Deconstructing Habermas

Lasse Thomassen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134236916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is the first book-length deconstructive study of the political philosophy of Jürgen Habermas. Inspired by the work of Jacques Derrida, the book applies deconstruction to key issues in Habermas's work: rational discourse and rational consensus, constitutional democracy, tolerance and civil disobedience.

The war in Iraq brought Habermas and Derrida together in defense of international law and in favor of a bigger role for a united Europe in international affairs. Yet, despite the rapprochement between Habermas and Derrida in the years prior to Derrida's death, important differences remain between Habermas's critical theory and Derrida's deconstruction. These differences reflect differences between post-structuralism and critical theory and between postmodernists and the defenders of modernity.

1The aporias of rational consensus

‘What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of universal and unconstrained consensus.’ In this way, Habermas announces the theoretical leitmotiv of his future work in the appendix to Knowledge and Human Interest.¹ In his subsequent writings, he was to develop an intersubjectivist approach to ethics and politics: Hence, the focus on language, which is evident in Habermas’s work on a formal pragmatic theory of language from the early 1970s onwards. As linguistic animals, an interest in reason is always-already posited to us. The ‘universal and unconstrained consensus’ referred to above is analogous to Kant’s ‘fact of reason’:

it is evidently a fact of nature that the human species, confined to its sociocultural form of life, can only reproduce itself through the medium of that most unnatural idea, truth, which necessarily begins with the counterfactual assumption that universal agreement is possible. Since empirical speech is only possible by virtue of the fundamental norms of rational speech, the cleavage between a real and an inevitably idealized (if only hypothetically ideal) community of language is built not only into the process of argumentative reasoning but into the very life-praxis of social systems. In this way, perhaps the Kantian notion of the fact of reason can be revitalized.²

The notion of rational consensus—although only one part of Haber-mas’s architectonic—is central not only to Habermas’s theories of communicative action, discourse ethics, and deliberative democracy, but also to his critics. I shall start by explaining the centrality of the notion of rational consensus to Habermas’s approach to social action, rationality, and normative validity. Next, I consider some of the criticisms of Habermas’s focus on consensus, most notably those of Jean-François Lyotard, Iris Marion Young, and Chantal Mouffe. Taking my lead from Mouffe, I then argue that the idea of rational consensus and Habermas’s approach more broadly, are marked by an aporia: rational consensus is the condition of possibility of communication, but it would simultaneously spell the end to communication. This has implications for the idea of rational consensus, for the relationship between consensus and dissent, and for how we think about reason. In this chapter I address the first two of these issues; in the last chapter of the book I take up the third issue. Habermas’s theories of communicative action, discourse ethics, and deliberative democracy rely on a division of work between the discourses of social agents and citizens and the rational reconstructions of philosophers and social scientists. Having shown the aporia of rational consensus related to discourse, in the last section of the chapter, I turn to consider Habermas’s rational reconstruction of the always-already of communication. He uses the method of rational reconstruction to argue for the unavoidability of rational consensus as a presupposition of communication, but I argue that he is unable to establish the necessity of the idealized presuppositions of communication. Together the arguments of this chapter point towards the need to rethink reason, argumentation, and democratic deliberation.

RATIONAL CONSENSUS

Rational consensus is, according to Habermas, an unavoidable, if implicit, presupposition of communicative action; that is, action oriented towards mutual understanding and, ultimately, towards the telos of a rational consensus. Social action can be either strategic or communicative, the latter being action oriented towards mutual understanding. There is no alternative to communicative action in the long run if we want something like a peaceful society. Moreover, strategic action presupposes a lifeworld background that can only be reproduced through action oriented towards mutual understanding.³ In this sense, communicative action enjoys primacy and cannot be chosen; it is posited to us through ‘our first sentence’. Similarly, the presuppositions of communicative action—ideas of rational discourse and rational consensus—are posited for, and by, us. Habermas writes:

The necessity of this ‘must’ has a Wittgensteinian rather than a Kantian sense. That is, it does not have the transcendental sense of universal, necessary, and noumenal [intelligiblen] conditions of possible experience, but has the grammatical sense of an ‘inevitability’ stemming from the conceptual connections of a system of learned—but for us inescapable [nicht hintergehbar]—rule-governed behavior. After the pragmatic deflation of the Kantian approach, ‘transcendental analysis’ means the search for presumably universal, but only de facto inescapable conditions that must be met for certain fundamental practices or achievements. All practices for which we cannot imagine functional equivalents in our sociocultural forms of life are ‘fundamental’ in this sense.⁴

Communicative action and discourse are just some practices or language games among others, yet they are unavoidable, because non-substitutable practices that one cannot avoid in the long run if social interaction is to take place. Habermas talks about ‘the lack of alternatives’ (Alternativlosig-keit) in this respect.⁵

According to Habermas, we are always-already situated within a mostly unquestioned lifeworld background consensus.⁶ Communicative action complements the lifeworld in the sense that the lifeworld can only be reproduced through communicative action. The lack of alternatives for the reproduction of the lifeworld refers to learning and socialization more generally and to the peaceful resolution of disagreements more specifically. If disagreement arises over an aspect of the lifeworld, it is possible to shift from communicative action to discourse, where the participants argue for and against the validity claims under more or less idealized conditions. A validity claim is always put forward in a particular context, but, at the same time, it points beyond that context to the possibility of universal vindication through discourse ‘in ever wider forums before an ever more competent and larger audience against ever new objections’.⁷ Any speech act aimed at mutual understanding contains—implicitly or explicitly—the promise of discursive vindication of the validity claims contained in the speech act, which may be vindicated in a rational discourse potentially ending in a rational consensus. These validity claims are, among others, claims to truth and claims to normative rightness, both of which are claims to universal validity. In the following I am mainly interested in claims to normative rightness.⁸ If the discourses meet certain criteria, we have a rational discourse (or argumentation). The criteria are ‘(a) the openness and full inclusion of everybody affected, (b) the symmetrical distribution of communication rights, (c) the absence of force in a situation in which only the forceless force of the better argument is decisive, and (d) the sincerity of the utterances of everybody affected.’⁹ There can be no internal or external constraints to rational discourse, ‘only the unforced force of the better argument’ counts.¹⁰ In terms of politics, these criteria could be expressed as the values of democracy, publicity, inclusion, and egalitarianism, which are all central to Habermas’s theory of deliberative democracy. The outcome of such a rational discourse will be a rational consensus ‘to which all possibly affected persons could assent as participants in rational discourse’.¹¹ These presuppositions of rational discourse and consensus are unavoidable if you engage in argumentation.

Since 1983, Habermas’s argument for the unavoidability of the idealized presuppositions of discourse and argumentation has been to show that you make a performative contradiction whenever you argue against the necessity of the idealized presuppositions. You cannot argue against the presuppositions without simultaneously presupposing them.¹² This is a central part of Habermas’s argument against post-structuralists such as Derrida and Foucault, who, Habermas thinks, are engaged in a total critique of reason.¹³ Whenever you enter into argumentation or discourse, you have already made these idealized presuppositions. So, if our first utterance contains the implicit promise to discursively vindicate the validity claims of that utterance if necessary, then any interaction presupposes communicative action, which in turn assumes the possibility of rational discourse and consensus. Habermas’s use of the performative contradiction argument assumes the universal validity of the rule of (pragmatic) non-contradiction; below, I shall question the force of this argument.

Habermas thus believes he has shown an internal relation between particular and local validity claims, discourse, rational discourse, and rational consensus. The promise of the possibility of a rational consensus inherent in particular practices of argumentation and discourse means that the latter may be said to contain some inherent rationality. With the presuppositions of communicative action, the Kantian opposition between real and ideal supposedly moves inside social practice: the ideal is ‘actually efficacious’ as a presupposition in real practice, and objectivity is actually effective in subjective points of view.¹⁴ Hence, the reference to the Kantian fact of reason in the initial formulation of the communicative turn in the Appendix to Knowledge and Human Interest: an interest in reason need not be posited as a transcendental Idea (in the Kantian sense involving a distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal), but can instead be conceived as the presupposition always-already at work in the use of what distinguishes us as human beings, namely language.

The ‘fact’ of language and reason not only binds the speakers to each other via their mutual obligations to vindicate their validity claims, it also promises that discourse tends towards a rational consensus. That is, it tends towards a situation where what is subjectively true or right to each participant is simultaneously universally and ‘objectively’ true or right because my/our reasons are identical to the reasons of everybody. The local validity claims contain the promise of the radical overflowing of their situatedness in a rational, universal consensus. This is what we have to hold onto in our particular localities in order to transcend their particularity, and the ‘what we have to hold onto’ here contains a double sense: it refers, first, to the fact that we have these structures to hold onto and, secondly, to the normative injunction to do so and to work towards rational consensus. It is the idea of a rational consensus that secures the rationality of discourse, and this in turn means that our particular practices of justification are not reducible to subjective whims and relations of power.

In short, rational consensus is constitutive of communicative action, although only in a weak sense of counterfactual ‘idealizing suppositions we cannot avoid making’.¹⁵ The idea of rational consensus gives you a way to distinguish between those norms that are ‘objectively’ right (namely, equally good for all) and those norms that are ‘subjective’ (relative to a particular good), because the latter are relativized vis-à-vis rational consensus. In other words, the idea of a rational consensus, conceived as a critical ideal, makes us able to rationally distinguish right from wrong and, in addition, it makes us able to view discourse as a learning process, where we in fact get closer to the truth and to what is normatively right. In conclusion, then, rational consensus (and rational discourse) functions both as a regulative idea (a fact of reason giving communication a certain telos) and as a critical ideal, even if only conceived as a counterfactual: ‘actually effective in ways that point beyond the limits of actual situations’.¹⁶ Importantly, and in opposition to Kant, the idea(l) is a ‘detranscendental-ized’ and ‘immanentized’ one. Habermas writes that ‘the sharp clarity of Kant’s oppositions (constitutive vs. regulative, transcendental vs. empirical, immanent vs. transcendent, etc.) diminishes’, because we are no longer dealing with a monological subject but with the reason built into social practices of communicative action.¹⁷ Habermas himself makes clear the differences between his own attempt to detranscendentalize Kant through the route of Hegel and Marx and those who take the route of Nietzsche and Heidegger. While one must avoid transcendentalism in its Kantian form, one should not succumb to ‘an iconoclastic deconstructionism that throws out the baby with the bathwater’ and where ‘the traces of a transcending reason vanish in the sands of historicism and contextualism’. The problem with ‘deconstructionism’ is, according to Habermas, that it seeks to ‘liquidate reason through its abstract negation’.¹⁸ That is, ‘deconstructionism’ abstracts from the pragmatic aspects of reason and thereby overlooks the quasi-transcendental potential of a communicative reason located in the very practice of communication.

I shall return below to the exact status and development of the notions of rational consensus and rational discourse in Habermas’s work. I shall argue that the idea of rational consensus is aporetic, and that this should lead us to rethink the status of rational consensus and the relationship between consensus and dissent. First, however, and in order to establish the precise stakes of the critique of rational consensus, I wish to look at some of the criticisms of Habermas’s consensual approach and examine some of the potential problems with rational consensus and rational discourse. These are the critiques of Habermas by Jean-François Lyotard, Iris Marion Young, and Chantal Mouffe respectively.

THE VIOLENCE OF CONSENSUS: JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD

One of the fiercest critics of Habermas and his emphasis on rational discourse and consensus is Jean-François Lyotard. They do have things in common, though, among other things a reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of language games.

Habermas uses Wittgenstein’s notion of language games to argue that language should be studied from its pragmatic aspect. However, he differs from Wittgenstein in two important aspects. First, he is interested in what different language games have in common, not in their particularities. For Habermas, then, it is important to be able to distinguish between, on one hand, local or empirical practices and, on the other hand, the quasi-transcendental structures of communication. Second, Habermas wants to uphold the distinction between two functions of language: problem solving and world disclosure. It must not only be possible to distinguish the two, the former must be independent of the latter; that is, we must be able to address questions of truth and normative rightness independently of attending to the opacity of language.¹⁹

Lyotard, too, takes inspiration from Wittgenstein’s notion of language games. However, as opposed to Habermas, he emphasizes the multiplicity and incommensurability of language games. Language games are, in short, idiomatic, and there is no neutral meta-language to connect them. The rules of particular language games are not set in stone, however, because they are open to the agonistic contestation of the participants in the language game. This reflects the general agonistic character of language games: ‘to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics’. Lyotard is quick to add, though, that ‘[t]his does not necessarily mean that one plays in order to win.’²⁰

From this conception of language games, Lyotard develops his critique of Habermas, which consists of two related points.²¹ First, he argues, Habermas relies on the Enlightenment meta-narrative of Emancipation, which serves as a meta-language of legitimation. Like any other meta-language, Habermas’s supposedly universal structures of communication violate and suppress the differences among language games because it is in fact just one language game among others presented as a universal language game. Thus, for Lyotard, if there is a multiplicity of justices, there should be a corresponding justice as multiplicity.

Second, and related to the first point, Lyotard argues that the Haber-masian aim towards consensus imposes consensus where there is none and where there should rather be dissent. In this connection, Lyotard talks about ‘paralogy’, that is, the aim should be to create new openings within existing language games as opposed to closing off language games by imposing consensus as their telos. Summing up, one might say that Lyotard is critical of Habermas’s universalism and focus on consensus because they issue in ‘terror’, by which he means ‘the efficiency gained by eliminating, or threatening to eliminate, a player from the language game one shares with him. He is silenced or consents, not because he has been refuted, but because his abi...