Critical Theory and the Linguistic Turn

Whereas perhaps Adorno abandoned his Marxist origins, Habermas tries to revise Marxism to rule out the possibility of it being dominated by the technical interest, by instrumental reason.

Habermas’s work in this area is very complex, and all that we can hope to do here is outline the main positions which he develops and changes throughout his as-yet- unfinished career. There are four points which are important in this context.

The first point is that with the exception of Gadamer all the philosophers we have discussed under the heading of ‘interpretive’ have concentrated on the meaning that individuals give to their actions, an approach Habermas calls the ‘philosophy of consciousness’. Such a viewpoint sees meaning and action in terms of a relationship between a subject acting on an object and this, Habermas argues, means that we are inevitably caught up in instrumental action and instrumental reason.

Drawing on linguistic philosophy, Habermas adopts a distinction between ‘performative speech acts’ and ‘communicative speech acts’. The former involve instrumental, purposive or strategic action. The latter involve an attempt to communicate with and understand the other, or to make oneself understood, and they are by definition open to revision: they are based on reasons and can be assented to or argued against by reference to other reasons, and the very possibility of argument implies that consensus may be reached. We move from the individual trying to achieve his or her ends through language (instrumental reason) to individuals participating in the play of reasons - or perhaps better, the play of reason in which the speaking subjects are, as they are for Gadamer, comparatively inessential in the overall development of knowledge.

This takes us on to the second point, Habermas’s ‘universal pragmatics’. The pragmatism discussed in Chapter 5 took the (instrumental) position that what works is right. Habermas’s pragmatism asserts that what can be agreed upon is right. All areas of human endeavour, whether we are talking about science or ethics or aesthetics or anything else, is mediated through communicative rationality; all arguments can in principle achieve consensus. We have in this a consensus theory of ethics - we can argue about what is good until we agree; and a consensus theory of knowledge of the outside world - we can argue about what exists until we agree. This offers a way out of relativism, based on the nature of language and thinking itself.

This takes us to the third point, and a debate between Habermas and Gadamer, and (by implication) Winch and Weber. For all these three latter thinkers, the culture, the form of life, the tradition, or whatever we like to call it, defines what is true, and what exists, and different traditions define different realities.

Fourth and finally, Habermas develops a different analysis of instrumental rationality as opposed to communicative rationality. The latter belongs to the life-world - a notion we met first in the discussion of phenomenology but which Habermas uses more in the sense of a level of open communication between people. The former becomes functional rationality, the rationality of the system, the rationality which enables it to keep functioning and which constantly threatens the life-world, imposing itself upon us through the demands of our social roles or positions. One near-to-home example of this conflict is to be found in the modern British university system. The communicative rationality developing from the research interests and concerns of academics might lead in one direction (for example, towards long-term, carefully thought out and argued projects with no immediate relevance), but the requirements of government-imposed surveillance in the form of research assessments and competitive ratings (the functional rationality of the system) push towards short-term, easily written-up research.