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Loquocentric Society and its Critics: the Case of Habermas*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Kenneth Minogue
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What is politics the outcome of? The common answers to this question would invoke such ideas as power and interests. I want to argue that political events, particularly in the modern world, are the outcome of nothing else but politics itself. They emerge rhetorically, from public talk, and nothing more fundamental can be found. A society which can be validly characterized in this way may suitably be called ‘loquocentric’, or talk-centred. The odd thing is that much of the most acute exploration of this idea has taken place in a distorted form - in a camera obscuru, as it were - in ideological writing, which is dedicated to such fundamental determinants of the course of events as race, nation, gender and class. The work of Jurgen Habermas is particularly striking. Before I consider it, however, let me sketch out the thesis that modern politics is essentially loquocentric.

Type
Research Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1986 , pp. 338 - 361
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1986

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References

1 The reference is, of course, to the German Ideology. Marx and Engels Collected Works, Lawrence & Wishart, 1976, Vol. 5, p. 36.

2 I use the word ‘ideology’ here and throughout in the political sense of a doctrine revealing hidden domination. See Minogue, Kenneth, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985.Google Scholar

3 See the discussion in Vollrath, Ernst, ‘That all Governments Rest on Opinion’, Social Research, Vol. 43, No. 1, Spring 1976.Google Scholar

4 Thus the social fabric of New Zealand was virtually torn apart a few years back over a South African touring side.

5 The classic version is the Preface to A Critique of Political Economy.

6 In ideological thought, everything modern is strictly speaking a kind of pathology. Thus discussing the interaction between life‐world and system’ Habermas remarks that ‘disturbances develop which, depending on one’s point of view, can be represented as disequilibriums or as pathologies’. (italics in text.) See ‘A Reply to my Critics’ in Habermas: Critical Debates (henceforth H: CD), London, 1982, p. 280. Every particular item takes its character from the total structure, which is dominatory; disequilibria are thus doubly pathological.

7 Thus Mark Poster, for example, follows Foucault in discovering a new form of domination located in the mode of information. See Poster, Mark, Foucault, Marxism & History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information, Polity Press, 1984, esp. ch. 2.Google Scholar

8 Habermas, Jurgen, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Schapiro, Jeremy J., Second Edition, Heinemann, 1978, p. 62.Google Scholar

9 Quoted Habermas, Jurgen, Legitimation Crisis, Heinemann, 1976, p. 127.Google Scholar

10 ‘As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end’. Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Tavistock, 1970, p. 387.Google Scholar

11 Mark Poster, op. cit., pp. 86–87.

12 Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, translated by Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, p. 14.Google Scholar

13 Derrida, op. cit., translator’s preface, p.lvii.

14 Derrida, op. cit., pp. 10–11.

15 Derrida, op. cit., p. xiv.

16 Some thinkers confronting this problem, as they see it, are prepared to jettison freedom of expression in favour of a ‘democratically planned’ condition of things described as ‘a sound mass communication’. For a somewhat remarkable, and to me rather alarming, attempt to remove all contingency from public life, see ‘Against Freedom of Expression’ by Torbjorn Tannsjo, Political Studies, 1985, XXXIII, p. 547.

17 Bernstein, Richard, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory, Methuen, 1979, p. 176.Google Scholar I have italicized ‘realisation’ because it begs the question of whether Habermas’s conviction is actually true. On this feature of ideological rhetoric, see Minogue, op. cit., p. 141.

18 Habermas, Jurgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Beacon Press, 1981, p. 99.Google Scholar

19 ‘A Reply to my Critics’ in H: CD, op. cit., p. 227.

20 Habermas, Jurgen, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Heinemann, 1976, p. 108.Google Scholar Italics in text.

21 ‘Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech’, The Theory of Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 287.

22 ‘What is Universal Pragmatics’ad fin in Habermas, Jurgen, Communication and the Evolution of society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Heinemann, 1979.Google Scholar

23 Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers, Oxford University Press, 1970, pp. 230–1.Google Scholar

24 ‘Performative Utterances’, in Austin, op. cit., p. 233.

25 The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Beacon Press, Boston, 1984, p. 293. Italics in text.

26 Austin, T. L., How to do things with words, Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 102.Google Scholar

27 ‘Habermas, op. cit., p. 294.

28 ‘Negotiating definitions’ is said to be an essential part of the interpretative accomplishments required for communicative action (Theory of Communicative Action, op. cit. p. 286). Habermas correspondingly disapproves of what he calls ‘publicly administered definitions’ (Towards a Rational Society, trans. Jeremy Schapiro, Heinemann, 1971, p. 120). Perhaps these locutions sound better in German.

29 The Theory of Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 295.

30 See Thompson, John B., ‘Universal Pragmatics’ in H: CD. op. cit., p. 120.Google Scholar

31 The Theory of Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 305.

32 Habermas is prepared to run with this, as with other criticisms of his work: ‘It is not my aim to characterize behavioural dispositions empirically, but to grasp structural properties of processes of reaching understanding, from which we can derive general pragmatic presuppositions of communicative action’ (Theory of Communicative Action, op. cit., p. 286). The problem, however, is how to derive such things as sincerity from structures and presuppositions.

33 See the account given by Epstein, Jay, ‘Habermas’ in Pelczynski, Zbigniew and Gray, John (eds), Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy, Athlone, pp. 415–6.Google Scholar

34 Legitimation Crisis, op. cit., p. 96.

35 The most brilliant version of the argument that Habermas’s own practices reveal the unreality of the ideal speech situation is by Margaret Canovan, ‘A Case of Distorted Communication: A Note on Habermas and Arendt’, Political Theory, Vol. 11, No. 1, Feb. 1983. ‘My purpose’, she writes, ‘is not to make a cheap jibe at the spectacle of an apostle of perfect communication failing to pay attention to another person’s ideas… The point is this: Habermas’s creative misreading of Arendt shows that distorted communication arises not only out of domination and repression, ideology and neurosis’. (pp. 112–13).

36 Even in relatively empirically based studies of political talk, the slide into the pathological visibly dominates everything else. See, for example, Goodin, Robert E., Manipulatory Politics, Yale University Press, 1980;Google Scholar or Edelman, Murray, Political Language: Words that Succeed and Politics that Fail, Academic Press, 1977.Google Scholar

37 ‘Law, Legitimation and the Advanced Capitalist State: The Jurisprudence and Social Theory of Jurgen Habermas’ in David Sugarman (ed.), Legality, Ideology and the State, Academic Press, 1983, p. 121.

38 Rhetoric, 1355 a.

39 Areopagitica, in Milton’s Prose, ed. Malcolm W. Wallace, Oxford University Press, 1949, p. 318.

40 History of the Peloponnesian War, Loeb, Classical Library, Book 111, xlvii., London, Heinemann.

41 See Hirschman, Albert, The Passions and the Interests, Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, Princeton University Press, 1977.Google Scholar