Yes—what you’ve written is a clear and nuanced synthesis of Habermas’ distinction between communicative action and strategic action, and how it relates to speech act theory. Let me expand and sharpen a few points, both to affirm your framing and deepen it.
🧩 1. Strategic Action as Distorted Communication
Habermas identifies strategic action as communication used instrumentally, where language is not a medium of understanding, but a tool to achieve aims—whether consciously or unconsciously.
There are two primary modes:
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Unconscious strategic action: Often arises from ideology, bias, or cultural conditioning. It doesn’t necessarily intend to deceive, but operates through false transparency—presenting norms or power structures as if they were neutral or universally valid. This is closely linked to what Gramsci would call hegemony, or Bourdieu's doxa—that which is so deeply embedded it goes without saying.
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Conscious strategic action: Here, one party uses communication to manipulate, persuade, or coerce without the other’s informed participation. It’s perlocutionary in Austin's sense—aimed at producing effects (fear, belief, action) regardless of mutual understanding.
🔍 2. Speech Acts and Power
You're right to tie this to John Austin’s theory of speech acts:
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Locution: the act of saying something
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Illocution: the intended function of the utterance (e.g., warning, promising)
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Perlocution: the effect the utterance has on the listener (e.g., scaring them, persuading them)
In ideal discourse, illocution and perlocution align under conditions of sincerity, shared understanding, and openness. But in strategic action, perlocution becomes the dominant frame—the aim is to provoke an effect, even if the illocution is masked or dishonest. Hence: “There’s a snake under you” may sound like a warning, but could actually be a manipulation if it’s false and said to scare you away from something.
🧱 3. Ideology and 'Common Sense'
You aptly highlight how ideology functions as a distortion of communication by embedding itself into the "naturalized" assumptions of common sense. This is what Habermas calls systematically distorted communication—a condition where the communicative infrastructure is itself compromised by structural domination.
Thus, strategic action becomes structural, not just interpersonal. For instance:
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A clinician may unknowingly reproduce institutional ableism while thinking they are offering help.
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A nonprofit may frame its work in “empowerment” rhetoric while excluding any real participation or self-determination by those it serves.
The perlocutionary effects of these utterances may be internalized, normalized, or resisted, but the crucial point is that the dialogic ground is uneven before anyone even speaks.
🧠 4. Why This Matters
Habermas’ interest in communicative rationality was political: to envision a space of undistorted dialogue, where legitimacy is earned through intersubjective agreement, not manipulation or force. This is the normative ideal behind his discourse ethics.
He wasn't naïve about the rarity of ideal conditions—but believed that critique could be guided by the counterfactual ideal of mutual understanding.
In contrast, strategic action colonizes the lifeworld (his term), replacing mutual understanding with performance, branding, outcomes, and metrics—especially relevant in nonprofits, academia, and bureaucracies today.
🎯 Summary
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Strategic action = communication as manipulation (intentional or ideological)
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Communicative action = communication as mutual understanding
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Perlocution = effect on listener (often hidden or strategic)
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Illocution = overt purpose of speech (e.g., request, promise)
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Systematically distorted communication = when ideology/power shapes language so deeply that misunderstanding becomes normalized
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