debased discourses, and which may therefore furnish a norm or regulative model for the critical assessment of them. ³²

The ideal speech situation would be one entirely free of domination, in which all participants would have symmetrically equal chances to select and deploy speech acts. Persuasion would depend on the force of the better argument alone, not on rhetoric, authority, coercive sanctions, and so on. This model is no more than a heuristic device or necessary fiction, but it is in some sense implicit even so in our ordinary, unregenerate verbal dealings. All language, even of a dominative kind, is in Habermas's view inherently orientated to communication, and thus tacitly towards human consensus: even when I curse you I expect to be understood, otherwise why should I waste my breath? Our most despotic speech acts betray, despite themselves, the frail outlines of a communicative rationality: in making an utterance a speaker implicitly claims that what she says is intelligible, true, sincere and appropriate to the discursive situation. (Quite how this applies to such speech acts as jokes, poems and shouts of glee is not so apparent.) There is, in other words, a kind of 'deep' rationality built into the very structures of our language, regardless of what we actually say; and it is this which provides Habermas with the basis for a critique of our actual verbal practices. In a curious sense, the very act of enunciation can become a normative judgement on what is enunciated.

Habermas holds to a 'consensus' rather than 'correspondence' theory of truth, which is to say that he thinks truth less some adequation between mind and world than a question of the kind of assertion which everyone who could enter into unconstrained dialogue with the speaker would come to accept. But social and ideological domination currently prohibit such unconstrained communication; and until we can transform this situation (which for Habermas would mean fashioning a participatory socialist democracy), truth is bound to be, as it were, deferred. If we want to know the truth, we have to change our political form of life. Truth is thus deeply bound up with social justice: my truth claims refer themselves forward to some altered social condition where they might be 'redeemed'. It is thus that Habermas is able to observe that 'the truth of statements is linked in the last analysis to the intention of the good and the true life'. ³³

There is an important difference between this style of thought and that of the more senior members of the Frankfurt School. For them, as we have seen, society as it exists seems wholly reified and degraded, sinisterly successful in its capacity to 'administer' contradictions out of existence. This gloomy vision does not prevent them from discerning some ideal alternative to it, of the kind that Adorno discovers in modernist art; but it is an alternative with scant foundation in the given

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