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2 Art of the communicative turn: Habermas and the political
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Published:June 2023
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Abstract
The chapter examines the philosophical underpinnings of social turn theorists, to grasp what distinguishes the political from the social within the debate – and what implications this has on how political effect is understood. It situates debates around contemporary relational/social works by considering Habermas’s theory of communicative action. The chapter draws out the critical implications of Habermas’s theory for this art of the social turn. It examines the effect of the work of art according to two possibilities speech act theory makes available: the artwork produces either illocutionary or perlocutionary effects. The social turn tends toward illocutionary effects, in Habermas’s sense, since they emphasise social interdependence. However, the chapter argues such an approach threatens a sociological reduction of the political. To counter that threat, the chapter advocates a different approach to Habermas’s – an approach he rejects: a perlocutionary theory of political effect in art. It shows how the problem with Habermas’s optimal description of the illocutionary speech act which produces social coordination derives from the assumption of political neutrality in the context of deliberative acts. It argues that the political must be grasped instead around the kind of strategic understanding that Habermas wishes to side-line, showing that a perlocutionary account is nonetheless the best way of understanding political effect in art: first because it can more genuinely grasp the strategic contexts of politics; second because it understands the unpredictable nature of political effects, which opens the way to a new understanding of how political effect works in the context of art.
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