Communicative action
In
Structures
Communicative action for Habermas is possible given human capacity for rationality. Habermas says rationality is a capacity inherent within language, especially in the form of argumentation. "We use the term argumentation for that type of speech in which participants thematize contested validity claims and attempt to vindicate or criticize them through argumentation."[1]: 18 The structures of argumentative speech, which Habermas identifies as the absence of coercive force, the mutual search for understanding, and the compelling power of the better argument, form the key features from which intersubjective rationality can make communication possible. Action undertaken by participants through a process of such argumentative communication can be assessed as to their rationality to the extent which they fulfill those criteria.
Communicative rationality is distinct from instrumental, normative, and dramaturgical rationality by its ability to concern all three "worlds" as he terms them, following Karl Popper—the subjective, objective, and intersubjective or social. Communicative rationality is self-reflexive and open to a dialogue in which participants in an argument can learn from others and from themselves by reflecting upon their premises and thematizing aspects of their cultural background knowledge to question suppositions that typically go without question.
Communicative action is action based upon this deliberative process, where two or more individuals interact and coordinate their action based upon agreed interpretations of the situation.[1]: 86 Communicative action is distinguished by Habermas from other forms of action, such as instrumental action, which is pure goal-oriented behavior, dealt with primarily in economics, by taking all functions of language into consideration.[1]: 95 That is, communicative action has the ability to reflect upon language used to express propositional truth, normative value, or subjective self-expression.
Social implications
Much of Habermas' work has been in response to his predecessors in the Frankfurt School. Communicative rationality, for instance, can be seen as a response to the critique of enlightenment reason expressed in Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno had argued that the Enlightenment saw a particular kind of rationality enshrined as dominant in western culture, instrumental reason, which had only made possible the more effective and ruthless manipulation of nature and human beings themselves.[2] Habermas' form of critical theory is designed to rediscover through the analysis of positive potentials for human rationality in the medium of language, the possibility of a critical form of reason that can lead to reflection and examination of not only objective questions, but also those of social norms, human values, and even aesthetic expression of subjectivity.
Habermas' earlier work,
Critiques
Habermas views communication and debate in the public sphere as argumentatively meritocratic. Critics have argued that Habermas' notion of communicative rationality, upon which communicative action must be based, is illusory. The formal prerequisites of equality among argument participants, for instance, may mask the reality of unequal social capital. "There is no guarantee that a formally symmetrical distribution of opportunities to select and employ speech acts will result in anything more than an expression of the status quo."[4] Historian Ian McNeeley, for instance, contrasts Habermas' view with Michel Foucault's notion of communication as embodying pre-existing power relationships: "Jürgen Habermas subscribes to an unrealistic ideal of power-free communication…Michel Foucault remedies this idealism by treating knowledge as power; his work is in fact suffused with applications of knowledge for the control of human bodies."[5] In a like manner, the discursive fiction of consensus achieved through rational argumentation might be used as a legitimating prop for social action to the detriment of marginalized members-this is the basis of much feminist critique of Habermas' notions.
Another radical critique is that of
See also
References
- ^ a b c Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.
- ^ Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2002
- ^ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991
- ^ Peter Miller, Domination and Power, Routledge, 1987
- ^ Ian McNeeley, The Emancipation of Writing, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2003
- ^ Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).