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JAC
Volume 6 |
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Editor: 
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Toward A Rhetoric of Intersubjectivity:
Hugh H. Grady and Susan Wells Rhetoricians and students of composition live with two notions of how meaning is formed: a persuasive, subjective rhetoric derived from antiquity and an objective and expository rhetoric derived from the Enlightenment. In subjective rhetoric, meaning is generated only within communicative situations, as a discourse about probabilities oriented to assent. Contemporary theorists of a subjective rhetoric might include Perelman and Burke. For objectivist rhetorics, meaning is a reflection of independently existing states of affairs; the aim of discourse is to organize the instrumental use of its objects. Objectivist rhetoric might be conveniently represented by E. D. Hirsch. It might be helpful to think through these oppositions, rather than to continue developing two isolated rhetorics, one for the writer as a subjective being, the other for the writer as a technician. We can begin such reflection through the work of Jürgen Habermas, a German critical theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Habermas has faced a similar contradiction as a problem in social theory, and his resolution of it is of interest to rhetoricians. Habermas’ theory takes as its central value intersubjective agreement—rational, negotiated assent among autonomous, responsible individuals. Intersubjective agreement mediates, for Habermas, a critique of positivism in the social sciences and an understanding of the need for objective science and administrative techniques, a tension analogous to that facing rhetoricians, who must mediate the opposing values of clarity and self-expression, readability and stylistic interest, effectiveness and truth. I. Introducing Jürgen Habermas Jürgen Habermas is the central surviving theorist in the tradition of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.1 The Frankfurt School, as it is usually called, has been one of the most influential currents in twentieth century intellectual life. Even those who have never heard of the Frankfurt School are familiar with some of its members—Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Walter Benjamin. The agenda of the Frankfurt School has shaped modem critical discourse: the reconciliation of Marx and Freud, the discovery of a young, subjective Marx, the correlation of authoritarian personality structures with the rise of fascism, and the confrontation with new social forms associated with technology and mass culture.2 Forced into exile by the rise of Hitler, Frankfurt School members did much of their most creative work in America. After the war, when Frankfurt invited the Institute back, the school, but not all of its members, returned to Germany. Among the post-war generation of the Frankfurt School, the most eminent is Jürgen Habermas. His main project is an audacious one—the re-establishment of the theoretical foundations of the human sciences in general and critical theory in particular, or as Habermas puts it, “the reconciliation of the decayed parts of modernity.”3 Habermas’ project began twenty years ago, with studies in epistemology, science, and social theory; it has led him to a deepening concentration on problems of communication, including extensive work in interpretive theory and speech act philosophy and a prolonged study of Piaget, Kohlberg, Pierce, and Dewey. Habermas uses intersubjectivity as a central term in two intellectual projects: the critique of positivism and scientism, and the reappropriation of the hermeneutic tradition. The Frankfurt School attacked the widely held notion that valid human knowledge is restricted to empirically testable propositions arrived at through disinterested, value-free inquiry—the notion that shapes both positivism and objectivist rhetoric. Briefly, the Frankfurt School argued that positivism rules out of bounds the rational discussion of meaning, values, and experience, leaving those areas open to the kind of irrationality that the Nazi movement exploited. At the same time, positivism misunderstands the role of psychological and social structures in constraining our modes of thought, and often sees “disinterest” where a more acute analysis, one informed by Marx or Freud, would reveal the force of the unconscious or the domination of ideology. For the Frankfurt School—to simplify radically—human society was a web of intersubjectivity, created through the actions and interactions of subjects who could become the conscious creators of values. Intersubjective also invokes the German hermeneutic tradition4 which Habermas sees not only as a body of philological rules for interpreting difficult texts (its historical origin), but also as an alternative to scientistic procedures for understanding human behavior and society. Hermeneutics allows us to understand the motives, values, emotions, and thoughts of others—subjectively, sympathetically, from the inside, as it were. In effect, we are to “read” society as a nineteenth-century German scholar read Shakespeare—with active, sympathetic imagination, and an openness to the strangeness of the text. We train ourselves to put aside our preunderstandings if they conflict with a full grasp of what we read. We work in the hermeneutic circle, in a dialectical movement from the text to our interpretation, checking against the text, then modifying the interpretation, in a silent dialogue of one subjectivity with the written projection of another. For Habermas, a theory of intersubjectivity contrasts with theories which base truth and meaning on individual consciousness. While an individual may arrive at knowledge through a sudden flash of insight, Habermas insists that such knowledge enters the intersubjective sphere only by being translated into rational, accessible discourse. The sphere of intersubjectivity is not the creation of a single individual psyche, but is a medium of communicable knowledge, created and maintained through the interaction of many subjectivities. As such, the intersubjective sphere has an autonomous existence, beyond any one individual, and must be entered through socialization, especially language acquisition. Of course, to learn the language of intersubjectivity is to create it again, since the language is constantly changing. II. Communicative Competence Habermas elaborates these ideas most fully in his theory of communicative competence, which holds that in a successful act of communication, the hearer agrees to five implicit claims: that the utterance is true, that the speaker is sincere or truthful, that the utterance responds to the appropriate values, that it is fitting to the relation between speaker and listener, and that it is comprehensible. From these claims, Habermas develops a notion of communication competency analogous to Chomsky’s syntactic competency, but treating the utterances of speakers rather than isolated sentences.5 The five claims also suggest a political project that, if achieved, would extend and deepen democracy in a striking way, since they imply a speech situation undistorted by domination, violence, coercion, or ignorance. Rhetorically, these claims would generate a theory that is socially situated, open to reflection, and that refuses to value one form of discourse—scientific, persuasive, or expressive—at the expense of others. Thus, Habermas’ communications theory realizes his early aspirations for philosophy that supports a public sphere of discussion; it may be of help to rhetoricians in our attempt to support the varieties of rhetorical practice and analysis in which we engage. Habermas recognizes that more is involved in communication than the grammatical comprehensibility of a sentence. The separation of langue and parole, necessary on one level to grasp the syntactic structure of the language, must be overcome on another level to grasp the social structure of speech. Habermas’ five claims are not necessarily the normal characteristics of our daily speech acts, which often fail to achieve full validity through misunderstanding, concealed motives, or reserved judgements. But they are, he claims, logically necessary qualities of speech directed at understanding. Of course Habermas recognizes that people may reach a consensus satisfying to themselves, but that others would judge non-valid. (Let us imagine ourselves, say, listening in at a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.) A further distinction is necessary; rational consensus vs. false consensus. In order for any consensus to be rational, each of the implicit validity claims must be redeemable—supportable by rational argumentation, open to questioning of assumptions, addressed by speakers free from inequality, coercion, and domination. Rational agreement is to Habermas, then, what language competence is to Chomsky: a formal, abstract, but not idealized reconstruction of assumptions implicit in ordinary communications. Similarly, any empirical speech situation is likely to include rational performance errors, but these need not invalidate our concept of rationality. The notion of rational agreement has critical force; the outcome of a discussion can be challenged as irrational if it is shown to be influenced by deceptive force, or the like. These ideas have important implications for rhetorical theory. An intersubjective rhetoric based on the notion of communicative competence would recognize that writing is undertaken within a social situation. The relation between writer and reader is not an external context to the act of writing, not an isolable element in planning, but a precondition of anything having been written at all. The most relevant model for a writer’s development, then, is not the cognitive model adapted from Piaget, in which young adults who have trouble writing are suffering in the last (it is to be hoped) throes of infant egocentrism. What is at stake for the writer is not learning to vary sentence structure, but earning entrance into a speech community as a responsible, autonomous speaker. For the student writer this means learning to participate in the norms, customs, and discourse formulas of a speech community—the community of college educated writers. And entrance into such a speech community is not merely a matter of learning certain conventions—say, a specific style of documentation. Questions of truth and value, of social roles and sincerity, are implicit in all discourse oriented toward understanding. An intersubjective rhetoric would make these questions explicit, so that students could recognize the larger claims of discourse forms, claims that they can choose to meet or to challenge, but which they cannot evade. III. Discourse Categories and Invention We speak of a speech community into which we attempt to induct our students, and for many purposes the singular is quite accurate enough; there are both customs and structures of discourse common to all academic disciplines. In some sense, the freshman writing course represents such an intellectual common denominator. But at another level—one being reached in programs for writing across the curriculum—the plural becomes necessary; students are inducted into speech communities. The theory of five discourse types found in Habermas’ The Theory of Communicative Action can throw considerable light on the implications of teaching such courses, and especially on problems of invention.6 Current teachings on invention often reflect the empirical tradition
of English philosophy founded by John Locke. The link was explicit in
George Campbell, whose Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) saw thirty American
editions.7 But it has since become implicit, part of the unexamined
theoretical baggage of rhetoric and composition. Perhaps most ironic
of all, while our literature courses, since the heydays of I. A. Richards
and Cleanth Brooks, have celebrated the “special” knowledge
provided by literature and art and specifically contrasted the language
of poetry with the language of science, many of our manuals advise students
to follow the guidelines of the natural sciences in their writing on
literature. Kane and Peters, for example, state: While at first glance this seems merely pedagogical common sense, a closer examination of assumptions reveals a fundamental confusion of the subjective and objective. What, for example, is “objective” in a rigorous sense (or even a loose one), about the advice to omit nothing “of obvious importance?” Indeed, it should be obvious that a judgement concerning relative importance cannot be objective, even if the criteria used to make it are widely shared. “Importance” is not an objective quality of things in themselves, but a choice made by human subjects in the act of perception. The writers have confused “objective” with “intersubjective,” creating a kind of philosophical disinformation that survives only in composition courses. Habermas’ theory of discourse forms may be understood as an attempt to rethink the terms subjective and objective and to clarify and define the difference we intuit between analysing a novel and knowing how a diesel engine operates. Habermas adds other categories to include what we must know about our own mental processes, the language, and the social organizations that generate both novels and diesel engines. In The Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas distinguishes five discourse types, corresponding to the five validity claims. These discourse types are subdivisions of expository and argumentative prose; they are ways of identifying the kind of claim that a text makes. Theoretical discourse is concerned with the truth of propositions; practical discourse, with the rightness of norms of action. Aesthetic criticism (and here we should think of Schlegel, or even Barthes, rather than Brooks or Wimsatt), is concerned with the adequacy of the standards of value presented in works of art. Therapeutic critique addresses the sincerity of a piece of discourse; it includes, on different levels, ideology critique and Freudian analysis. Finally, explicative discourse is concerned with questions of comprehensibility, of how a text is to be understood. Let us consider the details of this classification. Theoretical discourse includes both analytic-empirical discourse, such a scientific and technical writing, and cognitive-rational discourse, writing oriented to describing states of affairs in society. Let us consider scientific and technical writing, which is oriented to describing and controlling nature, first. Habermas’ predecessors in the Frankfurt School— Marcuse most strikingly—had mounted a sustained attack on technical reason and the exploitation of nature and humanity that has accompanied it. But Habermas believes that such a position left no philosophical room for the methodology of modern science, which he is unwilling to discard. His strategy instead is an attempt to delimit science’s legitimate application, sharply distinguishing technical reason from the related categories of normative and theoretical discourse. Habermas insists, however, that even technical knowledge is constituted by the active interventions of human subjectivity and can be described intersubjectively. Consider, for example, the case of a scientific measurement—say, measuring temperatures in degrees. A statement such as "The oven is at 350°; which we normally understand as an objective, verifiable statement about the external world, makes sense only in the context of a certain speech community, one interested in recording relatively small differences in temperatures, able to control the temperatures of enclosed spaces, familiar with a scale for measuring temperature, and skilled in cooking techniques that use stable temperatures to produce predictable results. Even such a simple statement as a record of temperature is comprehensible only as part of a web of social institutions—oil companies, cookbooks, and experiments in physics. These institutions and the knowledge they generate have shaped a world different from the one in which our grandmothers talked of “brisk” or “moderate,” “quick” or “slow” ovens. Cognitive rational discourse is also oriented toward truth, but it drops the fiction of impersonality that scientific and technical discourse maintain. Sociological writing is the paradigm for cognitive-rational discourse, especially when it combines theoretical discussion and the presentation of concrete information. Habermas makes an important distinction between discourse about society which addresses questions of truth, and discourse that addresses social norms. Such discourse, which we may call social hermeneutics or, following Habermas, practical discourse, seeks to grasp its object of study precisely as part of a humanly formed, subjectivity-disclosing system. It is this distinction that is obscured by the handbook generalization about the facts of the case: we make the facts as much as we find them. The empirical sciences seek to establish technical control over their objects; hermeneutics seeks to open its objects to comprehension as forms of intersubjective communication. Aesthetic criticism addresses similar questions of norms and values, but in a different context: the interpretation and evaluation of works of art. Here, we must understand “value” quite broadly, to include not only the values represented directly in the text (the “disciplined heart” in David Copperfield, for example), but also the values abstracted from the text and advanced by critics: organic unity, or ironic tension, or the free play of signifiers. Students are often puzzled—and rightly so—by the constraints of making arguments about works of literature. Isn’t it all a matter of opinion, of what you see in it? An intersubjective rhetoric might make it clear that, while literary arguments are not equivalent to arguments about the nature of matter, or about the best way to organize education, they respond to their own distinct norms, and follow their own logic. Such a procedure is at least clearer than advising students to “omit nothing of obvious importance.’’ Habermas’ fourth discourse form, therapeutic critique, is addressed to the reader’s ability to reflect on his or her own discourse. The model for therapeutic critique is the Freudian dialogue between doctor and patient; its aim is to emancipate the reader from systematic but unconscious self-deception. The fifth discourse form, explication, includes such disciplines as linguistic inquiry and translation. We believe this ambitious and challenging theory of discourse can be most helpful as a way of understanding invention; it leads us to understand invention as a way of establishing relations with diverse audiences rather than as a tool for recalling information. Heuristics, then, emerge as homing devices for generating discourse in specific speech situations. Since there has been a growing awareness in rhetorical studies of the diversity of heuristics, we have seen several attempts to classify them, usually by the number of questions they include and the volume of information they uncover.9 Habermas’ discourse categories suggest that we see various heuristics as abbreviated and simplified descriptions of what various speech communities are interested in talking about. In an intersubjective rhetoric, then, the first step in invention is to reflect about the kind of problem that the writer is working with. To illustrate how Habermas’ categories aid invention, let us assume a number of writing situations in response to the same case, say a parent and child who are fighting. In our example, the mythical writer can “constitute” a description of the parent and child in different ways according to the claim he or she is establishing. Different claims imply different audiences, and these differences are crucial to the process of invention. Let us consider some possibilities: 1. The writer is investigating the psychological effects of a drug the child is taking. 2. The writer is preparing a case study as a background to help a social service agency decide how to intervene in the case. 3. The writer is preparing a case study so that he can understand the conflicts in the family, with the aim of acquainting the participants with each other’s subjective points of view. 4. The writer is analysing his or her own relation with the child, in order to become conscious of distorted patterns of communication. 5. The writer is preparing a case study for inclusion in a textbook, to illustrate the concept double bind. 6. The writer is preparing a case study to support the claim that normal counseling procedures fail to take into account children’s desires for independence. These six writing situations show how similar things in the world—in this case, family troubles—might mobilize different communicative interests, and require different communicative competences. We should note that these divisions do not correspond with the traditional aims of discourse. In Habermas’ terminology, examples 1 and 6 are theoretical; examples 2 and 3 are practical; example 4 is therapeutic; example 5 is explicative. Categorized according to Kinneavey’s aims, our examples are grouped quite differently: example 4 is self-expressive; 3 and 5 are informative; 1, 2, and 6 are on their face informative, but with a strong persuasive undercurrent, especially in 6. What an intersubjective rhetoric suggests is that the writer first investigate the boundaries of these situations, including their appropriateness or rightness, a problem that becomes especially important in distinguishing technical from hermeneutic situations. In the first two examples, the writer’s situation is controlled by a fiction of objectivity. Habermas admits that this fiction does not preclude instrumental analysis from playing a legitimate role in social situations, provided its status as supposedly value-free thought is understood as concealing a value of control over the object being analyzed. In example 1, we could argue that a technical study of psychoactive drugs could provide very useful information. While such a study would abstract from the family’s subjective situation, there is no reason why the information generated could not be later reinterpreted in explicitly intersubjective terms. Our second example is more complex. Here, the orientation toward control that shapes empirical discourse conflicts with the orientation toward understanding that ideally informs our relations with other people. In such a case, it seems to us, the writer might reflect on whether it might be better to approach the case as a question about norms. Such an approach is explicit in example 3. The concrete human situation being written about might be lost to the potentially reductive properties of instrumental reason, and the practical discourse that might be more appropriate to do justice to the situation might be silenced, unless the writer begins invention with such a reflection. Once the question of appropriateness is settled, however, intersubjective rhetoric would warrant a number of heuristics for instrumental or empirical writing. We should clarify that in developing such techniques for invention we would draw from a wide variety of sources beyond Habermas, situating such practical techniques within the theoretical framework of intersubjective rhetoric. Heuristics suitable to empirical writing would treat the object of discourse as separate from the speaker, characterized by concrete features which are objectively present. Such heuristics would provide tools for generalization, for classification into groups based on shared characteristics. There is no lack of such heuristics; these are the controlling assumptions of nearly all the heuristics current in the field. The tagmemic matrix is perhaps the most complex and comprehensive of these heuristics. An intersubjective rhetoric would negate neither these heuristics nor the insights they generate. But it would discourage us from presenting them as absolutely reliable ways of producing information about the world. Since the first step in such an invention process is to ask “What kind of problem am I working on?” the information generated in these contexts is firmly bracketed within a limited knowledge category. Such boundaries would discourage us from saying that any heuristic tells us “what we must do to describe an experience,” or that it directs us to the “central features of any event,” but it would not prevent us from asking any useful set of questions about our experience of the world. In example 3 our writer faces a question of norms in a practical situation. His or her intention is to propose an interpretation for a given intersubjective situation such that it will become accessible to a new audience. Such an interest implies a dialogic stance; the writer stands as intermediary between the situation and the audience, and takes the audience into account as he or she questions the situation. The writer may or may not claim special access to knowledge—in our example, the writer might claim to know a lot about troubled families, or might present himself or herself as “just a facilitator.” But there is a claim to skill in normative interpretation, in the rules of social hermeneutic proof and argumentation. Unlike the writer of instrumental discourse, however, the writer of practical discourse is not trying to incite his or her reader to a specified course of action, but rather to open the question of norms and their application. Again, we would develop these broad concepts by drawing from established rhetorical techniques. There is a rich history of heuristics based on the hermeneutic mode which are applicable to practical discourse, including three-leveled or five-leveled scriptural interpretation, the interpretive canons of German philology, and the rules of legal inference. Few of these heuristics have been incorporated into the field of composition, and we might suggest a more familiar heuristic for practical discourse—Burke’s pentad. The pentad, an examination of a topic in terms of Act, Agency, Agent, Scene, and Aim, is a heuristic concerned with forms of thought, and it is therefore appropriate for the examination of social norms.10 The pentad, as formulated by Burke, provides the writer with a structure for approaching a situation hermeneutically: ambiguity is to be seen as a resource, as is the pliancy of the heuristic’s terms. The pentad invites a writer to see a given text or situation as unique and undetermined; it also suggests that it be viewed historically, broadening the possibilities of locating discourse within a social situation. Our examples include no instance of aesthetic critique, since we have chosen a social situation rather than a literary text for analysis. However, heuristics for aesthetic critique are quite common, although they are often combined with questions directed at explicating texts. The list of codes in Barthes’ S/Z is one such heuristic; similar in function are lexicons of basic terms such as Jonathan Culler’s in Structuralist Poetics, or, in a more critical mode, that in Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature.11 All these lists identify the central topics of critical discourse, locate values to which a literary text can respond, and suggest ways of describing and evaluating that response. We can see example 4 as an instance of therapeutic critique, in this case directed toward the writer’s own self-understanding. It is very difficult to specify a heuristic for this kind of reflection: such a heuristic would lead to the identification of unspoken assumptions, and of the gaps, discontinuities, and contradictions in discourse. The closest thing we now have to such a method is Peter Elbow’s method of revising, a method which encourages students to think through the contradictions in their writing rather than simply to excise them in rewriting. Explicative discourse is represented, in this series, by example 5; the traditional heuristic associated with explication is the hermeneutic circle. Here, the writer conjectures a sense of the text, and works with some significant detail to specify, amplify, or subvert that conjecture. This circular process leads the writer back to the details of the text, and then again to a reformulated sense of the whole. In our example, a psychologist writing a case history to explicate a central concept might work with some controlling metaphor that illuminates the concept, and then find a detail of the case study that embodies this metaphor. A reader would come to understand case and concept simultaneously. Our last example, that described in sentence 6, returns us to the realm of theoretical discourse, but with a difference. We are no longer concerned with describing objects instrumentally, but with organizing that description as a rational structure, and in this case a critical structure. It is considerably more difficult to specify a heuristic for critical thought than for instrumental discourse. Provisionally we list here some heuristic probes characteristic of Marx and Freud, the thinkers who exemplify critical thought for Habermas. These probes do not form a systematic heuristic, but a set of common topics for critical invention: • unmasking, disclosure, finding an inner reality that reverses outer appearances. See Freud on jokes, Marx on commodities. • genesis, the logical reconstruction of a complex history, undertaken as a way of uncovering hidden relations. See Freud on dreams, Marx on money, or Vygotsky on word meanings. • history, a more circumstantial and less conceptual analysis, in which seemingly accidental characteristics of a period or action are related to the central qualities of the object of analysis. See Freud’s case histories, Marx’s account of primitive accumulation. • reversal, verbally, as the trope of chiasmus, a favoritive figure for both Marx and Freud. Conceptually, reversals link different levels of analysis, as in Marx’s “The weapons of criticism shall pass over into the criticism of weapons,” which links logical analysis to utopian projection. These topics, and others like them, are ways of thinking about the kind of question that the writer is considering. In them, the initial hermeneutic “as if” is allowed to take over the object of the analysis, so that it can be seen as if it were mere appearance, as if it could easily be constituted otherwise. Nor is the investigator immune from this process. Forced to examine his or her own categories, to question the desires and interests that shape them, to consider the possibility of reversal, the writers of critical discourse are also continuously rewriting themselves. IV. Conclusion It is in such self-revisions that Habermas, in his earlier work, located
the ethical core of discourse, its function as a tool for emancipation.
And Habermas has never renounced the special liberating power of critical
discourse to reach outside social constraints and negotiate entirely
new bases of understanding. But in Habermas' more recent work, the notion
of communicative competence, which describes the extraordinary claims
made by ordinary speech, is given priority, since critical discussion
can be seen as a way to re-establish consensus. Critique, in this view,
is a way to secure common assent to the claims of truth, rightness,
truthfulness, value, and comprehensibility, so that the real talking
can go on. This revision of Habermas' thought asserts the centrality
and seriousness of unheroic writing. Just as the most serious problems
in linguistics involve ordinary syntactic structures like nominals and
indirect questions, the simplest forms of discourse may raise questions
that are very far reaching about domination, distortion of language,
and the equality of speakers. As we consider the implications of this
position, we may find in communicative competence a challenging
conception of our own discipline’s humane purpose: the formation
of autonomous and responsible speakers, capable of participating
fully in the discourse of a speech community. NOTES 1 The main works of Habermas that have been translated are: Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. J. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. J. J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). Theory and Practice, trans. J. Viertel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973). Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975). Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). The Theory of Communicative Action, I, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). Useful books about Habermas include Thomas McCarthy’s The Critical
Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1978) and
Habermas: Critical Debates, ed. John B. Thompson and David Held (Cambridge:
The MIT Press, 1982). Both of these works include excellent bibliographies. |
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