The Aesthetic Habermas: Communicative Power and Judgment

Habermas’s Conception of Communicative Power

For Zerilli, the problem with understanding political power as a will is that it leads us to conceptualize politics in terms of command-obedience relations. The will (or the sovereign) issues commands, and the other parts of the self (or of society) obeys. This is true even when the will is “rational.” A rationally formed will might be morally right or based on a true understanding of the world, but to conceive of politics as the formation of and obedience to a rational will prevents us from affirming the forms of pluralism and nonsovereign exercises of freedom that Arendt places at the heart of political life. Even if we link rational will-formation to free and open deliberative procedures, Zerilli argues, it retains authoritarian tendencies, where one views pluralism and contingency as problems that must be overcome or regulated in accord with principles all must accept.

This is what is at stake in Zerilli’s critique of Habermas’s interpretation of Arendt’s account of power. In interpreting Arendtian power “as the potential of a common will formed in noncoercive communication,” Zerilli argues, Habermas both misunderstands Arendt and creates a flawed conception of politics (Habermas 1996a, 147, emphasis in original; quoted in Zerilli 2016, 194). Because he allegedly misses the eventfulness of Arendtian power, and because he equates power with the formation of a common will, Habermas misses the “passions, values, and beliefs” that inspire action in concert (193). More importantly, he gets caught up in an aporia: he cannot move from the idea of a rationally formed common will to the affirmation of pluralism and exercises of nonsovereign freedom (189; also see Arendt 1981, 161). To specify how the will can be made rational, Habermas identifies transcontextual principles that operate in the communicative procedures by which a common will gets formed. This move, however, restricts the pluralism and forms of practical attunement by which action in concert proceeds. On Zerilli’s account, the speech norms Habermas identifies as guiding discursive procedures are not political judgments that differently situated actors could argue about. They are an ontology, an “irrefutable normativity” that arises from the “inescapability of the general presuppositions that always already underlie the communicative practice of everyday life” (Habermas 1990, 130; also quoted in Zerilli 2016, 197). On this reading, Habermas’s speech norms only demand obedience, where dissent becomes equivalent to irrationality and performative self-contradiction. They operate as an unavoidable, prepolitical, and nonpluralistic necessity that pushes people’s willing toward reason whether they know it or not (see Zerilli 2016, 196–197).

Granted, Zerilli acknowledges that there is an “ambiguity” in Arendt’s account of power and that this might explain Habermas’s apparent misreading. Arendt, Zerilli notes, offers two descriptions of power (2016, 192–193). Sometimes Arendt describes power as an eventful and contingent phenomenon: “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert; it belongs to a group and stays in existence only so long as the group keeps together” (1972b, 143). Or in a similar formulation: “power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse” ([1958] 1998, 200). When speaking of power in these terms, Arendt denies that it is a measurable attribute, or that it is something durable or reliable. As a pure potentiality, it emerges only in the contingent and “temporary agreement of many wills and intentions” ([1958] 1998, 201). It only opens a space of possibility that “does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being” ([1958] 1998, 199; also quoted in Zerilli 2016, 192).

Yet Arendt also describes power in ways that make it appear more durable and “will-like.” Zerilli cites Arendt’s claim that “power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence” ([1958] 1998, 200; also quoted in Zerilli 2016, 192). One might also cite Arendt’s claim that a government’s pursuit of policy goals relies on a “power structure” that “precedes and outlasts all aims” (1972b, 150). These passages, Zerilli admits, are in tension with Arendt’s other descriptions, and she speculates that this might be why Habermas is misled into believing that Arendt equates power with the formation of a common will. Habermas’s interpretation is not quite so easy to dismiss, however. Arendt’s tendency to describe power in durable and will-like terms occurs more than in just a few stray remarks. It is a persistent theme throughout her work. Arendt argues that power arises from sincere and mutual promises, or from an “opinion on which many publicly were in agreement” (1990, 76; quoted in Habermas 1996a, 147). Public agreements, in turn, generate and sustain governments and institutions:

It is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country, and this support is but the continuation of the consent that brought the laws into existence to begin with. Under conditions of representative government, the people are supposed to rule over those who govern them. All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them. (1972b, 140)

What Arendt says about the power of governments and institutions also applies to “every organization of men,” even nonpolitical “social” groups (1972a, 92). Regardless of the form they take or the ends they pursue, human groups depend on the human capacity to make and keep promises. The potency of this support is a function of the number of people who agree, the strength of the mutual promises that brought the groups into being (1972a, 87), and even the quality of the opinion on which they are based (cf. 1972a, 76). It seems quite plausible to say that Arendtian power has at least something to do with generating common opinions that support political projects.

Curiously, Zerilli responds to these aspects of Arendt’s thought mostly by ignoring them. She does not discuss the passages where Arendt describes durable power structures or where she describes power as a sustaining support for human groups. Instead, she recites Arendt’s first set of descriptions, concluding that “power, when all is said and done, is hardly distinguishable from action, and like action, it opens up a field of possibilities” (2016, 193). Zerilli ignores these passages because she is keen to use Arendt to give judging, as opposed to willing, the central role in democratic politics. In “judging politically,” one states opinions about how the world appears while also taking the point of view of others into account. The crucial feature of this activity is not that it gets us to rationally justified truths (cf. Zerilli 2016, 28ff; see also Arendt 1981, 25). Nor is it necessary for theorists to explain how actors can determine whether a judgment is true or right, for such efforts inevitably interfere with understanding others’ points of view. Before we address the questions about what ought to be done about a practice, we have to understand the meaning of the practice, and the articulation of universal principles interferes with the clash of opinions by which that understanding occurs. Instead of trying to understand things from others’ points of view, one subsumes the problem under pregiven categories. ²

Thus for Zerilli, judging is a kind of “worlding.” It brings objects into the space of appearance—as events, institutions, claims, arguments opinions, and so on—so that they can be treated as occasions for engagement and action. One does not, in the first instance, seek to determine whether a practice is legitimate. Instead, one must first see things from others’ points of view in order to understand the meaning of the practice. This is why Zerilli thinks that judging, unlike willing, affirms pluralism and nonsovereign freedom. Because it involves seeing things from other points of view, judging brings the objects of the world into being as objective and meaningful phenomena: one sees that something is there (since other people perceive it too) and also that it could be otherwise (since other people perceive it differently). With this orientation, the world appears neither as a set of rational truths nor as a set of subjective perceptions but as a common and meaningful space for action, judgment, and response. This, Zerilli argues, amounts to “Copernican revolution” in the study of politics. One shifts theoretical attention away from questions about how and whether a will is rationally justified and toward questions of how people bring objects into view and whose perspectives will matter in that process (Zerilli 2018, 631); one also reveals that whatever opinion or will that emerges is dependent on prior activities of judging (see Zerilli 2016, 190).

There is no doubt that Zerilli’s Arendtian account of judging draws attention to essential questions about how meaningful worlds come into view. Democratic politics should not be understood merely as the activity of determining which opinions are true and right and then acting on those opinions. Nevertheless, Zerilli’s erasure of Arendt’s tendency to conceptualize power in multiple ways remains unfortunate. It leads her to think that the central question about power is whether it is eventful or durable/will-like. It also leads her to present judging as if it were in conceptual opposition with willing. This one-sided account allows her to miss one of Arendt’s central insights, as well as the ways that Habermas’s account of communicative power clarifies and extends that insight.

This insight is that there is a nonviolent and noninstrumental mode of being and acting with others that occurs in “action in concert.” There is an aspect of human intersubjectivity, which never appears in its purity, ³ that is motivating without being manipulative or dominating. Arendt’s dual descriptions of power can be understood as the effort to identify nonviolent and noninstrumental modes of engagement, while also acknowledging that they only ever appear in particular forms: in the sincere and mutual promises and acts of civil disobedience that Arendt emphasizes, and in the social rituals, or in the communicative exchanges aimed at opinion- and will-formation on which Habermas focuses. The questions to ask about both Arendt’s and Habermas’s accounts have to do with the nature of this nonviolent and noninstrumental mode of engaging with others, how it emerges, and how it aligns or misaligns with the forms it takes.

In order to see how Habermas can help us address these questions, let us return to his claim that “Arendt views power as the potential of a common will formed in noncoercive communication.” Habermas emphasizes “common will,” but in the present context, the key term is “potential.” If power is the potential of a common will, then it seems clear that Habermas does not equate it with willing. Moreover, as will become clear in sections 2 and 3, a common will is the potential outcome of power not just in the sense that participants in discursive procedures might take a “no” position vis-à-vis proposed opinions. It is also potential in two other ways. First, noncoercive communication can take forms that are not oriented toward will-formation at all, including social rituals that generate common symbols and forges bonds of solidarity (cf. Habermas 2017, 36ff). Second, a common will is potential in the sense that participants might or might not experience the communication as meaningful. ⁴ To form a will, it is not enough for a communication procedure to adhere to speech norms that produce true claims and legitimate norms. The participants must come to experience the procedures as meaningful and the validity claims as motivating. These different potentialities are all at work in Habermas’s account of why the “unhindered use of communicative freedom” can produce communicative power (1996, 147). Discursive procedures, Habermas tells us, can be understood in cognitive terms, as rational testing procedures for assessing which arguments are best defended. They can also be understood in practical terms as establishing intersubjective relations:

The discursive character of opinion- and will-formation . . . has the practical sense of establishing relations of mutual understanding that are “violence free” in Arendt’s sense and that unleash the generative force of communicative freedom. The communicative power of shared convictions issues only from structures of undamaged intersubjectivity. This interpenetration of discursive law-making and communicative power formation ultimately stems from the fact that communicative action reasons also have motivational force. (1996a, 151, emphases in original)

Here Habermas explicitly identifies power with the establishment of nonviolent and noninstrumental relations with others in language. It is the discursive character of opinion- and will-formation that establishes structures of undamaged intersubjectivity and violence-free relations, and it also unleashes a creative force.

At this point, we do not know the nature of these nonviolent relations, how they are formed, or whether they support or undermine the linguistic structures and procedures in which they emerge. We do know, however, that they motivate. Nonviolent relations and structures of undamaged intersubjectivity, we might say, make communication powerful. Habermas usually describes this as the “weakly motivating force of good reasons” (cf. 1996a, 147). Klaus Günther is right to notice that this force is also quite strong (1036). Insofar as discursive procedures establish violence-free relations, actors stand “at ease” before one another, allowing their “yes” or “no” positions, and the procedures by which they adopt them, to affect and even effect them (cf. Miller 2011, 65). Opinions, reasons, and procedures can then become shared, such that the opinion, and the relation to the other that produced it, becomes part of oneself. Habermas describes this power as “weak,” because it is always subject to dissent (one can say “no” to others’ claims) and because it can be overwhelmed by other powers (one can know something is true but to find it difficult to acknowledge publicly, or one’s knowledge can become distorted by other concerns). Nevertheless, it is also strong in that it constitutes one’s desires and perceptions of the world. The communicative power that emerges from nonviolent and noninstrumental modes of engaging with others may take the form of justified opinions, but it also creates, binds, or dissolves subjects, perceptions, and cultural values. Whatever rational elements it has, nondistorted communication also involves practices and experiences by which other perspectives become part of oneself, and this motivates actors to adhere to a community’s values, and/or dissent from them (cf. Miller 2011, 13).

Given this, it seems that Arendt and Habermas share more than Zerilli suggests. They both aim to track a nonviolent and noninstrumental mode of engagement (action in concert) that occurs within structures of intersubjectivity. They also address a similar set of questions regarding the nature and formation of nonviolent and nondominating relations. Just what is this nonviolent relationship that operates in Arendtian action in concert or Habermasian communication? How does the establishment of this relationship open a world or induce people to care about it? What is the relationship between these nonviolent relations and the forms in which they operate: the “support” that Arendt identifies with power, or the discursive procedures of rational opinion- and will-formation that Habermas describes? As we shall see in the next three sections, Habermas helps us to answer these questions in his account of the role of mimesis in communication.

“You Be Me for a While, and I’ll Be You”

As a preliminary effort to clarify the concept (see Potolsky 2006, 6), let us follow Miller in noting that mimesis plays a significant role in two overlapping traditions. In the representational arts, mimesis refers to the relationship between a representation and the object to which it refers. In its psychological/anthropological register, mimesis refers to a practice of imitation as a mode of identity-formation (Miller 2011, 14; see also Haliwell 2002). The painting of the bowl of fruit looks like a real bowl of fruit, and the piece of music sounds like a story; the actor speaks in the voice of a character, and a hand gesture mimics one’s speech, as when we press our forefingers to our thumbs to convey the precision or delicacy of an idea. Yet imitating another is more than play, and it produces more than pleasure. As a practice, imitation shapes and forms the self. One can come to identify with the role—the speech, dress, posture, gestures, and habits of thought—that one might have started out merely imitating. Imitation can therefore transform the self and the world we inhabit, perhaps even “re-enchanting” it. Through the imitation of models, one might affectively identify with them, their forms of speech and action, along with their associated ethical values. One might also develop emotional associations with objects and accoutrements, where one experiences them as a meaningful world (see Miller 2011, 36ff; see also Duvenage 2003, 121ff).

Both of these aspects of mimesis saturate the history of political theory, including Habermas’s account of communicative power. As the reader might have already guessed, my claim is that the nondominating modes of engagement Habermas identifies in communicative power should be understood as mimetic practice and experience, where one switches roles with others, and the others’ perspectives, along with the practice of role-switching itself, becomes part of who one is. This is a consistent theme in Habermas’s discussions of communicative action. For instance, in response to a question from Martin Jay about the relationship between a professionalized artworld and an increasingly impoverished lifeworld, Habermas writes:

If aesthetic experience is incorporated into the context of individual life histories, if it is utilized to illuminate a situation and to throw light on individual life-problems . . . then art enters into a language game that is no longer that of aesthetic criticism but belongs rather to everyday communicative practices. It then no longer affects only our evaluative language or merely renews the interpretation of needs that color our perceptions; rather, it reaches into our cognitive interpretations and normative expectations and transforms the totality in which these moments are related to each other. In this respect, modern art harbors a utopia that becomes a reality to the degree that the mimetic powers sublimated into the work of art find resonance in the mimetic relations of a balanced and undistorted intersubjectivity in everyday life. ([1985] 1998, 414–415, emphases added)

As Miller observes about this passage, it is not surprising that Habermas argues that modern art sublimates mimetic powers (2011, 32). It is fairly normal to argue that art involves mimesis, and Habermas argues that modernization processes have institutionalized aesthetic experiences into the functionally differentiated sphere of “art” (cf. Barbosa 2003). More surprising, however, is Habermas’s assertion that modern art can transform cognitive interpretations and normative expectations by resonating with mimetic relations that are already operative within everyday life. This suggests that there is a communicative mimesis that goes hand-in-hand with communicative rationality, and that it operates in everyday intersubjectivity without distorting it (see Miller 2011, 32; see also Ingram 1987, 183).

Habermas articulates a similar position in response to a question about the relationship between his theory of communication and Adorno’s aesthetic theory. He first emphasizes the familiar idea that his approach shifts from the paradigm of the “philosophy of consciousness” to the paradigm of intersubjectivity. Less familiarly, he explains that this shift allows us to see that there is “already a mimetic moment in everyday practices of communication, not just in art” (1985, 81, emphasis added; also quoted in Miller 2011, 32). And just to make sure we do not miss the point, Habermas approvingly cites Albrecht Wellmer’s similar idea: Adorno’s reliance on the premises of the philosophy of consciousness, Wellmer argues, leads him to see mimesis only as the “other” to rationality, whereas the shift to the paradigm of intersubjectivity allows us to see the “prior unity of the mimetic and the rational moment in the foundations of language” (quoted in Habermas 1985, 81; emphasis added). Once again, Habermas does not present mimesis as an “other” to reason, and he does not locate it only within the differentiated sphere of art (see Miller 2011, 137–138; see also Strong and Sposito, 1995). Rather, mimesis appears as a coequal partner to communicative rationality, both operating at the heart of language use. Habermas even reverses the formulation. One of his goals in shifting to the intersubjective paradigm, he tells us, is to reveal “the rational core of mimetic achievements” (1984, 390; also quoted in Miller 2011, 32). If there is a “prior unity” of rational and mimetic moments in language, then there is mimesis at the heart of communicative rationality, and there is a rationality at the heart of mimesis.

Taken together, these passages suggest a hypothesis about Habermas’s account of communication. Linguistically structured communication is “Janus-faced” not just in the sense that a speech act’s validity claims occur and are redeemed in concrete contexts while also gesturing beyond every context (Habermas 1996a, 20–21). It is also Janus-faced in the sense that it contains both rational and mimetic aspects. Communicative actors raise validity claims, and these actions reproduce formal grammar positions (the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives) and presuppose the speech norms Habermas reconstructs. Yet these same actions must also be understood as mimetic practices of role-switching and world-building, and they generate affective and subject-forming experiences. Communicative procedures involve imitative role-switching, and this imitation affectively forms and transforms actors’ experiences of the social world, including the identities that operate in it. Notwithstanding the fact that it occurs in language, communicatively achieved understanding generates noncognitive and affective bonds. The cognitive practice of accepting a validity claim is also an aesthetic practice of identification (where one switches roles with others), and it generates affective bonds in which one takes on the perspectives of others as part of the “self.”

This hypothesis does not require significant interpretive leaps. The idea that communicative action involves role-switching is an explicit part of Habermas’s account of the speech norms operating in communicative action. Consider the universalization principle (U): “For a norm to be valid, the consequences and side effects that its general observance can be expected to have for the satisfaction of the particular interests of each person affected must be such that all affected can accept them freely” (1990, 120). In the present context, the important bit is not the way that (U) defines the general interest, but how it is supposed to improve upon Immanuel Kant’s “monological” categorical imperative. Kant’s categorical imperative, Habermas argues, creates a procedure of moral reasoning in which one projects assumptions upon others, whereas (U) governs actual procedures of moral argumentation. These procedures avoid the problem of projection, he tells us, because (U) compels the “universal exchange of roles that G. H. Mead called ‘ideal role taking’” (Habermas 1990, 65, emphasis added; see also Miller 2011, 63).

Nor is this role-switching merely procedural. If communication is to coordinate action on the basis of meaning, role-switching must produce important affective and subject-forming experiences. Habermas distinguishes communicative action from strategic action primarily in terms of the disposition of the actors. Actors who engage in “success-oriented action” adopt an “objectivating attitude,” where one treats others and the speech situation as objects to be manipulated in pursuit of premeditated goals. Such an orientation might “cause” others to act in the speaker’s preferred way, but it cannot motivate hearers to act on reasons (1990, 58). For motivation to occur, actors must adopt a performative attitude, where they pursue their illocutionary goals without reservation. With an unreserved pursuit of illocutionary goal shifts, both the “outcome” of the communication and the participants’ identities and interests are open-ended and nonteleological. With an objectivating attitude, participants treat their goals, interests, and identities as given, whereas the performative attitude involves openness and fluidity, where the self can be (trans-)formed in the speech act. This suggests that Habermas goes beyond a cognitivist account of communicative action, in which it appears merely as the presentation, acceptance, and/or negation of validity claims. Accepting a validity claim also produces a noninstrumental power, a binding and motivating effect. If communication is to produce illocutionary force, one must feel bound to the other on the basis of meaning. Habermas explicitly describes this as a mimetic achievement: the illocutionary force of language “is rooted in the mimetic act of role-taking—that is, in ego’s making his own the expectation that alter directs to him” (1984, 390, emphasis added; also quoted in Miller 2011, 60). In communicative action, imitation must become identification. Communicative actors take on the structures and expectations associated with adopting each others’ roles, and they must experience a “slide” between self and other, as an alter’s expectations become part of oneself (cf. Miller 2011, 132). This is just what it means to adopt a “performative attitude.” Through the practice of role-taking, others’ positions, perspectives, and expectations stamp themselves onto the self, affecting (and effecting) persons to their core.

This provides confirmation of the interpretive claims I introduced in section 1. Forms of linguistic communication might possess an identifiable structure and a set of immanent principles. Yet they generate communicative power only insofar as they give rise to mimetic achievements. Habermasian communication is therefore not just guided by abstract and procedural norms (see Zerilli 2016, 195; see also Honig 2007, 8ff). It also involves the creative orientations (aesthetic identification with roles and the activity of exchanging roles) and affective experiences (the performative attitude and the identifications and bonds that arise with it) that Zerilli associates with judgment. There is the set of communicative procedures and norms, but there is also the experience of understanding, produced by mimetic achievements, which brings the self, the world, and other participants into view as meaningful phenomena. This is not akin to the “minor theme” that Markell (2000) identifies in Habermas’s account of constitutional patriotism. The better metaphor is that of the “open secret” (Miller 2011, 34). The operation of mimesis in communication is an explicit and recurring dimension of Habermas’s thought. It subtends his idea that reasons have a motivating force; his claim that ego-identity possesses an intersubjective core; and his account of how social rituals can make institutions, roles, norms, and traditions feel authoritative (cf. 2017, 36ff). However, neither he nor his interpreters emphasize these elements. ⁵ Habermas does not develop an aesthetic vocabulary or model for understanding what it is like for the alter’s perspective to become part of one’s own (Miller 2011, 61). As Miller notes, this is an error on his part (2011, 66; see also Duvenage 2003, 110). It prevents him from modeling the experience of understanding in genuinely intersubjective terms and from exploring its relationship to the structures and principles of communication that he reconstructs. I clarify these issues in sections 3 and 4. For the moment, I simply want to sum up my claim here: the nonviolent and noninstrumental mode of engaging with others is mimetic, and it generates a communicative power that is subject-forming and world-disclosing.

With this aspect of Habermasian communication in view, we no longer focus on the rationality of procedures of opinion- and will-formation, their principles and pragmatic presuppositions, and the justified claims they might create. We focus, rather, on the procedures’ discursive character as such—the nonviolent and noninstrumental mimetic achievements that occur in communicative forms—and the worlding they might produce: the lifeworld of meaningful symbols and roles (cf. Habermas 2017, 34ff) and a people for whom arguments and procedures might matter (cf. Miller 2011, 141). Taken together, these aspects of communicative power overcome the conceptual opposition between judging and willing. Procedures of opinion- and will-formation depend upon mimetic achievements, in which actors come to experience those procedures and their results as meaningful. At the same time, the linguistic form of mimetic achievements provides the resources and perspectives that enable actors to reflect upon and shape those achievements into various political projects, including Habermas’s democratic project.

Both critics and supporters of Habermas’s proceduralism tend to miss this sublation. They tend to read Habermas's defenses of constitutional democracy as a species of ideal theory, where he justifies a set of reflexive procedures and hopes that actors will realize this ideal more fully. They fail to see that, because communication involves mimetic achievements, it does not inherently generate democratic orientations or take the form of democratic procedures; rather, it only creates a meaningful world of objects and values, along with a collection of actors for whom meaning matters (cf. Miller 2011, 141). Habermas’s account of the creative power of communicative action is therefore conceptually distinct from his normative project, his procedural accounts of reason and democracy. Habermas’s accounts of communicative reason and deliberative democracy must be understood as post-hoc reflections on and articulations of the mimetic relations of everyday life. Habermas’s normative project, in other words, functions as an epistemic filter that illuminates—and, as we shall see in section 4, aims to generate—the egalitarian and pluralistic dimensions of mimetic achievements. This approach is closer to Marxism understood as a critical theory than it is to liberal theory. Habermas does not deduce the universal principles of communicative rationality (or constitutional democracy) from the pragmatic presuppositions that actors necessarily take on when they engage in communicative action. Rather, he articulates unrealized potentials for emancipation in the struggles and practices of the present in order to invite actors to take up the political project of making them real in and through practical action.

Ungovernable Understanding

So far, I have identified and examined the mimetic nature of the nonviolent and noninstrumental modes of engagement that are at the heart of Habermas’s conception of communicative power. I now turn to the question of the relationship between the mimetic mode of communicative understanding and the linguistic forms—everyday action coordination, procedures of opinion- and will-formation, ritual communication, and so on—in which they operate. As we have seen, Zerilli believes that Habermas’s efforts to identify the structures and speech norms at work in discursive procedures of opinion- and will-formation is a problem, for the same reason that “logical truths” were a problem for Arendt: the unavoidability and necessity of the speech norms negates human freedom (Zerilli 2016, 137; see also Zerilli 2005 and Arendt [1968] 2006). My claim to this point has been that this critique misses important overlaps between Arendt’s conception of power and Habermas’s account of communicative power. I now turn to the argument that these mimetic aspects offer a way to understand how speech norms can operate without foreclosing pluralism and freedom.

I can summarize Habermas’s conception of communication in the form of two main claims. (1) Communicative encounters, no matter what form they take, involve mimetic achievements: the switching of roles, the fusion of perspectives toward something in the world (that is, the opening of a “shared world”), and the affective bonds that these activities can produce. (2) These mimetic achievements have a structure that actors draw upon and reproduce as they interact with one another.

If I am right that (1) is true, then Habermas’s account of communication is not as bound to necessity as Zerilli suggests. Indeed, there is a permanent gap between communicative structures norms, including the ones that Habermas identifies, and the mimetic achievements that occur within them. Again, Habermas is explicit about this when he observes that “the potential of unleashed communicative freedoms [contains] an anarchistic core” (1996a, xl; also quoted in Miller 2011, 13). This anarchistic core does not simply mean that communicative actors are free to take a “yes” or “no” position vis-à-vis a validity claim. It does not even mean, as White and Farr (2012) argue, that an actor’s “yes” or “no” is an aesthetic-expressive negation (or affirmation) of a lifeworld, although this gets us closer to what Habermas has in mind. Rather, the “anarchistic core” expresses the idea that the generation of communicative power depends upon ungovernable experiences of understanding and the transformations they can produce. No rules, principles, or structures—not even the communicative structures and the speech norms that Habermas reconstructs—can produce or govern mimetic achievements.

Hence Miller’s “extraordinary conclusion” about Habermas’s account of communication (2011, 65–67): The speech norms that Habermas reconstructs occur at a different register of experience than the experience of understanding produced in mimetic achievements. As Miller puts it, “[P]rinciple (U) can govern how humans come together in language, but it does not penetrate the how of understanding” (Miller 2011, 65, emphases in original). It might be true that linguistically mediated intersubjective encounters encode the grammar positions of the first-, second-, and third-person perspectives. It might also be true that participants in encounters make certain idealizing presuppositions, such as (U), as they seek to coordinate action on the basis of mutual understanding. Yet those structures and norms remain permanently external to the experiences and transformations that can occur in the event of understanding. The observer might identify the formal existence of the first-person perspective, but the participants might experience radical and disorienting shifts in their senses of themselves. By the same token, a rational reconstruction might reveal the operation of (U) in a communicative procedure, but the actors’ experiences in role-switching might shift their perceptions and understanding of context, thus altering their sense of who counts as part of the “all affected,” or better, Nancy Fraser’s (2008) “most affected” (see also Afsahi 2020). For the theorist, the idea of a rationally motivated consensus appears as a regulative ideal operative in participants’ communicative actions, but from the perspective of the participants, consensus takes on a different meaning: it is the point at which the other’s perspective has been reached, a pause in the ongoing flow of intersubjectivity in which subjects can be (trans-)formed. ⁶

In short, qua mimetic achievements, linguistically mediated intersubjective encounters cannot be universally determined. Mimetic achievements remain temporal and serendipitous crystallizations of communicative power, bound to the contingent historical conditions in which they occur. ⁷ No matter how legitimate a communicative procedure might be, it remains a permanently open question whether actors will find it meaningful, whether it will induce actors to take on others’ perspectives, or what will happen to actors who do take on others’ perspectives and imitate the symbols and roles that the lifeworld provides.

The gap between the experience of understanding and the structure and norms of speech persists in Habermas’s analysis of how communicative power interpenetrates the discursive production of law. Habermas’s idea is that discursive procedures of opinion- and will-formation can become legally encoded. Discursively produced shared opinions can then become legally binding. We must bear in mind, however, that the legal form is no more able to produce mimetic achievements than communicative structures and speech norms are. One essential aspect of the legal form is that it is indifferent to motives. From a legal perspective, it does not matter whether one complies with a law because one thinks it is legitimate or out of fear of punishment. Participants engaging in a legally encoded discursive procedure are free to comply with its formal rules or obey its outcomes for strategic reasons—the fear of punishment or a desire for a reward. As Cover (1986) points out, the law cannot force participants to identify with its identities, structures, and procedures, nor can it prevent actors from using its symbols and roles in unexpected and innovative ways. If the law is discursively generated, then the anarchistic core remains. This is what Arendt is driving at when she notes that power cannot be stored up or kept in reserve ([1958] 1998, 200), and what Habermas means when he observes that legal institutions are dependent on forms of power that they cannot control or produce at will (1996a, 149). Because it is involves a nonviolent and noninstrumental mode of interacting with others, communicative power cannot be produced administratively. It is possible for actors to experience legally encoded discursive procedures as meaningful—as the site of mimetic achievements. Still, there is no way to ensure that this happens, nor can one prevent those mimetic achievements from subverting the existing legal procedures. No matter how well-organized a discursive procedure is, it can only become powerful insofar as it sustains nonviolent and noninstrumental modes of interaction, ones that might arrest existing discursive procedures.

This returns us to the idea I introduced in section 1 and mentioned at the end of section 2, that we can distinguish between the form that communication takes and its mimetic mode. Because Habermas focuses his theoretical attention on the use of language to coordinate action and the rational discourses by which actors assess validity claims, and because his interpreters assume that this form must be the opposite of “irrational” mimetic practices and experiences, it might appear that Habermas is trapped in Zerilli’s aporia of willing. He appears to insist that there are necessary structures and norms of speech that reduce pluralism (because all actors have the same self-understanding as participants in rational procedures) and freedom (because all actors adopt common norms). Once we focus on the mimetic mode of communication, however, things look quite different. Within linguistic forms and procedures, including ones that might produce legitimate norms, laws, or decisions, there is the potential for ungovernable experiences that shape selves, constitute social solidarity, and open meaningful worlds. The use of speech to coordinate action vis-à-vis things in the world, or to engage in argumentation to assess contested validity claims, by no means eliminates mimetic achievements. They simply convert mimesis into a different form, where ordinary speech acts and procedures of argumentation can themselves function as sites of affective transformation.

I hasten to add that this does not mean that mimetic achievements have priority over communicative rationality. We need not follow Zerilli’s argument that world-opening and subject-forming experiences and practices are prior to procedures of rational will-formation. The point, rather, is that Habermas’s account of mimesis in communication obviates the question of priority. Here we can return to claim (2), that mimetic achievements occur in cognitively comprehensible forms. Communication can be affective, meaningful, and transforming, and it retains an anarchistic core that can be noncompliant with procedure. However, because mimetic achievements occur in linguistic form, they retain a “rational core.” Actors do not wholly “lose themselves” or their integrity; their mimetic achievements draw on, reproduce, or reinterpret the historically saturated roles, symbols, and structures of the lifeworld. Habermas’s wager is, then, that “the everyday mimesis in communication can carry the power of entrancement without the trance,” as Miller puts it (59). By way of conclusion, I argue that this bet pays off.

The Rational Core of Mimetic Achievements

The question of how to understand the relationship between politics and aesthetics underwrites many debates in political theory. Most theorists treat aesthetic practices and experiences as a threat to good politics. This is explicit in the worries about “post-truth” politics, the claim that citizens of contemporary democracies have lost the ability to distinguish truth from falsity, or that they no longer care about truth as a value. The result is that truth gets replaced with aesthetics: “When we give up on truth,” historian Timothy Snyder (2021) argues, “we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.” Instead of making rational decisions based on evidence, we get decisions based on feelings, charismatic authority, or partisan identifications. Responses to this worry vary, but they usually involve some combination of a philosophical effort to distinguish between rational decision-making and aesthetic seduction, and a political effort to shield the former from the latter. One restricts aesthetic experiences and practices to the domain of art, or one redirects them toward “safe” objects, where actors affectively identify with constitutional principles, as opposed to charismatic leaders or “tribal” identities. ⁸

For those operating in the so-called aesthetic turn in political theory (cf. Kompridis 2014), by contrast, reason—including Habermas’s conception of a proceduralized communicative reason—is held complicit with forms of exclusion and authoritarian commands. The theoretical response is to valorize aestheticized experiences of aporia, liminality, ambiguity, and excess as ways to resist reason’s closures, calculations, and formulas. It is through aesthetic experiences, as opposed to explicit and transparent practices of reason giving, that actors can introduce novelty, dissent, and pluralism into the political world. This, in turn, often sustains antiprocedural and antistatist modes of politics, where the goal is to disrupt sclerotic, exclusionary, and domineering laws, institutions, and practices, as opposed to generating legitimate ones. These themes emerge in a variety of theoretical approaches, including Zerilli’s account of judging, Honig’s (2001, 2013) suggestion that reinterpreting cultural narratives is an integral part of democratic politics, Jacques Rancière’s (1999) conception of politics involves the invention of subjects, spaces, and perceptions that have no “place” within the existing order of sense, and Davide Panagia’s (2009, 2016) celebration of the subject-disforming character of aesthetic experiences as valuable interruptions of dominant sensory orders. Perhaps its purest form is the Levinas-inspired ethics of infinite responsibility, where ethics involves an inarticulable and nondischargeable responsibility to an indeterminable otherness. Here ethics does not so much involve the identification and fulfillment of one’s obligations to others, but instead the experience of aporia or an aestheticized openness to the uncanniness of the other (cf. Derrida 1995, 68ff; see also Derrida 2001 and Coles 1997, 2000).

Participants in these debates nearly always position Habermas as a partisan of the former approach. There is good reason for this. Throughout his work, Habermas presents himself that way. He privileges constitutionally organized deliberative procedures as the key to democratic politics, and he defends reason giving, transparency, and explicit normativity as the values by which one pays due respect to others. In his (1987) polemics against “postmodernism,” he adopts a suspicious or even hostile attitude toward aesthetic experiences and practices. Keen to distinguish rational decision-making from aesthetic seduction, Habermas’s “official” account quarantines aesthetic practices and experiences within the specialized domain of art and art criticism, and he casts the world-disclosing uses of language as derivative from the “normal” use of language to solve problems and come to agreements on validity claims (especially claims to truth and normative rightness) (1987, 185ff). These attitudes, it seems, are part of his defense of the “project of enlightenment.” On his account, the path to emancipation runs through the critical faculties at work in rational procedures of argumentation, as opposed to aesthetic experiences of liminality, ambiguity, aporia, and excess.

The argument I have presented here significantly complicates this story. I have claimed that Habermas does not defend communicative reason against aesthetic mimesis. He overcomes the conceptual opposition between the two. Even the most formal and rational communicative procedure depends upon mimetic achievements, wherein participants point to something in the world while simultaneously establishing “an intersubjective connection between viewpoints” (Habermas 2017, 33). It is through mimetic achievements that participants in procedures of opinion- and will-formation come to experience themselves and others as participants, as enacting the roles of ego, alter, and the third person. Yet because these mimetic achievements occur in linguistic form, the aesthetic experiences they produce should not be understood as irrational enchantment, nor do they simply explode, interrupt, or deform rational subjectivity. The reverse is closer to the truth: mimetic achievements in language create the social roles and the rules of role-switching by which communication occurs, and they stamp those roles and rules onto communicative actors. Role-switching, and the rules of the game immanent in it, is what we are, or as Miller more aptly puts it, it is how we are as rational beings (Miller 2011, 106). The practice of role-switching has rules and structures, and these enable communicative actors to think through mimetic achievements, to reflect upon, articulate, and assess them. The capacity for critical reflection emerges not from standing “outside” of aesthetic practices and experiences, but precisely within them. Habermas’s position, therefore, comes quite close to Walter Benjamin’s description of the “progressive reaction” toward film, where there is a “direct intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert” (2007, 234; also quoted in Duvenage 2003, 48; see also Miller, chapter 4). In Habermas, the play of role-switching becomes intimately fused with the orientation of the observer/critic.

Habermas argues that “the moment of unconditionality that is preserved in the discursive concepts of a fallibilistic truth and morality is not an absolute, or it is at most an absolute that has become fluid as a critical procedure” (1994, 144). In light of my argument, this means two things. First, Habermas’s communicative account of reason does not derive from a noetic insight into an unchanging and unconditional moral order; it only redescribes the critical testing procedures that actors already use, a description that is itself fallibilistic and subject to critique. ⁹ Second, it means that the moment of unconditionality—the communicative rules, roles, and structures of communication—is invented and in flux in communicative performances, including his own theorizing. In developing a postmetaphysical position, Habermas cannot present the “moment of unconditionality” that operates in communication as existing a priori. It must be created anew in each communicative encounter (cf. Miller 2011, 65).

This is precisely what Habermas aims to do in his account of constitutional democracy and how it can be realized under modern conditions. He reinterprets previous mimetic achievements in order to channel communicative power into liberal democratic procedures. As mimetic achievements, the discourses Habermas reconstructs are fluid, but his reconstructions pick out their egalitarian and pluralistic potentials. He does so in order to produce fresh mimetic achievements of his own; as a communicative action, a rational reconstruction aims to establish intersubjective relations, soliciting others take up its perspective and enact egalitarian and pluralistic practices in the present. Habermas’s rational reconstruction, in sum, mimetically fuses the (potential) production of communicative power to a specifically democratic vision, that of a reflexive political procedure. I cannot assess the value of this normative vision here. ¹⁰ My point is simply to emphasize the contingency and politicality of the project. It is not, as Zerilli suggests, an ideal theory invented in an “academic laboratory.” It is precisely the kind of “substantive public vision” that Zerilli calls for, one that could become part of “objective worldly reality” (Zerilli 2016, 281), but only if others take up its perspective as their own. Habermas’s democratic vision becomes part of the world in much the same way the utopian aspects of modern art do: not through speech norms that are already “there,” but through creative articulations that might find resonance within the mimetic relations of everyday intersubjectivity.

This is the promise of Habermas’s sublation of reason and mimesis, or willing and judging. Guided by its insight, we can explore the creative power of communication and its ability to (re-)create subjectivities, worldly objects, and intersubjective bonds, and how it might be channeled into reflexive procedures of opinion- and will-formation. Theorists can therefore go beyond “justifying” principles of liberal democracy to examine how to articulate those principles in ways that might resonate with or produce new intersubjective encounters and shared experiences. They can also go beyond the “radical” critiques of modern reason and proceduralism, in which reason and procedure become complicit authoritarian closures or even the horrors of the twentieth century, and that must be interrupted by incomprehensible aesthetic experiences. With the figure of mimesis, Habermas builds an otherness into communicative reason, but communicative reason also makes that otherness determinate and thinkable, at least in retrospect. Instead of a critique of reason and proceduralism in the name of an aestheticized and indeterminate otherness, we get a critique of particular expressions of reason and proceduralism, performed in the name of determinable counterworlds invented in identifiable speech acts (cf. Mackin 2016). There is a radical hope in this account: not so much that communication can generate rationally acceptable truths and norms, but that it can generate a world in which procedures, truths, and norms become meaningful. When this happens, people can be motivated to adhere to—and dissent from—political projects and the worlds they invoke. And they might remain open to worlds and moral images that transcend the current ability to perceive them.