ABSTRACT
The foregoing chapter has prepared the following, evaluative discussion of various accounts of the relation between aesthetic rationality and communicative reason. This chapter will elaborate and support my critique of Habermas’s theory of communicative action, not in order to depreciate its value as a theory of society but to challenge its account of the societal role of literature and to present an account of the latter that appreciates the communicative and action-coordinating capacity of literature and indeed the necessity of the function that literary rationality serves in the reasoning practice of the public sphere at large. This critique of Habermas will take place in three stages, each of which makes up a section in this chapter. In the first section (3.1) I will discuss methodological and theoretical
problems in revising TCA (and Habermas’s own subsequent revisions of it) to include aesthetic rationality. The methodological problem (3.1.1) concerns the unit of analysis: Habermas selects the individual, “standard form” of the speech act as the basis for his analysis of communicative reason, which will clearly not work in a straightforward manner in the case of literature. The answer to this methodological problem, which consists in the consideration of context (in various senses of the latter term), is actually already present in Habermas in an underdeveloped form. The theoretical problems in TCA and subsequent revisions of it that are relevant to my discussion are numerous (3.1.2) and will be dealt with under three headings:
1. Habermas’s reduction of aesthetic rationality to expressive rationality, which is demonstrable in part on the basis of his assertion of the predominance of the truthfulness claim in aesthetic practice;
2. Habermas’s correlation of truthfulness claims to the predominance of a concern for perlocutionary effects, which is demonstrable on the basis of his discussion of certain example forms of speech acts; and
3. Habermas’s definition of the peculiarity of literary language as the predominance of the “poetic function” and the concomitant suspension of illocutionary force inherent in literary uses of language.
