It is twenty-five years since Jurgen Habermas published his "Theory of Communicative Action." Colin B. Grant shares the same commitment to a philosophical theory of communication but issues a range of challenges to Habermas' magnum opus. "Uncertainty and Communication" mounts a critique of theories of dialogism and intersubjectivity, proposes a radical rethinking of the communicating subject in society and explores the new contingencies of culture and media in our interconnected global communication system.

Compared with other human and social sciences, communication theory appears to be of recent origin. Appearances deceive, however, for the antecedents of this growing field of work can be found in the classic philosophical treatises of western and non-western thinkers including Plato, Sextus Empiricus and Laozi, reaching forward through the theolinguistic tradition of St Augustine, Boethius, Averroes and Ockham before arriving at the modern age. Following Wittgenstein's linguistic turn and Husserl's phenomenology in the early decades of the twentieth century, we arrive at the fertile plains of semiotics, information theory, pragmatics and dialogism out of which communication theory has grown. And yet an unresolved and historically non-coincidental tension remains between the implicit transcendental claims of much of communication theory and our experiences of risk, uncertainty and dissolution in what Zygmunt Bauman has described as our 'liquid age'. As communication theory matures, it is an opportune moment to reflect on what form a detranscendentalised theory of communication might take. In bringing intentions, understandings, meanings and interactions down to earth this book invites its readers to account for the complex communications between communications, actors and social processes without recourse to transcendental theories of understanding.

Sharing a commitment to the theory of communication to Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action , Grant here issues a range of challenges to it. He critiques theories of dialogism and intersubjectivity, proposes a rethinking of the communicating subject in society and explores the new contingencies of culture and media in today's world.

The explicit ambition of this collection is to move 'beyond' the Universal Pragmatics of Jurgen Habermas. It is without doubt an ambitious programme whose architect has led since the 1960s a series of reflections on the rational potential of western society from the Enlightenment to the present. However, this theoretical emphasis on the irreducibility of the rational content of debate cannot avoid abstracting communicative universals from the empirical communication practices which are always embedded in multiple contexts of discourse, identity, media and institutions. This tension in Habermas's oeuvre has developed an antagonistic potential. An example of this antagonism can be seen in the distorting effects of a normative theory of communication whose very normativity means turning a blind eye to a history of social communication. For example, Habermas infamously neglects the constitutive role played by the media in constructions of what is held to be 'public' and even his more recent revisions do not resolve this dilemma. The nine contributions in this volume from the fields of psychology, politics, media, epistemology and aesthetics set out to move beyond the influence of communicative universals and propose alternative approaches to the challenge of reconciling autonomy, interaction and social organisation.