1. Communicative Action and Discourse

Jürgen Habermas places significant philosophical as well as socio-political emphasis on the intrinsically social character of language: meaning, normativity, and knowledge are mediated by practices that are rooted in communicative action.Footnote ¹ For Habermas, communicative action is the type of action aimed at establishing consensus (i.e. mutual understanding) through the agonistic establishment of legitimate and valid norms for persons (i.e. language-using individuals). As Habermas frames it:

Communicative action is not modelled on any kind of instrumentalised subject-object relationship and means-end framework. This is because communicative action is the variety of activity constituted by one of our knowledge-constitutive interests,Footnote ² namely communicative interests: the function of communicative action is to interpret and to bring about the intelligibility of concepts such as justice and goodness under public reason. Communicative action, therefore, is directed at ends-in-themselves and to realising an intersubjective relationship between agents as much as possible. Specifically, the norms structuring communicative action simultaneously concern three different kinds of validity claims – a) claims to truth; b) claims to sincerity (truthfulness), and c) claims to normative rightness.Footnote ³ Tracing his intellectual lineage to Fichte’s theory of recognition,Footnote ⁴ G.H. Mead’s pragmatist social psychology, and J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, Habermas’s theory of communicative action draws on the following claims from Fichte, Mead, and Austin respectively.

On the Fichtean side of things, the ‘I’ must ‘posit’ (Setzen) itself as an individual for the ‘I’ to be an individual. In order to posit itself as an individual, the ‘I’ must recognise itself as ‘summoned’ by another individual. The summons (Aufforderung)Footnote ⁵ of another individual limits the freedom of the ‘I’ out of respect for the freedom of the Other.Footnote ⁶ Such a practice of mutual recognition between individuals is a necessary condition for the possibility of personhood. On the Meadian side of things, the practice of navigating one’s way in a team/group by understanding the various roles and behavioural habits/associations of ‘the generalised other’ enables a person to develop self-consciousness, which involves the internalisation of socialising practices.Footnote ⁷ Mead’s well-known claim that individuation occurs through socialisation and his focus on both gestural and linguistic forms of interaction become central to Habermas’s own theory. As Habermas writes:

In other words, Habermas contends that Mead is credited with the foundational insight that language-use involves norms requiring discursive exchange, a variety of an I-thou relation, rather than the I-they and/or I-it relation, and that the most basic linguistic unit is ‘the relationship between ego’s speech-act and alter’s taking a position’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas and Hohengarten1992, p. 163).

On the Austinian side of things, Habermas claims that ‘a turn to the pragmatics of language … concedes primacy to world-disclosing language – as the medium for the possibility of reaching understanding, for social cooperation … – over world-generating subjectivity’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas and Hohengarten1992, p. 153).Footnote ⁹ Briefly put, Austin details three varieties of speech-acts,Footnote ¹⁰ where the latter two are especially relevant for our concerns and for making sense of Habermasian communication (and discourse):

• – Locutionary act: uttering the literal meaning (Bedeutung) of a statement – i.e. stating the pure semantic content of a proposition.

  E.g. ‘It's rather nippy in Boston during winter’ = ‘it's very cold in Boston during the winter months’

• – Illocutionary act: the intended meaning (Meinung) of the speaker in the utterance of a sentence, namely the assertive/directive/commissive/expressive/declarative features of that sentence.

  E.g. ‘Jim, it's rather nippy in Boston during winter’ = ‘Jim, please consider taking a down-coat with you when you travel to Boston in the winter’.

• – Perlocutionary act: the consequential effects of an illocutionary act.

  E.g. After Sarah says ‘It's rather nippy in Boston during winter’ to Jim, Jim takes a down-coat with them when they travel to Boston in the winter.

Habermas himself identifies only illocutionary acts with communicative action, as, in his view, these acts are orientated to reaching mutual understanding and, in turn, such understanding is linked to reaching agreement and ‘rationally motivated binding’ or ‘force’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas and McCarthy1984, p. 278). For Habermas, then, ‘communicative agreement has a rational basis [and] it cannot be imposed by either party, whether instrumentally through intervention in the situation directly or strategically through influencing the decisions of opponents’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas and McCarthy1984, p. 287). In illocutionary acts a speaker partakes in communicative action in saying something such that she lets a hearer know she wants to be understood, in a perlocutionary act, the speaker aims to produce an effect on the hearer, and ‘thereby brings about something in the world’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas and McCarthy1984, pp. 288–89). Thus, according to Habermas’s view, perlocutionary acts are associated with an intention and are considered a form of goal-directed action more generally. In Habermas’s schema, perlocutionary acts then represent forms of strategic action given their intent is to bring about some particular end, rather than merely a form of communicative action directed toward mutual understanding.

Crucially, for Habermas, successful communication between agents involves the hearer being able to transparently (and non-coercively) grasp the reasons motivating the propositions put forward by the speaker:

The pragmatics of language do not only reveal how individuality is mediated through a complex process of socialisation. Rather, illocutionary acts also point to democratic potentialities. This is because ‘[w]henever the speaker enters into an interpersonal relationship with a hearer, he also relates himself as an actor to a network of normative expectations’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas and Hohengarten1992, p. 190). Linguistic practice involves not just grasping the norms of assertion,Footnote ¹¹ it also involves, to use Wilfrid Sellars’s expression, knowing how to move in the space of reasons.Footnote ¹² Successful navigation in the space of reasons requires grasping the plurality of communicative inferential commitments and entitlements one has in the use of words.

Importantly, as mentioned above, for Habermas, the norms structuring communicative action simultaneously concern three different kinds of validity claims – claims to truth; claims to sincerity (truthfulness); claims to normative rightness –, which directly correspond to three different kinds of formal ‘world’:

By engaging in illocutionary speech-acts – the ‘bread and butter’ linguistic practices of communicative action – (i) the intentional content of a speaker’s propositions – i.e. to what the speaker is referring when they say things – is automatically directed to a shared world of agents. By virtue of, saying ‘please consider’, for example, the speaker is ‘attempting to establish an interpersonal relation which the hearer will recognise as legitimate’ (Niemi, Reference Niemi2005, p. 230); (ii) what the speaker is referring to in practices of communicative action is an accessible, objective world; (iii) the speaker, just by virtue of performing an illocutionary speech-act (‘Jim, you should seriously consider taking a down-coat with you when you travel to Boston in the winter’) reveals a subjective world to the hearer. If Jim is to genuinely understand Sarah’s advice, they must understand what it would mean to action her advice as well as understand that accepting Sarah’s speech then commits them to take a down-coat with them when they travel to Boston in the winter.

Crucially, the emphasis on communication transforms the subject of experience from being voyeuristic to actively engaged. Habermas’s position is, thus, allied with Kant’s notion of pragmatic anthropology, which draws a distinction between die Welt kennen and Welt haben: ‘the expressions “to know the world” and “to have the world” are rather far from each other in their meaning, since one only understands the play that one has watched, while the other has participated in it’ (APPV, [120], p. 4). This empowers human beings by regarding their communicative practices as authoritative, since it is only through successful discursive exchanges that one can meaningfully develop notions of autonomy and respect. As such, for a practical relation-to-self to be healthy requires progressive intersubjective relations, ones which engender and sustain autonomy and respect.

On the corresponding socio-political front, Habermas contends that all social processes are assessed with respect to how well (or invariably not) they foster communicability and the development of ‘discourse’, namely non-coercive arenas for the agonistic, public use of reason. As he writes, ‘[an] ego-identity can only stabilise itself in the anticipation of symmetrical relations of unforced reciprocal recognition’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas and Hohengarten1992, p. 188). Democracy and communication are necessarily tied together and mutually supporting: the failure to develop communicative action is a barrier to democracy in the public sphere, and the failure to develop democratic values is a barrier to communicative action.

In Habermas’s schema, when communicative practices fail or break down, participants can turn to discourse. Discourse, for Habermas, involves the public testing of claims to universal normative validity; as such, discourse is central to his modern critical social theory, to the extent that his discourse theory is effectively the rational reconstruction of Kant’s moral theory implicitly embedded in the theory of communicative action. For Habermas, discourse comprises two key principles: the Discourse Principle (D) and the Universalisation Principle (U).

(D) concerns ‘[j]ust those action norms are valid to which all possibly affected persons could agree as participants in rational discourses’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas and Hohengarten1992, p. 107). In other words, valid norms are not extra-human dictates handed down to us. Rather, valid norms are, to use Robert Brandom’s expression, (Brandom, Reference Brandom2002, p. 216) – outcomes of communicative action established and sustained by agents’ intersubjective practices. These social achievements get their normative purchase by virtue of being assented to and acknowledged by a community of agents. Crucially, though, the practice of assenting to and acknowledging normative constraints and normative entitlements comprises determining ‘the precise content of those implicit norms … through a ‘process of negotiation’ involving ourselves and those who attribute norms to us’ (Houlgate, Reference Houlgate and Hammer2007, p. 139). By virtue of being a process of negotiation, norms are never fixed but always subject to ‘further assessment, challenge, defence, and correction’ (Brandom, Reference Brandom1994, p. 647).

(U) concerns the formal, pragmatic procedural justification of moral norms based on (D). In effect, Habermas construes (U) as the rational reconstruction of Kant’s supreme principle of morality in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. As he writes,

Crucially, the Kantian universalisation test aims to establish which maxims and interests pass deliberative discursive articulation and challenge such that those maxims and interests are objectively valid (or universally and equally binding for any rational agent). By extension, democracy, for Habermas, is a constitutional state model structured in accordance with the principles of communicative action and discourse: the laws of a democratic constitutional state are legitimate insofar as we arrive at them through discursive practices that are wholly intersubjective and inclusive, since society can only be integrated peacefully in the long-run if social integration involves communicative action and discourse.Footnote ¹⁴

In what immediately follows, we examine the vulnerability of speaking and communicating subjects in light of issues raised or neglected by Habermas’s account of communicative action. We take vulnerability to be understood as a multifaceted concept, one that generally refers to our interdependence as human beings. Here vulnerability is understood to be a shared constitutive condition that evokes our needful openness to others and the open-ended nature of the human condition; it therefore points to power, injury and suffering, as much as it does to forms of care, social (inter)action and cooperation.Footnote ¹⁵ For our purposes, the notion of vulnerability becomes even more salient when we examine the forms of reciprocity, responsiveness and interdependence that we argue underpin Habermas’s account of language-use, discourse and communicative action.

3. Epistemic Pathologies: Epistemic Oppression & Testimonial Injustice

Epistemic oppression refers to, as Kristie Dotson writes, ‘a persistent and unwarranted infringement on the ability to utilise persuasively shared epistemic resources that hinders one’s contributions to knowledge production’ (Dotson, Reference Dotson2014, p. 115). According to Dotson, systemic practices of epistemic exclusion and oppression result in positions and communities that produce deficiencies in social knowledge, as evidenced by increasingly widespread, normalised virulent epistemic contempt for non-privileged groups. For example, distress at systemically reproduced institutional racism and police brutality is often dismissed, to the extent that the vocabulary of protest against racial oppression is viciously misrecognised to the point of erasure. As Robert Gooding-Williams writes, the reactionary view is ‘a failure to regard the speech or actions of black people as manifesting thoughtful judgements about issues that concern all members of the political community’ (Gooding-Williams, Reference Gooding-Williams2006, p. 14).

Black Lives Matter demonstrations typically involve the chant ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!’, where marchers raise their hands above their heads while chanting, as part of the effort to explicitly challenge the reactionary socio-epistemic paradigms which construe antiracist protestors as public threats. To quote José Medina here, ‘[t]his slogan performatively challenges the misplaced presumption that demonstrators pose a threat to public order, interrogating the underlying narratives that depict them as such a threat, while invoking alternative images of peaceful expressions of group agency’ (Medina, Reference Medina2018, p. 12). Furthermore, the chants ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ and ‘No Justice, No Peace!’ are deliberately misinterpreted and misrecognised by reactionary groups to imply that the basic progressive claim ‘black lives matter’ is equivalent to ‘black lives matter more than white lives’. Crucially, this forms a significant part of the explanation for why #AllLivesMatter is in fact reactionary, since #AllLivesMatter reveals itself as ignorant of structural racism and systemic misrecognition.

Related to, but conceptually and politically distinct from the concept of epistemic oppression, which is principally concerned with endemic patterns of structural exploitation and domination of specific epistemic communities, is the concept of epistemic injustice. To quote Miranda Fricker, epistemic injustice arises when a person is ‘wronged in their capacity as a knower’ (Fricker, Reference Fricker2007, p. 20). Such wronging usually happens in at least two ways: (1) through testimonial injustice, which typically occurs when a speaker’s assertions are given less credibility than they deserve because the hearer has prejudices about a social group of which the speaker is a member;Footnote ²³ (2) through hermeneutical injustice, which occurs when there is a gap in the collective interpretive resources of a given society that leaves a marginalised and socially powerless group unable to properly make sense of their social powerlessness. Crucially, the epistemic pathologies of misrecognising or not recognising individual knowledge-claims and/or social group knowledge-claims are particularly vicious forms of humiliation, in that they are a ‘deformation of the normal human capacity for the evaluative perception of others’ (Zurn, Reference Zurn2015, p. 101).

With regard to the kind of epistemic pathology of recognition in the context of testimonial injustice, in particular (for our specific focus here), it would be helpful to refer to Patricia Williams’s autobiographical account of her experience of testimonial justice:

In addition to being harmed by the salesperson’s racism – Williams was racially barred from entry and consequently could not participate in the activity of buying Christmas presents for one’s mother – Williams suffered a distinct, further wrong by having her testimony dismissed and not accorded serious communicative status. Specifically, in the Habermasian sense of validity claims involved with those speech acts conveying truthfulness and, above all, revealing and baring the subjective world of individual anxieties, hopes (and the like) to one’s listener(s), Williams, rather than automatically receive the default level of epistemic respect, trust, and communicative appreciation provided by the Acceptance Principle,Footnote ²⁴ is not only treated with epistemic scorn, she is also stripped of any normative authority. She is deemed as someone who violates the communicative norms of assertion. As such Williams’s capacity for speech is violated – where, crucially, speech involves the vulnerability that comes with revealing oneself in the transparent communicative act of sharing sincere propositional content for uptake by the listener. This is why racism – at the epistemic level – is structured around the pathological norm of believing untrue things about black people, rather than believing black people about true things.

Testimonial injustice deprives Williams, a rational agent, of her rightful place as someone moving in the communicative space of reasons, and thereby leaves individuals like her who are systemically prejudiced against in a state of self-alienation and double-consciousness: Williams is forcibly alienated from her own speech and rationality, where these enable her to be a member of a community of inquirers and reliable narrators. As part of her self-conscious identification with fellow African-Americans in an African-American community, Williams communicatively self-interprets and finds such communicative action empowering. However, African-Americans (and other people of colour), as part of a racist world, are met with external and hostile web of meanings that radically distort such uplifting local self-conceptions. The power structure of racial oppression is pervasive such that the experiential relation Williams has to herself becomes distorted by how she views her agency from the perspective of white prejudicial attitudes, which aim to rob her of her position as a communicative subject, and instead treat her as an object of derision and contempt. This is what we take her to mean when she argues that ‘the greater problem is a powerfully oppressive mechanism for denial of self-knowledge and expression’. Crucially, the asymmetrical nature of the cognitive environment causes Williams to think and feel that the space of reasons, where communicative practices derive their sense of meaning and purpose, is not a space for her.

Given that epistemic oppression and testimonial injustice cause one to be alienated from both their own communicative rationality and from the speech-based practices which necessarily constitute discourse between peers, exclusion from the space of reasons amounts to ‘discursive abuse’. The experience of discursive abuse ‘carries with it the danger of an injury that can bring the identity of the person as a whole to the point of collapse’ (Honneth, Reference Honneth and Wright1995, pp. 132–33), where the identity under threat here is a person’s self-interpretation as agential,Footnote ²⁵ since speech involves vulnerability with respect to revealing oneself in the transparent, trusting communicative act of sharing propositional content for uptake by the listener. To use Andrea Lobb’s expression, the kind of ‘epistemic injury’ (Lobb, Reference Lobb2018, p. 1) endured here can be made sense of in relation to what Richard Rorty calls ‘mute despair’ and ‘intense mental pain’. For Rorty, this notion of agential pain – the type of pain unique to agents

The failure to properly recognise and accord somebody the epistemic acknowledgement they merit is an act of abuse in the sense of forcibly depriving individuals of a progressive communicative environment in which the epistemic recognition accorded to them plays a significant role in enabling and fostering their self-confidence as a communicative agent. This includes:

1. i. External and forcible control over one's own communicative integrity.

2. ii. Violation of communicative integrity prevents one from trusting others and one's own capacities to the distressing extent that victims internalise culpability.

3. iii. Discursive abuse represents a type of disrespect that does lasting damage to one's basic confidence that one can autonomously coordinate one's own communicative claims and even identify as a communicative subject or be recognised as one.

Understood in this manner, there is compelling reason to see how all three points above relate to the vulnerability associated with a) identity-formation, b) distorted identity-formation and the internal organisation of speech, and c) being a participant in communicative action, where c) especially concerns the dynamic between a speaker’s performance and a hearer’s uptake. Regressive recognition orders deliberately exploit intersubjective vulnerability and pervert communicative dynamics by making those excluded from the space of reasons think and feel as though their rejection is entirely the result of their failings. Epistemic oppression and systemic testimonial injustice permeate, to the extent that individuals and/or social groups are made to blame themselves for not being deemed worthy enough to be afforded credibility.Footnote ²⁶

4. Spreading One’s Dreams at the Feet of the Other: Habermas and the Fragility of Communicating Subjects

The preceding discussion of illocutionary acts and silencing, as well as discursive injustice and abuse, raises questions about the neglected element of vulnerability inherent in being a participant in speech acts and more fully in communicative action. In turn, the vulnerability of participants in communicative action, flows through to the vulnerability of persons as knowers and participants in the space of reasons. What, then, do we draw from the above discussion in regard to the interrelation between vulnerability, speech and communication as it pertains to Habermas’s work? In what follows, we conclude by considering, on the one hand, the manner in which an account of vulnerability enriches Habermas’s overly formal notions of communicative action and discourse; on the other, we examine the ways in which Habermas’s own account of communicative action is already oriented towards the vulnerability of speaking agents. This is evinced not only through the rules of communication and discourse that he goes to such lengths to construct, but also in claims he makes in regard to moral intuitions and discourse ethics.

As we have seen, Habermas builds an account of normativity and recognition into his theory of communicative action and discourse. Implicitly, the formal structure of Habermas’s theory of discourse and notion of the ‘ideal speech situation’, already acknowledges the vulnerability of speaking agents by providing measures aimed to protect persons in the realm of communicative action. His account of language-use points to what he regards as our primordial interdependence as language-users and the basic uncertainty of this endeavour. The account of the ideal speech situation makes a claim for equality of speaking-agents by having the opportunity to speak and to express one’s viewpoint without coercion or interference. Moreover, Habermas argues for the need for free and equal argumentation and the use of reason in practical discourse, with the view to reaching mutual understanding and fostering mutual cooperation. However, he does not assume this process is seamless. Rather, he points to the fragilities and uncertainties of communicative freedom that arise with modernity due to particular developmental logics or dynamics (the decoupling of ‘Lifeworld’ and ‘System’Footnote ²⁷), which in turn impact upon the internal structure of communicative action and the potential for rationality.

Notably, Habermas explicitly ties his account of discourse to a notion of vulnerability in texts such as Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. In this text, he restates that ‘[a]rgumentation insures that all concerned in principle take part, freely and equally, in a cooperative search for truth, where nothing coerces anyone except the force of the better argument’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas, Lenhardt and Weber Nicholsen1990, p. 198). However, what is significant in this account is that Habermas also makes clear the anthropological claim underlying his discursive approach as it pertains to moral intuitions. As he writes:

Here, it might be suggested, that Habermas makes clear that his theory of communicative action is in fact underpinned by a constitutive notion of vulnerability that is inherent to every social and intersubjective context. It also brings Habermas within the vicinity of other vulnerability theorists when he ties this notion of vulnerability to our constitutive interdependence as human beings and to forms of subject-formation dependent upon recognition from others. For, as he states: ‘[t]he more the subject becomes individuated, the more he becomes entangled in a densely woven fabric of mutual recognition, that is, of reciprocal exposedness and vulnerability’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas, Lenhardt and Weber Nicholsen1990, p. 199).

In Habermas’s view, then, moralities address or respond to what he terms the ‘fragility of human beings individuated through socialisation’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas, Lenhardt and Weber Nicholsen1990, p. 200). But the protection of these fragilities requires a two-pronged approach that safeguards not only the individual subject but also the community in which that subject is embedded in a web of ‘intersubjective relations of recognition’ (Ibid.). These two elements point to two related principles that Habermas terms ‘justice’ and ‘solidarity’, and as he sees it, both principles are rooted in ‘the specific vulnerability of the human species, which individuates itself through sociation’ (Ibid.). In this respect, we argue that Habermas’s theory should be taken seriously as a contribution to the discourse on vulnerability, particularly as it pertains to the neglected elements of speech and communication. In the essay ‘Morality and Ethical Life’, he even goes so far to say that ‘linguistically mediated interaction, is both the reason for the vulnerability of socialised individuals and the key resource they possess to compensate for that vulnerability’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas, Lenhardt and Weber Nicholsen1990, p. 201). It is clear, then, that Habermas acknowledges that forms of vulnerability are inherent to speech and linguistically mediated interaction as well as to individual subject-development.

However, despite this anthropological claim in regard to linguistic forms of vulnerability, the way in which Habermas addresses this issue is ironically conceptualised at a rather formal and abstract level. As a consequence, he does not take adequate account of the more embodied, pre-reflexive and affective forms of interaction that characterise much of the literature in vulnerability theory. Indeed, even in his early work, Habermas’s theory is based on the assumption that certain procedural rules are always already presupposed by human discourse and that these rules can be drawn on to validate moral principles, and thus normatively justify social interaction. Under this schema, rational consensus presupposes an ideal speech situation as a kind of meta-norm, a situation that significantly assumes a kind of symmetry and reciprocity, requiring all participants to adopt the standpoint of the ‘generalised other’. In assuming this standpoint, though, participants must abstract from their individuality and concrete identity, thereby leaving behind their private and particular affiliations, and the specific social context in which they are embedded.Footnote ²⁸ Through such a principle, Habermas suggests a rational consensus can be achieved in the context of conflicting opinions and interests regardless of differing traditions, cultural perspectives, or individual life-histories.

In order to make this claim, though, Habermas’s moral theory relies upon a distinction he makes between issues of justice (morality) and questions of the good life (ethics), based upon a postmetaphysical argument shared with John Rawls’s liberal egalitarianism (Reference Habermas and Shapiro1971; 1985) that ontological questions must be separated from practical matters if the universalist normative presuppositions of communicative rationality are to succeed. In this respect, in Habermas’s view, moral judgements are concerned only with right or just action, not with substantive values of the good or characteristics that pertain to individual needs and identities; only claims about rightness and just action are considered to provide norms that are obligatory for all persons universally and equally.Footnote ²⁹ As a consequence, Habermas concludes that moral-practical dilemmas can be resolved on the basis of a universal sense of communicative reason, whereas questions relating to ethical identities can only be considered in terms of the ethical values within a particular form of life.

However, as Honneth, for example, has argued, normative claims are experienced and articulated by people in everyday life as disturbances that may, or may not, make mutual recognition possible prior to them reaching the level of discourse. These disturbances may therefore disclose the processes through which recognition is, or is not, achieved prior to the articulation of moral norms. Consequently, these are processes and conditions that individuals must feel are safeguarded even before they can attain the competency considered necessary by a theory of discourse ethics. In this respect, then, the Habermasian form of moral reasoning, as the impartial application of general principles, describes a restricted field of moral life concerned with public institutional forms of morality, but which, ironically ignore everyday motivational contexts despite their explicitly pragmatic orientation.Footnote ³⁰ The universalist principle of Habermas’s discourse ethics demands from interaction partners a willingness and refined ability to enable consideration of normative questions from a generalised standpoint whilst leaving aside their concrete relations with others in everyday experience.Footnote ³¹ However, such claims address dilemmas in social life that are not located at the abstract level of universalisation, but at the concrete level at which everyday forms of conflict occur. The proceduralism of Habermas’s discourse theory and his overly formal account of linguistic action, therefore, means it is difficult to theorise how the initial feelings of injury that motivate moral claims are converted into propositional attitudes (articulated linguistic claims) in the first place.

As the above discussion of Allen revealed, it is then not only a matter of identifying forms of systematically distorted communication but equally forms of systematically distorted identity-formation that impact upon forms of communication. Thus, as Honneth and Allen have noted, normative criteria must not only be concerned with the intersubjective presuppositions of language but also the intersubjective presuppositions of human identity development that impact upon speech, communication, and the social scaffolding of the knower. Moreover, as Honneth identifies, Habermas’s theory is also susceptible to the ‘cultural exclusion’ of oppressed social classes from the articulation of claims of injustice in the public sphere. Honneth draws attention to the silencing of forms of moral conflict or social feelings of injustice, that as he expresses it in early work, ‘lie behind the façade of late-capitalist integration’ (Honneth, Reference Honneth and Anderson1995, p. 207).

This critique is aimed at Habermas’s particular model of society and the public sphere, which unwittingly results in the exclusion of certain voices and forms of moral protest from the public field of speech and communicative action; in other words, Habermas’s model fails to make sufficient sense of this type of discursive abuse, where such forms of discursive abuse reinforce the structural (epistemic) obstacles facing certain voices and forms of moral protest. These structural (epistemic) obstacles prevent certain voices and forms of moral protest from being publicly articulable and from becoming fully elaborated moral claims (Honneth, Reference Honneth and Wright1995, p. 207; p. 209). In this manner, forms of exclusion are related to deprivation of ‘linguistic and symbolic means’ (Honneth, Reference Honneth and Wright1995, p. 213), and this creates not only misrecognition and silencing, but the invisibilisation of disadvantaged groups. Indeed, what particularly motivates the inquiries of intersectional feminist epistemologists is precisely the focus on (i) the power dynamics of gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability; (ii) the role these dynamics of power play in the social conditions of knowing; and (iii) the ways in which the structures of existing social institutions affect the actual practices of knowers. As indicated above, intersectional feminist epistemologists are particularly concerned with (i) how the normative space of reasons is organised; (ii) how one negotiates the normative space of reasons; and (iii) how one gets into normative space at all. To put this more simply, the overriding focus is critically uncovering the substantive link between various types of power relations and epistemic practices. Arguably, the central question is ‘who gets to know things?’.

One problem, then, with Habermas’s ‘linguistification’ of moral conflict and his account of justice, is that it potentially contributes to the very forms of silencing it seeks to overcome. This is due not only to the formal nature of his pragmatics but also implicit assumptions about the skills and capacities required for individuals and groups to enter into moral debate and discourse in the first place. Moreover, Habermas’s account of communicative action and discourse relies upon certain democratic and discursively structured institutions and forms of political life. Here Habermas points to an important issue: communication free from power and distortion requires the establishment of robust modern democratic institutions, ones that are constituted through reciprocal relations and patterns of interaction. Such institutions must be underpinned by forms of reciprocal freedom that are grounded in relations of recognition. For such institutions to ensure forms of communicative action without coercion they must be immanently constituted from within the structure of recognition relations, or to put it another way, they must develop out of normative patterns of social interaction between social actors themselves in any given social context.Footnote ³²

Unfortunately, many existing modern institutions fall well short of the standards of Habermasian discourse and forms of recognition: they tend to have exclusionary epistemic habits and reveal a normalised contempt for non-privileged agents. To put this point more polemically, many existing modern institutions fail to be relational institutions, since they fail to promote practices of symmetrical recognition in communication; many institutions have substantive internal structural weaknesses; they often fail to encourage the quest for self-realisation and thereby leave people who are epistemically oppressed and marginalised in a constant state of alienation; many existing modern institutions, therefore, require radical change, rather than liberal tweaks. The goal of social critique, therefore, is to identify and shift unequal power relations that are directly responsible for forms of suffering and alienation that are produced by marginalisation and thereby further entrench forms of oppression.

On this score, Habermas’s theory offers insights into the ways in which such institutions might be structured democratically in a manner that enables equal participation in communicative interaction. For, as Simone Chambers points out, in principle, discourse ethics combats the ‘marketplace of ideas between elites in which interests and understandings compete with each other for domination’ (Chambers, Reference Chambers and Meehan1995, p. 176). Habermas’s discourse theory (in principle) offers a model for mutual cooperation precisely through the acknowledgement of difference. These discursive spaces, however, can be opened up further by extending ‘opportunities to participate, by including excluded voices, by democratising media access, by setting up ‘town meetings’, by politicising the depoliticised, by empowering the powerless, by decentralising decision-making … and so on’ (Chambers, Reference Chambers and Meehan1995, pp. 176–77). These are all measures that might reinvigorate practices of discourse that are at the heart of Habermas’s democratic project and address the fragilities associated not only with being a participant in communicative action but also interdependent subjects who rely upon recognition from others.

For as we have argued, participants in communication lay themselves bare in front of one another, and as Habermas suggests, there is an implicit trust built into communication that aims at reaching understanding. By drawing attention to the structure of communication with respect to the subjective world, Habermas highlights the need for the recognition of the intentions of the speaker in acts of communication. In doing so, he acknowledges the forms of interdependence, reciprocity and responsiveness that are intrinsic to vulnerability in a manner that might evoke an account of the intentions of the horizontally ‘inclined’, rather than vertically ‘autonomous’ speaker, to use Adriana Cavarero’s terms.Footnote ³³

The desire to transform the practices of many existing modern institutions by recognising and embracing vulnerability crucially reminds us of precisely what we owe to one another. As evoked by the passage from Yeats with which this paper began, as communicating subjects, we ‘spread our dreams’ before one another thereby placing our trust in the other’s moral responsiveness. Acknowledging the vulnerable dynamics of discourse advances democratic forms of association by fostering the protection of the individual as well as ‘the well-being of the community to which he [or she] belongs’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas, Lenhardt and Weber Nicholsen1990, p. 200). As Habermas writes in one of his more recognitive moments, as ‘creatures’ constituted by ‘profound vulnerability’ we require communicative forms of moral attentiveness by which we can defend both ‘the integrity of the individual’ and preserve ‘the vital ties of mutual recognition through which individuals reciprocally stabilise their fragile identities’ (Habermas, Reference Habermas, Lenhardt and Weber Nicholsen1990, p. 199; 200). Embracing mutual vulnerability, then, has the potential to provide the indispensable symbolic and material space for bringing about a better world.