Jürgen Habermas
As a prominent member of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, German
philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) inherited the mantle of
Adorno and Horkheimer. His theoretical outlook can be seen as both a development and
critique of the earlier Frankfurt School project. He rejects the pessimism of its earlier
outlook, especially in its critique of enlightenment rationality. Habermas is careful to
distinguish between normative and instrumental rationality. The latter is positivistic in its
outlook and serves to impoverish cultural life. A normative rationality, on the other hand,
may serve as a force of social change. Habermas therefore endorses modernism as a
continuation of the enlightenment project, and supports rationality as a potential source of
emancipation.
Habermas places great emphasis on the public sphere as the realm of communicative
action. Here he subscribes to a form of inter-subjective communication as a means of
overcoming the potential relativism of the ‘language games’ celebrated by various
theorists of postmodernity. This emphasis on the public sphere has led others to employ
Habermas’s theories in various areas of public participation. John Forrester, for example,
has applied the principles of Habermas’s thinking to the field of planning.
Habermas has proved to be one of the most outspoken critics of postmodernism. His
position on this question is outlined articulately in the article ‘Modernity, an Incomplete
Project’, which he opens with a criticism of the conservatism of the architectural exhibits
at the Venice Biennale of 1980. He develops this criticism further in his article
‘Modernism versus Postmodernism in Architecture’. Modernism, according to Habermas,
suffers from being overburdened and instrumentalized. Habermas himself would favour a
self-critical continuation of the Modern Movement. By way of contrast, he outlines three
oppositional trends which repudiate rather than attempt to rework the Modern Movement:
neo-historicism, postmodernism (as defined by Charles Jencks) and ‘alternative
architecture’.
Habermas criticizes neo-historicism as a conservative escapist reaction which
‘transfroms department stores into Medieval rows of houses, and underground ventilation
shafts into pocket-book size Palladian villas’. Likewise he attacks postmodern architects
like Hollein and Venturi as ‘surrealist stage designers’ who ‘utilise modern design
methods in order to coax picturesque effects from aggressively mixed styles’. Finally—
and perhaps most surprisingly—he condemns the ‘alternative architecture’ of interest
groups who are concerned with questions of ecology and preservation of historic centres.
While ‘initiatives which aim at a communal participatory architecture’ might subscribe to
his celebration of communicative action, they all too often lead to ‘the cult of the
vernacular and reverence for the banal’. In its time this ‘architecture without architects’
led to the monumentalism of Führer-architecture.