From: James McFarland <rmutt-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: HAB: Communicative Action and Strategic Action
Date: Tue, 9 May 1995 10:42:44 -0400 (EDT)


> 2.  Instrumental Action concerns itself only with mean-ends success as
> where communicative action concerns itself with achievement of mutual
> understanding.  Strategic action for Habermas is a form of instrumental
> action which uses speech as a means to an end. The strategic actor thus
> does not orient him/herself to being understood as such but rather to
> causing another individual to act in a certain way regardless of how they
> may understand their reason for doing so.  Strategic action is thus
> parasitic upon normal commuicative action.  It only works because people
> assume the context of speech oriented toward mutual understanding.  While
> instrumental action in general is unavoidable, strategic action is not
> unavoidable in principle and there is a limit on how much ostensibly
> communicative interaction could be turned strategic without undermining the
> cohesiveness of a society.

This accords with my understanding of Habermas, but I'm not sure that 
strategic action is exactly parasitic on communicative action, except 
when its object is another person. Strategic action derives from the 
means-ends rationality that governs human technical interactions and 
manipulations of nature, and is related to the Zweckrationalitaet that 
Horkheimer analysed in his Critique of Instrumental Reason. What is 
detrimental (though not always avoidable), is using actions of this sort 
in what are taken to be communicative situations, where the "object" to 
be manipulated isn't the impersonal in-itself of nature, but another 
for-itself, or subject in its own right, so that the situation "should" 
(force of this should left undetermined for now) be oriented 
toward a mutual understanding. Propaganda is an obvious example. It is 
parasitic inasmuch as it only works if the person being manipulated 
remains unaware of the ulterior motive, and remains convinced that he or 
she is in a communicatively-oriented speech situation. But the model of 
strategic action does not derive from the model of communicative action, 
it derives from the technical manipulation of the natural world. I'm not 
saying you claim otherwise, but I wanted to clarify this (as much for my 
own sake as for anyone else's).

Jim McFarland