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CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: July 26, 2002
Latest Update: July 26, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Graduate Seminar in Reintrpretation of Theory, jeanne curran, CSUDH, Fall 2002

Teaching Essay Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individaul Authors, July 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Welcome to students and others who share our research and praxis goals.

We expect learning to take place on multiple levels, across public and private spheres, across normative and aesthetic spheres, and to transform our own subjectivities and those of our institution of higher education and its community in the process. This means that we hope to open possibilities for you to grow through your own cognitive understanding of the social theorists we discuss, but we also expect that you will use that changing subjectivity to interact with your family, both of procreation and of orientation, that your subjective growth may be interdependent with theirs, and so that you may share their insights in this, our learning community. (That's what we're calling learning in both the public and the private sphere. Sharing throughout our lifeworlds.)

This graduate seminar in the reinterpretation of theory will provide some review of classic and contemporary social theory as we re-examine the contributions of many theorists whose role in social theory we have come to take, well, sort of for granted. Today, as the major issues to which we must turn are the ethics that draw such clear distinction between the world's haves and have-nots, the means by which we shall judge how our economic and political systems shape our globalized world, including our ethical perceptions; and what role empire, colonialization, and democracy will play in the future world we are trying to shape.

By learning across normative and aesthetic spheres, we mean paying specific attention to the fact that not all communication is rational. Reuther perhaps says it best when she says: "First there was God. Then there was the song. Then there was the story." The normative sphere covers cognitive and dominant discourse, or normative expectations. Those, for Reuther, come last, as we submit what we have shared to the cognitive process of discovering our theology. But the song and the story, like the original perception of God, those come first, from the aesthtic realm. The asethetic sphere covers expressionistic communication. Several of the theorists we will consider insist that Habermas has not included adequately in the communicative act the expressive nature of art. So we'll talk about that, and we'll pay attention to the expressive as well as the cognitive aspects of our learning.

As I tried to select some of the approaches of reinterpretation I wanted to share with you, many theorists came to mind: The unconscious, as we have come to understand it through Freud, whose influence has been so broad; Metanarratives, as Habermas, who places so much faith in communicative discourse and reason, interprets them; feminism, grown to watch its own changing subjectivity transform the whole spectrum of social theory; religion, which takes on new meaning as we find ourselves drawn more and more into a world grown used to producing atrocities on a genocidal scale. Clearly, I have had to pick and choose. My hope is that the process of questioning and re-interpretation will prove so freeing that you will not be able to resist it as you go on with your education and your life. I remind you that Socrates insisted that an unexamined life was not worth living. See Socrates on the unexamined life.

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