Theory & Event

The long debate over Habermas's theory of communication, while pertinent, obscures other important elements of his thought. He has contributed to this neglect, first, by connecting everything in Legitimation Crisis to a controlling logic of rationality and, second, by later dropping the most powerful themes about capitalism in that book. We have made a larger contribution. In returning to the power of that early book, I defer discussion of its partiality for reason, while knowing that this issue will return.

Legitimation Crisis rejects neoliberalism in advance by showing how historically specific investment priorities, tethnological innovations, worker motivations, consumption practices, and state-electoral processes of legitimation enter into the very constitution of capitalism. The idea of a self-equilibrating market is utopian to Habermas, because of the market's own volatility and because of the essential interinvolvements of capitalism with nature, science, education and technology, replete with their own fluctuations between periods of stability and those of turbulence. Similarly, he stretches Marxist theory, claiming that the labor theory of value has lost much of its explanatory power in an age of high technology and the detailed administration of production. He reworks the Marxist idea of crisis, exploring how a rationality crisis of capitalism, in which two system imperatives reach an impasse, can morph through state intervention into motivation and legitimacy crises. As he puts it, "A rationality deficit ..means that the state apparatus cannot, under given boundary conditions, adequately steer the economic system. A legitimation deficit means that it is not possible by administrative means to maintain effective normative structures to the extent required."¹ The more the state protects the market from itself, the more it sets itself up to be the fall guy.

These reflections on potential motivation and legitimacy crises are impressive. While the crisis potentialities were in fact deferred and absorbed in capitalist states, it is plausible to say that the former Soviet Union did become entangled in crises of Habermasian proportions. And already in nineteen seventy three (the year of the German edition), Habermas warned that a rationality crisis could be generated by a clash between capitalist growth and the recoil back on the political economy of climate change. Who would not be pleased to be so prescient, first, with respect to an economic system at which your theory was not aimed and, second, in exposing tensions between capital and climate well before other political economists took the issue seriously?

The Habermas exploration of potential capitalist crises also opens a door to productive engagements between him and Gilles Deleuze. The two differ in their philosophies of time, nature, ethics and reason. And, yes, these differences do make differences. But Habermas's explorations of convoluted relays between economic rationality, motivation and legitimation processes resonate with the Deleuze/Guattari conception of an unstable capitalist "axiomatic" ensconced in a larger assemblage of intercoded elements with its own tendencies to instability. A capitalist axiomatic consists of knots between capital, labor, and the commodity form. It creates constraints and possibilities. But since it cannot be without complex conjugations with nature, human bodies, the state, science, and religious institutions, its very shape is both prodded and infected by the larger assemblage in which it is set. And vice versa: the axiomatic and the assemblage are interinvolved in that they enter into both relations of external impingement and mutual infusion. A capitalist assemblage (even more than the Habermasian system) is marked by volatility and an uncertain degree of pluripotentiality. A specific concatenation of events from multiple force-fields could create a tragic impasse in which the system's ability to meet its own demands is defeated, but there is no consummate mode of rational or dialectical analysis through which to determine with certainty the limits of capitalist morphing. To put it another way, we still don't know what capitalism can become, even though its density and fragility give us reason to worry about the worst. Deleuze pursues this issue through a multi-tiered conception of time as becoming, with periodic forks in climate, asteroid showers, religious movements, new instruments of investment, technological developments, invasions, and state priorities, etc. engendering a capitalist assemblage in...