3.3 - McCumber, John - Critical Theory and Poetic Interaction (en)

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Critical Theory and Poetic Interaction

«Critical Theory and Poetic Interaction»

by John McCumber

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 3 / 1985, pages: 268-282, on www.ceeol.com.

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Praxis International 268

CRITICAL THEORY AND POETIC INTERACTION

John McCumber

In contrast to his predecessors at the Frankfurt School and indeed to whatCharles Taylor has called a whole “tradition” of social critique, JürgenHabermas undertakes to articulate and justify the positive standards in terms of which he criticizes existing institutions.1 Also in contrast to the “classical”Frankfurt writers, he does not accord aesthetics an important place in thisthought. Their aesthetic concerns, he writes, reflected a “completely affirma-tive attitude to . . . the art of the bourgeois epoch,” and in effect deliveredcriticism over to the “measure of the age.” In Habermas’ own view, art is anexpression of needs (individual or cultural) which exploits an “intentionalconfusion” between being and appearance: the audience’s suspension of disbelief is a “category mistake” which founds an illusion.2

Art would thus seem for Habermas to have no promise as a source of standards for social critique. But in his “Bewusstmachende oder rettendeKritik—die Aktualität Walter Benjamins,” Habermas indicates otherwise.

Sharply distinguishing freedom from happiness, he suggests that Benjamin’sconception of critique as the aesthetic “redemption” of lost semantic potentialsbe viewed as conducive to the latter alone. Aesthetic experience would thusprovide a basis for criticizing institutions, not for being unfree, but for being unhappy.3

But even if this divorce of freedom from happiness is accepted, Benjamin’s“redemptive critique” cannot be fully legitimated in Habermasian termsbecause it fails to justify the positive standards on which it is based. Benjaminmust be in possession of such standards, because he is able to discriminatesemantic potentials which are beneficial to mankind from those which are not.

The ancient meanings deposited in Genesis’ myth of the Fall, for example, aresalutary; but Benjamin’s retrieval from the myths of Niobe and Prometheus of the “principle of all mythic rectification” ( Rechtsetzung ) reveals that principle tobe force, which is deleterious.4 Habermas shows, in effect, that Benjamin hastwo incompatible accounts of his standards for such discriminations. On theone hand, he derives them from what he calls the “divine” element in art—anelement which itself is susceptible, Habermas argues, only of an idealistic justification. On the other hand, Benjamin evaluates semantic potentials interms of historical materialism.5

Even in the case of Benjamin, then, aesthetic experience is unable to provide

positive standards for social critique. But Benjamin’s is not the only possibleapproach. Habermas’ own “universal pragmatics” furnishes, I suggest, a framework in terms of which to consider the emancipatory potential of aestheticexperience. In part I below, I argue that Habermas does not include certaintypes of poetry within his account of the forms of communication, and in part II




suggest how this can be done. The resulting account of aesthetic interaction willturn out to be paradigmatic of a wider sort of human communication. Adopting the breadth of reference (though not, as will be seen, the exact meaning) of theGreek “πσι @ σις,” I will call this broader mode of speech “poetic interaction.”Part III will examine three ways in which such interaction can be said to be“emancipated;” part IV will use these senses to formulate positive standards forsocial critique, and will suggest how the present undertaking is related toHabermas’.

I

The relevant portion of Habermas’ views may be summarized from “What isUniversal Pragmatics?”6 Whenever we engage in “communicative action” withothers, we presuppose that the message communicated is

1. true (wahr )2. appropriate to social norms (richtig )3. a truthful expression of the speaker’s intentional state (wahrhaft )4. intelligible (verständlich)These four presuppositions are not always rightly made, of course.7 But

are always made, and must be if we are to reach agreements and understandingswith others.

A second sort of presupposition follows for the speaker. In his every

utterance in communicative action, any speaker engages himself, should one of these four validity-claims be challenged, to redeem or justify it. The paradigmfor such justification Habermas calls “discourse.” Discourse ideally requiressymmetry of interaction, in that all participants have equal opportunity to statetheir views; universality, in that no possible interlocutor be intentionallyexluded from the debate; and generality, in that every claim made be viewed asopen to challenge and redemption. The concept of such a general, universal,and symmetrical redemption of validity-claims is that of the “ideal speechsituation,” which is therefore anticipated in every case of communicativeaction. The norms of ideal speech constitute for Habermas the positive basis for

the critique of actual communication, and of the social norms and institutionswithin which such communication takes place.8Habermas has been taken to claim that all human speech makes all four

validity-claims.9 In fact, the theory is formulated to cover only “speech acts”occurring in cases of “communicative action,” by which Habermas meanscommunication governed by binding consensual norms. Not all communica-tion is of this type. In “strategic action,” which includes manipulation andsystematically distorted communication, the sincerity-claim is suspended: in“symbolic action,” which includes the sorts of communication occurring in a concert or dance, the truth-claim is. Communicative action is indeed for

Habermas the fundamental form of communication—but not, as Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns makes clear, in the sense that it is a base from whichother types are formed or to which they are added (this role would belong, if anywhere, to “ideological action” and its communicative counterpart, strategicaction). Rather, communicative action is fundamental because it is complete:

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while other forms of communication make only some validity-claims, it makesall four, other types can be grasped as limited cases of it, but not it of them.10

Writing and reading, hearing and reciting poetry are presumably com-municative activities, and the question arises of whether they are also cases of communicative action: of whether they require the raising of all fourvalidity-claims. Habermas has not dealt with this issue in detail, but scatteredremarks in his writings suggest an affirmative answer. If works of art did notclaim to be intelligible, there would be no such thing as art criticism.11 If artisticexpression did not imply specific norms in terms of which members of the“aesthetic community” relate to one another, there would be no such thing as anavant-garde .12 As an expression of needs, art comes under the sincerity-claim;and Habermas’ view that aesthetic understanding “confuses” being andappearance might be taken to imply that the two are originally distinct—thatwe first approach a work of art with the presupposition that its assertions aretrue, but then somehow “bracket” that claim.

Not all cases of aesthetic interaction, I submit, would conform to such a model. Consider a poem as a communication from the poet. A truth-claim forthe assertions it contains would for Habermas amount to the claim that thoseassertions could be justified as true to participants in an ideal speech situation.Someone who takes poems to make this sort of claim would be prepared to seek consensus regarding such matters as whether the Trojan War really took placeas Homer recounts it, or whether summer really surprised T.S. Eliot, coming

over the Starnbergersee.13

But we would, I think, suspect that such a person was not really encountering the poems as poems: that he was interested in their historical or autobio-graphical aspects, rather than in their poetic ones, or that he was simplyuninformed about the nature of poetry in contemporary culture. An“informed” reader today, by contrast, is usually not prepared to investigate thetruth of a poem’s assertions; such investigation, he is likely to tell us, isgenerally irrelevant to the poem’s status as poetic. It seems, in other words, tobe an empirical fact that the interactive context for discussing poetry todayforbids examining the truth of assertions a poem contains. And since to raise a

truth-claim for an assertion is in Habermas’ view to claim that discursiveexamination of the assertion would yield consensus on its truth, this means thatpoems cannot raise truth-claims for the assertions they contain.

The “confusion of being and appearance” to which Habermas alludes thusturns out, in the case of at least some poetry, not to be a process of first raising and then bracketing truth-claims, but an acceptance of truth-claims as onlyapparently raised by poems—and hence as not really raised at all.14 So theassertions contained in a poem do not claim, as poetic, to be true at all. Somesort of truth-claim may, of course, be recuperable from higher levels of poeticreading; but as will be seen, this is irrelevant to my point here.

Similarly, while some poetry does claim to express the intentional states of the poet, some does not. Again, Homer is a good example: we cannot tell fromhis poems whether “he” was one person or many, and one scholar has arguedthat “he” was a woman.15 And finally, it is hard to locate transcultural moral orsocial norms in some poetry, which makes it hard to see how such poetry could




claim to be “appropriate” to readers from another culture who may none theless appreciate it deeply. How could the Iliad, archaic in its structure and inwhat it depicts, in its language and its very conception of poetry, claim to be“appropriate” to Renaissance Italy, Victorian England, or even classicalAthens? All poetry claims to be appreciable by the reader, and hence in a broadsense intelligible; but it seems that poetry does not necessarily claim truth,sincerity, or appropriateness, and that poetic communication is not necessarilygoverned by those binding consensual norms.16

II

As Habermas notes, it is through its claims to truth, sincerity, andappropriateness that an utterance is tied to the non-linguistic components of actual situations.17 If we want to understand an utterance which does not makesuch claims, we must seek to do so without appeal to any particular state of affairs it describes; to the actual mental states of its utterer; or to those socialnorms which govern our interaction with him. Nothing is left to “understand”except the words themselves—the meanings and forces (illocutionary andperlocutionary) which the utterance might have in some actual situation.18 Sincethe utterance does not describe any particular situation, for example, we arefree to define—within the parameters it gives—the sort of state of affairs itmight describe. Similarly, we are free within limits to impute mental states to its

utterer, to decide which social norms would make the utterance appropriate,and to derive for ourselves what sort of “uptake” it might, in variouscircumstances, secure. Such an utterance, in short, provides guidelines withinwhich we are free to construct a situation for it. In contrast to Habermas’ modelof “understanding” in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns , we do not measurethe utterance against presupposed worlds (natural, social, or intentional) to seewhether it relates to them acceptably. We construct a world, or situation,for it.19

On the model of Rezeptionsästhetik , this kind of situation-building approxi-mates, not to literal, but to literary understanding. As Wolfgang Iser has

written,The parting of the ways between literary and ordinary speech is observed in thematter of situational context. The fictional utterance seems to be made withoutreference to any real situation, whereas the speech act presupposes a situationwhose precise definition is essential to the success of that act . . . In simple terms,we may say that fictional language provides instructions for the building of a situation, and so for the construction of an imaginary object.20

We need not defend Rezeptionsästhetik as the sole possible approach toliterature to sustain the rather banal claim that some literature operates this

way. Because in such cases the audience constructs the situation of a givenutterance from the utterance itself, such interaction involves a production, orπσι @σις , in two senses. In any communicative encounter, we may say,utterances are produced and themselves produce illocutionary and perlocution-ary effects. In many cases, this proceeds in accordance with linguistic norms




and conventions clearly in force, on the Austinian model Habermas uses.21 Butin some cases, such an unequivocal set of conventions is not in force, norintended to be; the procedures for understanding the utterance are notunivocally dictated, and are up to the hearers to derive (in senses yet to bediscussed). Those procedures then amount to rules for constructing a situation“around” the utterance, within and for which it will be acceptable orunacceptable. The effects an utterance achieves on a given occasion will in partbe determined by which procedures the hearers derive.

Thus, if I view Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses as merely themusings of a faithless housewife, I have opted for a very different set of ways of understanding her final “yes I will yes” than if I view it as the primordiannight-language of Mother Earth. The point is that, as a literary work, Ulysses explicitly forbids neither view. It leaves me free to decide how I will understandthe passage, thus permitting me to produce (or adduce) the procedure in termsof which I construct a situation for it. It is with reference to this second-orderproduction of understanding-procedure that I call this sort of speech“poetic.”22

Poetic interaction so understood, however, occurs outside contexts we wouldproperly call literary or aesthetic.23 We can show this by modifying Sartre’sfamous treatment, in Being and Nothing , of the couple in the cafe.24 Suppose a man and woman are having a business lunch, and she has just outlined to himher plan for a daring and resourceful coup d ’affaires. Turning to her, gazing

deep into her eyes, he blurts out “I think you’re the most fantastic co-workerI’ve ever had.”In trying to understand this utterance, the woman would be ill-advised to

speculate on whether she is really the most “fantastic” employee of the firm; theutterance is too vague to have any assignable truth-value and even if it were not,its truth or falsity would help little towards understanding it. It is also irrelevantwhether the man is sincere in claiming that the woman is his “most fantastic”co-worker, and just what his intentions are—whether he is genuinelycomplimenting her acumen or is expressing a quite different emotion—isunclear. Let us assume, in fact, that he does not know himself—that the

utterance just escaped him, that he does not know just what his feeling are, andso does not know what sort of action he is performing with his statement.Because of all this, the woman suddenly does not know what norms aregoverning the encounter—those of friendly collaboration, of entrepreneurialinquiry, of flirtation or perhaps of some other kind altogether. The question of whether the utterance is appropriate or not cannot then be resolved until thesituation is further defined.

The woman is thus in the uncomfortable position of not knowing what theman’s utterance actually means in the given situation—not just because shedoesn’t know what the situation is (neither does he), but because in a sense there

will be no situation until she makes her response. Her task is not to come to anunderstanding with the man about what is happening, but to make something happen. The situation has been left up to her to “construct,” and the encounterthus exhibits the structure of double πσι @ σις that we found in some literarydiscourse. “Unlike the situational frame presupposed by speech act theory,”




writes Iser, “the fictional situation does not exist until it is produced.“ 25 Thesame goes for some very non-fictional situations as well.

Just what sorts of situation these might be is an issue that, fortunately, neednot be addressed here. Consider, for example, Lakoff and Johnson’s view of metaphors as “partially structuring” our understanding of situations. The verypartiality of this structuring can be viewed as making the understanding it leadsto creative, in the sense that those operating with a given metaphor are free todefine for themselves whatever aspects of their current situation are not coveredby that metaphor. Given the pervasiveness of metaphor in ordinary and even inspecialized discourse (also amply shown by Lakoff and Johnson), it becomesplausible that “poetic interaction” refers less to a specific class of utterances andresponses than to a way of operating with language that occurs across thespectrum of human interaction.26

But the question of which cases of interaction are to be classed as “poetic” isof no immediate concern, as long as it is recognized that they are not all literaryor “aesthetic.” Poetic interaction, if instantiated par excellence in literarydiscourse, is as I have presented it also to be found, in greater or lesser degree, inother realms of interaction.27

“Poetic” interaction is not communicative action in Habermas’ sense becausean utterance in it does not claim to be true, sincere, or appropriate. A “poetic”utterance claims, at most, that situations can be constructed in which it would have (or not have) those characters. Poetic interaction is not strategic, because it

is neither manipulative nor necessarily success-oriented: if the man in the cafedoes not know himself what response he wants from the woman, his utterancecannot be aimed at bringing about any particular response from her. And,unlike dances and concerts, poetic interaction contains utterances which arepropositional in form; it cannot be symbolic interaction. It can, however, beconstrued within Habermas’ basic framework as speech in which only theintelligibility-claim is directly in force; for the man’s words, whatever they maybe decided to mean, claim from the outset to mean something.

III

If poetic interaction is a distinguishable type of human communication, thequestion arises of whether, like communicative action, it can provide positivestandards for the critique of actually existing social institutions. To answer this,we must clarify the senses in which poetic interaction can be called emanci-pated. I will discuss three such senses. But a complete account of theemancipatory potential of poetic interaction cannot, even in principle, be given.This is because, unlike Habermas’ ideal speech situation, situation-building speech is not a conceptual construct but, on the testimony adduced, anempirical given. Its basic structures call, not for argument, but for description;

and empirical description can never be complete. Neither, therefore, can anaccount of the emancipatory potential of what is being described.

In what follows, I will assume as a basis only what has been argued so far: thatthere is a kind of interaction in which the hearers of an utterance themselvesderive procedures for understanding it. My account will flesh this out to some




degree, but will necessarily remain abstract. The discussion can at most point tothe need for a fuller reconstruction of the nature of poetic interaction.

If we understand “derive” in the above formulation as “choose,” then theprocedures applied to a given utterance in poetic encounter are selected by thehearers of that utterance from a repertoire of understanding-procedures withwhich they are already acquainted.28 Thus, we may assume that the woman inthe cafe knows the social norms governing both intellectual collaboration anddating, and in that case her understanding-procedure will be to select the set toapply to the man’s utterance. By allowing such selection, poetic interactionallows for a greater freedom of choice than do interactions which proceed on thebasis of a single set of conventions already clearly in force.

However, not all choices are emancipatory. Suppose that I choose to regard a given utterance as an insult, though nothing in the utterance itself or itsattendant circumstances requires me to do so. I am then committed to a courseof action which includes quarrelling, breaking off communication, or even (insome cultures) a duel or vendetta. Are we to say that my free choice of anunderstanding-procedure was in any important sense “emancipated?”

We may meet this by distinguishing responses which continue a givenencounter as poetic from responses which either break it off altogether orconvert it to a non-poetic one. In general, we may say that once a single,unequivocal procedure is chosen and applied to a given utterance in such a waythat the response to that utterance cannot be understood as itself poetic, the

poetic encounter as such is terminated.Poetic interaction, which as inter active must consist, at a minimum, of anutterance plus the response it evokes, then falls into two types. In “terminating poetic interaction,” we will say, one of the possible understandings of anutterance is selected as that in terms of which the response to the utterance ismade, and the participants are committed to an unequivocal course of action(which may be communicative action) on that basis; their encounter, whateverforms it may then take, is no longer “poetic.” In “non-terminating poeticinteraction,” the utterance elicits a response which itself is poetic and can beunderstood in a variety of ways. Such interaction is inherently open-ended:

either side is free, at any stage, to select procedures for understanding in termsof which to formulate his response. The freedom of choice inherent in poeticencounter thus becomes symmetrical, and its emancipated character is notdefeated by either side’s commitment to a single course of action. Suchnon-action-oriented encounter cannot, of course, be a means of resolving political (or other) issues. But the sort of freedom it involves can, as I will arguebelow, serve as a standard in terms of which to assess actually existing normsand institutions.

There is another traditional view of freedom, perhaps most vigorouslyrepresented by Aristotle and Schiller, with which poetic interaction can be

connected. For Aristotle, an action is in the strict sense “voluntary” when itresults from deliberation, from the coincidence of reason with appetite. Whenreason tells me that what I desire is in fact good for me, and shows me how toobtain it, I “choose” to pursue the desired object or state of affairs.29 ForSchiller, freedom is the unification of the sensory and intellectual components




of man’s being.30 We may express this view of freedom as a sort of humanwholeness more generally by saying that an act is “free” in so far as it isdetermined by a broader spectrum of the psychosomatic factors—needs,desires, dispositions, beliefs, background knowledge, etc.—present in theactor at the time of the action, and “unfree” in so far as that spectrum isnarrowed by social or institutional constraints.

We may also suppose that, in some if not all cases, the repertoire of proce-dures from which the hearer of a poetic utterance selects those which he willapply to that utterance is conditioned by psychosomatic factors present in hismake-up at that time. If the woman in the cafe is from a culture in which flirting does not occur, for example, those norms may not be part of her backgroundknowledge and she may not be able to understand the man’s utterance as flirta-tious. If she is fighting Asian flu, those norms may be temporarily absent fromher make-up.

A restriction on the repertoire of understanding-procedures thus restricts aswell the variety of psychosomatic factors which will be allowed to play a role inproducing the response to a given utterance. Suppose that other workers arepresent at the business lunch. The norms of discourse in this situation, enforcednow by the presence of others, do not allow anyone to speak flirtatiously; and if the man in fact comes out with his utterance, the woman will not be free to selectan understanding-procedure which will give it a sexual meaning. She ispermitted to respond in terms of only some of the factors present in her

psychosomatic make-up and her response is, to that degree, “unfree.”In poetic interaction, by contrast, a single set of understanding-procedures isnot specified. The hearer’s choice among possible procedures thus allows her,in principle, to take account of a wider variety of factors in her currentindividual make-up, and does not require her to suppress all but a single set of such factors (though she may in fact choose to do so). In this sense, even a terminating poetic encounter can be viewed as negatively free: it does notenforce as partial a response as do situations that are clearly defined from theoutset.

If the encounter is non-terminating, then the hearer can not only allow a

variety of psychosomatic factors to condition her response, but can actuallyallow her response itself to express or convey a variety of such factors—as if thewoman’s response in the cafe were to convey at once a desire for sex and forbusiness collaboration. In such a case, diverse psychosomatic factors cooperateto produce a response. The response itself can be viewed as the expression of a (relatively) unified self, rather than as resulting from a fragmentation of the self via the suppression or selection of some of its current constituents. Such a response we will call “positively emancipated.”31

This second account of the emancipatory potential of poetic interaction, likethe previous one, points to the limits of poetic concepts of emancipation. The

open-ended character of non-terminating poetic interaction meant that action-oriented communication was in a sense not “emancipated.” Neither, it nowappears, is any interaction which proceeds in accordance with univocallydetermined understanding-procedures. However, action-oriented, norm-governed, interaction clearly possesses, as Habermas’ thought shows, eman-




cipatory potential of its own. “Poetic” emancipation can thus be at most oneparticular type of freedom—a species, not the genus, as I will argue below.

Finally, it is not necessary to view the derivation of understanding-procedures as a process of selection at all. It can happen that a poetic utteranceconsists of words and phrases combined in truly new ways, and thatconsequently no situation can be constructed for it that greatly resembles anysituation in which its hearers have previously been. The hearers are thusrequired, not to decide which of a set of previously known procedures to applyto the utterance, but to extrapolate new procedures to cover it. Thiscorresponds broadly to what Richard Rorty calls “abnormal discourse,”32 and Iwill refer to it as “abnormal poetic interaction,” as distinct from the “normal”varieties so far considered.

An utterance in abnormal poetic interaction, since it cannot be understood byany currently known procedures, first appears as unintelligible. Its hearers arefree to retain the “canonical” status of previously known procedures, either byapplying them to the utterance as far as they will go or by rejecting it asaltogether nonsensical (as Carnap did with Heidegger’s “das Nichts nichtet”).33

In such cases, an abnormal poetic utterance does not lead to a poetic encounter.But even an abnormal utterance, simply by being uttered, makes a claim to

intelligibility of some sort, and if its hearers are not wholly wedded to the“canonical” repertoire they may undertake to formulate new procedures forunderstanding the utterance. Such abnormal poetic encounters can, again, be

either terminating or non-terminating. If a single, new set of procedures isextrapolated, an alternative is presented to the current repertoire.34 Depend-ence on that repertoire is correspondingly reduced; the hearers are “liberated”from its limits. Such interaction is not only emancipatory, but emancipated: itcan only proceed if the hearers are “liberated” from the canonical repertoireenough to be willing to countenance alternatives to it.

In a non-terminating abnormal poetic encounter, no single new set of procedures for understanding is arrived at. Rather, the encounter continueswith a response that is itself abnormal, and which requires a furtherextrapolation of new procedures.35 Instead of reducing dependence on a

particular repertoire of currently existing procedures, such encounter reducesdependence on established procedures for understanding as such. It corres-ponds, presumably, to what Rorty calls “edification” in philosophy, as opposedto the sort of “revolution” brought about by great thinkers who institute newbut unequivocal procedures for speech and response.36

The question of whether poetic interaction is or is not “emancipated” cannot,in sum, be given a simple answer. The concept of emancipation, like thecorrelative notion of freedom, is almost perversely polymorphic.37 This leads toa dilemma. Attempts to impose uniform meanings on such terms seemthemselves (paradoxically) authoritarian. On the other hand, to remain content

with affirmations of the concrete heterogeneity of meanings for “freedom” and“emancipation” would amount to abjuring the search for positive formulations,as did Adorno et al.

The concept of poetic interaction would, I suspect, allow us to resolve thisdilemma more in the spirit of Habermas. The typology offered here of poetic




interaction is at bottom descriptive, and can claim neither completeness norfinality. But it does seem that at least some traditional meanings of “freedom”and “emancipation” correspond to the various forms of poetic interaction thathave presented themselves. And this suggests that further investigations of thelatter may yield a key to understanding certain rational structures of theformer—somewhat as Habermas’ analyses of communicative competence haveilluminated and helped structure the manifold data of developmentalpsychology.38 If we have no proof that the genus “poetic interaction” isnecessarily emancipated, we do have patterns of correlation that invite furtherinvestigation.39

IV

Because we have no unified concept of “poetic emancipation,” we cannotformulate a unified set of standards for evaluating existing institutions. Thevarious correlative senses of poetic interaction and emancipation do, however,yield a looser set of standards, more or less mutually independent. If we definean “institution” as an established pattern of human interaction which includesverbal behaviour, we can say that any poetically emancipated institutionsatisfies one or more of the following conditions:

1. It allows any utterance which occurs as part of its distinctive pattern of interaction to be understood in any of a plurality of ways, i.e., to produce

any of a variety of illocutionary and perlocutionary effects. Just whicheffects is up to the hearers. (This standard is derived from terminating normal poetic interaction.)

2. It does not enforce the univocality of responses to such utterances, whichas we saw means that the encounters it contains must be open-ended andsymmetrical (non-terminating poetic interaction).

3. It does not exclude in advance any type of psychosomatic factor whichmay be currently present in the hearer from conditioning his repertoire of understanding-procedures (terminating normal poetic interaction) orfrom actually playing a role, simultaneously with others, in the produc-

tion of a response (non-terminating normal poetic interaction).4. It has no predetermined criteria of what is to count as “nonsense” withinits pattern of interaction, but leaves this up to the hearers in each case(abnormal poetic interaction).

5. It does not require that a response conform to established procedures forunderstanding, whether those procedures be, (a) known at the outset of the encounter (terminating abnormal poetic interaction), or (b) extrapo-lated from an utterance occurring within the encounter (non-terminating abnormal poetic interaction).

It is clear that, while these conditions are not mutually incompatible, at least

some of them can be fulfilled independently of one another (e.g., 1 and 2-5; 4and 1-3). Poetic emancipation is not a unified ideal, then, but a family of them.On the other hand, (5) cannot be met without (1) and neither can (3): as thepreliminary typology I have given also suggests, this family has a tree, a patternof interrelationships which I will not explore further here.




These standards can presumably be applied to any “institution” as definedabove. But they may not tell very much about its overall worth. Natural science,at least as normally understood, requires the rigorous exclusion of certain typesof motivation (e.g., desire for personal gain) from its institutionalizeddiscourse-patterns, and has rigorous standards for what is to count, withinthose patterns, as nonsense. According to the standards of poetic interaction,then, discourse in the natural sciences is in certain senses unfree. But we wouldhardly condemn natural science on these grounds, or wish humanity to be“emancipated” from it; so the standards of poetic emancipation are not the onlystandards in terms of which to judge an institution. The fact that they are notprivileged, however, does not mean that they are uninformative. Discourse inthe natural sciences is in some senses unfree as compared, for example, withsome forms of artistic discourse. The persistent tendency of the epoch tocanonize scientific discourse as the only paradigm of rationality suggests that itwould be important to have a full account of just what those senses are.

But the standards of assessment opened up by the concept of poeticinteraction do not even cover all of “emancipation.” For our account of suchinteraction is parasitic upon Habermas’ account of universal pragmatics—andthat account, of course, also admits of a very different view of emancipation.How are these two views related?

Habermas has claimed, throughout his development, that reflection isnecessary for emancipation.40 Though there is nothing in the types of poetic

interaction so far considered to exclude reflective procedures, there is alsonothing to require them. We can select procedures for understanding withoutbeing aware that we are doing so, and can extrapolate new procedures whilethinking that we are only clarifying old ones. Thus, the question of how thepresent view relates to Habermas’ can be approached through the question of the relation of reflective to non-reflective forms of emancipation.

In so far as interaction is norm-governed, i.e., is in Habermas’ sensecommunicative action, the governing norms can be viewed as constraintsinherent in interaction itself. Such constraints can, presumably, only bechanged by conscious intervention. The intervening parties must first become

aware of them, and then undertake to question their validity. Such interventionmust be reflective and, in Habermas’ sense, discursive. But not all interaction,as has been seen, is of this type; in poetic interaction, norms of encounter can beselected or extrapolated. Such encounter is as such emancipated from some of the very norms, among others, which reflection seeks to dethrone.

Each paradigm of interaction, then leads to a different sort of critical theory.Focusing on communicative action, Habermas’ critical theory seeks toreconstruct its presuppositions and emancipatory potential.41 Also possible,though not as difficult and (given the peripheral nature of poetry in all senses tomodern society) probably not as important is a critical theory which would

undertake to elucidate the structures and conditions of non-reflective processesof emancipation, as evidenced here by poetic interaction.

Such a critical theory would, I think, have two major applications. First,directed to given empirical cases of poetic interaction, it would seek tounderstand their exact nature, by reconstructing the repertoires of the




participants, determining which understanding-procedures were selected orextrapolated, and examining the resulting situation to see what sort of “emancipation,” if any, was achieved. Such critical theory would then take theform of a reflective reconstruction of non-reflective processes of emancipation.

Second, critical theory could apply itself more generally to patterns of interaction within a society, evaluating them by the standards of poeticemancipation. Its aim would be to diagnose suppressions of poetic interactionin the hope of facilitating its emancipatory potential where it is unnecessarilyrestricted by existing institutions.

The object domain of critical theory would not be extended by the sort of additional approach I am suggesting here. But critical theory as a whole wouldhave a wider variety of standards in terms of which to carry out its critique, anda broader concept of emancipation. These would be, I think, worthwhileadditions to its repertoire.

NOTES

1 Jürgen Habermas, “Moral Development and Ego-Identity,” in Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society , trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1979), p. 72ff.(hereafter CES ); “Summation and Response,” Continuum 8 (1970); 128f; for Taylor’s clearlypolemical remarks, see Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1975), p. 559. I am much indebted to Richard J. Bernstein, Nancy Fraser, and Françoise

Lionnet-McCumber for their incisive critiques of earlier versions of this paper.2 Jürgen Habermas, “Moral Development and Ego Identity,” CES , p. 93; “Some Distinc-tions in Universal Pragmatics,” Theory and Society 3 (1976): 167; Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns , 2 Vols. (Frankfurt; Suhrkamp, 1981), 2:559f. (hereafter TKH ); for the view thatthe needs expressed in art need not be merely individual, cf. TKH 1:36, 136.

3 Jürgen Habermas, “Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik” in Habermas, Kultur und Kritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 339-344.

4 Walter Benjamin, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 3, ed. Paula Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 198ff; “Über Sprache überhaupt undüber die Sprache des Menschen,” in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemannand Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 153.

5 Habermas, op. cit., p. 330f.6 Jürgen Habermas, “What is Universal Pragmatics?” CES 67; “On Systematically Distorted

Communication,” Inquiry 13 (1970): 206; “Wahrheitstheorien,” in Wirklichkeit und Reflexion: Walter Schulz zum 60en Geburtstag (Pfüllingen: Neske, 1973), pp. 221f, 238;Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie: Was leistet die Systemforschung? (with NiklasLuhmann) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), p. 189. In his later work, Habermas reassignsintelligibility to the presuppositions of communicative action, instead of viewing it as a claimraised in such interaction (“Some Distinctions in Universal Pragmatics,” p. 159; TKH 1:147ff). Because this issue concerns Habermas’ view of intelligibility as syntacticwell-formedness, it does not seem to bear on my argument here, which construesintelligibility more broadly as the capacity to achieve illocutionary and perlocutionary effectsin rational, i.e., criticizable, ways (for this concept of rationality, cf. TKH 1:25-71).

7 Jürgen Habermas, “What is Universal Pragmatics?” CES, p. 3; “Wahrheitstheorien,” pp.255f.

8 Jürgen Habermas, “What is Universal Pragmatics?” CES, pp. 61-65; Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie: Was leistet die Systemforschung? , pp. 101f, 139, 190, 224;




“Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence,” Inquiry 13 (1970): 371f. The demandfor generality follows from Habermas’ stated requirement of “unimpaired self-presentation”in ideal speech, which I take to entail that any validity-claim a participant thinks should be

challenged is in fact open to challenge: “Wahrheitstheorien,” op. cit., pp. 255f.9 This question is not to be confused with that of Habermas’ “transcendental turn,” for which

see Thomas McCarthy, The Critical Theory of Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 1978), pp. 272-279, and TKH 1: 199. At issue is not whether “ideal speech” can bereconstructed as a necessary presupposition of communicative action, but whether thedomain of the latter is to be equated with all human language. Authors who think it isinclude: B.C. Birchall, “Radicalization of the Critique of Knowledge: EpistemologyOvercome or Reinstatement of an Error?” Man and World 10 (1977): 375f. Eva-MarieEngels, “Mündigkeit: eine anthropologische Kategorie?” Zeitschrift für Philosophische

Forschung 33 (1979): 403; Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 65ff; Dieter Misgeld, “Discourse and Conversa-tion,” Cultural Hermeneutics 4 (1977): 328.

10 TKH 1: 126-151.11 For Habermas’ views on the nature of artistic criticism, see TKH 1: 41f, 70; again, I am

using “intelligible” in the broad sense.12 For problems of the avant-garde, cf. Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society, trans.

Jeremy J. Shapiro, (Boston: Beacon, 1975), pp. 78, 84-86.13 Jürgen Habermas, “Wahrheitstheorien,” pp. 218, 239f. In the case of Eliot, we cannot even

begin to inquire about the truth of the opening lines of the Wasteland because the syntax isdesigned to leave it unclear whether it was we or summer “coming over the StarnbergerSee.” Cf. T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 1934), p.

51.14 Cf. Dennis Rasmussen, Poetry and Truth (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), pp. 15f.15 Samuel Butler, The Authoress of the Odyssey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967);

also cf. the article by C.M. Bowra on “Homer” in the Oxford Classical Dictionary , 2nd ed.(Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), pp. 524ff.

16 Similar issues have been raised by Dominick LaCapra, “Habermas and the Grounding of Critical Theory,” History and Theory , 16 (1977): 237-264; Michael Ryan, “New FrenchTheory in New German Critique ,” New German Critique 28 (1981); and John B. Thompson,“Universal Pragmatics,” in Habermas: Critical Debates , ed. John B. Thompson and DavidHeld (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), p. 126. On the view that art (and especiallypoetry) does not make all four validity-claims, cf. also Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the

Work of Art,” in Heidegger, Poetry Language Thought , trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 50-52 (vs. “truth”), 66 (vs. “sincerity”), 68 (vs. “appropriate-ness”); and Michael Oakeshott, “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind,” inOakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London: McThuen, 1972), pp. 226-230 (vs. “truth”),230-234 (vs. “sincerity”), 240-244 (less-perspicuously, vs. “appropriateness”). For a generalconsideration of the relevance of poetry to politics, cf. Fred Dallmayr, Language and Politics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. 148-192.

17 Jürgen Habermas, “What is Universal Pragmatics?” CES, pp. 65-68.18 J.L. Austin, How to do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 99f.19 Such an utterance can, of course, portray social norms, intentional states, and truth claims.

But the norms, etc. so portrayed are not themselves binding on the reader or hearer of theutterance, who retains his freedom to accept, reject, or interpret them. Wolfgang Iser findssuch non-binding portrayal of norms to be itself emancipatory: Wolfgang Iser, The Act of

Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 1978), p. 74. Cf. TKH 1: 400.20 Iser, op. cit ., pp. 63f.21 Austin, op. cit ., pp. 101f; for Habermas’ critical appropriation of Austin, cf. “What is




Universal Pragmatics?” CES, pp. 44-59.22 Poetic discourse and interaction thus exhibit what Hans-Robert Jauss has called the

“norm-establishing” (normbildend ) function of art: H. R. Jauss, “Negativität und Identifika-

tion,” in Poetik und Hermeneutik 6 (1975): 324. In “On Social Identity,” Telos 19 (1974): 99f,Habermas refers to art as “norm-forming,” but without as far as I can see attempting todevelop the idea of such norm-forming as emancipatory. Because what Jauss calls “norms”and what Iser calls “strategies” are different things from what those terms mean forHabermas, I am using the phrase “understanding-procedure” to cover, roughly, bothnotions: Jauss, ibid; op. cit., pp. 85f.

23 Iser, as the textual citation quoted as length shows, denies this point. So does Jauss, forwhom literary discourse produces distinctively aesthetic enjoyment: H.R. Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 22-36. As my subsequent example will I think show,situation-building discourse need not be “enjoyable.”

24 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 94ff; my account here drawsupon the analysis of flirtation in John Sabini and Maury Silver, Moralities of Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 107-123.

25 Iser, op. cit ., p. 66.26 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1980), pp. 12f., 52-55 and passim.27 This provides half an answer to a problem Habermas often raises: how can art, which is a

distinct and often autonomous realm in modern society, undertake to liberate the whole? Weare not locating emancipatory potential in art per se , but in the wider sort of interaction forwhich art is the paradigm. The other half of the answer—that such “emancipation” is not the

only, or even the most important, sort, will be discussed below. See Jürgen Habermas,“Modernity vs. Post-Modernity,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 12; TKH 2: 586;“Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik,” pp. 339-344; and the passages cited above fromLegitimation Crisis and Toward a Rational Society.

28 For the notion of “repertoire,” cf. Iser, op. cit., pp. 53-85.29 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.3, 1113e; III.5, 1113b; de Anima III. 10, 433a seq.30 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man , trans. Reginald Snell (New York:

Ungar, 1954), p. 96f.31 In the ideal, limiting case, all factors in the psychosomatic make-up of the individual would

be positively expressed in his response or utterance; on the less stringent and lesscounterfactual view expressed by Aristotle and Schiller, representatives of their basic types

would be. But neither needs to be the case for poetic interaction to count as relativelyemancipated.

32 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1979), pp. 320-322, 387.

33 Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language,” in Logical Positivism, ed. A.J. Ayer (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 60-81.

34 As Heidegger puts it, “what went before is refuted in its exclusive reality by the work,” in“The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 75.

35 For what seems to be a discussion of this admittedly elusive form of interaction, cf. JacquesDerrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Derrida,Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp.278-293. Derrida notes that Levi-Strauss, because of the absence of a “center” which wouldcontrol the free play of meaning in myth, was forced in writing of myths to adopt a discoursewhich was itself mythic, i.e., allowed of a free play of meanings.

36 Rorty, op. cit., p. 369.37 In his “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Isaiah Berlin refers to “the more than two hundred senses




of (‘freedom’) recorded by historians of ideas.” Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 121.

38 Habermas, “Moral Development and Ego identity,” CES 60-94.

39 We may summarize the results of this section in the following table:TYPE OF INTERACTION

STATUS OF PROCEDURES

EMANCIPATORYCHARACTER

communicative actionpoetic interaction:

governing reflective

normal:terminating selected choice of procedures

(negative)non-terminating selected unification of self

(positive)abnormal:

terminating extrapolated reduced dependence onprevious procedures

non-terminating extrapolated reduced dependence onestablished proceduresas such

40 Cf. my “Reflection and Emancipation in Habermas,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 225(1984): 71-81.

41 We may then say that Habermas has stacked the hardest case: showing that even

norm-governed interaction has emancipatory potential (though not, to be sure, directly, butin so far as it anticipates discourse and ideal speech).

3.3 - McCumber, John - Critical Theory and Poetic Interaction (en)

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