Habermas - Adversary Culture

As we discussed and identified in class on Tuesday, Lyotard says that Habermas thinks;
1. Life is splintered into independent specialities ruled by disciplinary experts
2. need to move aesthetics from 'taste' to 'historical problems of existence'
3. arts open way to a 'unity of experience'.
Having read Habermas I think this summation although accurate from the Lyotard perspective does not fair so well against the actual reading. I actually enjoyed reading Habermas a lot more than Lyotard and found his writing style to be far more approachable and easily read. Whilst I found myself cross-eyed with confusion in Lyotard, Habermas' approach to the material relayed his points to me in a very easily understood manner. He starts by building up a comprehensible definition and groundwork for a concept, in this case modernity, and then expands on it incorporating and elaborating on the works of other sociologists establishing his own ideologies. Reading Habermas, I see and understood a lot of Marxist concepts in his writing and thought his expansion on them were very well put together and actually helped further my understanding on sociology I previously found obscure and confusing. (I bring Marx up a lot because he's hands down my favorite sociologist).
The concepts covered in Habermas' opening pages provided me with a lot of clarity on concepts that have been relatively confusing to me thus far and thats what I want to riff about in this entry. Habermas' identification of modernity breaking the word up by latin meaing to establish a basis for the ideology of modernity sees the recurrent actions of the modern expressing again and again 'the consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past of antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition from old to the new' (98). He states the shift from Roman and pagan culture to that of Christianity and even mentions the 'dissolution of the Protestant Ethic on the adversary culture' (101). The Protestant Ethic, written by Marx was one of the sociological works that I found the most engaging and intersting. Overly simplified (understatement of the century) it says that the moral, social and cultural framework learned through Protestantism made the Protestants as successful as they are. It lead to traits - being hard working etc. - that allowed Protestants to rise higher and do better than most others in society and attributed this success to the framework of the religion, spanning its history.
The idea that Habermas brings up that 'Bell places the burden of responsibility for the dissolution of the Protestant Ethic on teh adversary culture'; Adversary culture being defined as 'culture in its modern form stirs up hatred against the conventions and virtues of everday life, which has become rationalized under the pressures of economic and administrative imperatives' (101) really cuts to the core of contempory culture. The dissolution of the protestant ethic to me means the argument that nurture breeds success and those raised in the right social circumstances excel more than those not on a consistent basis - that nurture leads to success and nurture is created by social rebellion (in a sense - because Protestantism started as a rebellion against Christianity). Adversary culture then is the revolt of the population in thought process and actoin against socio-cultural norms. Habermas couples this with the notion that 'modernity lives on the experience of rebelling against all that is normative... to neutralize the standards of both morality and utility... addicted to a fascination with that horror which accompanies the act of profaning and yet is always in flight from the trivial results of profanation' (100). What this says to me, applied to our current society is easily summed up in the 80's mentality of 'stick it to the man'. We want to revolt to test the bounds of society of social norms, to push the envelope to the point where it pushes back. We push and push but are in fact scared of the results of that push scared of the 'trivial results of profanation' (100). A recent media example is a man wore a tee-shirt to a recent Florida professional sporting event that read profanely 'Tiger Woods, making putts - nailing sluts'. The tee-shirt was a profanity, the man was expressing a profane take on a media scandle of Tiger Woods cheating on his wife. He wore the shirt to make this statement, that he respects Tiger Woods' objectification of women and that he in turn supports both Tiger Woods and this objectification. The man wearing the shirt was asked to remove it by event staff, challenging his profanation and when he did not he was ejected from the event. The point here is that socially we look to push the bounds to differentiate ourselves in a way of personal or social expression, to stand out, to be seen, but that we are not willing and even scared of the ramifications for these actions. Another example is a man wore a Lebron James Miami Heat jersey to a Cleveland Indians baseball game. Cleveland was heartbroken at James leaving the city for Miami so the statement was a conscious decision, he could of worn anything, it had nothing to do with baseball. This profane act, profane in the sense that it was a bold statement to incite such social disruption, lead to the man and his girlfriend being hassled, fought and kicked out of the game. We look to the profane to shake things up, to push and test the bounds of society but when they push back we ask 'what, what did I do?' we are scared of the ramifications of our profane actions but do them anyways to see what happens. When our profanity goes unnoticed we raise the stakes with our next profane gesture and so on until it is noticed, until someone recognizes the profanity but once it is recognized we are scared of teh ramifications.