LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION, AND SOCIETY: JUERGEN HABERMAS, KARL-OTTO APEL, AND THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSAL PRAGMATICS

Pragmatics is that division of language study concerned with problems of "language use," especially with the socially interactive employment of signs or symbols among speaker-listeners. By raising the question, "What is universal pragmatics?" the social theorist Jurgen Habermas joins contemporary linguists in their effort to construct a theory of the universal conditions of possible speech communication--a theory of "pragmatic" or "communicative competence." Here it is argued that, critically reassessed, Habermas' work does contribute to this end. Additionally, a pragmatic linguistics could ground systematically the insight of much recent political theory that "politics is talk." A formal, or universal, pragmatics also contains a "utopian moment." For, the linguistic competences it "reconstructs" in the methodological attitude of Noam Chomsky's generative grammar could only be fully exercised in polities in which people determine and revise their social relations in the medium of "free agreement." More immediately, the theory can help further to undermine that objectivistic solipsism which social science distills from the dominant methodological consciousness.; Habermas' colleague, Kark-Otto Apel, has criticized the latter. The critique yields a positive result: an anthropology of "communication." The species organized as a "communication community" is the presupposition par excellence of all human cognition and action. But, it is argued, Habermas' "communicative competence" remains too narrowly linguistic. Because he abstracts from the outset from nonlinguistic components of communication, the scope of the theory too narrowly restricts the meaning of the presupposition. Nonverbal action and expression also "communicate." The logocentric consciousness of the era fails adequately to comprehend human communication as embodied interaction. Against its intent, this consciousness reinforces the instrumentalization of expression and the reduction of action to pure strategy. Habermas has rightly implied that Critical Theory and liberatory practice cannot overleap the sphere of politics and morality: one cannot move directly from the world of "alienated" cognition and work into the free sensuousness and sensuality of the "aesthetic dimension." Yet it is only from a standpoint within that dimension, in which a sensuous materialism comes into its own, that the ethical foundations of political communication can be made to appear.