Page 69 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

64 Jürgen Habermas

Habermas’s concept of communicative action is a product of
the ‘linguistic turn’ in social theory. Adorno as well as Foucault
and the ‘post-structuralists’ had claimed that the Enlightenment
‘philosophy of consciousness’ – which assumes that ‘the solitary
subject confronts objects and becomes reflective only by turning itself

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into an object’ – had run out of steam. Whilst Adorno lamented the
alienating impulse to objectify the inner and outer worlds, the ‘post-
structuralists’ showed how that impulse was necessarily thwarted
by the webs of discourse and textuality through which it always
already operates. At the same time, Habermas argues, both camps
in their different ways (Adorno’s Kulturpessimismus versus the ironic,
self-referentialism of the post-structuralists) bow to this negativity:
neither really exorcises the philosophy of the subject, they just carry
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out endless post-mortems. This motivates Habermas to try to fi nd
a linguistic turn that, unlike the one taken by the post-structuralists,
doesn’t lead down a philosophical cul-de-sac. He turned to linguistics
and speech act theory in order to displace the emphasis on the
subject with a focus on questions of intersubjective understanding.
What ‘speech act theory’ enables us to do, in Habermas’s view, is to
reveal universally unavoidable ‘presuppositions’ behind everyday
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language use (‘universal pragmatics’). If we are prepared to give
up on the task of elucidating universal aspects of subjectivity, we
can instead focus on the more modest task of understanding the
conditions under which reasonable, workable communication takes
place. Such a task does not rest on a fallacy of perfect communication
but on the basis that we use communication to try to reach acceptable
(that is, legitimate) understandings, agreements and compromises
with each other.
According to the theory of universal pragmatics, whenever we
communicate (through language or through action), we unavoidably
‘take up relations’ to a number of ‘domains of reality: “the” world
of external nature; “our” world of society; “my” world of internal
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nature’; and to the medium of language itself. The distinction
between ‘society’ and ‘nature’ is not one of institutions versus trees
and birds. ‘Nature’ refers to the domain of facticity that comes
into existence whenever we take up an ‘objectivating’ attitude to
something (institutions and even other individuals routinely become
‘second nature’). ‘Society’ is constituted whenever we take up a
first person plural orientation towards something. Whenever we

communicate, assuming we mean to be understood, we explicitly or
implicitly raise ‘validity claims’ relating to those domains: correctness

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