do the boundaries of a Habermasian communications theory lie therein?
The boundaries of Habermas communications theory are connected with his individual media ecology, as well as with certain constraints of professionalized academic philosophy and furthermore with a bunch of cultural-historical configurations of the modern media world. The adherence to the philosophical quest for a transcendental certainty, the praise of the analytic and scientific perspective of the observer as prior to the transformative and designing perspective of the participant or the bias towards the linguistic forms of rationality in contrast to non-verbal media: these constraints are stable pillars of Habermas’ philosophy, but at the same time they also mark some of the problematic limits of his approach from my point of view as a pragmatist media philosopher. Within the Frankfurt School there are attempts to go beyond Habermas fixation on language as being the distinguished media of communicative reason. Matthias Vogel has gone the farthest. In his book Medien der Vernunft (Med
