Lecture 12: On Resistance, Iran, Normative Questions and Critique

7. We have already seen that he was much occupied with the question of rethinking its meaning. Revolution is quite vital to his notion of social change because it ensures that no power, however apparently irresistible, is beyond resistance and revolt. In this sense, the possibility of revolution is the guarantee of transgressions that break existing institutions, moulds, constraining and limiting shapes and values. Foucault went to Iran twice in 1978 both immediately before and then later to report on the uprising against the Shah. There he found confirmation of his ideas on resistance, “of the timeless drama in which power is always accursed” and of the fact that the modern understanding of revolution, that rationalised it into a lawful and controllable history, was in fact the colonisation by Realpolitik of an inexplicable, and therefore, truly historical event. He even continued to publicly support the revolution in the press even after its fundamentalist character became clear and the theocracy began murdering and persecuting its opponents.

8. His justification of this stand is very revealing. Essentially he breaks the Iranian revolution into two realities. Most important to him is the revolt itself. Here is manifest the beauty of a collective will that is, for him, bent not just on a change of regime but on radically changing itself, its relations to things, others with eternity and God. This is the process of self-transformation he spoke of in relation to the Enlightenment but in a less conscious form. Interestingly, here Foucault speaks of the peoples uprising as ‘the self introduction of a subjectivity (not that of great men, but that of a people) into history and life”. For Foucault, this radical will to change an entire way of life is the truly beautiful and memorable aspect of the revolution. It reaffirms that the human spirit is beyond even the most formidable power and beyond all calculation. He is not particularly concerned that this spiritual determination found its sources in Islam. Shi'ite Islam is simply the occasion for the expression of something deeper. The capacity to revolt, to overturn the thread of history, to risk death is the fundamental anchorage of liberty: it is a human potential that cannot be explained. It must simply be accepted because there are revolts, sometimes, as in the Iranian case, against all the odds. The other level of the revolution is politics: this is the domain where the “will is multiple, hesitant, confused and obscure even to itself”; this is the domain of alliance, compromise and the deal. Despite his enthusiasm for the revolution, Foucault was also a defender of human rights and did challenge the new regime (unsuccessfully) to live up to its absolute ethical responsibilities and ensure that its justice was open and transparent. But Foucault’s division of the revolution into these two realities reveals a degree of political romanticism in his thinking. He aligns himself with the insurrection by bare hands of whose who want “to lift the fearful weight of the entire world order” that he says, “bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them” (F&IR, p. 222) Although Foucault affirms the inevitability of resistance, the revolutionary romanticism of his account is hardly reassuring. Furthermore, for Foucault, resistance and revolt are mere limit concepts, the other of power. They signify the undifferentiated will of the oppressed that in its very unanimity is volatile, amorphous and therefore necessarily unpolitical.

9. For Foucault, the phenomenon of revolt is a touchstone of hope, optimism, the dignity of primeval freedom expressed in the act of transgression. However, given his uncompromising repudiation of humanism, all we have is a glimmer called “resistance” that carries a heavy emancipatory load but without any real normative credentials. Despite this romantic affirmation of the irrepressible character of resistance, Foucault almost immediately reasserts his sceptical guard in the expectation that even successful revolt that becomes revolutionary change will ossify and become another inhibition to liberty and barrier to transgression. Yet, it is hard to know how Foucault succeeds in distinguishing power from resistance: without normative credentials it would seem that resistance is in danger of being viewed as just another strategy of power.

10. We have seen that Foucault repeatedly stressed the political character of his own work. He understands his genealogies as anti-sciences that attempt to remarshal the buried memories of conflict and the disqualified singular and local knowledges of the subjugated as a political/ideological challenge to the orthodox monopoly on scientificity, the existing regime of truth. This self-understanding is entirely in keeping with his idea of the specific intellectual who foregoes the universalising task of speaking the "truth" from above the contest, on behalf of mankind. Foucault offers knowledges that claim not truth, but, as we have seen, problemisation. He tells us:

The discourse that deciphers war’s permanent presence within society is essentially a historic-political discourse, a discourse in which truth functions as a weapon to be used for a partisan victory, a discourse that is darkly critical and at the same time intensely mythical. (SMD?)

Even the very one-dimensionality of his vision of modernity as the carceral society in Discipline and Punish (1976) can be explained as a rhetorical device designed to motivate "pessimistic activism" and the cause of the subjugated. An image of the depth of crisis generates action. However, Foucault's explicit political self-understanding is supposedly bracketed from his genealogies. He claims to avoid the pitfalls of humanism by methodologically excluding subjective meanings, of identification with subjects or struggles. Such identification would signify a capitulation to the values of the enlightenment that already stand impeached on the charge of complicity in subjugation and oppression. Only extreme caution allows the committed philosopher to avoid legitimating particular regimes of truth and the spectre of substitutionalism (the posture of the universalising intellectual who purports to speak for the oppressed and define their interests). Foucault repudiates identification as a refusal to join some new regime of power/knowledge. Yet, Foucault was not always consistently sceptical of normative claims. As I mentioned, in his last years he involved himself in a number of much publicised human rights campaigns such as support for the Vietnamese boat people and the Polish Trade Union Solidarity and even wrote in favour of human rights. Foucault employed "rights talk" but was reluctant to connect it to national or post national political or legal arrangements. In keeping with his stress on “not be governed too much” he wanted to rely instead on the international public sphere and of civic organisations to monitor rights rather than the state. His general scepticism in regard to power sees him puts more faith in unregulated civic action than in agreements guaranteed by authorities, in attempting to construct postnational legal and political architecture.

11. But on what basis can Foucault advocate resistance to domination or why prefer struggle to submission? Clearly he has political sympathies yet how, on the basis of his own theory, can he distinguish between the forces of oppression and domination and those oppressed and dominated? By relinquishing the option of a normative foundation, Foucault may escape the totalising logic of the form of life and the type of theoretical discourse he finds complicit in a range of normalising practices. But, without normative criteria, the social critic seems to disempower his/her own critique. Not only is the critic unable to articulate the forms of "otherness" or of action that diminish the inegalitarian logic of strategic power relations, but he/she also becomes an indifferent alien merely bearing witness to the ceaseless, meaningless rotations of domination and resistance. The critics of Foucault's strategy argue that he deprives the modern rebel of any institutional or normative resources for constituting him/herself in terms other than those already provided by the prevailing dominant regimes. The difficulty of his position is exemplified by his later reversion to "rights talk". He affirms rights but is unwilling to anchor it in political or legal authority; it is supposed to float freely supported only by the international public sphere and opinion. Foucault’s defenders, on the other hand, argue that his critique of modern humanism amounts to a rejection of traditional normativity. The best defence along these lines comes from Thomas Lemke. He argues that to focus on the question of norms and normativity is to miss the decisive characteristic of Foucault’s work. That is to see normativity as not outside the historical field of investigation. Norms are less a starting point than an object of an analysis and the result of conflict. Thus Foucault’s alleged weakness is a strength because it allows him to articulate the critique of the juridical model at the theoretical level by placing in question the orthodoxies of political thought and leftist critique that constrain the imagining of political alternatives; it rejects the proposition that every political intervention must compulsorily bind itself to a proof of justification by taking a position in an already fixed political system. Against this, Foucault is allegedly in the business of imagining and bringing into existence new schemas of politicisation. (Lemke, T. Constellations Vol 10 no 2, pp174/75). While I find this a very plausible and consistent reading of Foucault’s theoretical intentions, it does beg vital theoretico-practical issues. One doesn’t have to argue that norms can be outside the historical field of investigation and conflict to insist that we still need normative orientation. What stops leftist political engagement degenerating into nihilism or positivism if it has no normative orientation. It is not necessary to cease reflecting upon operative norms and testing them against their practical consequences while employing them as critical standards. On the other hand, to abandon all normative orientation leaves the critique with no other compass than the theorist’s own moral and political sensibilities. And we know that these are not always so finely tuned.

12. It is interesting that Foucault himself continued to think about these issues right up to his death. In his 1982/83 lectures at the College that were published in English as The Government of Self and Others only a couple of years ago he addresses the normative question in the explicit context of political democracy and the essential importance of Parresia or truth telling. The specific context is a discussion of Periclean democracy and the role of the political leader. The term “Parresia” connotes the courage to speak truthfully or frankly. For Foucault, this means more than a formal right granted to every citizen of a democracy that the Greeks termed “isegoria”. Characteristically, Foucault is less concerned with formal understandings of institutions and their practices than with the social reality of their actual operation. While all in a democracy may have the formal right to speak, he is interested in the question of who does speak. And this is where the virtue or the courage for fearless speech or truth telling comes to the fore. Beyond formal equality is a struggle about who is to speak and exercise influence, an also, the Tocquevillean question of how is the quality of public discussion to be preserved against the democratic possibility of the “tyranny of the majority”. To articulate these issues Foucault locates his discussion of Parresia in what he calls a rectangular field of competing values. At one corner is democracy in the sense of the formal equality he associated with the value of isegoria. In another corner is ascendency, or the struggle for priority and influence in the actual hurly burly of real democracy. A third corner is occupied by the explicitly normative value of truth that guards against the reduction of democratic politics to the tyranny of the majority opinion, while the final corner is occupied by risk as the empirical reality of the uncertainty and contingency of real political outcomes and the need for courage to confront such risks and the value of real political leadership in fearlessly pursuing truth telling in conditions where this may not be popular or risk free. The point to be made about this rectangle or force-field of conflicting pressures is that Foucault does not want to eliminate the question of normativity from the theoretical discussion of politics but he does want to view it in tension with the other ingredients of the political field. For him the normative question can neither lie outside the terrain of legitimate inquiry and critique and nor should it be isolated from the other factors that constitute the absolute singularity of the specific event.  

13. It is clear that Foucault sees his task as to bring into question conventional normativity. This is also clear in other dimensions of his later work where he explores the idea of a non-normalising reconceptualisation of normativity associated with the idea of the care of the self within the paradigm of “governmentality” I spoke of a while ago. The key to this later model is that it obviates the requirement that the individual conform to a code of behaviour and thus engage in the repressive practices of self-sacrifice associated with Christianity. As Foucault tells us in his late lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981/2), “ in the mind of a Roman or a Greek, neither obedience to the rule nor mere obedience can constitute a beautiful work. A beautiful work is one that conforms to the idea of a certain forma (a certain style, a certain from of life) (H of S, p424). And this followed from the fact that neither the nomos of the city -state nor its religion, its political structures or the form of law could dictate what a citizen must do concretely throughout their life (H of S, p447). For Foucault such an ethics eliminates the externally prescriptive and regulatory modality of ethics by turning to an aesthetics of living where the ethical is focused primarily on the relation the self has to itself. Foucault finds the paradigm of the care of the self in Plato and more generally in classical society. On his reading, the moral problem is converted into the practice of liberty, the art of individual self-caring or self-formation. This process of self-cultivation requires the guide, friend, the master, the election of cultural patterns belonging to society and social groups. So it would be a mistake to understand this process of self-constitution as solely a self-self relation: it is a historically constituted social relation still implying inter-subjective relations of power. While it is clear that Foucault understands the historical conditioned character of this model, he still wants to insist that this is a positive model of active subjectivisation that gives ontological priority to self-care. But the practices involved in this are not those of knowledge per se but for the subject’s very being. This emphasis on spirituality implies that the truth is never given to the subject by right, it is not an act of knowledge but of transformation and that the truth is only given at the price of bringing the subject’s being into play: that is, there can be no truth without the transformation of the subject (H of S, p15) The whole point of this excursus into a positive notion of subjectivity as “care of the self’ is to demonstrate that contemporary notions of subjectivity are historical constructs, that there are alternative models that provide cultural resources that might assist us to avoid the problems of prescription, self-sacrifice and normalisation identified as deficits in later forms of the history of subjectivity.

13. Foucault has provided us with important critical insights into modernity. He has reminded us that although existing institutions speak a language of "rights" and mouth the principles of human dignity, public pronouncements can disguise a practice of unacknowledged administrative violence. However great the advances of democratisation and public scrutiny of administrative functioning, this not only does not always constrain arbitrary power nor generate a kind of power different from administrative control. Democracy and its administrative machinery have often been complicit in disguising and masking various normalising and marginalising practices and oppressions. He warns against the increasingly pervasive social surveillance exemplified in the growing incursions of "welfare" and security instrumentalities. He shows how the double idioms of law and medicine perform a duet that softens our reaction to administrative violence and lulls us into the political rationality of the carcarel continuum. He has revealed that, despite its advantages, the new reign of publicity means that all of society either directly or vicariously takes over the role of judge or engages in normalising judgements.

14. Yet, isn’t it possible to take all these important insights on board without sacrificing explicit critical orientation. Foucault’s global scepticism of the present seems to ignore his own strictures against “global revolutionism”. In his urgency to focus on overlooked and previously unacknowledged oppressions, to “not be governed too much” or “in that way”, he purports to ignore or at least bracket the emancipatory gains achieved by the bourgeois, democratic revolutions only to emphasize their darker side and family linkages to the growing carceral and its disciplinary matrix of micro-mechanisms and techniques. Yet, Foucault's global scepticism is linked to what I would argue is a vague sort of revolutionary-anarcho-romanticism. His critical perspective does have unacknowledged normative presuppositions. As we saw in the Iran case, he extols elemental revolt as a primitive expression of emancipation and a nascent subjectivity despite its ultimate costs. But to make this explicit would be to drop the sceptical guard and accept, at least in some form, the blackmail of the enlightenment. The champion of experimentation and testing limits is not prepared to concede this. But to my mind concessions to the transgressive imagination have to be balanced by both an acknowledgement of where the critic him/self stands and a sense of political responsibility.

Critical Theory Take-Home Exam 2015

DUE DATE: Mon 9^th Nov

Answer any two questions (1, 250 words each).

Submission

Please submit via Turnitin. The Take-Home exams will not be returned and late take-home exams will normally not be accepted. All extension queries address to the coursegiver (email: John.Grumley@sydney.edu.au)

QUESTIONS

     1.   Compare and contrast Hegel’s account of the role of philosophy in the Preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right with Adorno’s account in Marginalia to Theory and Praxis. Who has the most adequate account?

    2.   Compare and contrast the ways in which Habermas and Foucault consider the practical dimension of philosophy. Who has the most adequate account form a contemporary perspective?

    3.   Compare Marx’s account of praxis in the Theses on Feuerbach with Adorno’s critique of it in Marginalia to Theory and Praxis. Who has the strongest position and why? (Students who have attempted Q1 on this paper should not do this question as well)

    4. Compare Adorno’s account of reason in ‘Notes and Sketches’ from Dialectic of Enlightenment with Habermas’s account of enlightenment in Modernity Versus Postmodernity. Who gives the most adequate account and why?

    5. In his account of the relationship between theory and practice Habermas sees a vital role for philosophy. What is this role and what do you imagine Marx would think of this reevaluation? Is Habermas justified?

        6. In the German Ideology Marx gives the division of labour a central role in his account of historical materialism. Specialisation also plays a large part in Habermas’s account of the changed cultural context of philosophy in The Relation Between Theory and Praxis Revisited. Compare and contrast these two analyses. Are they that different? And if so, why?

    7. Habermas views modernity as an “incomplete project” of Enlightenment rationality whereas Foucault counsels us not to accept the “blackmail” of the Enlightenment. Are these alternative stances a question of style or substance? Explain the alternative positions and suggest who is more convincing and why?

     8. Compare and contrast the accounts of the uses of suffering in Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and Benjamin’s Thesis on the Philosophy of History? Who do you think give the most potent account and why?

Lecture 11: Foucault (cont) & Knowledge, Power, Resistance, the “Care of the Self” and the Problem of Normativity

 

5. For the early Foucault, subjectification is a process aimed at generating obedient subjects principally characterised by their malleability and permeability to disciplinary mechanisms. The Enlightenment version is especially oppressive because it coincides with the new more pervasive regime of rationalisation and the disciplinary modalities of power.

6. This is not to say that Foucault is simply a critic of the enlightenment: far from it. Although he believes we need to escape from the illusions tied to the above idea of a universal foundational subject, he also views Enlightenment as the basis for a new understanding of the task of philosophy. From him, this ambiguity is already at the very centre of the Kantian project. For Foucault, Kant is the founder of two great traditions in modern philosophy. The first associated the three critiques, concerns the exploration of modern scientific rationality and especially the conditions under which true knowledge is possible. It is this project that developed the idea of the transcendental subject as the abstract, logical foundation from all knowledge and morality. This is the model that Foucault now rejects. However, some of Kant’s occasional essays offer another philosophical project. In Kant this assumes a form that was primarily concerned with the immediate present, with the question of our actuality. (PT, 94) This second version of the task of modern philosophy comes to the centre in the late Foucault as the basis of his own final understanding of philosophy and of his interpretation of critique that had its origins in the ancient tradition of philosophy as the “care of the self’ that since Christianity and especially the scientific revolution had been marginalised within the Western tradition. These ideas are developed in his late lectures at the College and a number of then contemporary essays, the most important of which is ‘What is Enlightenment?’

7. Here Foucault reflects on Kant’s famous contemporary attempt to explain the general cultural significance of the enlightenment. But he uses these ideas as the basis for formulating his own contemporary vision. Firstly, Foucault underlines the centrality of the Enlightenment. As he sees it, modern philosophy itself can be viewed as an attempt to answer the question: What is Enlightenment? But this means that we need to rethink our traditional understanding of Enlightenment. He maintains that for Kant this is neither an historical era nor the dawning of an accomplishment or an effort to locate the present in a philosophy of history. Rather, Kant is primarily interested in what distinguishes the present from the past, what is different about his today. The key to this actuality, according to Foucault, was the contemporary sense both for authors and the public of being part of a process that was releasing contemporaries from an inherited status of immaturity, where they were content to accept the authority of others in the use of reason. What is involved here is a shift from the government of others to the government of the self, a fundamental modification of the pre-existing linkage between will, authority and the use of reason. In the past, the use of reason and will is subordinated to the authority of others. Foucault suggests that in the new configuration the ethical task is to wilfully assert rationality against the authority of convention and thus confirm individual autonomy. The motto of this new configuration is: Dare to know! This motto exemplifies the fact that the contemporary individual is set before a task demanding a courageous attitude. S/he can no longer be passive and obedient but must assume agency in a process of personal change. S/he will only escape immaturity if they assume responsibility for him/herself and become the agents of their own self-transformation. It should be underlined that Foucault is not just describing the process of “enlightenment”, he is prescribing what is required for maturity to be attained. We could say that he views this process in dialectical terms: he makes it clear that men are at once both elements and agents within this process.  It is not purely incidental that its was the historical actors of this time that recognised their own epoch as that of “enlightenment”. It is worth noting here that Foucault now explicitly repudiates the simple dichotomy that characterised his earlier rejection of the phenomenological subject and emphasised structuralist determination. The contemporary individual occupies both positions in the polarity as both conditioned and agent. However, this latter must also not be viewed in teleological terms but as completely open-ended. That he characterises this as a “way out” underlines the indeterminacy that surrounds it. Foucault emphasises experimentation of the limits, as a possible transgression and expression of the creative potential and freedom of the individual but not as a teleological endpoint.

8. In keeping with this dialectical conception, the obligation to escape immaturity has both an ethical and political dimension. To distinguish between these dimensions requires that a distinction be made between private and public uses of reason. Kant renders this distinction in terms that are the opposite of contemporary usage. For him, the distinction does not apply to a ream of things but to uses. The private use of reason is a submissive one where the context renders the agent a mere cog in a machine. In such a private context, the appropriate usage involves obedience to the dictates and requirements externally imposed. On the other hand, the public use of reason emancipates the actor from these dictates so that they reason as a rational and potentially universal being. Reasoning as a member of a rational community requires the unconstrained exercise of reason. However, the free exercise of reason involves for Kant more than the absence of any challenge to its free use. This is more than an ethical problem conceived either individually or universally. Because the individual is a political subject, the question of their free employment of reason always remains precarious. They stand before a challenge to overcome laziness and cowardice. They cannot rely on maturity being delivered to them on a plate by a sage or a philosopher. Long before his own critique of the universal intellectual who speaks for others, Foucault acknowledges that Kant had already recognised that revolutions easily turn bad and eat their children under ever new regimes of authority.  At this point this problem remains unresolved. Kant could only offer the prospect of a contract with rational despotism that delivers obedience on the part of the rational actor on condition that the dictate be in conformity with universal reason. However, as this condition is breached at least as much as it is honoured, Foucault puts a premium on the responsibility of the individual to engage in fearless speech. Parrhesia (truth telling) remains a perpetual task involving courage before political power.

9. Foucault maintains that that critique is indispensable in those moments when humanity exercises its reason without subjection to authority. This defines the conditions under which the use of reason is legitimate. He locates critique at the outer limits of philosophy, very close to it, up against it, at its expense (PT. p.42). This is a very interesting formulation. It indicates Foucault’s ambivalence towards the modern philosophical tradition. It is this relation of tension between philosophy and critique that takes us back to Marx’s own critique of philosophy and his own genuine ambivalence towards it which is apparently shared by Foucault. He, too, seems to recognise that he has arrived at the point of transgression and limit. The challenge is to experiment towards a future philosophy (The philosophy of the present.) or towards something that occupies the enticing space now looming beyond it. He often denies he is a philosopher while, at the same time, he is also prepared to designate his own work a place within at least the second tradition stemming form Kant. Foucault clearly believes that critique strains to go beyond the limits that the other tradition of philosophy has imposed on itself. Critique only exists in relation to something other than itself, that is, the non-discursive regimes of institutional knowledge/power. It serves as an instrument of a truth it will not know nor happen to be. According to Foucault, critique is a means towards an undefined future. This makes this tradition of philosophy a discourse of, and about, modernity, of ourselves. But just because it occupies the present in its essential diversity and dynamism, it is ‘condemned to dispersion, dependency and heteronomy. However, this is only because it exists in relation to something other than itself. The “something other” seems to stand for power, contingency and the future, which it might want to police but its regulation is simply beyond all capacities. One key aspect of this future orientation we have already seen in Marx’s understanding of praxis and Horkheimer’s emphasis on will as a decisive dimension of truth. This re-emerges here in Foucault’s suggestion that critique involves something akin to virtue. It is clear from this formulation that Foucault wants to see a philosophy with more than the cognitive task of eradicating error. What is required is not just a critical attitude in the present, to existing power but self-transformative spiritual process that is directed at limits and the future. Foucault suggests teasingly, perhaps in lieu of all possible philosophy.

10. Beyond this tortuous and ambivalent relation to philosophy, Foucault defines critique more simply as the counter discourse to that of governmentality or the art of not being governed too much. In Foucault’s late work the notion of governmentality is understood in the broadest possible sense as the totality of strategies and practices whereby individuals regulate their conduct in regard to themselves and others. Governmentality is a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability and reversibility. In this model self -relation as a care of the self has priority. But it also incorporates the other relations like that of strategic relations to others, technics of government and includes a notion of domination defined as relations wherein power is asymmetrically fixed. This model was conceived as a way of incorporating a positive, active concept of subjectivity seemingly missing in Foucault’s earlier work. For that reason, the self-relation understood as an ethics of care of the self is especially prominent and vital to the project of critique. However, when Foucault refers to critique as the counter discourse to governmentality, as the art of not being governed too much, the notion of governmentality has an emphatic negative connotation of those dimensions of government (strategic relations and technics of government) where the danger of domination is ever present.

Lecture 11: Knowledge, Power, Resistance, the “Care of the Self” and the Problem of Normativity

1. If we are to fully understand Foucault’s theoretical motivation completely, we need to return to his fundamental understanding of social existence mentioned early as a ceaseless battle in which everyone is a combatant at least in the sense that they are always engaged in strategic games of power. It is at this point that Foucault’s reliance on Nietzsche is especially strong. Let’s briefly consider two key dimensions of this: Firstly in respect to his conception of knowledge and then power.

2. In his 1970-71 Lectures on the Will to Know Foucault tells us that knowledge is not an operation that opposes appearance to being or essence, by lifting the veil to expose the object behind appearances.  Rather, knowledge is the breach in appearance, it maliciously destroys appearances by putting them in question and extracting their secrets. Thus knowledge that remains at the level of appearance would not be knowledge at all. So the process of unmasking should give rise not to essence but to ever-new appearances. Previously all philosophers had viewed themselves as truth seekers: this is a long historical process, a groping that accumulates in time. But the relation finally established between truth and knowledge is assumed from the outset as one that existed by right, just as knowledge was founded on a pre-established relation between subject and object, and the philosophers sole concern had been to bring subject and object closer together. In this traditional scenario, to will the truth means to make way for the truth, to allow it to express itself and to erase any impediments in the knower that might distort or deform the presence of the object. At the heart of this quest for truth is freedom: The truth must be free from determination by the will and the will must be free to give access to the truth. (W to K, 215) But in the Nietzsche counter narrative, instinct, interest, struggle and play are not impediments that knowledge must tear itself away from, they are not shameful motifs but the permanent, inevitable and necessary supports for knowledge creation. Knowledge is not discovered but created, always perspectival and incomplete.  For Nietzsche, knowledge is not preceded by any complicity or guaranteed by any power (W to K, 207).  Neither is it the product of a simple abstract wanting to know. Rather Nietzsche’s knowledge is a corporeal knowledge prior to any truth, born of life, struggle, and rivalry and governed entirely by need and the desire for mastery.  For Nietzsche the knowledge that suppresses the body and usefulness, erases partialities and limits, and wants to see everything without prejudice is a secondary formation parasitical upon these more primal realities (W to K, 209).  The result is the opposition between the violent and wicked knowledge that serves life and another, which may be historically effective but is also illusionary, paradoxical and ascetic. Nietzsche contends that to wonder about the original value of knowledge is to accept the premise of a certain type of relation between subject and object. Yet he maintains that this presupposed relation is not the foundation of knowledge but the reality produced by it. (W to K, 210) Against this, Nietzsche argued that knowledge rests upon a network of relations, an inter-play of differences, multitudinous in form.  A group of these relations impose themselves through violence. Such a will to power is the necessary foundation of any given social reality. As such the world is essentially a world of relations unknowable in themselves. Thought is not a form of consciousness but an effect of extra-thought, a result of violence and illusion (W to K, 211). A similar Nietzschean emphasis on relationality, embodiment, productivity and the illusions of transcendence and impartiality are all repeated in Foucault’s understanding of power.

 3. The Foucauldian notion of power fundamentally demarcates itself from the juridical or sovereign notion that power as something to be possessed either by individuals or groups. In its place he conceives power as a relation of forces:

Power must be analysed as something that circulates or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localised here or there, never in anybody's hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power.

This dispersed conception of power makes it co-extensive with the social body. As Foucault puts it in an interview: all relations are at least partially power relations. Power is not localised in specific institutions but imbricated and fused with all other relations including production, the family, sexuality, knowledge and kinship. Power relations are both the internal conditions and the immediate effects of all variety of divisions, inequalities and disequilbria. They are localised, heterogeneous and dispersed, exercised through a multitude of strategies and techniques while still accessible to integration into more global strategies to serve economic and state goals. This is why Foucault recommends as a methodological starting point that our analysis of power should be ascending: rather than meeting power in its most global and also domesticated form as say state power, he suggests beginning with its infinitesimal mechanisms, which have their own history, trajectory and tactics and see how they have been invested, colonized, used, transformed and extended by increasingly general mechanisms and forms of overall domination. (SMBD, P30)

4. Foucault concludes that power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere. This notion of de-centred and dispersed power in turn rests on a strategic model of strategic, asymmetrical relation of social forces. To completely capture the fluidity and relationality of power, as I’ve already mentioned, Foucault sometimes has recourse to the image of the endless battle: changing alignments, dynamic resistances constantly recharged and eclipsed: where victory is only a momentary respite. He clearly views the paradigm of war as a model that gets beyond the sovereign model of power and its vision of society as a unified expression of subjects, unitary power and law. Foucault endorses Nietzschean belief that behind these primitive elements of peaceful and stable civil society lies a constant subterranean struggle of fear, aggression, violence, servitude and oppression.

This does not mean the society, the law and the state are like armistices that put an end to wars, or that they are the products of definitive victories. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. War is the motor behind institutions and order. In the smallest of its cogs, peace is waging a secret war. To put it another way, we have to interpret the war that is going on beneath the peace; peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other. There is no such thing as a neutral subject. We are all inevitably someone’s adversary. (SMDI pp50/512)

Foucault traces the genealogy of this war in the counter official historiography that emerged in the 17th century. According to these historians, society exists in the binary mode of a race war. Here “race” signifies not a biological category but refers simply to differences between ethnic and language groups, to differences in degree of force, vigour, energy and violence. However, whether this opposition was articulated in terms of race, religion or class, the most important point is that this clash ran through society from top to bottom and forms the matrix of social warfare beneath every appearance of civil peace and political unity. Of course, Nietzsche is not Foucault’s only forerunner in viewing social struggle as a key dimension of social existence. We have already seen the figure of class struggle as the key to history in Marx and the role of contradictions as the key to historical dynamics in Hegel. Yet Foucault believed that the Hegelian idea of dialectic does not actually validate war and struggle philosophically but transmogrified them into a logic of contradiction. This means they are actually totalised into a more basic and irreversible rationality. The primal fact of war and social conflict is subsumed into a universal subject, a reconciled truth and a right, in which all particularities have a pre-ordained place (SMD, p58). This is why Foucault prefers to view Nietzsche rather than Hegel as his closest predecessor.

5. It follows from Foucault’s reading of social relations as permeated by a ubiquitous power that resistance always shadows power. De-centred power finds its own inverse energy in a similarly dispersed resistance. The key to this conception of the relationality of power is that neither power nor resistance can be fundamental or substance. The template of modern power relations, as we have seen, lies in the post 68 politics of social movements. This appeared to Foucault as an explosion of local, dispersed resistances to the totalising aspirations of the whole range of institutional authorities in the bureaucracy, universities, schools, hospitals and prisons. Foucault's account of power expresses this new configuration of resistances. Yet, on a theoretical level, Foucault’s interpretation goes further by inflecting these developments in the light of Nietzsche’s idea of the "will to power" as a ubiquitous, anonymous power in general ultimately grounded in life itself. Admittedly Foucault prefers to view it traversing the social body but metaphysically adrift. He denied that he was offering an alternative theory or metaphysics of power. He stresses that his ideas on power arise from the inadequacy of existing models to explain the historical phenomena he confronted in his attempts to theorise madness, prisons, sexuality and truth. However, his understanding of resistance seems to inject these post-68 socio-political struggles with trans-historical significance. Inflected in this vision, social life becomes a force field of asymmetrical power relations, the binary battlefront referred to earlier. The dispersion of anonymous power presupposes the generalised proliferation of resistance as the mere other of power. However, in this light resistance loses all historical and sociological specificity. It is simply posited by the theory as ubiquitous. Where there is a power relation there is also the possibility of resistance.

6. Although Foucault affirms the inevitability of resistance, his account of it troubling. On the one hand, his empirical resisters are obvious: the oppressed and downtrodden in a variety of shapes--the mad, the prisoner, homosexual, women, various third world communities that provided the specific occasions, contexts and inspirations for his works. But more than these concrete oppressed actors, resistance and revolt are, in Foucault, merely limit concepts, the other of power. Their status is nothing more than a theoretical postulate or an inexplicable brute fact. Given it was Foucault’s life's work to question all conventional facts and expose their historical conditions of possibility, his reticence in the face of revolt is troubling but not inexplicable. As we know, he is sceptical of the notion of the unified subject and accuses humanism of complicity in many crimes associated with modern power. Resistance must be therefore the other of this power. This could be called the “residual humanism” in Foucault: one he refuses to call by its name, a humanism every bit as essentialist as those he critiques in the Western tradition. An example of this is to be found in Foucault’s fascination with revolution.

Lecture 10: Habermas’s Paradigm Shift (cont) & Foucault: Biography, "Revolution" and "the End of Man"

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1. The question of rationality and the possibility of a more comprehensive account brings us to Habermas’ understanding of the modern philosophy and its role. In his magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action (1981), Habermas was concerned to present an alternative account of rationality. He acknowledges that from its beginning philosophy had been concerned to reflect upon reason and tried to explain the whole in terms of reason. However, in modern times this traditional philosophical quest had become problematic. Since Kant, philosophy had developed a critical self-awareness. Recognising that consciousness had no pure unmediated access to the whole or being, philosophy had been compelled to direct its attention to the formal conditions of rationality (TCA2). This focus on the knowing subject was compounded by the multiple 19th century insights of historicism, Marxism, psycho-analysis and cultural anthropology which revealed that the knowing subject was itself conditioned in myriad ways by historical, economic, social, psychological and cultural factors. The old strategy of constructing an ontology of being was abandoned once it was recognised that philosophical reason could not consider itself above the fray, had no unmediated access to the world but that, in fact, the world was always a socially conditioned construct. Not only has philosophy lost its self-sufficiency, it can no longer even defend its Kantian transcendental understanding as a logical reconstruction of consciousness in general and therefore to act as the judge of reason and arbiter of culture.

2. In the post Kantian cultural environment philosophy must abandon all pretensions to play a foundational epistemological role. It can only respond post festum to developments within the now autonomous sciences. However, Habermas wants to preserve philosophy's traditional affiliation with reason. It remains a guardian of rationality in so far as it acts as an interpreter and translator between the everyday world and the specialised spheres of cultural modernity. Habermas explains this mediating, translator function as the product of philosophy realising its full potential in changed historical conditions. Recognising that it does not stand outside the world, philosophy must situate itself in relation to sciences and other functional spheres in order to make its own specific contribution. The aspiration to totality characteristic of philosophy means that it nevertheless resists reduction to a purely functional role. As Habermas says:

Were philosophy to correspond fully to one of these sharply defined functions based on a clear division of labour, then it would be robbed of its best, its anarchist heritage, namely the strength of a kind of untamed thinking that is neither channelled nor fixed by any particular method (T&J, p.286)

Philosophy, like the sciences, is concerned with truth but it also has a mediating and also transgressive connection to law, morality and art. So, on the one hand, it uses pre-theoretical commonsense knowledge to reconstruct and illuminate the significance of the sciences, while, on the other hand, it maintains the unity of an increasingly pluralised rationality of the various cultural value spheres by its capacity to both cross the boundaries between cultural language games and remaining attuned to holistic lifeworld contexts (T&J, p.287).

But Habermas insists that philosophy should not disassociate itself from science or hanker after its own radical autonomy: this is no longer an option. Today philosophy receives its problems from the interface between these sciences and differentiated functional spheres and the everyday lifeworld.

3. Today the reason to which philosophy orients itself is not the substantive concept inherited from the tradition associated with a particular cultural content but a formal or procedural notion. Habermas finds the roots of this procedural concept in everyday understanding and its social practices of justification. In everyday communication speakers make validity claims that transcend the specific conversational context. Here Habermas draws on developments in the philosophy of language associated with J L Austin and John Searle. The gist of these ideas is that language is not just communication but also a speech act. The importance of this pragmatic dimension of language is to emphasis that the pragmatic or illocutionary aspect or speech involves an action component where the speaker makes implicit claims or promises. So if I say: “I know that p” I am giving my word that p. Here we distinguish between the illocutionary and the rhetorical or perlocutionary dimensions. In other words, the action component of the speech act has a normative dimension that amounts to a claim that speakers can be expected to redeem, if required. In other words, in conversation we raise claims seeking agreement and expect to give reasons if challenged. The expectations raised in speech acts imply a set of implicit rules that circumscribe the meaning of a domination free dialogue that is undistorted by power. These implicit rules include mutual recognition, being prepared to include all interlocutors and allow them the time to convey their opinions, willingness to learn from others and be reflective about one’s own traditions. The communicative presuppositions of everyday language use, whether they are strictly adhered to or not, exemplify an exercise in rationality. They provide the roots of the traditional critical enterprise of philosophy and sustain its claim to still be the guardian of rationality. However, in the modern world philosophy exists in the differentiated domain of culture and cannot expect either to work alone or the act as sovereign commander.

4. This is why Habermas resuscitates Horkheimer’s idea of an inter-disciplinary harnessing of philosophy with the reconstructive social sciences. What is required is a new relationship between philosophy and science where philosophy employs the sciences to test its hypothetical universality claims while the autonomy of modern science is constrained by the need for a philosophical explanation and justification of its everyday significance. In this configuration, philosophy maintains a crucial cultural role as the translator or interpreter between the specialised cultural spheres and everyday life without suffering from any delusions that that it should either hand down wisdom to the man in the street or dictate prescriptive rules to the practice of science. It understands the specialised vocabulary of the various sciences but it has not abandoned the everyday idiom of the street and is able to compel these sciences to confront issues from which they are normally quarantined by specialisation.

5. The story that Habermas tells about critical theory is one of painfully learned lessons of limitation and the bursting of illusions. Despite Marx’s will to an immanent theory, his critical theory was the bearer of a philosophy of history that could not be sustained under modern epistemological conditions. Neither the totalising aspiration of critical theory as it expressed itself in relation to the historical future nor its immediate will to praxis can be sustained. Of course, for Habermas the idea of an immanent theory and the need for a link between theory and practice remains very important. He remains attached to an enlightenment project of a maturing humanity with a historicizing dimension. The Enlightenment ideals of rationality and individual autonomy are not given in nature; their realisation is a historical achievement. This project cannot rely on the assistance of external agents like God or nature. Modernity can rely only on self-foundation, on the immanent historical achievements of existing human beings and their own maturing self-understanding and values. This is the basis of the need for an immanent critical theory. However, today Habermas talks more about philosophy than critical theory. This may suggest his desire to detach his theory from the illusions of Marxism but it does not mean the repudiation of a theory with a practical dimension. He reaffirms the interdisciplinary aspirations of the early Horkheimer but with the philosopher occupying a more modest role. No longer the possessor of a confirmed epochal diagnosis of the present—Horkheimer’s “existential judgement”-- that it might deliver to the masses or its avant garde, the philosopher takes on a truly democratic role as translator between the everyday and the sciences.

6. However, if Habermas presents us with a more chastened view of philosophy and a much more mediated conception of its practical role, he has certainly not abandoned it. Along with its connection to reason, philosophy holds on to one aspect of its totalising aspiration: that is its anarchist untamed thinking. This means that it transcends mere functionality and cannot be contained by any single specialist role. Habermas aligns philosophy with the role of the modern public intellectual. Philosophy can play a role in the modern cultural division of labour as expert knowledge in certain narrow contexts, in questions of methodology in the critical evaluation of competing expert opinions and on normative questions concerning ecology, medicine or genetics. It may also have something to offer to a personal philosophy of life as long as it acknowledges the pluralism of modern forms of life and limits its therapeutic role to encouraging people to live their life consciously and does not succumb to the temptation to play the prophet. The era of a single “good life” is long since past and this means that philosophy cannot make the choices for modern individuals. Greener philosophical pastures lie outside the twin domains of special expertise and therapeutic culture. The greatest opportunities for the philosopher to give their work a practical dimension lies in the role of pubic intellectual.  As we have seen, the public sphere or spheres is that loose configuration of formal and informal debates and discussions whereby modern societies come to a better self-understanding across the dynamic range of issues and gradually form democratic will on a range of public issues. In a decentered modern world increasingly dominated by quasi-autonomous subsystems that are guided by their own logics and attempt to externalise all problems, the public space provides the best sounding board for macro social problems and an outlet for the discussion of significant failures and risks. While all interested parties may make contributions to these debates, Habermas argues that the public intellectual acquires a certain authority on the basis of a reputation for considering “in each case all relevant points of view impartially” and taking “all interests involved equally into account” (T&J, p289-290).

7. As Habermas sees it, philosophy has some real advantages in such public debate where the job description involves the capacity to consider all relevant points of view and interests. We have already seen the intimate connection between the philosophical project and a rational self–reflexivity. From the time of Kant, the auto-critique of reason has been at the centre of philosophical self-understanding as has the concern for the totality. This later interest also comes into play in the public sphere where the capacity to think in terms of the whole, to speak the idioms of both specialised scientific discourse and those of ordinary language is vital to illuminating the multiple dimensions of the bureaucratic and economic systems’ colonisation of the modern life world. The final element of the elective affinity between philosophy and the public intellectual resides in the latter’s long historical and conceptual connection to democracy. Philosophy puts a premium on the anarchy of unconstrained thinking. It relies on the freedom of communication best ensured by democratic constitutional arrangements in precisely the same way that democracy stands in need of a discourse that focuses on the normative issues of a just and well-ordered society and therefore ensures the cultural present of reflective rationality.

8. Finally I want to consider a possible objection to Habermas that strikes at the most abstract level of his theorisation. I have just recounted Habermas' account of the story of philosophy's treatment of rationality. He maintained that since Kant modernity has focused not on substantive rationality but the formal conditions of rationality. While this is taken as the starting point of his own theory of communicative action, it is clear that this theory is guided by a vague idea of more comprehensive notion of rationality that has its roots in the tradition and which underpins his whole theory. How is this notion to be justified? It seems that Habermas’ underlying orientating concept echoes past substantive concepts of reason like those embodied in the Marxian notion of socialism and the Hegelian concept of spirit. Yet, Habermas repudiates this sort of teleology as a return of discredited notions of the philosophy of history. His alternative is to view his own standpoint in a quasi-Hegelian fashion as the outcome of the evolutionary historical processes of cultural rationalisation. This process has no concrete bearer in the sense of Hegel's spirit or Marx's proletariat. For Habermas, it is a theoretical construct of his universal pragmatics, ie. a theory of language. He argues that the process of cultural rationalisation gives us access to the immanent general formal pragmatic structures of language as a set of procedural rules for the guidance of both scientific discourse, and even more importantly, democratic dialogue and decision-making. In following the process of cultural differentiation which has allowed for the unfolding of distinct value spheres with their distinct validity claims of truth, rightness and authenticity we have unlocked the key to the logic of a mode of domination-free communication that is the originary function and structural potential inherent within language. Yet to maintain this communicative dimension is the originary function of language is  far from an uncontested claim. It would be rejected by thinkers as different as Benjamin or Heidegger and seems hard to reconcile with the fact that language as always had multiple dimensions not reducible to a single function.

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Lecture 10/11 2015  Foucault (1926-1984)

1. Foucault's biography is typical of the French intellectuals of this century. The son of a provincial bourgeois family and a father who was a surgeon, he attended the Ecole Normale just after the war. In retrospect, Foucault speaks of Heidegger and Nietzsche as his major influences but we should also add the major figures of French philosophy of science, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and his teacher at the Ecole Normale, Louis Althusser. As a young man, he experienced difficulties coming to terms with his own homosexuality and this led to a number of attempts at suicide. After early training in psychology, he lectured at the University of Uppsala in Sweden for several years and spent brief episodes as a cultural attach to French diplomatic missions while completing his dissertation. After a series of famous philosophical/historical studies in the sixties, he became a Professor at the new university of Vincennes before being elected to the College de France in 1972 (the most prestigious academic appointment in France) where he taught until his death from AIDS in 1984. From the seventies, Foucault became an international figure. He was active in a series of radical social and political causes around prisoner’s action, anti-psychiatry and human rights. In retrospect, Foucault viewed the events of May 68 as a historical watershed. Although he was not in Paris at this time but teaching in Tunisia, these events seemed to confirm the political bankruptcy of the French Communist Party as vehicle for radical social transformation  and the need to rethink the vocabulary of radical politics. Briefly a member of the Communist party in the early fifties, Foucault was, however, never a Marxist.

2. Foucault's interest in the oppressive dimensions of modern rationality and its institutions has deep roots in his biography. As a homosexual in the era of Gay Liberation, he personally experienced a sense of marginality and this was compounded when he began with his initial training in psychology. This training, which included some first hand experience of practice in contemporary psychiatric hospitals, engendered his distaste for institutional medicine and aroused his scepticism regarding the scientific pretensions of the human sciences. Out of this interest flowed a series of philosophic-historical works that explored the history of the modern human sciences--psychiatry, medicine, psychoanalysis, linguistics and political economy. What distinguishes Foucault's account from the more orthodox historians of science are two things: his interest in discontinuity (his assertion that scientific advance was not a matter of smooth progress but of disjunction and new paradigms) and his fascination with the dark side of this purported triumph of human reason. He reveals the ways in which the human sciences function as instruments of power, social control, discipline and exclusion. He argues they are complicit in the radically new modern configuration of power/knowledge. He warns us against the humanist ideology of progress and sees behind a white coat of “objectivity” domination, governmental paternalism and talk of rehabilitation, health and welfare. He wants to dramatise the frightening completeness of this unacknowledged oppression. His theme is the 'the madness lying at the very heart of reason’.

3. We have seen how the Frankfurt School constructed their theory of modernity, of the “totally administered society” from the perspective of the missed revolution. For Foucault "Revolution" is also a vital theme. However, he drastically transforms the meaning of this concept. His question is how are we to think revolution after the demise of revolutionary Marxist politics and its emancipatory view of history. This theme runs throughout Foucault’s work and emerges even in his final lectures where he views the revolutionary militantism of the 19^th century as another instance of the ‘aggressive, constant and endless battle to change the world’ that had first emerged with the ancient Cynics as an ascetic version of a philosophical ‘care of the self ‘ that had been emphasised by Socrates as the central philosophical task (CT, 286). However in Foucault’s early work, this questioning is marshalled as radical historical scepticism. Against the Frankfurt School's pessimistic reversed philosophy of history premised on crushed humanist hopes, he announces not the "end of the individual" but the "death of man": this slogan proclaims Foucault's view that the idea of man was a cultural/scientific construct of the recent past(the post classical period, from 1800) that is now in crisis and that humanist values need to be treated sceptically and their complicity in pervasive modern discourses and practices of domination exposed. However, in terms of revolutionary hopes and prospects, he suggests that today is no better nor worse than any other time. In place of what he will call the ‘empty shell of universal revolutionism’, he prefers to reach back to the ancient notion of the “care of the self’ in the shape of the project of an ethico–spiritual transformation and experimentation on limits: ‘to grasp the points where change is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change should take’(W is E? Pol of Truth) p114.

4. To begin to appreciate the radicalism of Foucault's standpoint we need to elaborate a little more his critique of humanism. I already mentioned that with him the slogan of the “decline of the individual” is replaced by “the death of man”. We have seen that for the Frankfurt School with the disappearance of revolutionary social forces, the emancipatory possibilities of modernity rest on the shoulders of the modern bourgeois subject now in decline. This subject was the bearer of the Enlightenment faith in rationality and morally autonomy. However, the momentous historical crisis that brought about monopoly capitalism has undermined the social conditions that underpinned this form of subjectivity. With Foucault, the critique is deeper. Gone is the nostalgia for this declining bourgeois species: it is replaced by sceptical unmasking of former illusions. The slogan “death of man” signifies the rejection of the idea of history as a unitary emancipatory process wherein the posited subject creates itself according to a predetermined essence. Foucault renovates Nietzsche’s critique of humanism viewing humanity in general as an ascetic and repressive ideological fiction. He utterly rejects the essentialist idea of the subject common to both empiricist and rationalist streams of modern philosophy. According to Foucault, these traditions presuppose the subject was unified and invariant. Foucault wants to explore the “otherness” that he views as being both internal and foreign to the subject, that determine ‘their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them’. (OTxiv) He argued that philosophy had to begin from things that positively exist, what the empirical sciences reveal about life, labour and language. The subject has to be placed within this context and the emphasis will be focused on how the subject is determined by outside elements. (F&IR.p188) Because he believes that discourse and its practices is such a complex reality with numerous levels, he rejects the phenomenological approach that ‘gives absolute priority to the knowing or observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity, which…leads to a transcendent consciousness’. (OTxiv)

Lecture 9: Habermas and his Predecessors (cont)

 

7. This overly hasty assimilation of communicative progress to instrumental progress accounts for a normative deficit in Marx's outlook. We can see here already that Marx has failed, according to Habermas, to give full weight to democracy and its institutional underpinnings as an independent learning process in the domain of social interaction. Marx had not felt required to independently account for progress in this communicative domain. He had simply derived the emancipatory values and norms from the evolution of social labour. Habermas' contention is that the historical process of human self-creation is marked not only by the discovery of new technologies and strategies of pushing back the limits of nature but also new stages of reflection, new modes of social interaction and social integration which issue in sublimating institutional oppression, dispelling conventional dogma and freer and more open communication. Habermas does not deny the inter-dependence between these two developmental forms of rationalisation but he argues that the problem solving logic of purposive-rational progress can trigger change but cannot overthrow the relations of production. In fact, Habermas suggests that it is the communicative learning processes that are the pacemaker of social evolution insofar as they establish new forms of social integration and very often make possible the introduction of new productive forces. This critique of the Marxian paradigm of production-- it led to a restricted concept of human self-creation through social labour which reduces the broad range of human learning processes and communicative interactions to instrumental activity alone-- led to Habermas' call for a paradigm shift to what he called the paradigm of communicative interaction.

8. Habermas has also specifically drawn attention to the inherent problems of a critical theory that viewed praxis as an indispensable moment of its own realisation. For Marx, the negation of philosophy through its realisation meant that Marxist intellectuals joined a social movement and attempted a direct unity of theory and praxis. However, the consequences of this were generally not promising: too often it has led only to theoretical dogmatism (theory closing itself off to new scientific objections) or moral rigorism (the idea that only the activist is morally worthy). But even more importantly Habermas maintains there are metaphysical residues with the Marxist project. He suggests that despite its emphatic claim for immanence, Marx’s critical theory had not completely broken with the totalising thrust of metaphysics. It simply transferred the teleological figures of the classical metaphysics of nature onto the history as a whole. The survival of the claim to totality in modern philosophy of history from Hegel to Marx fails to meet the fallibilist self-understanding of knowledge characteristic of contemporary knowledge. Habermas also argues that the idea of the proletariat as a macro subject of history fails to fully take into account that the only basis on which the divergent beliefs and conflicting intentions of different individual even within a class can be integrated is inter-subjective processes of communication and deliberation that implies democratic opinion and will formation.

9. Habermas also turned his attention to his immediate Frankfurt School predecessors. Adorno and Horkheimer looked to the work of Max Weber who had focused on the problem of societal rationalisation. In their work the form of rationality dominant in Weber’s account of societal rationalisation (a means /end rationality) is viewed as instrumental reason. Furthermore, they argue that the evolution of Western civilisation itself can be viewed as a narrative of the historical unfolding of this self-preservative, instrumental reason. In Habermas' view they were unable to appreciate the other side of the dialectic of enlightenment associated with cultural learning processes that he designates communicative interaction. As we have seen, these learning processes takes place on the level of social interaction, consensual regulation and moral insight. Rationalisation in the domain of communication removes restrictions on self-reflection and domination free communication; it therefore enhances the possibilities of socio-political emancipation. Adorno and Horkheimer's failure was preordained by their preference for the concept of instrumental reason as the key to understanding the civilisatory process. Their neglect of the bourgeois order as a fertile ground for democratic decision-making, universalistic notions of morality and law, individualist patterns of identity formation and aesthetic experience is nothing more than blindness to the processes of cultural rationalisation and its real institutional consequences. These represent the evolution of communicative reason and its advances in the differentiated cultural spheres of science, morality-law and aesthetic expression. Habermas is no apologist for bourgeois capitalism but he is concerned to overcome the undialectical tenor of the earlier Frankfurt School's identification of rationalisation with instrumental reason.

10. I have already mentioned that one constant theme in Habermas’ work has been the desire to see a healthy liberal democratic society established in Germany. It is therefore not surprising that Habermas devoted his first major work (his Habilitationschrift) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) to the liberal democratic public sphere and its contemporary crisis. On first appearance in 1962 this may have appeared as an Adornoian influenced work of culture critique that fitted into the thesis of the “fully administered society”. However, a difference of perspective is evident from the fact that Habermas clearly takes the ideology of the bourgeois public sphere much more seriously than the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Habermas sets out to reveal the historical origins and normative functionality of the notion of the public sphere in bourgeois social reality and political thought. This notion departs from the division of the bourgeois between public and private, between the bearer of liberal freedoms and the citizen or l'homme. The bourgeois public sphere emerged in opposition to the absolutist state as an intermediary between state and society in which bourgeois citizens could freely articulate and discuss their views on public issues. Beginning with the discussion of culture it quickly turned into a forum for the discussion of the great political questions of the day. As access to this sphere was at least notionally open-ended, the private individual entered it simply as l'homme, obliged to conform to certain standards of rationality and the better argument. While Habermas never for a moment doubts the counter-factuality of this idealisation, his main point is the following: in its classical phase this idea of the public sphere corresponded to the reality of a competitive market economy and a relatively homogenous class of small private entrepreneurs with interest in this forum of publicity. Furthermore, and most importantly, the public sphere rendered political domination legitimate by providing an arena in which the views of private individuals could circulate and be filtered within a sphere of public discussion that became increasingly influential as a gauge of consent. This was a crucial link in the nascent institutions of bourgeois democracy where these same private individuals exercised their political judgement in shaping the laws they would have to obey.

11. This classical model begins to fragment under the pressures of modern dynamism in the course of the last century. His main point is that the public sphere has lost its go-between function mediating between private and public, state and society. The increased interlocking integration between state and society with economic rationalisation and technological development has seen this mediating function pass out of the hands of the public sphere and into those stemming from the private sphere like corporate associations, lobbies, parties and unions. Both big players in the private sphere and government public agencies were able to use their resources to transform the public sphere increasingly orientated to mass media and to distort and manipulate it in their own interests. Publicity remains but its function is now fundamentally changed. It no longer primarily serves rational public consensus but only as advertisement and public relations, to display conflicts of interest and affirm compromises and deals worked out behind closed doors between the bureaucratic apparatus of government and a range of private interests. It is no longer the guaranteed linkage between a rational critical public debate and the democratic legislature under supervision. Having charted the demise of the bourgeois public sphere, however, Habermas steps back from calling it a sham. Even after this structural transformation, the original idea of the public sphere remains a crucial normative dimension of understanding modern democratic constitutionalism. The contemporary task remains to further democratise those private and public agencies that now dominate the public sphere in order to bring real transparency to their activities and recharge the critical-rational element that is the key to the proper functioning of the bourgeois public sphere.

12. We have seen some of the major ingredients that go into Habermas’ reworking of the concept of critical theory. He criticises what he believes is a certain one-sidedness in both Marx’s account of historical evolution through social labour and in Horkheimer and Adorno’s vision of civilizatory “progress” as the unfolding of instrumental reason. He also wants to draw attention to the importance of the bourgeois public sphere and, despite the strains under which it operates in the contemporary world of fused economic and political power, underscore its contemporary importance both as a normative standard and as a vital part of the institutional machinery of a further democratised and transparent liberal democratic society. The rationale of Habermas’ critique of his predecessors in the critical theory tradition is tied to their neglect of what he calls communicative action or cultural rationalisation. He clearly views this latter as a source of historical learning and emancipation and this is clearly connected to the idea of a more pluralistic and democratic society. It is here that this theme connects up with his interest in the bourgeois public sphere. Now I want to elaborate more fully Habermas’ account of cultural rationalisation and also assess its impact on his understanding of the potentials of a critical theory.

Lecture 8: The Dialectic Of Enlightenment (Cont) & Habermas and His Prdecessors

4.           In this perspective, the process of humanity’s separation from nature and the latter’s subordination as a mere object of appropriation signifies both a distortion of human cognitive interests exclusively towards domination and a repression of the natural in man. This is the paradox of the civilisatory process. In this development, the supposed goal— a fully civilised humanity—becomes a mere means and is distorted and brutalised by the instrument—reason—that is supposedly the means of liberation. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the tragic mistake is the identification of the subject with a distorted rational faculty of mere calculation and the dissolution of all phenomena into the quantitative calculus of this faculty. “Identity thinking” reduces everything alien to its own categories and thereby eliminates all otherness and difference. A qualitatively different world is transformed into one homogenous with the categories of reason. The human attempt to preserve itself through increasingly knowledge requires an ascetic suspension of appetites and the elimination of the other, of the non-identical. Latent in this idea of self –preservation is the idea of the subjectivity as a unified ratio. Increasing knowledge is identified with unified rationality in terms of increasing coherence, systematisation and logic. By this means, knowledge becomes autonomous, exclusively identified with a single faculty but increasingly detached from the interests and other needs of the corporeal, natural subject. The result is that the development of civilisation is a history not of liberation but of increasingly domination of self, nature and others.

5.           The first social expression of this inversion of ends and means is the primitive division of labour. The categories of logic arose as ideal expressions of the original social relations of domination. The order and hierarchy of concepts reflect the primitive social hierarchy. These ideal categories serve as instruments of man’s attempt to report, order and explain the surrounding environment in the interests of his own self-preservation. While these categories were only a means, they preserved and exemplified the irrational structure of domination. When thinking is understood as mere self-identification, it is reduced to emptiness and formalism. A specific mode of thought has been reified in just the same way that the bourgeois commodity form expresses the permanent quest for equivalence. All aspects of the external world outside the subject and nature within are reduced to the thinking activity and terms of the subject, which becomes blind to its own particularity and constructed character. It also marginalised the other more reflective dimension of rationality. For abstract rationality, the qualitative uniqueness of each particular phenomenon and situation is rendered imperceptible and inexpressible. Abstract rationality treats every unique historical situation as a repetition of what has already occurred. The single and unique is obliterated by subordination to the lawfulness that allows them to be subsumed by rational thought. This ideal of lawfulness is a perpetuation of the ancient myth of eternal recurrence, which naturalises the present as an eternal order.

6.           The radical meaning of this analysis is revealed in the equation of the whole civilisatory process with the concept of enlightenment. Here the concept of enlightenment is understood not as the antithesis of myth but as a perpetuation of the innermost logic of the latter. On this view, myth is originally nothing but the first version of enlightenment. It is product of the human need to subordinate nature to its own categories of regularity, order and explanation.  Myth is the first instalment a process of evolving enlightenment in which every worldview will have to submit itself to more sophisticated cultural interpretations of rationality. On this reading, myth is a form of enlightenment that cannot withstand its own ongoing enhancement. The program of enlightenment is thus the ongoing destruction of the rational pretensions of all previous forms of social explanation-magic, myth, and religion. However, this program of critical destruction of the past forms of rational explanation is ultimately nihilistic. It eventually annihilates precisely those concepts, on which the Enlightenment had based itself and for which it had struggled. These values--truth, reason, freedom and justice—also eventually succumb to the new more rigorous standards of contemporary scientific analysis. Under critical analysis these values are revealed as illusions, as myths, which can now be demoted to the level of magic. Whereas the enlightenment believed reason to be an anthropological constant and truth “correspondence” to an existing objective structure of the world, contemporary analysis empties out the idea of a “rational faculty” to reveal nothing but a variable cultural construct without substantive content, the product of a contingent and idiosyncratic historical odyssey, whereas “truth” is merely a property of sentences with no direct purchase on the world; freedom and justice are value concepts that have no legitimate place in a scientific worldview. This is the dialectic of enlightenment. Each new form of enlightenment destroys its predecessor and discards it as just another myth. However, the most modern variant of enlightenment--scientific positivism-- attempts to exempt itself from the fate of all its predecessors. On its view scientific method is immune from this fate of perpetual self-critique. As the most recent philosophical reading of the method of science positivism bases itself on “facts’ but is unwilling to enquire into the ground or the basis of those facts. In methodologically excluding such questions, it ignores its own historical pre-conditions and eternalises the existing social world as the eternal or natural substratum of all experience. This invests existing social power with the same absolute status that was once claimed by the old metaphysical truths. For Horkheimer and Adorno, the desire to avoid critical examination is symptomatic of the ideological limitation and weakness of positivism. It signifies that this most scientific version of enlightenment has its own metaphysical bias. This denial of self-reflectivity is, for Horkheimer and Adorno, the perpetuation of myth. To absolutise the contemporary version of reason and to equate it with the adoption of quantitative, mathematical procedures is to convert means into ends and to lose sight of a rationality that is anything more than mere calculation.

7.           What is the real purpose of this critique of civilisation as a process of constant critical enlightenments? On one level, this was ideology critique. The authors critique the modern faith in progress and especially its failure to relativise its own claim to rationality. But, on another level, it does not stop at mere ideology critique. Here is the attempt to diagnose what the authors consider to be a new modern form of domination, characterised by new degrees of alienation, depersonalisation and administrative repression. Here the authors offer a crucial departure from the critical theory formulated by Horkheimer in the 1930’s. They depict a society no longer in crisis and no longer generating its own immanent forces of resistance. This society had overcome the threatened economic collapse by political, administrative cultural means. The “totally administered society”, a society where economic, political and cultural power and authority have been fused into a unified system, had been able to expunge all historical subjectivity surplus to the requirements of maintaining profitable, capitalist reproduction. Here again we have the paradoxical inversion of means and ends. Historical subjectivity, supposedly the highest achievement of the process of civilisation, is negated in favour of the functional requirements of the totally administered society.

9.         With the control and manipulation of even the major social bearer of resistance to bourgeois society, with the pacification of the working class through incremental improvements in living standards and a stupefying mass culture, all critical momentum is lost and critique survives only in the exceptional isolated individual who have not surrendered their critical faculties to the illusion of a integrated, rational organization. This gloomy picture of a totally administered society typified by an underlying conformity and absence of social resistance has often led to the authors being accused of cultural aristocratism and pessimism. Certainly Dialectic of Enlightenment does almost invite misinterpretation. While Horkheimer and Adorno censure all philosophy of history, they simultaneously seem to construct one of their own, only theirs’ is in reverse.  Rather than viewing history as a progressive process, they construct a grand narrative of disasters, from “the sling shot to the atom bomb” as Adorno was to characterise it later, with the contemporary victory of an especially sophisticated instrumental rationality and overly refined domination of containment. But this is not the simple inconsistency it might at first appear. At various points, the authors do speak about missed historical opportunities for emancipation. However, these opportunities were bungled and the fully administered society seems devised to kill subjective resistance before it can even emerge. The ambiguity in Horkheimer and Adorno’s position make it hard to divine just where they stand. They consciously employ extreme formulations and striking contradictory images to redouble critical energies and to illuminate what they perceive to be the real truth behind the appearance of progress. Deprived of a concrete social bearer of critique, these authors make a strategic withdrawal to philosophy and even art. Horkheimer withdraws from running the Institute after its return to Germany and becomes more politically conservative.  The later Adorno will resort to a more aesthetic mode of argumentation and relying less on the categories and coherence of philosophical theory, which, according to him, has now become contaminated by instrumental reason and the logic of domination. While the later Adorno as Head of the Institute was heavily engaged in a range of projects, overseeing empirical studies and becoming a major public intellectual, he did not fundamentally re-evaluate his essentially negative view of modernity even while he realised that the liberal democracy being created in Germany was not identical to the other totalitarian forms. 

Habermas (1929- ) and his Predecessors.

1.  Today Habermas is Germany’s most internationally recognised philosopher. He was born with a cleft pallet and this left him with a speech impediment that, on his own account, made him especially sensitive to the predicament of the marginalised and outsider. He was born in Dusseldorf and came from a politically conformist, middle class family; his father was a minor bureaucrat. He grew up in the period of National Socialism and reckoning with this past has also been a decisive determinant of his theoretical and public life. Much of his work has concerned the question of democratisation and the establishment of a liberal democratic society in Germany. After the war he had a typical education in a largely unreconstructed Germany university system at Göttingen, Zurich and Bonn. His first publication was a critique of Heidegger after he republished his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics in 1953 without retracting the passage where he spoke of “the inner truth and greatness of the Nazis movement” other than to note that this “greatness” had denoted “the encounter between global technology and modern man”. Up to this point Habermas said he had been living in Heidegger’s philosophy so this insight into Heidegger’s Nazis commitments was a great shock. His critique came to the attention of Adorno who offered a position as his assistant in 1956.

2. So from his earliest work Habermas has always been a very engaged leftist intellectual. He has always been willing to enter public debates in Germany over contemporary political and cultural issues like educational reform in the fifties, the political role of student protest in the sixties, the historians dispute in the eighties and the resurgence of anti-foreign neo-Fascism in the wake of German reunification, the Iraq War and the resulting Euro-American Foreign policy disputes and more recently, the fate of the EU where he has been a major critic of Merkel’s austerity policy in relation to Greece and the other debtor nations. Much of his participation in public discussion was concerned with efforts to ensure the embedding of a post war healthy liberal democratic society and its further democratisation. This stance as an engaged public intellectual is very much in conformity with his understanding of critical theory as a practically motivated cultural self-reflection. He believed that the earlier generation of the Frankfurt School after their return to Germany had retreated too far into a traditional philosophical mode of speculation and detached themselves from a practical engagement with the contradictions of post-war German society. Ironically, he was promoted to Horkheimer's chair at Frankfurt in the early sixties despite the fact that Horkheimer has considered him too radical. From this time, he became the most prominent of the second generation of Frankfurt School thinkers. Towards the end of the sixties at the height of the Student Movement he moved from the University of Frankfurt to head the Max Planck Research Institute at Starnberg before returning to Frankfurt in the early eighties as the Professor of Sociology and Philosophy. He remained there until retirement in the mid 90’s but has continued to write and teach in the United States. Amongst his many awards, in 2004 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize for his lifetime contribution to scholarship and public debate.

3. Habermas’ version of critical theory emerges from a careful critique of what he takes to be the shortcomings of his theoretical predecessors. But most characteristic of his thinking is the effort to preserve what he thinks is valuable in the tradition from which he emerged and a boundless capacity to reach beyond it to other sources/traditions for theoretical inspiration. We can see clear examples of both of these tendencies when we consider the fundamental theoretical resources that go into his critical theory. In this respect I will briefly look at his critique of Marx, Horkheimer and Adorno and his appropriation of the public sphere from the liberal democratic tradition.

4. Habermas’ critique of Marx permeates the early and middle phase of his work from Theory and Praxis (1963), Towards a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism (1976) (in English) Communication and the Evolution of Society and Theory of Communicative Interaction Vol 1(1981). Habermas critiques the Marxian understanding of history and its underlying paradigm of work. As we have seen, Marx had conceived history as an emancipatory process of human self-constitution through labour. Social labour acts as a constant revolutionising force enhancing productive forces and creating an accumulating reservoir of new capacities, needs, skills and aspirations; it therefore functions as the decisive learning process whereby human subjects simultaneously renew and transform their material conditions in such a way as to open up ever-new possibilities. Work served Marx as a model for conceiving the self-constitution of the species and as the fundamental dimension in which human progress accrues.

5. Habermas raises a whole range of empirical objections to Marx's optimistic historical scenario. Chief amongst these are flaws in his account the dynamics of 19th century capitalism. Marx views the laws of motion of capitalist society as a closed system in which the superstructures were always dependent upon the immanent movement of the economy. But this inherent tendency was eventually nullified by the political struggle of the workers and the increasing intervention of the state. In the 20th century the balance turned from economics to politics. At the same time, science begins to play the role of the leading productive force. The development of large-scale industry that welds together research, science and technology into an interlocking system rendered inoperative the conditions, which had underpinned the Marxian labour theory of value. Science and research become an independent source of value overshadowing the labour power of the immediate producers. The spectacular explosion in the productivity of labour allowed capital to accommodate rising wages and increase the rate of surplus value. As a result, they were able to both ward of political challenge and decreasing profitability. Furthermore, Marx had believed that the advanced industrial organization of workers would bring about an aggressive form of class consciousness. However, massive structural changes also brought with it persuasive disqualification and deskilling. Higher living standards were offset by workers polarisation and the expected evolution of the working class as a unified conscious, historical subject never eventuated.

6. Habermas also points to basic theoretical problems in Marx's emancipatory account of history. Marx had simply equated the development of the productive forces with the workers cause of social emancipation. Habermas argued that this simple identification involved a confusion of two historical dialectics or rationalising processes, each of which had its own tempo, trajectory and logic. The first was the rationalisation of purposive-rational action. This concerned all those learning processes concerned with the growing mastery of nature and instrumental control. These need to be distinguished from another form of rationalisation at the level of communicative interaction. Habermas views this later form of rationalisation as another form of learning process that takes place on the level of social interaction, consensual regulation and moral insight. Rationalisation in the domain of communication removes restrictions on self-reflection and domination free communication and enhances the possibilities of socio-political emancipation. Marx's mistake had been to identify the progress in this domain most clearly manifest in the revolutionary bourgeois political institutions with the expansion of the productive forces.