Habermas: The Ideal Speech Situation Is A Bad Model For The Ideal Speech Situation
In Between Facts and Norms, the central empirical question is how discourse - and with it, particular modalities of power - gets formed within modern institutions and transmitted across them. The central normative task is to formulate the conditions under which the process and products of these interactions can be deemed legitimate. The title of the book describes not simply the condition of modernity or the nature of law - respectfully, suspended between facts and norms and constituted by their tension - but also the two registers that must be methodologically attended to in order to approach modernity.
Facticity and validity, of course, were not absent in pre-modern times (validity after all being a transcendental condition of communication). As a methodological issue, however, they did not have to be approached separately - the distinction between modernity and pre-modernity is precisely that in pre-modernity the factual exhausted the normative. The existence of a pre-modern institution or norm was sufficient to legitimize it, and the non-existent or potential was de facto illegitimate - hence the atrophy of social progress. The modern cleavage between validity and facticity is the Creation story of BFN - although critically, modern humans can not be restored to any kind of Eden. In place of pre-modernity's "fusion" of facticity and validity, Habermas seeks to develop a discourse ethics that can hook different social institutions together.
Those institutions themselves are constituted by different "amounts" of facticity and validity, and here is the first place where Habermas departs from the model of TCA
Discourse ethics hooks different institutions and social spheres into each other, establishing the norms by which power - which is, again, communication - is channeled between them. There are institutions that are encountered mostly in their facticity - prisons, police, and so on. There are other institutions such as Congress that serve mostly normative functions, and are in fact endangered when they lose that aura (cynicism about public institutions is not the least common route to legitimacy crises). But - critically - each of these institutions have their own modes of discourse - very few actually lend themselves to rational deliberation as such. Habermas is absolutely clear on this: he goes so far as to separate himself from Joshua Cohen by mobilizing this distinction. In contrast to Cohen's view, Habermas holds that certain procedures should be the "core structure in a separate, constitutionally organized political system, but not [serve] as a model for all social institutions" (BFN 305). In this sense, BFN seperates itself from Habermas's previous work by moving away from an emphasis on bracketing power in discursive situation to a model for channeling power through concrete institutions.
The genuine advance of BFN, however, is one level deeper. Not only does Habermas acknowledge that there are legitimate social institutions that are, to put it crudely, mostly coercion. That distinction alone would not have much effect on his overall architectonic, so long as the space "between" these institutions was still conceived of in terms of the ideal speech situation. However - and here is where Habermas ceases to become "Habermas" - BFN holds that even the intersubjective space of the lifeworld must be constituted in part by coercion. The lifeworld is not only "between facts and norms," but is facts and norms - it requires both legal sanction and deliberative validity to itself hang together. In stronger terms, even in the lifeworld the force of the better argument must sometimes be supplemented by coercive power. Again, Habermas is perfectly explicit on this question: he writes that in modernity "good reasons" alone have an insufficient and "weak motivating force".
Now, the degree to which this is genuinely a departure from TCA is a little tangled. The Habermasian lifeworld is constituted by background assumptions and understandings about communication. Bureaucratized institutions understand the world in a different way, and so the specter of colonization is a real one. But that does not mean that the effects of coercive institutions should be kept out of the lifeworld. Quite the opposite, the coherence of the lifeworld would be impossible with those institutions ability to enforce deliberatively validated sanctions on citizens.
References:
* Habermas, Jurgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Trans. William Rehg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998.
* Habermas, Jurgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984.
* Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992.
* Joshua Cohen
Previously:
* Habermas's Peircean Fallibilism
* Rhetoric Not So Much With the Revolution Thing
* What Isn't Argument?
