Page 115 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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Ideal speech situation This is a notion specifically associated with the philosophy
of Jürgen Habermas. Working within the tradition of critical theory, Habermas has
sought universal grounds for the validation of moral judgement and claims to
human emancipation. He does so by arguing that human social and cultural
interactions presuppose language and that in the very structure of speech we may
find the essential grounding conditions for all forms of social organization. When
we speak, argues Habermas, we are making four validity claims: namely, to
comprehensibility, truth, appropriateness and sincerity. These claims, he argues,
imply both the logical justification of truth and the social context for their
rational debate, the conditions for which Habermas calls an ‘ideal speech
situation’. Here competing truth-claims are subject to rational debate and
argument; that is, within an ideal speech situation truth is not subject to the
vested interests and power plays of truth seekers but rather emerges through the
process of argumentation. For Habermas, our very ability to make truth-claims is
dependent on a democratically organized public sphere that approximates an
ideal speech situation.
Some postmodern critics, particularly Lyotard, have argued that Habermas’
notion of an ideal speech situation that underpins the public sphere reproduces the
totalizing discourse of ‘Enlightenment reason’, ignoring its repressive character.
That is to say, there can be no common or ideal speech situation since language and
culture are radically diverse in character and unavailable to either a single discursive
ethics or to a universal set of truth-claims. It could be countered that the purpose
of Habermas’ work does not lie in the final determination of common needs, but
centres on the possibility of intersubjective agreement concerning the very social
norms that allow different needs to be articulated and realized. That is, Habermas
would argue that he is stressing the importance of the democratic process rather
than the outcome of that process.
Links Communication, critical theory, Enlightenment, language, language-game, public
sphere

Identification In everyday language the concept of identification involves the
processes of describing, naming and classifying. That is, to identify. Within cultural
studies this concept, while retaining aspects of this meaning, has also been deployed
in a more specifically psychoanalytic sense in relation to the construction of
identity. More particularly, identification is at the core of the processes of fantasy
and attachment that are said to partially suture or stitch together discourses and

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