Allegories of America by Frederick M. Dolan

Author:Frederick M. Dolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

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A prime source of the political anxiety inspired by the rejection of theoretical piety is the fear that, Being having been revealed as a text, the special authority enjoyed by agreements reached through discourse governed by universal rational procedures is lost. Those who in the name of reason would instrumentalize and objectify have lost their moorings; but so too have those for whom reason signifies openness, contestability, and continuous revision and who therefore insist that the call for the democratization of society can be uttered in the name of reason. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jürgen Habermas argues that underlying these two senses of reason is a distinction between two aspects of language: the serious and the fictive (pp. 185–210, 294–326). In serious discourse, what is said is uttered in the understanding that the speaker may be called upon at any time to defend his or her views or proposals with rational arguments; in Habermas’s terms, a statement’s “validity claims” may be “redeemed.” In fictive discourse, these expectations are “bracketed,” so that the aesthetic, self-referential, playful aspects of signification may predominate. Against deconstruction, which questions the coherence of the opposition between the serious and the fictive (or between what he also terms the “action-coordinating” and “world-disclosive” aspects of discourse), Habermas argues that this distinction is no arbitrary theoretical construct nor a habitual, traditional linguistic practice (pp. 198–204).1 Rather, it isolates attitudes and idealizations participants in communicative action necessarily hold when they enter into relations with one another (p. 198).

Governed by the expectation of rational defensibility and the ideal of universal argumentative norms, serious, action-coordinating discourse makes of communication a problem-solving instrumentality capable of coordinating action because of the “binding illocutionary force” with which it connects participants to one another. Seriousness, for Habermas, is the norm; the expectation of redeemability structures and informs everyday, ordinary communication. Fiction, then, must be thought of not simply as a deviation from the ordinary, an extraordinary and specially demarcated lifting of the constraints and expectations governing normal communication, but as a deviation that is “parasitic” upon those very constraints because they are necessary for the establishment of the realities that fictional citations only mime.2 The poets and novelists whose fictions tempt us to redescribe familiar experience in new terms and who, at the limit, are said to invent entirely new perspectives from which to judge and value our experience, are far from being Shelleyan “unacknowledged legislators” of the sort monumentalized in Nietzsche’s “metaphysics for artists.” In fact, they must ultimately prove their worth in terms of the continuous “learning processes” and “ongoing test[s]” of ordinary serious language; for its perspective, just because it is not merely local but appeals to norms that transcend any particular context, remains decisive (pp. 195–210).

Against this Habermasian argument, deconstructionists point to the way in which the allegedly serious, literal discourses of everyday life are in fact permeated with symbolic, fictional constructs and conventional, ritualized meanings. If the communication of a meaning demands linguistic convention, then all communication is play-acting, all meaning fictional, all reason “mere” convention.

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