Colin B. Grant Bücher

The explicit ambition of this collection is to move ‘beyond’ the Universal Pragmatics of Jürgen Habermas. It is without doubt an ambitious programme whose architect has led since the 1960s a series of reflections on the rational potential of western society from the Enlightenment to the present. However, this theoretical emphasis on the irreducibility of the rational content of debate cannot avoid abstracting communicative universals from the empirical communication practices which are always embedded in multiple contexts of discourse, identity, media and institutions. This tension in Habermas’s œuvre has developed an antagonistic potential. An example of this antagonism can be seen in the distorting effects of a normative theory of communication whose very normativity means turning a blind eye to a history of social communication. For example, Habermas infamously neglects the constitutive role played by the media in constructions of what is held to be ‘public’ and even his more recent revisions do not resolve this dilemma. The nine contributions in this volume from the fields of psychology, politics, media, epistemology and aesthetics set out to move beyond the influence of communicative universals and propose alternative approaches to the challenge of reconciling autonomy, interaction and social organisation.

Focusing on communication theory, the author critiques Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, presenting challenges to dialogism and intersubjectivity. He advocates for a reexamination of the concept of the communicating subject within society, addressing the evolving complexities of culture and media in contemporary life. This exploration invites readers to consider how these dynamics shape communication and understanding in a modern context.

Compared with other human and social sciences, communication theory appears to be of recent origin. Appearances deceive, however, for the antecedents of this growing field of work can be found in the classic philosophical treatises of western and non-western thinkers including Plato, Sextus Empiricus and Laozi, reaching forward through the theolinguistic tradition of St Augustine, Boethius, Averroës and Ockham before arriving at the modern age. Following Wittgenstein’s linguistic turn and Husserl’s phenomenology in the early decades of the twentieth century, we arrive at the fertile plains of semiotics, information theory, pragmatics and dialogism out of which communication theory has grown. And yet an unresolved and historically non-coincidental tension remains between the implicit transcendental claims of much of communication theory and our experiences of risk, uncertainty and dissolution in what Zygmunt Bauman has described as our ‘liquid age’. As communication theory matures, it is an opportune moment to reflect on what form a detranscendentalised theory of communication might take. In bringing intentions, understandings, meanings and interactions down to earth this book invites its readers to account for the complex communications between communications, actors and social processes without recourse to transcendental theories of understanding.

This study, the first of its kind in English, sets out to analyse literature as a form of social communication by considering developments in literary theory and practice in the German Democratic Republic in the Honecker era. Attention focuses on the changes in the discourses of literary theory and literary practice in a semi-public sphere controlled by an increasingly ossified political discourse. Key developments in the 1970s, hailed by GDR theorists as the point of departure for a new kind of literary communication in society, are carefully examined. The study then contrasts these idealised views of literature as social communication with practice and theory in the late 1970s and 1980s. In clear trends in practice (and, to a lesser extent, in theory) communication was perceived as being increasingly problematic and conflictual. The development from this sense of destabilisation to the rupturing in communication between literature and society, between literature and political authority and in literature itself became more salient in the 1980s as its forms and themes radically challenged the mounting stagnation of the discourse of political power. These conflicts are illustrated and discussed with the aid of detailed analyses of key literary texts and previously unpublished interviews with leading theorists.