length in his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, can be
formulated in a few words: the very structure of language as interlocution
presupposes agreement, or at least a striving for agreement. Philosophy will
therefore start with an analysis of interlocution, which will take the form of
a ‘general pragmatics’ – that is, a pragmatics which enables us to conceptualise
the social, whereas Anglo-American pragmatics (that of Austin and Searle),
which is Habermas’s source of inspiration, is restricted to the linguistic activity
of the individual. We can see the extent of the displacement with respect to
traditional Marxism: the underlying tendency is to think the social in the
mode of co-operation, not struggle. This does not mean that Habermas ignores
the facts and that he is not aware of the concrete existence of class struggle,
but that he theoretically reconstructs society on the basis of the co-operation
implicit in the very constitution of language. This theoretical decision has at
least one thing in common with Marxism: founding the social on interlocution,
it avoids methodological individualism; it insists on the fact that language is
a social phenomenon, that it can only be thought as an activity of interaction
between human beings, and not as an individual faculty. Thus we are already
far removed from Chomsky.
To base a philosophy of language on a universal pragmatics is thus to
operate a dual shift in the direction of the social: it is to abandon Chomskyan
naturalism for the scorned part of linguistic science called pragmatics; and
it is to abandon a pragmatics that concerns the individual (her intended
meanings, her speech acts) for one concerned with action that is not individual,
but collective. Universal pragmatics is therefore organised around two concepts:
inter-subjective understanding and the life-world.
The concept of inter-subjective understandingtells us that human activity,
what characterises human beings in society – i.e. the whole of humanity, with
the exception of Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein’s monster – is, first of all,
a communicative activity. We can see how this decision turns Marx upside
down. The infrastructure on the basis of which the whole of society is
reconstructed is no longer labour – the activity of production and exchange –
but what, for traditional Marxists, is at best an instrument of this productive
activity – language – and, at worst, an element of the superstructure. We now
understand the title of Habermas’s work: what interests him is not language
as a faculty and mental organ, but language as action. And communicative
action is not based on struggle (linguistic struggle, class struggle), but
46 • Chapter Three