Communicative action

In sociology, communicative action is cooperative action undertaken by individuals based upon mutual
deliberation and argumentation. The term was developed by German philosopher-sociologist Jürgen
Habermas in his work The Theory of Communicative Action.

Contents
Structures
Social implications
Critiques
See also
References

Structures
Communicative action for Habermas is possible given human capacity for rationality. Habermas situates
rationality as a capacity inherent within language, especially in the form of argumentation. "We use the term
argumentation for that type of speech in which participants thematize contested validity claims and attempt
to vindicate or criticize them through argumentation."[1]:18 The structures of argumentative speech, which
Habermas identifies as the absence of coercive force, the mutual search for understanding, and the
compelling power of the better argument, form the key features from which intersubjective rationality can
make communication possible. Action undertaken by participants through a process of such argumentative
communication can be assessed as to their rationality to the extent which they fulfill those criteria.

Communicative rationality is distinct from instrumental, normative, and dramaturgical rationality by its
ability to concern all three "worlds" as he terms them, following Karl Popper—the subjective, objective, and
intersubjective or social. Communicative rationality is self-reflexive and open to a dialogue in which
participants in an argument can learn from others and from themselves by reflecting upon their premises and
thematizing aspects of their cultural background knowledge to question suppositions that typically go
without question.

Communicative action is action based upon this deliberative process, where two or more individuals interact
and coordinate their action based upon agreed interpretations of the situation.[1]:86 Communicative action is
distinguished by Habermas from other forms of action, such as instrumental action, which is pure goal-
oriented behavior, dealt with primarily in economics, by taking all functions of language into
consideration.[1]:95 That is, communicative action has the ability to reflect upon language used to express
propositional truth, normative value, or subjective self-expression.

Social implications
Much of Habermas' work has been in response to his predecessors in the Frankfurt School. Communicative
rationality, for instance, can be seen as a response to the critique of enlightenment reason expressed in Max
Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. Horkheimer and Adorno had argued that the
Enlightenment saw a particular kind of rationality enshrined as dominant in western culture, instrumental
reason, which had only made possible the more effective and ruthless manipulation of nature and human
beings themselves.[2] Habermas' form of critical theory is designed to rediscover through the analysis of
positive potentials for human rationality in the medium of language, the possibility of a critical form of
reason that can lead to reflection and examination of not only objective questions, but also those of social
norms, human values, and even aesthetic expression of subjectivity.

Habermas' earlier work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, anticipates his concern for
argumentation and can be read retrospectively as a historical case study of Western European societies
institutionalizing aspects of communicative action in the political and social spheres. Habermas notes the
rise of institutions of public debate in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Britain and France especially.
In these nations, information exchange and communication methods pioneered by capitalist merchants
became adapted to novel purposes and were employed as an outlet for the public use of reason. The notion
of communicative rationality in the public sphere is therefore heavily indebted to Immanuel Kant's
formulation of the public use of reason in What is Enlightenment? Habermas argues that the bourgeoisie
who participated in this incipient public sphere universalized those aspects of their class that enabled them
to present the public sphere as inclusive—he even goes so far as to say that a public sphere that operates
upon principles of exclusivity is not a public sphere at all.[3] The focus on foundations of democracy
established in this work carried over to his later examination in The Theory of Communicative Action that
greater democratization and the reduction to barriers to participation in public discourse (some of which he
identified in the first public sphere of the Enlightenment) could open the door to a more open form of social
action. The shift from a more Marxist focus on the economic bases of discourse in Structural Transformation
to a more "super-structural" emphasis on language and communication in Theory of Communicative Action
signals Habermas' transition to a post-Marxist framework.

Critiques
Habermas views communication and debate in the public sphere as argumentatively meritocratic. Critics
have argued that Habermas' notion of communicative rationality, upon which communicative action must be
based, is illusory. The formal prerequisites of equality among argument participants, for instance, may mask
the reality of unequal social capital. "There is no guarantee that a formally symmetrical distribution of
opportunities to select and employ speech acts will result in anything more than an expression of the status
quo."[4] Historian Ian McNeeley, for instance, contrasts Habermas' view with Michel Foucault's notion of
communication as embodying pre-existing power relationships: "Jürgen Habermas subscribes to an
unrealistic ideal of power-free communication…Michel Foucault remedies this idealism by treating
knowledge as power; his work is in fact suffused with applications of knowledge for the control of human
bodies."[5] In a like manner, the discursive fiction of consensus achieved through rational argumentation
might be used as a legitimating prop for social action to the detriment of marginalized members-this is the
basis of much feminist critique of Habermas' notions.

Another radical critique is that of Nikolas Kompridis, a former student of Habermas, who views Habermas'
theory as another attempt to arrive at a "view from nowhere", this time by locating rationality in procedures
of reaching agreement independent of any particular participants' perspective or background. In response, he
proposes a "possibility-disclosing" role of reason to correct the problems with Habermas' work.[6]

See also
Discourse analysis
Lifeworld
References
1. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, Boston:
Beacon Press, 1984.
2. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Palo Alto:
Stanford UP, 2002
3. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas
McCarthy, Cambridge MA: MIT Pres, 1991
4. Peter Miller, Domination and Power, Routledge, 1987
5. Ian McNeeley, The Emancipation of Writing, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2003
6. Nikolas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

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