In Between Facts and Norms, the central empirical question is how discourse - and with it, particular modalities of power - gets formed within modern institutions and transmitted across them. The central normative task is to formulate the conditions under which the process and products of these interactions can be deemed legitimate. The title of the book describes not simply the condition of modernity or the nature of law - respectfully, suspended between facts and norms and constituted by their tension - but also the two registers that must be methodologically attended to in order to approach modernity.

Facticity and validity, of course, were not absent in pre-modern times (validity after all being a transcendental condition of communication). As a methodological issue, however, they did not have to be approached separately - the distinction between modernity and pre-modernity is precisely that in pre-modernity the factual exhausted the normative. The existence of a pre-modern institution or norm was sufficient to legitimize it, and the non-existent or potential was de facto illegitimate - hence the atrophy of social progress. The modern cleavage between validity and facticity is the Creation story of BFN - although critically, modern humans can not be restored to any kind of Eden. In place of pre-modernity's "fusion" of facticity and validity, Habermas seeks to develop a discourse ethics that can hook different social institutions together.

Those institutions themselves are constituted by different "amounts" of facticity and validity, and here is the first place where Habermas departs from the model of TCA and the ideal speech situation of STPS. But this departure is not as significant the next step that Habermas takes, wherein he functionally abandons the ideal speech situation as a model for public argumentation. Pace Foucault, he not only acknowledges that it's futile to try to remove power from discourse - he radically emphasizes that succeeding would be even worse.

After all of the underbrush of Between Facts and Norms is cleared - all the constitutional identity stuff, all the deliberative democracy stuff, etc - there's still the naive question: what, exactly is between facts and norms? This is obviously the space where facticity intersects with validity, but that's a trivial result based as much on synonyms as on analysis. Slightly less trivial - but still too abstract to be any good - is the observation that the space between facts and norms links the two together. In other words, that it provides the medium for communication between the two dynamics - that it binds them together by channeling something between the two of them. That something will turn out to be communicative power, but that's another post.

What we're interested in here is the way in which what is to be communicated comes about - specifically the debt that Habermas explicitly acknowledges he owes to Peirce on this issue. For Habermas, the space between facts and norms partakes of - but is not self-identical with - the lifeworld. It is, however, a social lifeworld self-reflexively constituted as outside the legal system, in a vulgar sense a more "social" reading of the lifeworld. This space is constituted by the background consensus of shared linguistic habits of communication - and by the implicit communicative assumptions that must also be shared for those linguistic habits to have formed. Into this space Habermas reads an essential fallibilism that he gets directly from Peirce.

We've been going back and forth with a colleague who has an unfortunate tendency to want to expand the horizon of what counts as "argument". As near as we can tell, argument for him is present whenever speakers gesture toward the form of an argument - that is, when they go through the motions of justifying their behavior by expressing something that has the form of an argument. This functionally makes almost any proposition given in the context of action - no matter how obviously a pretext - into an "argument". Our concern is that this makes "argumentation" too thin to be useful. As with all globalized hermeneutics, the mistakes become two-fold: the results either end up being untenable or incoherent. Untenable when persuasion is explained as a result of the force of the better argument rather than as of what's actually going on, or incoherent when objects of analysis can't even be usefully differentiated because the concepts to differentiate them simply aren't there. After the jump, our stab at a relatively precise - albeit modest - understanding of argument.

For all that he's appropriated as a proto-postmodernist, Nietzsche is as profoundly anti-reductionist as he is anti-universalist. Rather than these extremes, he emphasizes the circumstantial. Christian values originate as an outgrowth and reversal of Jewish values (GM). Debilitating skepticism is sublimated by Frederick into a "dangerous freedom" that establishes German cultural hegemony across Europe (BGE). And of course, the same process is good or bad, life-affirming or life-denying depending on the time and culture that it works on. The Nietzschean question is never "what gave rise to this phenomenon," but always "how is this phenomenon expressing itself now" - how is it functioning?

Kairos provides the historical foundation of rhetorical theory and exigence is probably the contemporary label for the moment of rhetorical practice. Sometimes a speech act persuades because it tells a good story. Other times it persuades because its a good argument. Much of the time, unfortunately, it doesn't persuade at all - but it produces the effect of persuasion as the audience uses it as a pretext to "reach" foregone conclusions. Certainly after Gaonkar, any theory that proceeds by saying "everything is this" must be understood as openly opposed to rhetoric - or as parasitic upon it, if the theory obnoxiously insists upon rhetorical lineage and status.

We're actually tempted to put any sufficiently robust claim of over-determination - as in Baudrillard's sense of one level overwhelming another, not as used by Freud or Althusser - beyond the horizon of rhetorical theory. Monsieur Foucault would be invited to exit stage far left, and to take his anti-circumstantial, overly-discursive, nominalist theory of language with him (alas, we don't make the rules around here). Regardless - if Nietzsche was not a rhetorical theorist, he certainly approached philosophy with an almost incomparable rhetorical sensibility.

References:
* Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1989.
* Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1969.
* Gaonkar, Dilip. "The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science." Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science. Eds. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Previously:
* "Nietzsche Was A Nihilist" And "Nietzsche Was An Anti-Semite" Had A Race To the Bottom. "Nietzsche Was A Nihilist" Won. [IIS]

We were planning to start our Nietzsche and nihilism post with some glib and dismissive bluster. Title: "Was Nietzsche A Nihilist?"; entirety of first paragraph: "No." However - of the two arrogant mistakes that a student can make - the swagger of a second-year undergrad who argues that some intellectual giant is "just wrong," and the boast of a first year graduate student who defiantly asserts something that everyone already agrees with - the second is far more cringe-inducing. Since we're pretty sure that not a single serious scholar believes that Nietzsche was a nihilist, glibness on this issue would kind of miss the ethos we're looking for.

We used to think that "Nietzsche was an anti-Semite" was the most egregious popular misreading of Nietzsche. But at least there are fabricated anti-Semitic quotes with Nietzsche's name on them (and of course those passages in GM that are just so definitive... when taken totally out of context). But this nihilism stuff - really? To sketch this out formally: the classical philosophical triumvirate is truth-beauty-good, and for contemporary purposes we'd want to hold on to aesthetics and axiology and then split truth into ontology and epistemology. For any and all of these registers - we're very close to accusing anyone who says that Nietzsche was a nihilist of willful misreading. It sounds condescending to just spell it out, but his goal is to avoid - or, more precisely, to push through - nihilism. Over and over again, in scholarly or indignant or derisive passages - he's explicit on this question. After the jump, each category, plus quotes and snark (natch):

For some reason, dealing seriously with language ingrains in a scholar a certain skepticism when it comes to revolutionary change. Lacan, for instance, is at his most explicitly rhetorical when developing his theory of the Four Discourses. His famous and prescient retort to student revolutionaries during May '68, coincidentally the time he was developing the theory: "you demand a new master, and you will get it". Saul Alinsky - whose revolutionary credentials are quite beyond reproach - finds in rhetorical norms the need, the method, and the necessity for slow but deep revolutionary change:

This failure... to understand the art of communication has been disastrous. Even the most elemenary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates with the experience of his audience - and gives full respect to the other's values - would have ruled out attacks on the American flag... if I were organizing in an orthodox Jewish community I would not walk in there eating a ham sandwich, unless I wanted to be rejected so I could have an excuse to cop out

There's another post to be had about rhetoric's (and Alinsky's) preference for a particular kind of propriety-acknowledging communication - and the consequences of that for those who glibly assert that rhetoric will have no truck with conservative sensibilities. For this post: Alinksy finds himself emphasizing that communication is essential to the slow work of forming alliances and creating the conditions for broad social change, lest progressive social projects burn out. He's almost certainly being too generous: the most dramatic revolutions don't end up failing, they end up crashing and burning spectacularly, taking them and their organizers with them. After the jump: why this means that rhetoricians are right and people who work in departments to which we are unlikely to apply to are hopelessly misguided.

Welcome to the first post on Icon Index Symbol, where we'll be attempting to see whether a graduate student really can make an academic career implode by mixing glib dismissal of powerful thinkers, snark about colleagues, and Google. Anything after that little experiment - from organizing our thoughts to getting feedback from as-yet-unoffended readers - will be an unanticipated but very welcome bonus.

We're gearing up for quals in the next couple of weeks, so we're going to use this space as a place to work out some ideas and trajectories. Plus: blogging what we've read is as close to instant gratification as academia gets - which is, as the psychiatrists say, "helpful" to us. We've got some Nietzsche, some Habermas, some Lacan, some Aristotle, some rhetorical criticism, and a little bit of new media technologies. So we figure we'll get to like two of those and then - mid-route to blogging - go check out what's happening over at The Superficial (the metaphor alone blows us away).

The rest of the posts will be of a form similar to: "no seriously, everyone on CRTNET is dying to hear about the rally you've organized for this year's NCA... because marching through freezing Chicago streets is right above going to the bar with old friends". So you can already tell there's no way this is going to go poorly.

References:
* The Superficial