File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_1997/habermas.9708, message 18


Date: 	Tue, 19 Aug 1997 21:03:10 -0400
From: "kenneth.mackendrick" <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca>
Subject: HAB: Communicative and Strategic Rationality


After taking, against my will, the summer off - i was wondering if 
anyone wanted to talk about habermas's theory of language.

Habermas divides language into two categories - communicative and 
strategic.  I would like to explore the idea of emphatic communication 
- language that reaches out but does not touch.  This would include 
things such as poetry, metaphor, irony, reflection, and aesthetics.

For Habermas, communicative action is language-use oriented by an 
intention to speak to a generalized other - a univeral being who is in 
agrees a priori to discuss generalized interests.  Strategic language 
use includes deception, ideology, and manipulation.

I would like to propose that emphatic communication speaks to a 
concrete other without presuppositions about who that other is (in a 
universalist sense).  Emphatic communication also shifts beyond 
intentionality to include aspects of communicative and strategic 
rationality which cannot be readily identified as either or both.  It can 
be reciprocal and respectful, in Benhabib's sense of the terms, but 
also aesthetic and personal.  Such an investigation would set out to 
shift the conversation away from transcendental intentionality to a 
more psychoanalytic discussion as well as incorporating earlier 
elements of critical theory into habermas's theory of communicative 
action - since it would make stronger claims for critical theory's 
ability to act as a progressive force in society as well as being 
inclusive of aesthetic discourses (unfortunately relegated to private 
interests).

The purpose of such an inquiry would be to examine what Habermas 
has missed in his two tiered idea of language - to include elements of 
how language is actually used by people....
ken




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