Wednesday, October 20, 2004

genealogical note on my project's beginning



Recently, I fell “victim” to an overwhelming need to go through all seven years of my postings on Habermas (to both the Spoon Collective—now dead—and to the Yahoo! group) in order to synthesize my views, not so much for a sense of integrated perspective on Habermas, but for an integrated sense of “Gary” as that dialogue role or discursant relativized to Habermasian issues—my own perspective relative to that extended dialogue with others on Habermas. In other words: to clarify that discursive dialogue role apart from and with Habermas (defending him) as a singular identity—the apart-and-with as integrated conceptual design—relative to those themes, views, responses to others, and influence by others.

I can do that!: a conceptual synthesis of a seven-year dialogue.

In the swim of it now, it’s a very instructive experience: facing the reality of myself as textual other over seven years, for I hadn’t much looked at any postings beyond the week or so of each, relative to response to others (and many I never saw again after posting). There are hundreds of pages (not counting any of the short responses!) to organize thematically before really beginning “the Habermas project,” in order to formulate the post(??)-Habermasian discursive stance—that I earlier so felt had already resulted.

This is to be about writing “after” Jürgen Habermas in my own way; on individualism, the ends of history—whatever’s on my mind: leading current events; who needs theory; the nature of discursive inquiry; taking lifeworldliness to heart; evolving as such; social evolution; conceptuality as such; narratibility; comity; bipartisanship; Habermas’s conceptual architecture (his philosophical hermeneutic); modernization—and tens of other “things,” for starters.