6.6.9. Instrumental and Co-operative Communication
By domination we mean social relations, in which one group controls and uses resources and exerts physical, structural or ideological violence in such a way that it derives benefits for one group at the expense of others. Domination can result in economic privileges through labour exploitation, political privileges through control, cultural privileges through ideological dominance. We can therefore distinguish between the accumulation of economic resource-power, political decision-power and cultural definition power as forms of economic, political and cultural domination. Domination is based on instrumental rationality and instrumental communication: dominative social relations are organised in such a way that one group instrumentalises others. Exploitation, control, manipulation, and exclusion are expressions of instrumental rationality. Instrumental communication is communication based on instrumental rationality. Co-operative rationality is opposed to the dominative logic of instrumental rationality. It does not aim at creating, reproducing or deepening domination. Its goal is social relations that transcend domination and create contexts that allow all humans to benefit and lead a good life. Co-operative rationality aims politically at participatory democracy, whereas instrumental rationality in the last instance means fascism. Co-operative communication is communication that is based in cooperative rationality.
The history of class-based societies is also a history of the clash between instrumental and co-operative rationality. Whereas dominant groups aim to find ever newer ways of how to instrumentalise humans in their interests and how to communicate such domination as ideological necessary, inevitable and without alternatives, dominated groups have the potential to resist, to self-organise alternatives that challenge instrumental rationality by embryonic forms and social systems of co-operation and to collectively communicate their opposition and the need for a society grounded in co-operative rationality.
Beyond Habermas: Rethinking Critical Theories of Communication
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