File spoon-archives/habermas.archive/habermas_1997/habermas.9708, message 21


Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 14:45:37 -0500
From: Scott Johnson <sjohn-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us>
Subject: Re: HAB: Communicative and Strategic Rationality


kenneth.mackendrick wrote:
> 
> 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).
[snip]
> 
> 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

Ken, Ken, Ken....*sigh*. Lets talk irony, then. I suppose you haven't
read Wayne Booth's _Rhetoric of Irony_, but he argues very convincingly
that irony involves "presuppositions about who that other is." When
those presuppositions turn out to be false in any given case, the irony
is not understood. Now, I don't know what you have in mind with your
reference to "a universalist sense", but these presuppositions are both
concrete AND are extended to one's interlocutor in a way in which it is
expected that the interlocutor SHOULD understand (in other words, both
the moments of particularity and universality are present). Notice in
your characterization of Habermas's conception of language as two-tiered
that strategic interaction could correspond to the
cognitive/instrumental sphere and communicative interactive to the
moral/practical. In that case, it seems that what you want to explore
would fall under the heading of therapeutic speech, which correspond to
the aesthetic/expressive sphere. Habermas doesn't really concern himself
with as this much as the others (see David Ingram's _Habermas and the
Dialectic of Reason_), and it has been argued that the therapeutic model
may be more important than Habermas credits (see Bernstein's _Recovering
Ethical Life_.) But in any case, the way has already been partly
traversed, and it might be a good idea to pick up from there.
   I can't help but point out that the sort of thing you want to
emphasize is a traditional Romantic preserve (art and the aesthetic
making "public" or expressing that which cannot be conceptualized.) The
emphasis in therapeutic interaction is on experience; the validity of a
therapeutic claim is connected with the power of the experience to which
I can "guide" you. I see another correspondence here: the
strategic/instrumental represents the Enlightenment strain of modernity,
the ideal of a disengaged subjectivity (with its correlate
"objectivity"); the aesthetic/expressive represents the Romantic strain
with its ideal of natural [unreflective] expression, an engagement with
a living world. (Here I'm thinking in terms of Taylor's exposition in
_Sources of the Self_.) Now, Habermas characterizes the problem of
modernity as being one of an overemphasis on strategic/instrumental
rationality at the expense of communicative. I prefer Taylor in that he
includes not just the Enlightenment strain, but the Romantic as well.
>From this perspective the dimension that Habermas has neglected is
incorporated, without going overboard and giving priority to the
aesthetic/expressive. I think that communicative interaction includes
both the the reflective moment of disengagement AND the unreflective
moment of engaged expression. Modernity is a diremption of the
communicative unity into autonomous Enlightenment and Romantic spheres
which both claim too much for themselves. The task is to recover a
communicative interaction that incorporates the gains of this
diremption, but corrects it as well.
   To note another correspondence, *Moralitat* and *Sittlichkeit* would
also correspond to the Enlightenment and Romantic strains. The former is
founded on the objective reflection of a disengaged subjectivity, the
latter on the "second nature" of custom and tradition. Doesn't this
pretty much sum up the difficulties of much modern social and political
theory? That is, the integration of "ought" and "is", of the claims of
community against the claims of the autonomous moral agent? Isn't this
all a problem because the two are not integrated in a sphere of
communicative action? And wouldn't this integration have to be a higher
integration which retained the now-autonomous moments? Aren't we in
Hegel's territory here?

Scott "excuse me, I'm just thinking aloud" Johnson
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------
                     Scott Johnson

105 W. 1st St. #214                sjohn-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us
Duluth, MN   55802             voice/fax  (218) 722-1351

   http://www.cp.duluth.mn.us/~sjohn/sjohn_on.html
 --

A memo signed by Major Okuntimo of the Rivers State Internal
Security Task Force, dated May 12th 1994, states: 
"Shell operations still impossible unless ruthless military
operations are undertaken for smooth economic activities to
commence."

-- From a web page (http://www.gem.co.za/ELA/ken.html)
dedicated to executed Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, 
who led a group resisting Shell Oil's activities in his
homeland. The memo referred to was sent 10 days before 
Saro-Wiwa's arrest.


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