> frameworks is remarkable. What is unmistakable is that Habermas's model of
> communication will likely be *the* model for sociological and critical
> theoretical work for a long time to come. Why? Because it provides
> diagnostic tools and a conceptual apparatus that, until now, has been
> unavailable to social theorists.
If only. Any theory of communication which completely lacks *any* notion of aesthetics, of communicative content, as it were, will run aground on its own formalism. It's like trying to figure out how video cards work by analyzing the packaging on the box; you might get glimpses of interesting things, but if you don't work through what Adorno calls experience-content, you end up with a bunch of pre-dialectical observations that a whole lot of stuff is being communicated out there, somewhere (which ties in to the fact that Habermas is appallingly clueless about Adorno, especially Adorno's last, greatest works). Habermas' communicative rationalism is the Central European flip side of Derrida's telecommunicatory idealism; both have interesting things to say about certain local features of Eurocapital, but don't give us anything approaching Bourdieu's global habitus and field, e.g.
-- Dennis