talks about literature. This is because literary texts, envisaged as the product
of specific speech acts, sit badly with his model of interlocution. In fact, almost
the only way in which he can treat literature is in terms either of a contract
of narration (between narrator and reader), or of generic constraints (agreement
on the rules of a specific language game), which excludes playing games with
contracts and constraints (everything that is called meta-fiction, characteristic
of postmodern literature), texts that actively destroy generic constraints and
refuse narrative contracts in favour of games with the signifier (the avant-
garde position characteristic of modernist texts); but also allliterary texts in
that they are citatory and re-contextualisable – that is, in that they escape
their initial context and live their textual life in a proliferation of interpretations.
Here, Habermas is still dependent on Anglo-American pragmatics and
vulnerable to the kind of critique that Derrida addresses to Austin in ‘Signature
Event Context’.^6 As regards literary criticism, this renders Habermas’s thinking
of little use. It condemns him to be almost as blind as Lukács to contemporary
trends in literature or to slip into what Derrida calls phonocentrism. When
Jonathan Culler criticises him for surreptitiously introducing understanding
into all language games, and cites as a counter-example his computer manual
(which is scarcely ‘user-friendly’), Habermas replies in terms of legal contracts
and ‘face-to-face interaction’. It will be objected that not all philosophies are
obliged to consider literary texts as objects of reflection, or even to appreciate
them. But a philosopher whose first philosophy is a philosophy of language
finds himself, in this respect, in a special situation: a theory of the structure
of language, no matter what level it is situated at, which ignores the literary
use of language or is incapable of accounting for it, is a problematic theory
to say the least.
Finally, Habermas’s model struggles to explain everything in language that
is fixed, already thought or already expressed; everything imposed on speakers
because language constrains their expression; everything, therefore, which
cannot be described in the framework of a rational perlocutionary effect aimed
at by the speaker: clichés, proverbs, stock phrases – everything pertaining to
the ready-made thinking of the doxa, and which plays a very important role
in the language of everyday life. As we have seen, Habermas is not unaware
of these problems, which he explains by recourse to the Husserlian concept
of the life-world shared by all speakers. Clichés and proverbs are then
54 • Chapter Three
(^6) See Derrida 1982 and also the polemic with Searle in Derrida 1988.