Thinking against Habermas
I shall start from the basic thesis on the structure of interlocution, which
presupposes agreement or strives for it. We are dealing here with a myth of
origins and, in truth, a religious myth: it is enough to compare this presupposed
agreement with the myth of the time before the tower of Babel. This structure
of interlocution, being original and universal like Chomsky’s grammar, ignores
the diversity of natural languages, since it is always situated prior to that,
pre-Babel. Although it appeals to the notion of life-world and tradition, it
ignores the linguistic aspect of this tradition and this life-world: it ignores
the fact that a natural language is also a cultural stock, a conception of the
world, and thus it ignores the fact that the functioning of natural languages
from the outset involves phenomena which are incompatible with rational
agreement – for example, the constitutive existence of misunderstanding due
to the diversity of languages, to the necessity of translation, to the proliferation
of dialects, registers and levels of language. This conception thus implicitly
postulates a single because universal language, in which understanding is a
natural thing; and a standard language, which allows all speakers to speak
the same dialect and thus understand one another: this object language.
It ignores the fact that if there is a standard language, it is neither universal
nor transcendental (even weakly), but historically, socially and culturally
conditioned.
I shall run back over the argument, which is rather hasty and might seem
unfair to Habermas. If the interlocutory structure of language presupposes
agreement; if to understand a sentence is to understand the reasonsthat the
speaker does or could adduce in support of what she says, in order to validate
it with a view to agreement; if, moreover, the illocutionary forceof a speech act
aims to obtain a rationally motivatedstance on the part of the addressee – then
this description of the structure of language as defined by interlocution
condemns Habermas to ignore a fair few phenomena and to lapse back into
the philosophy of language which is dominant, from Stalin to Chomsky, and
which makes it a neutral instrument (of information, communication,
agreement).
What is it, then, that Habermas is condemned to ignore? First of all, explicitly
agonistic linguistic phenomena – that is, all the situations where language
itself is a vector of strategic action, where to speak is to seek to establish a
Critique of the Philosophy of Language • 51