Parsing the promise of modernism: Habermas, the avant‐garde and the aesthetics of normative order

In a 2018 interview with Jürgen Habermas by the Spanish newspaper El Pais, visiting journalists noted that Habermas’ home, bedecked with modern art, presented “a juxtaposition of Bauhaus modernism and Bavaria's staunch conservatism” (Hermoso, 2018). The shelves were lined with the German Romantics and the walls adorned with icons of European aesthetic modernism, cohering with the style of the house itself. In fleeting autobiographical remarks made in the preface to his essays in Naturalism and Religion, Habermas proffers an account of his decorative tastes and the experiences and hopes at which they gesture. He writes of the postwar revelations that disclosed a civilizational rupture after 1945, along with the sense of cultural release brought about by the doors being opened “to Expressionist art, to Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse, to world literature written in English, to the contemporary philosophy of Sartre and the French left-wing Catholics, to Freud and Marx, as well as to the pragmatism of John Dewey…” (Habermas, 2008, p. 19). He continues to describe how “the liberating, revolutionary spirit of Modernism found compelling visual expression in Mondrian's constructivism, in the cool geometric lines of Bauhaus architecture, and in uncompromising industrial design” (Habermas, 2008, p. 19). Together, these aesthetic movements espoused what Rembert (2015) calls a determination to develop an artistic practice that conveyed a “new world image” (p. 40). According to Habermas, the “cultural opening” instigated by these aesthetic pursuits “went hand in hand with a political opening,” which primarily took the form of “the political constructions of social contract theory…combined with the pioneering spirit and the emancipatory promise of Modernism” (Habermas, 2008, p. 19). In this brief sketch Habermas depicts politics and aesthetics working in tandem to drive emancipatory social renewal; the intellectual constructions necessary for political transformation leaned, he suggests, upon the revolutionary social vision framed by modernism's “cool geometry.” This article further explores this connection with a view to examining the role of modernism as an imaginative resource for the kind of normative integration developed by Habermas in his pursuit of the neo-Kantian “project of modernity”—that is, the project of integrating pluralistic mass societies via postmetaphysical rational presuppositions and the normative principles to which they give rise. In excavating and critiquing the resources that inform Habermas’ normative framework, this article locates an important source of inspiration in 20th century European aesthetic modernism, which, I argue, supplies something like an “orienting background metaphor,” and a methodological resource, for the envisioning of a detranscendentalized normativity based upon the dualism of form and content (Blumenberg, 1983, p. 217). The form/content dichotomy is essential to the normative power of formalism in its claim to postmetaphysical lightness and context-transcending openness to various cultural and ethical identities. Yet the modernist aesthetic tradition from which it draws is laced with philosophical commitments of the kind that compromise its peculiar kind of normative ambition—that is, the ambition to entrench normative bearings that, while ethically weightless, possess cognitive power and seamless rational appeal across languages and social contexts. Attending to the ideational connections between aesthetic modernism, linguistic idealism, and a certain kind of “deflationary” neo-Kantianism, helps clarify how formalism does its integrative work, as well clarifying the ideological contours of its claim to an immanently resourced context-transcending openness. There is, of course, important existing literature on the place of aesthetics in Habermas’ thought, particularly Duvenage's detailed treatment of aesthetics and communicative reason (see Duvenage, 2003). The aim here is not to break pristine exegetical ground but rather to explicate what I take to be an underappreciated connection between a particular aesthetic movement (with its attendant visualization of political and social transformation) and a specific way of framing normative and political order, which endures in the contemporary democratic theory influenced by Habermas’ deflationary neo-Kantianism. An excavation of the sort carried out in this article is apt in view of the persistence, in the recent work of contemporary intellectual historians and philosophers engaged with the Frankfurt School, of secularism as a concept, and secularization as a social process, that “unbinds us from the spell of mythic belonging” (Gordon, 2020, p. 154). According to this view, secularism in its intellectual, legal, and social formations offers the only viable methods of integrating disparate worldviews amid the “complications of multiplicity” (Gordon, 2020, p. 153). For all of the dialectical richness offered by Frankfurt School figures such as Adorno and, very differently, Habermas, we continue to encounter renderings of the contemporary conjuncture as defined by a stark divide between “those who adhere to the claims of secular reason” and those tempted toward theocracy and “the promise of religious certitude” (Gordon, 2020, p. 147). Against the backdrop of this sociological typology we are directed toward the promise of a “culture of formalism,” as one prominent legal scholar affirmingly calls it, as the essential trait of a social order free from impositional cultural self-assertion (Koskenniemi, 2009, p. 504). Modernity must be able, grudgingly, to co-exist with metaphysically laden ethical culture its cognitive and social modern normative order in be to the “complications of multiplicity” the for its social For those who in emancipatory promise the of as social Habermas out for his toward ethical religious for the of the modern is Habermas is to “a dialectical of by which the of metaphysically are as cognitive power is a it which the in the view that an of secularization that the of religious (Gordon, 2020, p. as while Habermas’ on the of very his he the by which ethically for all are of the to rational claims (p. Habermas to an by which reason its in the for claims to normative and aesthetic (p. 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