Page 72 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 67

by mediated communication which scatters participants across
space and time. In the case of mass mediated communication, the
‘ideal speech situation’ is a weak metaphor indeed for democratic
aspirations of greater diversity or more egalitarian forms of access:
literal reciprocity between ‘speakers’ and ‘hearers’ is largely alien to
mass mediated communication. 30
And yet, for Habermas, all instances of speech gesture towards
this counterfactual ‘ideal situation’. Every speech act implies the
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possibility of ‘uncoerced consensus’. He arrives at this conclusion by
conceiving of ‘derivative’ modes of discourse in terms of ‘blockages’
in the testability of validity claims – blockages which, through
history, have been progressively challenged by humans societies. In
this conception, ‘communicative action’ spans all three ‘domains of
reality’ (‘the’, ‘our’ and ‘my’ worlds) and the corresponding validity
claims (truth, rightness, sincerity), whereas the three models of action
which loom large in the sociological literature (strategic, norm-
guided, and dramaturgical action) are ‘one-sided’ in their privileging

of specific reality domains and validity claims. Only communicative
action privileges the discursive testing of all three types of claim and
the interplay of first, second and third person perspectives.

The one-sidedness of the first three concepts of language can be seen in
the fact that the corresponding types of communication singled out by
them prove to be limit cases of communicative action: first, the indirect
communication of those who have only the realisation of their own ends in
view; second, the consensual action of those who simply actualise an already
existing normative agreement; and third, presentation of self in relation
to an audience. In each case only one function of language is thematised:
the release of perlocutionary effects, the establishment of interpersonal
relations, and the expression of subjective experiences. By contrast, the
communicative model of action … takes all the functions of language equally
into consideration. 32

For Habermas, then, the model of communicative action functions as
a framework for analysing the shortcomings and blockages of extant
practices, discourses and institutions.
In addition to this synchronic argument for treating communicative
action as a kind of meta-model, Habermas wants to ground its privileged
status in a historical narrative of the ‘unfolding’ of communicative
potentials in modern society which invokes that distinction between
system and lifeworld. The ‘lifeworld’ is, for Habermas, ‘the horizon

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