Toward a Rhetoric of Intersubjectivity - Introducing Jürgen Habermas.pdf

7/30/2019 Toward a Rhetoric of Intersubjectivity - Introducing Jrgen Habermas.pdf

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TOWARD A RHETORIC OF INTER SUBJECTIVITY:INTRODUCING JURGEN HABERMASHugh H. Grady and Susan Wells

Rhetoricians and students of composition live with two notions of how meaning is formed: a persuasive, subjective rhetoricderived from antiquity and an objective and expository rhetoric derived from the Enlightenment. In subjective rhetoric, meaning isgenerated only within communicative situations, as a discourse aboutprobabilities oriented to assent. Contemporary theorists of a subjective rhetoric might include Perelman and Burke. For objectivistrhetorics, meaning is a reflection of independently existing states ofaffairs; the aim of discourse is to organize the instrumental use of itsobjects. Obectivist rhetoric might be conveniently represented by E.D. Hirsch.It might be helpful to think through these oppositions, ratherthan to continue developing two isolated rhetorics, one for the writeras a subjective being, the other for the writer as a technician. We canbegin such reflection through the work of [urgen Habermas, a Germancritical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Habermas hasfaced a similar contradiction as a problem in social theory, and hisresolution of it is of interest to rhetoricians. Habermas' theory takes asits central value intersubjective agreement-rational, negotiated assent among autonomous, responsible individuals. Intersubjectiveagreement mediates, for Habermas, a critique of positivism in thesocial sciences and an understanding of the need for objective scienceand administrative techniques, a tension analogous to that facingrhetoricians, who must mediate the opposing values of clarity andself-expression, readability and stylistic interest, effectiveness andtruth.

JOURNAL OF ADVA1'JCEDCOMP()SfllON, Volume VI (1985-86). Copyright1987.


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34 JournalofAdvancedComposition

I. Introducing Jurgen HabermasJiirgen Habermas is the central surviving theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.' The FrankfurtSchool, as it is usually called, has been one of the most influentialcurrents in twentieth century intellectual life. Even those who havenever heard of the Frankfurt School are familiar with some of itsmembers-Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, MaxHorkheimer, and Walter Benjamin. The agenda of the FrankfurtSchool has shaped modem critical discourse: the reconciliation ofMarx and Freud, the discovery of a young, subjective Marx, thecorrelation of authoritarian personality structures with the rise offascism, and the confrontation with new social forms associated withtechnology and mass culture.'Forced into exile by the rise of Hitler, Frankfurt School mem.bers did much of their most creative work in America. After the war,when Frankfurt invited the Institute back, the school, but not all of itsmembers, returned to Germany. Among the post-war generation of

the Frankfurt School,the most eminent is Jiirgen Habermas. His mainproject is an audacious one-the re-establishment of the theoreticalfoundations of the human sciences in general and critical theory inparticular, or as Habermas puts it, "the reconciliation of the decayedparts ofmodernity.'? Habermas' projectbegan twenty years ago, withstudies in epistemology, science,and social theory; it has led him to adeepening concentration on problems of communication, includingextensive work in interpretive theory and speech act philosophy anda prolonged study of Piaget, Kohlberg, Pierce, and Dewey.Habermas uses intersubjectivitys a central term in two intellectual projects: the critique ofpositivism and scientism,and the reappropriation of the hermeneutic tradition. The Frankfurt School attackedthe widely held notion that valid human knowledge is restricted toempirically testable propositions arrived at through disinterested,value-free inquiry-the notion that shapes both positivism and objectivist rhetoric. Briefly, the Frankfurt School argued that positivismrules out of bounds the rational discussion of meaning, values, andexperience, leaving those areas open to the kind of irrationality that

the Nazi movement exploited. At the same time, positivism misunderstands the role of psychological and social structures in constraining our modes of thought, and often sees "disinterest" where a moreacute analysis, one informed byMarxor Freud, would reveal the force


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Hugh H. Grady and Susan Wells 35

of the unconscious or the domination of ideology. For the FrankfurtSchool-to simplify radically-human society was a web of intersubjectivity, created through the actions and interactions of subjects whocould become the conscious creators of values.Intersubjectivelso invokes the German hermeneutic tradition"which Habermas sees not only as a body of philological rules forinterpreting difficult texts (its historical origin), but also as an alternative to scientistic procedures for understanding human behavior andsociety. Hermeneutics allows us to understand the motives, values,emotions, and thoughts of others-subjectively, sympathetically,from the inside, as it were. In effect, we are to "read" society as anineteenth-century German scholar read Shakespeare-with active,sympathetic imagination, and an openness to the strangeness of thetext. We train ourselves to put aside our preunderstandings if theyconflictwith a full grasp ofwhat we read. We work in the hermeneuticcircle, in a dialectical movement from the text to our interpretation,checking against the text, then modifying the interpretation, in a silentdialogue of one subjectivity with the written projection of another.For Habermas, a theory of intersubjectivity contrasts withtheories which base truth and meaning on individual consciousness.While an individual may arrive at knowledge through a sudden flashof insight, Habermas insists that such knowledge enters the intersubjective sphere only by being translated into rational, accessible discourse. The sphere of intersubjectivity is not the creation of a singleindividual psyche, but is amedium of communicable knowledge,created and maintained through the interaction of many subjectivities. As such, the intersubjective sphere has an autonomous existence,beyond anyone individual, and must be entered through socialization, especially language acquisition. Of course, to learn the languageof intersubjectivity is to create it again, since the language is constantlychanging.

II. Communicative CompetenceHabermas elaborates these ideas most fully in his theory of

communicative competence, which holds that in a successful act ofcommunication, the hearer agrees to five implicit claims: that theutterance is true, that the speaker is sincere or truthful, that theutterance responds to the appropriate values, that it is fitting to the


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relation between speaker and listener, and that it is comprehensible.From these claims, Habermas develops a notion of communicativecompetency analogous to Chomsky's syntactic competency, but treating the utterances of speakers rather than isolated sentences," The fiveclaims also suggest a political project that, if achieved, would extendand deepen democracy in a striking way, since they imply a speechsituation undistorted by domination, violence, coercion, or ignorance.Rhetorically, these claims wold generate I a theory that is sociallysituated, open to reflection, and that refuses to value one form ofdiscourse-scientific, persuasive, or expresive-at the expense ofothers. Thus, Habermas' communications theory realizes his earlieraspirations for philosophy that supports a public sphere of discussion;it may be of help to rhetoricians in our attempt to support the varietiesof rhetorical practice and analysis in which we engage.Habermas recognizes that more is involved in communicationthan the grammatical comprehensibility of a sentence. The separationof langueand parole,necessary on one level to grasp the syntacticstructure of the language, must be overcome on anotehr level to graspthe social structure of speech. Habermas' five claims are not necessarily the normal characteristics of our daily speech acts, which often failto achieve full validity through misunderstanding, concealed motives, or reserved judgements. But they are, he claims, logicallynecessary qualities of speech directed at understanding. Of course,Habermas recognizes that people may reach a consensus satisfying tothemselves, but that others would judge non-valid. (Let us imagineourselves, say, listening in at ameeting of the Flat Earth Society.) Afurther distinction is necessary; rational consensus vs, false consensus. In order for any consensus to be rational, each of the implicitvalidity claims must be redeemable-supportable by rational argumentation, open to questioning of assumptions, addressed by speakers free from inequality, coercion, and domination. Rational agreement is to Habermas, then, what language competence is to Chomsky:a formal, abstract, but not idealized reconstruction of assumptionsimplicit in ordinary communications. Similarly, any empirical speechsituation is likely to include rational performance errors, but theseneed not invalidate our concept of rationality. The notion of rationalagreement has critical force; the outcome of a discussion can bechallenged as irrational if it is shown to be influenced by deception,force, or the like.

These ideas have important implications for rhetorical theory.


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An intersubjective rhetoric based on the notion of communicativecompetence would recognize that writing is undertaken within asocial situation. The relation between writer and reader is not anexternal context to the act of writing, not an isolable element inplanning, but a precondition of anything having been written at all.The most relevant model for a writer's development, then, is not thecognitive model adapted from Piaget, in which young adults whohave trouble writing are suffering in the last (it is to be hoped) throesof infant egocentrism. What is at stake for the writer is not learning tovary sentence structure, but earning entrance into a speech community as a responsible, autonomous speaker. For the student writer thismeans learning to paticipate in the norms, customs, and discourseformulas of a speech community-the community of college educatedwriters. And entrance into such a speech community is not merely amatter of learning certain conventions-say, a specific style of documentation. Questions of truth and value, of social roles and sincerity,are implicit in all discourse oriented toward understanding. Anintersubjective rhetoric would make these questions explicit, so tahtstudents could recognize the larger claims of discourse forms, claimsthat they can choose to meet or to challenge, but which they cannotevade.

III. Discourse Categories and InventionWe speak of a speech community into which we attempt toinduct our students, and for many purposes the singular is quite

accurate enough; there are both customs and structures of discoursecommon to all academic disciplines. In some sense, the freshmanwriting course represents such an intellectual common denominator.But at another level-one being reached in programs for writingacross the curriculum-the plural becomes necessary; students areinducted into speech communities. The theory of five discourse typesfound in Habermas' The theoryof CommunicativeAction can throwconsiderable light on the implications of teaching such courses, andespecially on problems of invention,"Current teachings on invention often reflect the empiricaltradition of English philosophy founded by John Locke. The link wasexplicit in George Campbell, whose PhilosophyofRhetoric(1776) sawthirty American editions? But it has since become implicit, part of the


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unexamined theoretical baggage of rhetoric and composition. Perhaps most ironic of all, while our literature courses, since the heydaysof I. A. Richards and Cleanth Brooks, have celebrated the "special"knowledge provided by literature and art and specifically contrastedthe language of poetry with the language of science, many of ourmanuals advise students to follow the guidelines of the naturalsciences in their writing on literature. Kane and Peters, for example,state:

Toconvincehisreaderof the truth or reasonablenessof his conclusionsabout characters, say,or setting,he literaryanalyst sticks closelyto the"fads"of the work discussed, adding nothing that cannotobja:tivelybeshowntobepresentand omittingnothingofobviousimportance,a pt'O:'cedurethat introducesat leastsomeobja:tivityinto literarydiscussion"

While at first glance this seems merely pedagogical commonsense, a closer examination of assumptions reveals a fundamentalconfusion of the subjective and objective. What, for example, is "objective" in a rigorous sense (or even a loose one), about the advice toomit nothing "of obvious importance?" Indeed, it should be obviousthat a judgement concerning relative importance cannot be objective,even if the criteria used to make it are widely shared. "Importance" isnot an objective quality of things in themselves, but a choice made byhuman subjects in the act of perception. The writers have confused"objective" with "intersubjective," creating a kind of philosophicaldisinformation that survives only in composition courses.Habermas' theory of discourse forms may be understood as anattempt to rethink the terms subjectiveand objectivend to clarify anddefine the difference we intuit between analysing a n.ovel and knowing how a diesel engine operates. Habermas adds other categories toinclude what we must know about our own mental processes, thelanguage, and the social organizations that generate both novels anddiesel engines.In TheTheoryofCommunicativeAction,Habermas distinguishesfive discourse types, corresponding to the five validity claims. Thesediscourse types are subdivisions of expository and argumentativeprose; they are ways of identifying the kind of claim that a text makes.Theoretical discourse is concerned with the truth of propositions;practical discourse, with the rightness of norms of action. Aestheticcriticism (and here we should think of Schlegel, or even Barthes, ratherthan Brooks or Wimsatt), is concerned with the adequacy of the stan-


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dards of value presented in works of art. Therapeutic critique addresses the sincerity of a piece of discourse; it includes, on differentlevels, ideology critique and Freudian analysis. Finally, explicativediscourse is concerned with questions of comprehensibility, of how atext is to be understood.Let us consider the details of this classification. Theoreticaldiscourse includes both analytic-empirical discourse, such a scientificand technical writing, and cognitive-rational discourse, writing oriented to describing states of affairs in society. Letus consider scientificand technical writing, which is oriented to describing and controllingnature, first. Habermas' predecessors in the Frankfurt SchoolMarcuse most strikingly-had mounted a sustained attack on technical reason and the, exploitation of nature and humanity that hasaccompanied it. But Habermas believes that such a position left nophilosophical room for the methodology of modern science, which heis unwilling to discard. His strategy instead is an attempt to delimitscience's legitimate application, sharply distinguishing technical reason from the related categories of normative and theoretical discourse.Habermas insists, however, that even technical knowledge is constituted by the active interventions of human subjectivity and can bedescribed intersubjectively. Consider, for example, the case of ascientific measurement-say, measuring temperatures in degrees. Astatement such as "The even is at 350,"which we normally understand as an objective, verifiable statement about the external world,makes sense only in the context of a certain speech community, oneinterested in recording relatively small differences in temperatures,able to control the temperatures of enclosed spaces, familiar with ascale for measuring temperature, and skilled in cooking techniquesthat use stable temperatures to produce predictable results. Even sucha simple statement as a record of temperature is comprehensible onlyas part of a web of social institutions-oil companies, cookbooks, andexperiments in physics. These institutions and the knowledge theygenerate have shaped a world different from the one in which ourgrandmothers talked of "brisk"or "moderate," "quick"or "slow"ovens.Cognitive rational discourse is also oriented toward truth, butit drops the fiction of impersonality that scientific and technicaldiscourse maintain. Sociological writing is the paradigm for cognitive-rational discourse, especially when it combines theoretical discussion and the presentation of concrete information.Habermas makes an important distinction between discourse


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about society which addresses questions of truth, and discourse thataddreses social norms. Such discourse, which we may call socialhermeneutics or, following Habermas, practical discourse, seeks tograsp its object of study precisely as part of a humanly formed,subjectivity-disclosing system. It is this distinction that is obscured bythe handbook generalization about he facts of the case: we make thefacts asmuch aswe find them. The empirical sciencesseek to establishtechnical control over their objects; hermeneutics seeks to open itsobjects to comprehension as forms of intersubjective communication.Aesthetic criticism addresses similar questions of norms andvalues, but in a different context: the interpretation and evaluation ofworks of art. Here, we must understand "value" quite broadly, toinclude not only the values represented directly in the text (the"disciplined heart" in DavidCopperfield,or example), but also thevalues abstracted from the text and advanced by critics:organic unity,or ironic tension, or the free play of signifiers. Students are oftenpuzzled-and rightly so-by the constraints of making argumentsabout works of literature. Isn't it all a matter of opinion, of what yousee in it? An intersubjective rhetoric might make it clear that, whileliterary arguments are not equivalent to arguments about the natureof matter, or about the best way to organize education, they respondto their own distinct norms, and follow their own logic. Such aprocedure isat least clearer than advising students to "omitnothing ofobvious importance."Habermas' fourth discourse form, therapeutic critique, isaddressed to the reader's ability to reflect on his or her own discourse.The model for therapeutic critique is the Freudian dialogue betweendoctor and patient; its aim is to emancipate the reader from systematicbut unconscious self-deception. The fifth discourse form, explication,includes such disciplines as linguistic inquiry and translation.Webelieve this ambitious and challenging theory of discoursecan bemost helpful as a way of understanding invention; it leads usto understand invention as a way of establishing relations withdiverse audiences rather than as a tool for recalling information.Heuristics, then, emerge as homing devices for generating discoursein specific speech situations. Since there has been a growing awareness in rhetorical studies of the diversity of heuristics, we have seenseveral attempts to classify them, usually by the number of questionsthey include and the volume ofinformation they uncover," Habermas'discourse categories suggest that we see various heuristics as abbrevi-


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ated and simplified descriptions of what various speech communitiesare interested in talking about. In an intersubjective rhetoric, then, thefirst step in invention is to reflect about the kind of problem that thewriter is working with. To illustrate how Habermas' categories aidinvention, let us assume a number of writing situations in response tothe same case, say a parent and child who are fighting. In our example,the mythical writer can "constitute" a description of the parent andchild in different ways according to the claim he or she is establishing.Different claims imply different audiences, and these differences arecrucial to the process of invention. Let us consider some possibilities:1. The writer is investigating the psychological effects of a drug thechild is taking.2. The writer is preparing a case study as a background to help asocial service agency decide how to intervene in the case.3. The writer is preparing a case study so that he can understandthe conflicts in the family, with the aim of acquainting the participants with each other's subjective points of view.4. The writer is analysing his or her own relation with the child, inorder to become conscious of distorted patterns of communication.5. The writer is preparing a case study for inclusion in a textbook, toillustrate the concept doublebind.6. The writer is preparing a case study to support the claim that normal counseling procedures fail to take into account children's desires for independence.These six writing situations show how similar things in theworld-in this case, family troubles-might mobilize different communicative interests, and require different communicative competencies. We should note that these divisions do not correspond with thetraditional aims of discourse. In Habermas' terminology, examples 1and 6 are theoretical; examples 2 and 3 are practical; example 4 istherapeutic; example 5 is explicative. Categorized according toKinneavey's aims, our examples are grouped quite differently: example 4 is self-expressive; 3 and 5 are informative; 1, 2, and 6 are ontheir face informative, but with a strong persuasive undercurrent,especially in 6. What an intersubjective rhetoric suggests is that thewriter first investigate the boundaries of these situations, includingtheir appropriateness or rightness, a problem that becomes especiallyimportant in distinguishing technical from hermeneutic situations.In the first two examples, the writer's situation is controlled by


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a fiction of objectivity. Habennas admits that this fiction does notpreclude instrumental analysis from playing a legitimate role in socialsituations, provided its status as supposedly value-free thought isunderstood as concealing a value of control over the object beinganalyzed. In example 1, we could argue that a technical study ofpsychoactive drugs could provide very useful information. Whilesuch a study would abstract from the family's subjective situation,there is no reason why the information generated could not be laterreinterpreted in explicitly intersubjective terms. Our second exampleis more complex. Here, the orientation toward control that shapesempirical discourse conflicts with the orientation toward understanding that ideally informs our relations with other people. In such a case,it seems to us, the writer might reflect on whether it might be better toapproach the case as a question about norms. Such an approach isexplicit in example 3. The concrete human situation being writtenabout might be lost to the potentially reductive properties of instrumental reason, and the practical discourse that might be more appropriate to do justice to the situation might be silenced, unless the writerbegins invention with such a reflection.Once the question of appropriateness is settled, however,intersubjective rhetoric would warrant a number of heuristics forinstrumental or empirical writing. We should clarify that in developing such techniques for invention we would draw from a wide varietyof sources beyond Habermas, situating such practical techniqueswithin the theoretical framework of intersubjective rhetoric.Heuristics suitable to empirical writing would treat the objectof discourse as separate from the speaker, characterized by concretefeatures which are objectively present. Such heuristics would providetools for generalization, for classification into groups based on sharedcharacteristics. There is no lack of such heuristics; these are thecontrolling assumptions of nearly all the heuristics current in the field.The tagmemic matrix is perhaps the most complex and comprehensive of these heuristics.An intersubjective rhetoric would negate neither these heuristics nor the insights they generate. But it would discourage us frompresenting them as absolutely reliable ways of producing informationabout the world. Since the first step in such an invention process is toask tlWhat kind of problem am I working on?" the informationgenerated in these contexts is firmly bracketed within a limitedknowledge category. Such boundaries would discourage us from


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saying that any heuristic tells us "what we must do to describe anexperience," or that it directs us to the "central features of any event,"but it would not prevent us from asking any useful set of questionsabout our experience of the world.In example 3 our writer faces a question of norms in a practicalsituation. His or her intention is to propose an interpretation for agiven intersubjective situation such that it will become accessible to anew audience. Such an interest implies a dialogic stance; the writerstands as intermediary between the situation and the audience, andtakes the audience into account as he or she questions the situation.The writer mayor may not claim special access to knowledge-in ourexample, the writer might claim to know a lot about troubled families,or might present himself or herself as "just a facilitator." But there isa claim to skill in normative interpretation, in the rules of socialhermeneutic proof and argumentation. Unlike the writer of instrumental discourse, however, the writer of practical discourse is nottrying to incite his or her reader to a specified course of action, butrather to open the question of norms and their application.Again, we would develop these broad concepts by drawingfrom established rhetorical techniques. There is a rich history ofheuristics based on the hermeneutic mode which are applicable topractical discourse, including three-levelled or five-levelled scriptural interpretation, the interpretive canons ofGerman philology, andthe rules of legal inference. Few of these heuristics have been incorporated into the field of composition, and we might suggest a morefamiliar heuristic for practical discourse-s-Burke's pentad. The pentad, an examination of a topic in terms of Act, Agency, Agent, Scene,and Aim, is a heuristic concerned with forms of thought, and it istherefore appropriate for the examination of social norms." Thepentad, as formulated by Burke, provides the writer with a structurefor approaching a situation hermeneutically: ambiguity is to be seenas a resource, as is the pliancy of the heuristic's terms. The pentadinvites a writer to see a given text or situation as unique and undetermined; it also suggests that it be viewed historically, broadenign thepossibilities of locating discourse within a social situation.Our examples include no instance of aesthetic critique, sincewe have chosen a social situation rather than a literary text foranalysis. However, heuristics for aesthetic critique are quite common,although they are often combined with questios directed at explicating texts. The list of codes in Barthes' 5/Z is one such heuristic; similar


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in function are lexicons of basic terms such as Jonathan Culler's inStructuralistPoetics,or, in a more critical mode, that in RaymondWilliams' MarxismandLiterature."All these lists identify the centraltopics of critical discourse, locate values to which a literary text canrespond, and suggest ways of describing and evaluating that response.We can see example 4 as an instance of therapeutic critique, inthis case directed toward the writer's own self-understanding. It isvery difficult to specify a heuristic for this kind of reflection: such aheuristic would lead to the identification of unspoken assumptions,and of the gaps, discontinuities, and contradictions in discourse. Theclosest thing we now have to such a method is Peter Elbow's methodof revising, a method which encourages students to think through thecontradictions in their writing rather than simply to excise them inrewriting.Explicative discourse is represented, in this series, by example5; the traditional heuristic associated with explication is the hermeneutic circle. Here, the writer conjectures a sense of the text, and workswith some significant detail to specify,amplify, or subvert that conjecture. This circular process leads the writer back to the details of thetext, and then again to a reformulated sense of the whole. In ourexample, a psychologist writing a case history to explicate a centralconcept might work with some controlling metaphor that illuminatesthe concept, and then find a detail of the case study that embodies thismetaphor. A reader would come to understand case and conceptsimultaneously.Our last example, that described in sentence 6, returns us to therealm of theoretical discourse, but with a difference. Weare no longerconcerned with describing objects instrumentally, but with organizing that description as a rational structure, and in this case a criticalstructure. it is considerably more difficult to specify a heuristic forcritical thought than for instrumental discourse. Provisionally we listhere some heuristic probes characteristic of Marx and Freud, thethinkers who exemplify critical thought for Habermas, These probesdo not form a systematic heuristic, but a set of common topics forcritical invention: unmasking, disclosure, finding an inner reality that reverses outerappearances. See Freud on jokes, Marx on commodities. genesis, the logical reconstruction of a complex history, undertakenas a way of uncovering hidden relations. See Freud on dreams, Marx


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on money, or Vygotsky on word meanings. history, a more circumstantial and less conceptual analysis, inwhichseemingly accidental characteristics of a period or action are related tothe central qualities of the objectofanalysis. SeeFreud's case histories,Marx's account of primitive accumulation. reversal, verbally, as the trope of chiasmus, a favoritive figure forboth Marx and Freud. Conceptually, reversals link different levels ofanalysis, as inMarx's "Theweapons ofcriticism shall pass over into thecriticism of weapons," which links logical analysis to utopian projection.

These topics, and others like them, are ways of thinking aboutthe kind of question that the writer is considering. In them, the initialhermeneutic "as if"is allowed to take over the object of the analysis, sothat it can be seen as if it were mere appearance, as if it could easily beconstituted otherwise. Nor is the investigator immune from thisprocess. Forced to examine his or her own categories, to question thedesires and interests that shape them, to consider the possibility ofreversal, the writers of critical discourse are also continuously rewriting themselves.

IV. ConclusionIt is in such self-revisions that Habermas, in his earlier work,located the ethical core of discourse, its function as a tool for emancipation. And Habermas has never renounced the special liberatingpower of critical discourse to reach outside social constraints and

negotiate entirely new bases of understanding. But in Habermas'more recent work, the notion of communicative competence, whichdescribes the extraordinary claims made by ordinary speech, is givenpriority, since critical discussion can be seen as a way to re-establishconsensus. Critique, in this view, is a way to secure common assent tothe claims of truth, rightness, truthfulness, value, and comprehensibility, so that the real talking can go on. This revision of Habermas'thought asserts the centrality and seriousness of unheroic writing.Just as the most serious problems in linguistics involve ordinarysyntactic structures like nominals and indirect questions, the simplestforms ofdiscourse may raise questions that are very far reaching aboutdomination, distortion of language, and the equality of speakers. Aswe consider the implications of this position, we may find in com-


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municative competence a challenging conception of our owndiscipline's humane purpose: the formation of autonomous and responsible speakers, capable of participating fully in the discourse of aspeech community.Detroit College of BusinessDetroit,MichiganTemple UniversityPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania

Notes"Themain works of Habennas that have been translated are:TO'UXUdRationalSociety:StudentProtest,Science,and Politics,rans. J.J.Shapiro (Boston:Beacon Press, 1970).K1ww1edgendHumanInterests,rans. J.J.Shapiro (Boston:BeaconPress,

1971).Theoryand Practice,rans. J.Viertel (Boston:BeaconPress, 1973).Legitimationrisis,trans. T.McCarthy(Boston:BeaconPress, 1975).Communicationnd theEvolutionofSociety,rans. T.McCarthy(Boston:Beacon Press, 1979).TheTheoryofCommunicativeAction,I, trans. T.McCarthy(Boston:Bea-eon Press,1984).Useful books about Habennas include Thomas McCarthy'sTheCritiallTheoryofJilrgenHabermasCambridge: The MIT Press,1978)and Habennas:CriticalDebates,00. John B.Thompson and David Held (Cambridge:The MIT Press,1982.).Bothofthese works include excellent bibliographies.While we have differencesof opinion and emphasis from Habermas, thisstudy is a positive application of his theories; the text will make clear where wedepart from his work.2SeeMartin Jay'sTheDialecticalmagination:aHistoryoftheFrankfurtScJwoland the InstituteofSocialResearch,1923-50(Boston:Little,Brown, 1973).3JiirgenHabermas, 'The Dialectics of Rationalization:an Interview," Telos49 (Fall,1981),28.4David C. Hoy's The Critiall Circle:Literature,History,and Phz10sophicalHermeneuticsBerkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, 1978),discusses Habermasand hermeneutics.5TheoryofCommunicativeAction,I, 137.6Discourseypesare discussed in TheoryofCommunicaiioection,I, 20-22.An earlier set of discourse categoriesis presented in KnowledgendHumanInterests. In both systems, there is a crucial distinction between instrumental andhermeneutic knowledge.


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7GmrgeKennedy, ClassicalRhetoricand Its Christianand SecularTraditionfromAncienttoModernTimes(ChapelHill: UniversityofNorth CarolinaPress,19aJ),p.242. 8Thornas Kane and LeonardPeters, WritingProse,2nd ed, (New York:Oxford University Press, 19aJ),p. 242.9JaniceLauer, 'Toward a Metatheoty of Heuristic Procedures," CCC 30(October 1979),268-270;James Kinney,ClassifyingHeuristics,"CCC 30 (December1979),351-356; and W. Ross Winterowd, "Invention," in Contemporaryhetoric:AConceptualackgroundith ReadingsNew York Harrourt,Brace,Jovanovich, 1975),pp.39-49."Kenneth Burke,A GrammarofMotives(Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress,1969),p. xvi.

l1RolandBarthes,5/2, trans. Richard Miller (New York Hill and Wang,1974);Jonathan Culler, StructuralistPoetics(lthaca:Cornell University Press, 1975);and RaymondWilliams,Marxismand LiteratureNew York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1979).

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Toward a Rhetoric of Intersubjectivity - Introducing Jürgen Habermas.pdf