay I explain what is at issue for Habermas in the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, and I focus on the specific arguments that he develops in his critiques of Foucault and Derrida. My main concern, however, is to analyze the complex ways in which Habermas's theory of modernity, his theory of communicative action, intersects with both genealogy and deconstruction. I argue that his attempt to apply the idea of a radical critique of reason to Foucault is only partially successful because, while it can show limitations in the genealogical method, it also gives rise to questions about the methodological basis of Habermas's own theory. In my discussion of Derrida and deconstruction I am especially concerned not to allow the differences between Habermas and Derrida to be reduced to personal idiosyncrasies, and I try to identify the basic theoretical claim of deconstruction, which I maintain, in opposition to Habermas, is made from within the tradition of rational argumentation. Horkheimer and Adorno's sweeping condemnation of Enlightenment thinking provides Habermas with a paradigm case of the paradoxes involved in self-referential critique. These theorists get entangled in paradoxes, he explains, because they cannot describe the dialectic of Enlightenment without making use of the critical capacity that, according to them, has been lost in the unbounded spread of instrumental reason.2 The problem might be understood as follows. If we have lost all capacity for critical reasoning, how is it then that we can even raise the question of such a loss? To raise the question, to enter into an open-ended discussion, is to announce, in a performative sense, the existence of a reason that cannot be reduced to the instrumental, or understood solely in terms of power claims. According to this view, anyone who argues against reason is necessarily caught up in contradiction: she asserts at the locutionary level that reason does not exist, while demonstrating by way of her performance in argumentative processes that such reason does in fact exist. Adorno, as Habermas writes, not only acknowledged his performative contradiction, but, inspired by Nietzsche, became defiantly resigned to it. But an attitude is not an argument, and Habermas interprets Adorno's resignation as indicating a failure to follow through problems in theory. Faced with the question of why Horkheimer and Adorno abandoned theory at such a critical juncture, Habermas points to limitations in their concept of reason. As he sees it, Horkheimer and Adorno were operating with a concept of instrumental reason that properly defines subject/object relations, but which is not adequate to what is involved in other types of relations. By the same token, in Habermas's view, we need an expanded concept of reason-a concept of communicative reason that focuses attention on the intersubjective (subject/subject) relations involved in communicative action. He explains that Horkheimer and Adorno did not have such a concept of communicative reason and that they tended to reduce intersubjective relations-which involve practical-ethical commitments-to subject/object relations-which involve instrumental (power-oriented) relations. …

On the Logic of the Performative Contradiction: Habermas and the Radical Critique of Reason

Jürgen Habermas levels the charge of performative contradiction as a scathing rebuke of inconsistency in his recent engagements with post-Nietzschean and Frankfurt critical theory. Focusing on this aspect of Habermas's critique of Theodor W. Adorno, the article argues against Habermas that Adorno's radical critique of reason actually pursues consistency in its radical critique of reason. It is contended that while Adorno's radical critique of reason may be total, it is not thereby hopeless and “aporetic” as critique. At root Adorno's critical theory may embody a “performative contradiction,” but this does not mean his project is necessarily incoherent or inconsistent.

Genealogy as examplary critique: reflections on Foucault and the imagination of the political

This paper suggests that genealogy (as it is elaborated and practised in the work of Foucault) is an exemplary form of critique. The stakes of this argument are established in the course of on intial response to critics of genealogy such as Habermas and Fraser (who claim that it involoves a performative contradiction) throght the distinguishing of legislative and exemplary forms or critique. The essay then goes on to to show how Foucault's central concern, namely, the relation of humanism and bio-power, leads him to articulate an ethics of creativity which exhibits an ethods of ironic heroization and discloses a conception of the political as agon. Reflecting on these features of genealogy's saying, it is argued that the form of genealogical reflection manifests these features. This emphasis on the showing of genealogy leads to the claim that Foucault's anti-humanism, mode of historical consciousness and perspectivism reproduce the substantive commitment of genealogy to the value of autonomy within the st...

Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique

1. Urban Flights - Institute of Social Research Between Frankfurt and New York 2. Debate Over Performative Contradiction - Habermas vs the Post-structuralists 3. Morals of Genealogy - Or is there a Post-structuralist Ethics? 4. Reassertion of Sovereignty in a Time of Crisis, Carl Schmitt and Georges Bataille 5. Women in Dark Times, Hannah Arendt and Agnes Heller 6. The Aesthetic as Ideology - Or What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics? 7. Apocalyptic Imagination and the Inability to Mourn 8. Rise of Hermeneutics and the Crisis of Ocularcentrism 9. Scopic Regimes of Modernity 10. Ideology and Ocularcentrism - Is There Anything Behind the Mirror's Tain? 11. Modernism and the Retreat From Form 12. Textual Approach to Intellectual History 13. Name-Dropping or Dropping Names? Modes of Legitimation in the Humanities.

Building an Unstable Pyramid: the Fragmentation of Alternative Theatre

In his earlier article, ‘Poaching in Thatcherland: a Case of Radical Community Theatre’, (NTQ34, May 1993), Baz Kershaw explored the work of the regional touring group EMMA during the 1970s, looking in particular at the quality of ‘performative contradiction’ which enabled it, for example, to make a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of a play steeped in rural nostalgia. Here, he explores other paradoxes of that era of burgeoning alternative and community theatre activity in the years before Thatcher, assessing the role and the ‘hidden agenda’ of the funding bodies, and analyzing and contrasting the working methods, aims, and resources of two of their very different clients – the ‘national’ fringe company Joint Stock, and the small-scale ‘reminiscence theatre’ group, Fair Old Times. Although both groups were engaged in the ostensibly radical and oppositional theatre practice which eventually led to their closures, there was, notes Kershaw, an increasing tendency by the funding bodies to judge the work of the latter by the more amply endowed standards of the former. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the work of Fair Old Times's ‘parent’ company, Medium Fair (TQ30, 1978), and has put the present studies into a broader context in his most recent book, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992). He is co-author, with Tony Coult, of Engineers of the Imagination (Methuen, 1983), a study of Welfare State, and has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers.

Poaching in Thatcherland: a Case of Radical Community Theatre

EMMA was one of the many small-scale touring groups which flourished as part of the community theatre movement of the 1970s. That it died within a year of the Thatcher decade was due, ironically, not to direct political intervention but to a financial crisis within its funding body, East Midlands Arts, brought on by its attempt to centralize community projects and render them safely retrospective. Here, Baz Kershaw compares the practice of EMMA with its stated intentions, and looks in detail at one of its self-created plays, The Poacher, as an example of ‘performative contradiction’ – in this case, the making of a subversive political statement within the ostensibly safe ambience of the rural nostalgia industry. Baz Kershaw, who lectures in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University, wrote for the original Theatre Quarterly on the rural community arts group Medium Fair. He has also contributed to Performance and Theatre Papers, and was co-author with Tony Coult of a study of Welfare State, Engineers of the Imagination. His most recent work is The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention (Routledge, 1992).

Habermas on Communicative Reason and Performative Contradiction

Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Question of Performative Contradiction We have become familiar with skepticism and various strategies in defense of rationality. Among the former have been the classical skepticisms of Cratylus, Xenophanes, Protagoras, Gorgias, Pyrrho of Ellis, and Sextus. Among the latter have been the Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian rational arguments on behalf of intelligible universe; Augustine's faith seeking understanding in Contra Academicos; and the modem attempts to overcome epistemic doubt by various turns of critical, transcendental, and self-reflective reason. This paper takes up the current argument of the critical modernist, JIurgen Habermas, against postmodern evasions of rationality. Is there anything philosophically interesting in rehashing the old theme of the ratio? Doesn't this problem die out with philosophies that engendered it? No, the very nature of philosophy is at issue in the division between modernists and postmodernists, a division which takes over and runs through the traditional split between contemporary continental and Anglo-American thought. Habermas locates the formal issue of rationality and performative contradiction within the debate on the crisis of modernity. But before we can take up the formal concept of performative contradiction, we must first define the broad historical context of this contradiction, second, see how the performative problem occurs in concrete existential strategies of contemporary philosophy, and third, evaluate the place of the project of modernity in light of these historical and existential contexts. Broadly defined within its historical context, performative contradiction is any argument which, in Habermas's understanding, proposes a wholesale

Epistemology and Exchange: Marx, Nietzsche, and Critical Theory

Jurgen Habermas argues that critical theorists' analyses ofthe dialectic of enlightenment contain a performative contradiction. By identifying reason with repression, they undermine the foundations of their own critique.' Habermas traces this performative contradiction to Friedrich Nietzsche's influence upon critical theory, but a significant gap appears in his analysis of it.2 Habermas argues that Adorno, by associating identity with exchange, extends Marx's critique of political economy to instrumental reason. He also maintains that Adorno adopts this Marxian critique too hastily, neglecting its instrumental biases. Yet