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 --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005