Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech. Naturally, speech and understanding are not related to one another as means to end. But we can explain the concept of reaching understanding only if we specify what it means to use sentences with a communicative intent. The concepts of speech and understanding reciprocally interpret one another (Habermas 1984a, 287).
Habermas does not deny that money and power are forms of communication. He however sees them as alienated media of communication that colonize, delinguistify, control, steer, dominate, replace and curtail authentic communicative action in the lifeworld and thereby create social pathologies:
The transfer of action coordination from language over to steering media means an uncoupling of interaction from lifeworld contexts. Media such as money and power attach to empirical ties; they encode a purposive-rational attitude toward calculable amounts of value and make it possible to exert generalized, strategic influence on the decisions of other participants while bypassing processes of consensus-oriented communication (Habermas 1987, 183).6
Teleological-purposive action (as in labour or exchange) could also take place through language, but language would only be authentic in communicative action:
The teleological model of action takes language as one of several media through which speakers oriented to their own success can influence one another in order to bring opponents to form or to grasp beliefs and intentions that are in the speakers’ own interest. […] Only the communicative model of action presupposes language as a medium of uncurtailed communication whereby speakers and hearers, out of the context of their preinterpreted lifeworld, refer simultaneously to things in the objective, social, and subjective worlds in order to negotiate common definitions of the situation (Habermas 1984a, 95).
The concept of communicative action presupposes language as the medium for a kind of reaching understanding, in the course of which participants, through relating to a world, reciprocally raise validity claims that can be accepted or contested (Habermas 1984a, 99).
So in these formulations it becomes again evident that, for Habermas, language and linguistic communication are authentic forms of social relations that he considers to be expressions of the normative good and potentials for a good society.
Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication
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