The Aesthetic Habermas: Communicative Power and Judgment

• Author: Glenn Mackin
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221092412
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221092412

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(5) 780 –808

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221092412

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Article

The Aesthetic Habermas:

Communicative Power

and Judgment

Glenn Mackin1

Abstract

Since the publication of Between Facts and Norms, Habermas’s concept of

communicative power has been the topic of significant discussion. This

article contributes to this conversation by examining Habermas’s account of

what makes communication powerful. I argue that Habermas’s conception

of communicative power describes a nonviolent and noninstrumental mode

of acting and being with others in language. This mode of engagement

underwrites a conception of power that is structurally different from

willing, one that builds meaningful worlds and (trans-)forms those engaging

in communicative procedures. In drawing out this aspect of Habermas’s

conception, I show that he is not a rationalist and proceduralist whose

account of communicative procedures protects decision-making from

irrational aesthetic powers. Rather, he presents communication as a mimetic

achievement, a set of aesthetic practices and experiences that affectively

alter its participants. With this position, Habermas makes an important

contribution to and not just against the analysis of the aesthetic dimensions of

political life. In casting communication as a mimetic achievement, Habermas

presents an account of how communication opens worlds and forms

subjects. Yet since these aspects of communication arrive in linguistic form,

he can also examine affective and aesthetic experiences within discursive

procedures. We can understand world-opening and aesthetic (trans-)

1Chair, Humanities Department, Associate Professor of Political Science, Eastman School of

Music, Rochester, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Glenn Mackin, Chair, Humanities Department, Associate Professor of Political Science,

Eastman School of Music, 26 Gibbs Street, Rochester, NY 14604-2505, USA.

Email: gmackin@esm.rochester.edu

1092412PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221092412Political TheoryMackin

research-article2022

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formation as an essential part of democratic politics while also identifying

the perspectives and resources by which actors can reflect on and critically

evaluate whether an opinion is justified or whether a political project is

worth pursuing.

Keywords

Habermas, communicative power, mimesis, communicative rationality,

democratic theory

Habermas actually pursues a sublation of rationality and mimesis, where

communicative rationality, rightly put, is a theory of rational illumination or,

better, articulate mimesis.

--Gregg Miller (2011, 31)

Since the publication of Between Facts and Norms, Habermas’s concept of

“communicative power” has been a significant topic of discussion (cf. Günther

1996; Preuß 1996). Critics have raised questions about the ambiguities of the

concept (Flynn 2004), about whether communicative power can successfully

steer administrative systems (Reunanen and Kunelius 2020), and about

whether Habermas’s efforts to distinguish communicative power from social

power are successful (Allen 2012; O’Mahony 2010). More radically—and

this is the argument I focus on—Linda Zerilli (2016) rejects the concept on the

grounds that Habermas presents communicative power as a will. This leads

Habermas to view politics through the lens of command-obedience relations

and leaves him unable to affirm the pluralism and nonsovereign exercises of

freedom that he identifies as central to democracy (Zerilli 2016, 189). This

critique may be controversial, but Zerilli’s interpretation is not. The broad

consensus is that the distinguishing feature of communicative power is only

that it originates from rational communicative procedures. Qua power, how-

ever, communicative power is a will that functions like any other.1 It forms

and directs decisions about political projects, including constitutions, lawmak-

ing, and policies (Habermas 1996a, 151ff).

1. This tendency to equate communicative power with a political will is promi-

nent in Hugh Baxter’s (2011) argument that Habermas should dispense with the

idea of the lifeworld and should instead understand the political system in terms

of autopoiesis. The distinction between system and lifeworld, Baxter argues, is

connected to a defensive “crisis model,” where the lifeworld only defends itself

from the incursions of administrative and economic systems. Moreover, Baxter