DUE DATE: Monday 12th Nov
Answer any two questions (1, 000 words each). Questions to be answered on the basis of the course readings
Submission
To the Sophie Office, Third Floor Main Quad with the proper cover sheet attached and plagiarism disclaimer signed. The Take-Home exams will not be returned and late take-home exams will normally not be accepted. The only satisfactory excuses are illness or misadventure. All extension queries address to the coursegiver Dr John Grumley (email: John.Grumley@arts.usyd.edu.au)
QUESTIONS
1. Both Foucault and Weber provide an account of the illusions of science? Are they speaking of the same illusions and, if not, why not? What remains of science after we subtract these illusions?
2. Compare and contrast the analysis of the masses and the elite in Weber and Horkheimer? Is either of these accounts plausible from a contemporary perspective? If not, why?
3. Both Horkheimer and Foucault articulate a critique of modern subjectivity. What arguments do they use to substantiate these critiques and to what extent are their views the same? Are these critiques still relevant?
4. Weber speaks of the institutions of science giving priority to mediocrity. To what extent is this view an endorsement of Horkheimer's claim that in modernity individualism has become "ideological"? Are these views convincing?
5. Both Foucault and Habermas offer critiques of the contemporary welfare state. Compare and contrast these critiques with particular emphasis on the law (Your answer should take into account Foucault’s ‘The Political Technology of Individuals” from the Reader). To what extent are their positions compatible and, if not, why?
6. Both Adorno and Habermas speak of the crisis of modern aesthetics. Are they talking of the same crisis and, if not, what is the difference in their analyses?
7. In Discipline and Punish Foucault maintains 'in its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing and educating'. Later he argues that' Lets take the pedagogical institution...I don't see where evil is in the practice of somebody who, in a given game of truth, knowing more than another, tells him what he must do, teaches him, transmits knowledge to him, communicates skills to him.' What is the tension if any in these two positions and how does Foucault reconcile these trains of thought in the interview ‘The Ethic of the Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom’? Is he convincing?
Mittwoch, 17. Oktober 2007
Lecture 13: Habermas (cont)
1. Not surprisingly for somebody who maintains that modernity is an “incomplete project” and upholds the fallibility of modern scientific knowledge, Habermas’ thoughts about the future are inconclusive. Unlike his immediate predecessors, he believes that the process of cultural rationalisation has provided us with vital resources to continue the struggle for generalised enlightenment. Yet he admits that the prospects of this politico-cultural option are not good. He seems to think that the old compromise structures of the welfare state cannot deal with the new conflicts. It is clear that the old welfare state compromises between capitalism and democracy were a zero-sum game under challenge from both sides. The strategy of welfare interventionism placed too great a demand on political power to bring forth the new forms of life. Foucault and others have revealed the destructive normalising role of bureaucratic and legal norms. A solution requires the building of restraining barriers and sensors for the really effective exchange between system and lifeworld. The need to protect highly rationalised lifeworlds from intolerable systems imperative poses the problem of limits. We cannot rely on these autonomous subsystems learning to function better. What is required is a new division of powers within societal integration that allows social solidarity to assert itself against these functional systems. As we have seen, Habermas has always put great emphasis on the public sphere as a realm of inter-subjective cultural and political dialogue regarding common issues. In the new context he sees the emergence of new autonomous public spheres out of everyday practice. He sees this as a means of consolidating higher level subjectivities and promoting self-organisation of citizens. This facilitates what he considers as a sharpened view of the political. The public sphere must act as a means whereby modern complex societies can gain a normative distance from themselves and work out experiences of crisis collectively. However, this model is clearly not without problems. The idea of spontaneously emerging public spheres presupposes a sort of grassroots organisation and discussion generated out of the lifeworld. However once this local solidarity crosses this threshold of organization, it then develops into full organisations with their own independent system imperatives. However, to leave things here would be to accept a model of imbalance between systems and lifeworld that reproduces the current bias in favour of systems.
2. Habermas attempted to address this problem in his major work in political philosophy Between Facts and Norms (1996). There he analyses the complex set of interdependencies that govern the relations between informal processes of collective opinion and will formation and the administrative and decision-making functions of the political centre. On this account, the informal public sphere does not appear in the first instance as a set of institutions but as a ‘network for communicating information and points of view’. It describes processes whereby problems, formerly encountered privately, are attached to reasons through which their generalising significance can be recognised. In pursuit of its ambition to facilitate the shift of expressions of private dissatisfaction into the terms of effective claims, public spheres must be ‘anchored in the voluntary associations of civil society and embedded in liberal patterns of political culture and socialisation.’ Habermas’ account of the informal public sphere describes the democratising potentials of this process of communicative rationality where legitimacy is generated via processes of argumentation. These finally appeal, not to the authority of tradition or power but to a set of consensually elaborated principles. The presumption of the rationality of this mode of interaction confers legitimacy on a democratising mode of interaction that takes shape within civil society. At this stage, however, the public sphere is not a formalised discourse of law but a generalized mechanism of “bundling” where streams of communication are filtered and synthesized into topically specified public opinions. The achievement of the public sphere is, on the one hand, measured in terms of the increased self-understanding and extended mutual understanding discovered by its participants. At the same time, this process of self-clarification finally permits the newly ‘bundled’ problems to seek patronage within the decision-making bodies of a constitutional democracy.
3. Habermas understanding of the role of the administrative institutions of liberal democracy attempts to synthesize the lessons of both the republican and liberal models. On the one hand the republican tradition is criticised for neglecting the theorisation of administrative power and expelling it from the domain of real politics as the ‘rule of nobody’. On the other hand, he argues that a liberal understanding of administration, that is focused primarily on rational outcomes, pacifies the citizen and fails to recognise the extent to which his or her own self-awareness of issues is a decisive ingredient in meeting real political needs.
4. Habermas offers a proceduralist interpretation of the role of the administrative state in democratic processes. It serves as model for democratising administrative power and confronting some of the deepest problems that have plagued the welfare state. His main idea is that the “bluntness” of law and administration as policy instruments in the fraught domains of welfare (epitomised by the phenomenon of juridification) can be best counter-acted by alternative arrangements. Democratic forums and enclaves must be devised and introduced within administrative arrangements wherever possible as a vehicle whereby clients are allowed to become citizens who articulate their own needs and interests. However, this reformist agenda in the domain of administration is only one instantiation of Habermas’ desire to conceptually spell out the normative meaning of contemporary liberal democracy. This is not to say that he ignores problems. The later chapters of Between Facts and Norms lay out the way in which money and power present real obstacles to the complete delivery of the normative content of liberal democratic arrangements. However, as we have seen, Habermas is convinced that the institutional realization of this normative vision of liberal democracy is itself a singular historical achievement. And this is not simply a laudatio of the past. He is also sure that this normative content acts as a vital and powerful counterfactual ideal that is something that can and must be built on.
5. Despite his assessment that in modernity the fragile project of democracy is everywhere on the defensive and the chances of moving in the right direction are not good, Habermas has become even more critical of his Marxist inheritance. By the time of the third German edition of The Theory of Communicative Action(1993) he is at pains to further distance himself from the theory of reification that had provided the conceptual basis of the colonisation thesis. He now suggests that in a theory meant to underline the ambiguous potentiality of modernity, it was a mistake to allow the concept of colonisation the central position. This conceptual preference seemed to decide the question of the dynamic between system and lifeworld in a predetermined way in favour of the former. On these grounds, he abandons the concept of colonisation. Not because he is no longer concerned about the real and potential encroachments of the systems and purposive rationality into the lifeworld but because he wants to view the nexus between the two as a two-way street with flows going in both directions. The question of which side imposes itself is ultimately an empirical question that cannot be decided in advance.
6. In the last two decades Habermas’ political thought has concentrated on the crisis of the welfare state with the emerging forces of globalisation This describes a “process not an end state” characterised by the “increasing scope and intensity of commercial, communicative and exchange relations beyond national borders”. While these tendencies run in many dimensions, the most dominant one has been economic globalisation. Here Habermas sees the re-emergence of an old problem. This concerns the difficulty of exploiting the effective functioning of the market without having to bear such great social costs that they eventually endanger the integration of liberal democratic societies. The democratic goal of the welfare state is to secure the social, technological and ecological conditions that make the equal opportunity for the use of equally distributed basic rights possible. This goal is now put out of reach by an economic globalisation that undermines the capacity of the nation state to prosecute its program. Capital mobility and ecological degradation across porous state borders are just two of the main indexes of the nation-states loss of sovereignty in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. Capital mobility has been especially telling on the capacity of the state to fund extensive welfare programs. Fiscal pressures all over the OECD countries resulted from tax-cuts in the attempt to stem capital flight. This has inevitably led to the slimming down of the state and drastic reductions in welfare expenditure in response to sinking corporate tax revenues.
7. For Habermas, one of the main paradoxes of globalisation is the fact that it “forces the nation-state to open itself up internally to the multiplicity of foreign, or new forms of cultural life” while, at the same time, “shrinking the scope of action for national governments. He adopts the metaphor of “opening” and “closing” to reinforce his point. He argues that European history since the Middle Ages has seen an unparalleled the opening up of traditional lifeworlds. As much as communities and lifeworlds profit from opening up to their environments, it is, Habermas argues, also essential that they be able to regulate this dynamism by various degrees of “closure.” Closure is vital because “the spatial and temporal horizons always form a whole that is both intuitively present and always withdrawn to an unproblematic background”. This provides lifeworld participants with a perspective of competence that contains every possible interaction. It is vital for both the community and the individual to absorb new impulses and loosen ascriptive ties of family, locality, social background and tradition so they can reorganise these relations. The happiest periods of European history have been those when some sort of equilibrium has been maintained between “opening” and “closing”. On this basis, he wants to argue that there is a dilemma facing both neo-liberalism and post-modernism alike. They cannot explain how the deficits in steering competencies and legitimation that have emerged at the national level as a result of such “opening” by economic globalisation can be compensated at the super-national level without some form of “closure” in the sense of political regulation.
8. It is in line with this comprehensive understanding of globalisation and in particular the pressure that its economic dimension has put on both the welfare state and its nation-state bearer, that Habermas poses the task of needing to supply democracy with some sort of post-national dimension. This would create supra-nation state political structures able to restore balance between the existing global economic networks and inchoate mechanisms of political closure. The movement towards some sort of supra-national institutions of co-operation and regulation are already evident in new economic and trading arrangements like NAFTA, EU and AESEAN. This is all part of a movement in which the political attempts to catch up with the economic. The limitation of these developments is that they do not change the overall context of the global economic competition but only amount to defensive trading adaptations. In Habermas’ view a meaningful (although to this time almost utopian) alternative would be to hand over most of the main regulative functions of the national welfare state to supra-national structures and authorities. The European Union has some potential in this direction. But as we have seen recently, there is also significant internal popular resistance to these developments especially when European populations feel that their life conditions may be eroded. At the moment the European Union stands before the question of whether it can make the jump from a union of economic relations and markets with weak and indirect political regulation to a new federated political structure. But Habermas insisted that this will not simply be the result of constitutional developments. The conditions for such a political entity depend upon the creation of solidarity at the base. It requires that all citizens of the Union be included in the creation of a unified political culture. Solidarity at the base requires democratic processes at the local level that have taken root. This will requires a synchronised debate across Europe on its future fostered by national political parties with the assistance of education systems fostering foreign languages. The goal would be to establish a polyglot communicative context by interlinking national public spheres and developing both common interests and a European civil society.
9. Clearly the obstacles to such a development seem formidable. All projects to further develop unifying procedures and practices face the reality of vested national interests and asymmetrical inter-dependence. This means that national global actors still prefer to externalise social costs and are generally reluctant to act even in the face of obvious global interests. However, Habermas argues that the national consciousness of the 19th century was only gradually produced. His own understanding of globalisation as a “process” involving not just the increasing scope and intensity of commercial but also of communicative relations holds further promise. We are now witnesses to a changing awareness of planetary interdependence and risk. Whether or not this will lead to a changed consciousness of citizens in a way that brings about cosmopolitan solidarity is impossible to say. What Habermas has in mind here is not just a fuzzy feeling of shared humanity but an actual preparedness to see policies implemented that successfully redistribute burdens. Yet Habermas argues that this cosmopolitan solidarity could be weaker than the bonds we typically associate with civil society. He is not a proponent of world government. Any realistic supra-national political framework must take into account the autonomy and differences of the existing sovereign national states. A move in this direction will be possible when electorates are prepared to reward political elites for decisions that demonstrate a concern for global governance. At the moment, the chances for this are reduced by the defensive reactions of middle and working class electorates that fear their prospects in a harsher globalised environment. Habermas sees the best hope for this in the pressures that can be exerted by interest groups, NGO’s and civilly active citizens. For him, the prospects for democracy in our time now rest beyond the nation-state. In this new global constellation the best that a national government can do is fight a losing rear guard action trying to hold of the irresistible powers of economic globalisation.
10. We have already touched on some problems with Habermas' contemporary prognosis. Another range of problems can be couched as objections and touch on various levels on Habermas' theoretical construction. The first level concerns the empirical adequacy of the theory. Remember that the fundamental motivation behind his reconceptualisation of modernity in terms of lifeworld and system lay in his belief that the welfare state compromise faced new challenges coming from new social movements and a post-materialist politics. Habermas's notion of the colonisation of the lifeworld was constructed especially to account for these challenges. However, while this model does appear in its focus on the client and the consumer to capture important aspects of the new situation, there are also some glaring holes. Perhaps the most significant problem in advanced Western societies is the issue of structural unemployment. Yet Habermas's model of a post-materialist reflective politics seems to largely depend upon conditions of relative full employment like those that operated in Germany up to the end of the eighties.
11. Objections can also be raised at the level of conceptualisation. Habermas' model views the lifeworld and system as two autonomous and complementary spheres of action. In conceptualisation of the system he presupposes a norm free organisation of action along purely functional lines. Likewise he views the lifeworld as sphere of communicative action where the integration is achieved by linguistic means orientated to mutual understanding. While Habermas does not consider this domain power free, he does at least seem to think that here domination is on the evolutionary decline. Some critics have argued that both of these conceptions are fictions. The idea of the system organised solely according to principles of purposive rationality commits a double error. It presupposes that the organisation of the economy and the administration of the state are the embodiment of purposive rational rules and that action within these domains take place independent of the formation of normative consensus. The first proposition seems contradicted by the fact economic organisations and bureaucratic administrations are the embodiment not only of purposive rational but also political-practical principles. Such political-practical principles are nothing else but the outcome of a continuous process of communication and bargaining of interests amongst concerned actors. Thus neither management nor administration carries out tasks completely independently from the normative agreement of members. Similarly, critics have also questioned the power free status of the communicatively orientated lifeworld on the grounds that the family and the public sphere are hardly bereft of power relations. Habermas is perhaps optimistic to view their presence as simply the residue of traditionalism soon to be dissolved by the enlightenment of evolutionary learning processes. But in his defense it should be noted that for him distortion-free communication is a counter-factual normative ideal rather than the reality. However, this still leaves his analysis of linguistic pragmatics open to the criticism that is neglects the role of a whole range of non-economic and non-bureaucratic power plays.
12. Even sympathetic commentators have also questioned the “uncritical” character of his reading of liberal democratic institutional arrangements in Between Facts and Norms. This representative complaint is expressed well by William Scheuerman. He maintains that this ‘at times surprisingly moderate and even conciliatory picture’ fails ‘to give adequate expression to legitimate unease and anxiety about ‘really existing” democracy’. Of course, this charge would come as no surprise to those familiar with the historical reception of Hegel’s political philosophy. Habermas here commits crimes that radical critics like Marx and the other Left Hegelians long ago placed at Hegel’s door. Those who were here in first semester will remember that Hegel’s own “reconciliation with reality” was ultimately bought at significant political and philosophical cost. His doubts regarding democracy and his philosophical retreat to a retrospective contemplation that “paints its grey in grey and cannot change the world” are only too well known. Habermas has learnt this Hegelian lesson well. While he acknowledges the importance of utopian images and the energies that motivate social movements, he agrees with Hegel that a responsible philosophy cannot be reduced to mere subjective fancy. What Habermas provides in the middle chapters of Between Facts and Norms is a philosophical reconstruction of the main normative elements of liberal democratic constitutionalism. Philosophy still has a vital contemporary critical task to perform, of translation between modern cultural and institutional achievement and the everyday, of critical self-reflection. The spirit of modernity has already set before us a challenging task that is still incomplete. The constitutional principles of liberal democracy demand a synthesis of private and public autonomy that takes us to a democratic horizon that is still to be realised and may ultimately never be attain. Yet, for him, this is the contemporary “rationality of the real” that we abandon only at our peril. Here is a combination of philosophical restraint and cultural optimism, of ambition and limitation that, while it may stray from the letter is very much in accord with the spirit of Hegel.
13. This leads to the most abstract level of Habermas’ theorisation. Earlier I mentioned Habermas' account of the story of philosophy's treatment of rationality. He maintained that since Kant modern philosophy had shifted focus from substantive rationality to 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 the idea of more comprehensive notion of rationality that underpins his whole theory. How is this notion to be justified? If we are to ask Foucault what is the normative standpoint of his critique of modernity, we must require Habermas to do the same. It seems clear that this underlying but 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 teleology as a return to 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 because for Habermas its theoretical status is that of a reconstructive philosophical hypothesis that is dependent upon the support of the full range of social sciences. However our access to this hypothetical universal is to traverse a la Hegel the story of human cultural evolution that Habermas lays out in The Theory of Communicative Action. He argues that the process of cultural rationalisation gives us access to the immanent general formal pragmatic structures of language. In following the historical process of cultural differentiation we have unlocked the key to the logic of a mode of domination-free communication that is the originary function and structural potential inherent in language. The illocutionary validity claims are implicit in the various potential speaker/ listener and observer roles and their accompanying validity claims allowed us as communicative actors. For Habermas this claim gives his theory a neo-transcendental foundation and is a defensible theoretical hypothesis, while critics might argue that it is a disguised return to a no longer tenable substantive notion of reason.
14. A crucial element of Habermas movement beyond teleology and concrete historical actors has been his embrace of the category of “universalisability”. This is the concomitant of a theory that has placed abstract humanity in the position once occupied by the proletariat. However, the category of “universalisability” does not provide criteria for moving from this description of the whole of society to a critique of its oppressive parts. It is incapable of dealing with intractable material interests. The category of universalisability works effectively when the issue is grounding specific rationalities. However it is incapable of specifying priorities amongst competing general concerns, material interest and confronting organisation questions. These are substantive and political questions. This is especially the case when the issues are economic inequality and intractable power differentials. Furthermore, the social effectivity of discourse ethics depends not on insight into the rules of linguistic competence but on a commitment to put them into practice. The problem of the “free loader” familiar to proponents of rational choice theory remains unaddressed by Habermas’ assurances of the counterfactual status of the ethics of communicative action. We are also well aware that the constitutional machinery of the liberal democratic state regularly produces real inequalities of outcome despite the existence of formally equal treatment before the courts and other arenas of political and social compromise. This fact suggests that an immanently critical theory to which Habermas aspires must aspire to go beyond the formalism of the general values of our society and track the substance of their realisation. A critical theory needs more than historical and institutional points of reference like those that issue from Habermas’ Hegelian reading of immanence: it needs to grasp these values in the context of the concrete constraints and alternatives making for their practical exercise.
15. Habermas’ theoretical achievement is unquestionable. He has relentlessly pursued the quest to grasp contemporary society as an integral and dynamic totality with potentials both of emancipation and threat. Against the strictures of the post-modernists, he has never lost sight of the necessity of compelling cultural meta-narratives. His theory of communicative action is a towering attempt to bring this practical cultural necessity into accord with a interdisciplinary program of philosophy and the human sciences and preserve a utopian moment duly constrained by immanence and political responsibility. Not even his harshest critics have been able to offer an alternative to his prerequisites for communicative action. This makes him a worthy successor in the tradition of Hegel, Marx and critical theory. Yet, it is questionable whether a conceptual instrumentarium drawn primarily from linguistic philosophy and functional sociology has all the equipment needed to address the problems mentioned above, preserve a comprehensive critical edge. This requires all the means of conceptualising not just the general dynamics of cultural learning processes and their instantiated validity claims but also the concrete dynamics of contemporary social reality and the historically determinant quality of events. The magnitude of Habermas’ own contribution towards such a theory cannot disguise the fact that a great deal more needs to be done. However such a conclusion is very much in accord with Habermas’ own understanding of modernity as ongoing and perennially incomplete project.
2. Habermas attempted to address this problem in his major work in political philosophy Between Facts and Norms (1996). There he analyses the complex set of interdependencies that govern the relations between informal processes of collective opinion and will formation and the administrative and decision-making functions of the political centre. On this account, the informal public sphere does not appear in the first instance as a set of institutions but as a ‘network for communicating information and points of view’. It describes processes whereby problems, formerly encountered privately, are attached to reasons through which their generalising significance can be recognised. In pursuit of its ambition to facilitate the shift of expressions of private dissatisfaction into the terms of effective claims, public spheres must be ‘anchored in the voluntary associations of civil society and embedded in liberal patterns of political culture and socialisation.’ Habermas’ account of the informal public sphere describes the democratising potentials of this process of communicative rationality where legitimacy is generated via processes of argumentation. These finally appeal, not to the authority of tradition or power but to a set of consensually elaborated principles. The presumption of the rationality of this mode of interaction confers legitimacy on a democratising mode of interaction that takes shape within civil society. At this stage, however, the public sphere is not a formalised discourse of law but a generalized mechanism of “bundling” where streams of communication are filtered and synthesized into topically specified public opinions. The achievement of the public sphere is, on the one hand, measured in terms of the increased self-understanding and extended mutual understanding discovered by its participants. At the same time, this process of self-clarification finally permits the newly ‘bundled’ problems to seek patronage within the decision-making bodies of a constitutional democracy.
3. Habermas understanding of the role of the administrative institutions of liberal democracy attempts to synthesize the lessons of both the republican and liberal models. On the one hand the republican tradition is criticised for neglecting the theorisation of administrative power and expelling it from the domain of real politics as the ‘rule of nobody’. On the other hand, he argues that a liberal understanding of administration, that is focused primarily on rational outcomes, pacifies the citizen and fails to recognise the extent to which his or her own self-awareness of issues is a decisive ingredient in meeting real political needs.
4. Habermas offers a proceduralist interpretation of the role of the administrative state in democratic processes. It serves as model for democratising administrative power and confronting some of the deepest problems that have plagued the welfare state. His main idea is that the “bluntness” of law and administration as policy instruments in the fraught domains of welfare (epitomised by the phenomenon of juridification) can be best counter-acted by alternative arrangements. Democratic forums and enclaves must be devised and introduced within administrative arrangements wherever possible as a vehicle whereby clients are allowed to become citizens who articulate their own needs and interests. However, this reformist agenda in the domain of administration is only one instantiation of Habermas’ desire to conceptually spell out the normative meaning of contemporary liberal democracy. This is not to say that he ignores problems. The later chapters of Between Facts and Norms lay out the way in which money and power present real obstacles to the complete delivery of the normative content of liberal democratic arrangements. However, as we have seen, Habermas is convinced that the institutional realization of this normative vision of liberal democracy is itself a singular historical achievement. And this is not simply a laudatio of the past. He is also sure that this normative content acts as a vital and powerful counterfactual ideal that is something that can and must be built on.
5. Despite his assessment that in modernity the fragile project of democracy is everywhere on the defensive and the chances of moving in the right direction are not good, Habermas has become even more critical of his Marxist inheritance. By the time of the third German edition of The Theory of Communicative Action(1993) he is at pains to further distance himself from the theory of reification that had provided the conceptual basis of the colonisation thesis. He now suggests that in a theory meant to underline the ambiguous potentiality of modernity, it was a mistake to allow the concept of colonisation the central position. This conceptual preference seemed to decide the question of the dynamic between system and lifeworld in a predetermined way in favour of the former. On these grounds, he abandons the concept of colonisation. Not because he is no longer concerned about the real and potential encroachments of the systems and purposive rationality into the lifeworld but because he wants to view the nexus between the two as a two-way street with flows going in both directions. The question of which side imposes itself is ultimately an empirical question that cannot be decided in advance.
6. In the last two decades Habermas’ political thought has concentrated on the crisis of the welfare state with the emerging forces of globalisation This describes a “process not an end state” characterised by the “increasing scope and intensity of commercial, communicative and exchange relations beyond national borders”. While these tendencies run in many dimensions, the most dominant one has been economic globalisation. Here Habermas sees the re-emergence of an old problem. This concerns the difficulty of exploiting the effective functioning of the market without having to bear such great social costs that they eventually endanger the integration of liberal democratic societies. The democratic goal of the welfare state is to secure the social, technological and ecological conditions that make the equal opportunity for the use of equally distributed basic rights possible. This goal is now put out of reach by an economic globalisation that undermines the capacity of the nation state to prosecute its program. Capital mobility and ecological degradation across porous state borders are just two of the main indexes of the nation-states loss of sovereignty in an increasingly interconnected and interdependent world. Capital mobility has been especially telling on the capacity of the state to fund extensive welfare programs. Fiscal pressures all over the OECD countries resulted from tax-cuts in the attempt to stem capital flight. This has inevitably led to the slimming down of the state and drastic reductions in welfare expenditure in response to sinking corporate tax revenues.
7. For Habermas, one of the main paradoxes of globalisation is the fact that it “forces the nation-state to open itself up internally to the multiplicity of foreign, or new forms of cultural life” while, at the same time, “shrinking the scope of action for national governments. He adopts the metaphor of “opening” and “closing” to reinforce his point. He argues that European history since the Middle Ages has seen an unparalleled the opening up of traditional lifeworlds. As much as communities and lifeworlds profit from opening up to their environments, it is, Habermas argues, also essential that they be able to regulate this dynamism by various degrees of “closure.” Closure is vital because “the spatial and temporal horizons always form a whole that is both intuitively present and always withdrawn to an unproblematic background”. This provides lifeworld participants with a perspective of competence that contains every possible interaction. It is vital for both the community and the individual to absorb new impulses and loosen ascriptive ties of family, locality, social background and tradition so they can reorganise these relations. The happiest periods of European history have been those when some sort of equilibrium has been maintained between “opening” and “closing”. On this basis, he wants to argue that there is a dilemma facing both neo-liberalism and post-modernism alike. They cannot explain how the deficits in steering competencies and legitimation that have emerged at the national level as a result of such “opening” by economic globalisation can be compensated at the super-national level without some form of “closure” in the sense of political regulation.
8. It is in line with this comprehensive understanding of globalisation and in particular the pressure that its economic dimension has put on both the welfare state and its nation-state bearer, that Habermas poses the task of needing to supply democracy with some sort of post-national dimension. This would create supra-nation state political structures able to restore balance between the existing global economic networks and inchoate mechanisms of political closure. The movement towards some sort of supra-national institutions of co-operation and regulation are already evident in new economic and trading arrangements like NAFTA, EU and AESEAN. This is all part of a movement in which the political attempts to catch up with the economic. The limitation of these developments is that they do not change the overall context of the global economic competition but only amount to defensive trading adaptations. In Habermas’ view a meaningful (although to this time almost utopian) alternative would be to hand over most of the main regulative functions of the national welfare state to supra-national structures and authorities. The European Union has some potential in this direction. But as we have seen recently, there is also significant internal popular resistance to these developments especially when European populations feel that their life conditions may be eroded. At the moment the European Union stands before the question of whether it can make the jump from a union of economic relations and markets with weak and indirect political regulation to a new federated political structure. But Habermas insisted that this will not simply be the result of constitutional developments. The conditions for such a political entity depend upon the creation of solidarity at the base. It requires that all citizens of the Union be included in the creation of a unified political culture. Solidarity at the base requires democratic processes at the local level that have taken root. This will requires a synchronised debate across Europe on its future fostered by national political parties with the assistance of education systems fostering foreign languages. The goal would be to establish a polyglot communicative context by interlinking national public spheres and developing both common interests and a European civil society.
9. Clearly the obstacles to such a development seem formidable. All projects to further develop unifying procedures and practices face the reality of vested national interests and asymmetrical inter-dependence. This means that national global actors still prefer to externalise social costs and are generally reluctant to act even in the face of obvious global interests. However, Habermas argues that the national consciousness of the 19th century was only gradually produced. His own understanding of globalisation as a “process” involving not just the increasing scope and intensity of commercial but also of communicative relations holds further promise. We are now witnesses to a changing awareness of planetary interdependence and risk. Whether or not this will lead to a changed consciousness of citizens in a way that brings about cosmopolitan solidarity is impossible to say. What Habermas has in mind here is not just a fuzzy feeling of shared humanity but an actual preparedness to see policies implemented that successfully redistribute burdens. Yet Habermas argues that this cosmopolitan solidarity could be weaker than the bonds we typically associate with civil society. He is not a proponent of world government. Any realistic supra-national political framework must take into account the autonomy and differences of the existing sovereign national states. A move in this direction will be possible when electorates are prepared to reward political elites for decisions that demonstrate a concern for global governance. At the moment, the chances for this are reduced by the defensive reactions of middle and working class electorates that fear their prospects in a harsher globalised environment. Habermas sees the best hope for this in the pressures that can be exerted by interest groups, NGO’s and civilly active citizens. For him, the prospects for democracy in our time now rest beyond the nation-state. In this new global constellation the best that a national government can do is fight a losing rear guard action trying to hold of the irresistible powers of economic globalisation.
10. We have already touched on some problems with Habermas' contemporary prognosis. Another range of problems can be couched as objections and touch on various levels on Habermas' theoretical construction. The first level concerns the empirical adequacy of the theory. Remember that the fundamental motivation behind his reconceptualisation of modernity in terms of lifeworld and system lay in his belief that the welfare state compromise faced new challenges coming from new social movements and a post-materialist politics. Habermas's notion of the colonisation of the lifeworld was constructed especially to account for these challenges. However, while this model does appear in its focus on the client and the consumer to capture important aspects of the new situation, there are also some glaring holes. Perhaps the most significant problem in advanced Western societies is the issue of structural unemployment. Yet Habermas's model of a post-materialist reflective politics seems to largely depend upon conditions of relative full employment like those that operated in Germany up to the end of the eighties.
11. Objections can also be raised at the level of conceptualisation. Habermas' model views the lifeworld and system as two autonomous and complementary spheres of action. In conceptualisation of the system he presupposes a norm free organisation of action along purely functional lines. Likewise he views the lifeworld as sphere of communicative action where the integration is achieved by linguistic means orientated to mutual understanding. While Habermas does not consider this domain power free, he does at least seem to think that here domination is on the evolutionary decline. Some critics have argued that both of these conceptions are fictions. The idea of the system organised solely according to principles of purposive rationality commits a double error. It presupposes that the organisation of the economy and the administration of the state are the embodiment of purposive rational rules and that action within these domains take place independent of the formation of normative consensus. The first proposition seems contradicted by the fact economic organisations and bureaucratic administrations are the embodiment not only of purposive rational but also political-practical principles. Such political-practical principles are nothing else but the outcome of a continuous process of communication and bargaining of interests amongst concerned actors. Thus neither management nor administration carries out tasks completely independently from the normative agreement of members. Similarly, critics have also questioned the power free status of the communicatively orientated lifeworld on the grounds that the family and the public sphere are hardly bereft of power relations. Habermas is perhaps optimistic to view their presence as simply the residue of traditionalism soon to be dissolved by the enlightenment of evolutionary learning processes. But in his defense it should be noted that for him distortion-free communication is a counter-factual normative ideal rather than the reality. However, this still leaves his analysis of linguistic pragmatics open to the criticism that is neglects the role of a whole range of non-economic and non-bureaucratic power plays.
12. Even sympathetic commentators have also questioned the “uncritical” character of his reading of liberal democratic institutional arrangements in Between Facts and Norms. This representative complaint is expressed well by William Scheuerman. He maintains that this ‘at times surprisingly moderate and even conciliatory picture’ fails ‘to give adequate expression to legitimate unease and anxiety about ‘really existing” democracy’. Of course, this charge would come as no surprise to those familiar with the historical reception of Hegel’s political philosophy. Habermas here commits crimes that radical critics like Marx and the other Left Hegelians long ago placed at Hegel’s door. Those who were here in first semester will remember that Hegel’s own “reconciliation with reality” was ultimately bought at significant political and philosophical cost. His doubts regarding democracy and his philosophical retreat to a retrospective contemplation that “paints its grey in grey and cannot change the world” are only too well known. Habermas has learnt this Hegelian lesson well. While he acknowledges the importance of utopian images and the energies that motivate social movements, he agrees with Hegel that a responsible philosophy cannot be reduced to mere subjective fancy. What Habermas provides in the middle chapters of Between Facts and Norms is a philosophical reconstruction of the main normative elements of liberal democratic constitutionalism. Philosophy still has a vital contemporary critical task to perform, of translation between modern cultural and institutional achievement and the everyday, of critical self-reflection. The spirit of modernity has already set before us a challenging task that is still incomplete. The constitutional principles of liberal democracy demand a synthesis of private and public autonomy that takes us to a democratic horizon that is still to be realised and may ultimately never be attain. Yet, for him, this is the contemporary “rationality of the real” that we abandon only at our peril. Here is a combination of philosophical restraint and cultural optimism, of ambition and limitation that, while it may stray from the letter is very much in accord with the spirit of Hegel.
13. This leads to the most abstract level of Habermas’ theorisation. Earlier I mentioned Habermas' account of the story of philosophy's treatment of rationality. He maintained that since Kant modern philosophy had shifted focus from substantive rationality to 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 the idea of more comprehensive notion of rationality that underpins his whole theory. How is this notion to be justified? If we are to ask Foucault what is the normative standpoint of his critique of modernity, we must require Habermas to do the same. It seems clear that this underlying but 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 teleology as a return to 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 because for Habermas its theoretical status is that of a reconstructive philosophical hypothesis that is dependent upon the support of the full range of social sciences. However our access to this hypothetical universal is to traverse a la Hegel the story of human cultural evolution that Habermas lays out in The Theory of Communicative Action. He argues that the process of cultural rationalisation gives us access to the immanent general formal pragmatic structures of language. In following the historical process of cultural differentiation we have unlocked the key to the logic of a mode of domination-free communication that is the originary function and structural potential inherent in language. The illocutionary validity claims are implicit in the various potential speaker/ listener and observer roles and their accompanying validity claims allowed us as communicative actors. For Habermas this claim gives his theory a neo-transcendental foundation and is a defensible theoretical hypothesis, while critics might argue that it is a disguised return to a no longer tenable substantive notion of reason.
14. A crucial element of Habermas movement beyond teleology and concrete historical actors has been his embrace of the category of “universalisability”. This is the concomitant of a theory that has placed abstract humanity in the position once occupied by the proletariat. However, the category of “universalisability” does not provide criteria for moving from this description of the whole of society to a critique of its oppressive parts. It is incapable of dealing with intractable material interests. The category of universalisability works effectively when the issue is grounding specific rationalities. However it is incapable of specifying priorities amongst competing general concerns, material interest and confronting organisation questions. These are substantive and political questions. This is especially the case when the issues are economic inequality and intractable power differentials. Furthermore, the social effectivity of discourse ethics depends not on insight into the rules of linguistic competence but on a commitment to put them into practice. The problem of the “free loader” familiar to proponents of rational choice theory remains unaddressed by Habermas’ assurances of the counterfactual status of the ethics of communicative action. We are also well aware that the constitutional machinery of the liberal democratic state regularly produces real inequalities of outcome despite the existence of formally equal treatment before the courts and other arenas of political and social compromise. This fact suggests that an immanently critical theory to which Habermas aspires must aspire to go beyond the formalism of the general values of our society and track the substance of their realisation. A critical theory needs more than historical and institutional points of reference like those that issue from Habermas’ Hegelian reading of immanence: it needs to grasp these values in the context of the concrete constraints and alternatives making for their practical exercise.
15. Habermas’ theoretical achievement is unquestionable. He has relentlessly pursued the quest to grasp contemporary society as an integral and dynamic totality with potentials both of emancipation and threat. Against the strictures of the post-modernists, he has never lost sight of the necessity of compelling cultural meta-narratives. His theory of communicative action is a towering attempt to bring this practical cultural necessity into accord with a interdisciplinary program of philosophy and the human sciences and preserve a utopian moment duly constrained by immanence and political responsibility. Not even his harshest critics have been able to offer an alternative to his prerequisites for communicative action. This makes him a worthy successor in the tradition of Hegel, Marx and critical theory. Yet, it is questionable whether a conceptual instrumentarium drawn primarily from linguistic philosophy and functional sociology has all the equipment needed to address the problems mentioned above, preserve a comprehensive critical edge. This requires all the means of conceptualising not just the general dynamics of cultural learning processes and their instantiated validity claims but also the concrete dynamics of contemporary social reality and the historically determinant quality of events. The magnitude of Habermas’ own contribution towards such a theory cannot disguise the fact that a great deal more needs to be done. However such a conclusion is very much in accord with Habermas’ own understanding of modernity as ongoing and perennially incomplete project.
Lecture 12: Habermas (cont) The Pathologies of Modernity
1. A crucial moment of Habermas’ paradigm shift in The Theory of Communicative Action is the movement away from the purposive instrumental model of rationality to that of communicative action drawing on the work of Mead, Durkheim and Parsons. The gist of this argument is that so-called primitive societies are normatively integrated under the authority of the sacred. In the course of social evolution, society undergoes processes of functional differentiation whereby some spheres of social action get hived off into specialized subsystems that are relieved of normative integration by adopting their own steering media. At the same time, the processes of cultural rationalisation referred to a bit earlier have a profound impact within the sphere of communicative action itself. These gradually weaken the hold of the sacred and tradition; they imposing their own post-conventional morality and normative integration, where practices, norms and institutional arrangements are detached from taken-for-granted normative contexts and negotiated through discursive processes orientated to mutual understanding. As Habermas argues, the institutions of bourgeois liberal democracy (civil society, the public sphere and the formal parliamentary institutions) are not a superstructural façade concealing the full integrated economic and political control of the bourgeois but a two-way channel of power and influence transmission between the lifeworld and organized functional systems like the economy and bureaucracy. That Habermas would want to theoretically elaborate this intuitive appreciation of cultural rationalization is not surprising. One of his biggest criticisms of Weber was that his positivist reading of the law confounded legality with legitimacy. Thus Weber ignored the way in which the law is a crucial mechanism for the institutonalisation of post-conventional communicative interaction. His exclusive focus was on ethical rationalisation in the shape of an individual calling so compatible with the capitalist spirit. But Habermas underlines the point that this ethical calling was confined to an elite. This spirit could not be generalized without the development of a system of compulsory norms. Without legal regulation capitalist economic relations are unthinkable. Furthermore, to the extent that Weber theorized the law, he viewed it as the embodiment of the cognitive, instrumental rationality of the economy and state. For Habermas, this view too easily detaches the legal from forms of moral practical rationality tied to legitimacy. Weber should have viewed the law as an order of life correlated with the normative value of rightness anchored in democratic will-formation and moral practical rationalisation. Already implicit in this critique of Weber is a view of bourgeois law and political institutions that take completely seriously its own normative claims as a product of cultural rationalisation. Taking seriously these normative claims does not mean that Habermas is prepared to evaluate the law at its own self-assessment. He is especially interested in registering the pervasive tension between facticity and validity in the law: the law as both compulsory and legitimate. However, it does mean connecting the law to the democratic processes that provide it with legitimation in liberal democratic societies.
2. Habermas' own initial theory of modernity is born from a critique of the Western Marxist theory of reification. But Habermas no longer uses the language of alienation but describes what he calls the pathologies of modernity. He identifies two types of these pathologies: the colonisation of the lifeworld by the mechanism of functional subsystems and the cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld According to Habermas, modernity is characterised by processes that increasingly rationalise the lifeworld. The notion of the lifeworld taken over from phenomenology refers to the taken-for-granted, common intersubjective meanings, norms and rules that underpin an individual’s interpretation of experience. However, Habermas wants to make this notion useful for social theory. This requires that it be emended so as to incorporate the structural elements of the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld. He identifies three structural elements--culture, society and person -- which form the nodal points of cultural reproduction in terms of cultural knowledge, social integration and socialisation. This means that the lifeworld includes all those non-symbolic aspects of life like family, informal social interaction and civil society. Reproduction involves the constant assimilation of new experience to the continuity of the past in a way that irons out dissonances, fuses horizons and incorporates innovation and cognitive advances. Habermas views the lifeworld as the centre of modern decentred society (a society broke up into specialised functional subsystems) in the sense that it is out of collision and working through of the differences between lifeworlds that a diffuse common consciousness emerges.
3. Increasingly in modernity the actions, interpretations and practices of individuals are detached from these taken-for-granted normative contexts and submitted to examination, critique and negotiation oriented towards mutual understanding. In other words, modernity sees the demise of tradition and its displacement by processes of communicative interaction where meaning is not "given" but arrived at through processes orientated to mutual understanding. According to Habermas the process of cultural rationalisation plays a vital role here insofar as it allows us to progressively distinguish and clarify our experience. The modern subject is potentially able to discriminate in terms of the formal world concepts between the various sorts of validity claim (truth, rightness and authenticity) and such claims can be redeemed through dialogue and discourse orientated to mutual understanding. As ever more domains of social life underwent this displacement of tradition by processes orientated to understanding, the medium of communication became overburdened. When the task of social integration depends less on tradition and more on the interpretive capacities of individuals and their greater commitment to the negotiation of agreements, there are great risks of disagreement and increasing pressure to create relief mechanisms, to reduce the possibility of breakdowns.
4. Relief mechanisms take two essential forms. One involves the condensation of communicative action in the sense that communicative action is not replaced but simply made more dense and abstract. An example of this would be the mass media where communicative processes are released from the provincialism of local contexts and a broader arena of public discussion emerges. A good example of this is the development of the modern newspaper. This sort of condensation has ambiguous consequences. On the one hand, it hierarchises issues, increases the prerogative of experts and removes knowledge from everyday communicative practices. On the other, it removes local restrictions on the horizon of possible understanding and opens them to alternative perspectives. The second form of relief mechanism involves the complete replacement of communicative interaction by the steering mechanisms of money and power that uncouple action coordination from language and the lifeworld and submit it to quasi-automatic functional subsystems. Habermas has in mind here the economic and administrative systems that provide the basis for a functional co-ordination of action beyond the lifeworld. They bypass the individual’s own interpretative acts and self-responsibility with the creation of almost norm-free systemic structures (of course this autonomy from the lifeworld and normative constraints is only relative as they remain linked with everyday communicative practice through basic legal institutions like private law and election).
5. Unlike Marx, who tended to view the automaticity of the market in terms of the reification of the world of commodities that dominated living labor, Habermas does not view the uncoupling of the subsystems from the lifeworld as intrinsically problematic. It does not automatically signify the subjugation of the lifeworld to the imperatives of the functional systems. Thus the emphasis is on differentiation rather than fragmentation or alienation. On the contrary, it may liberate agents from time consuming tasks of co-ordination and promote various efficiencies. The institutions that anchor the economic and administrative subsystems in the lifeworld like civil and public law and political representation ideally offer a reciprocal two-way channel for influence between the lifeworld and the organised functional systems. However, at this point while sometimes Habermas talked of inflexible lifeworld structures withdrawing motivation and legitimacy, the colonisation thesis suggested mainly that it was the communicatively structured domains of the private and public lifeworld that are most under threat from the dynamism of the functional economic and administrative systems. This may seem like Habermas' concession to the power of the Marxian argument that domination arises from differential economic power. Yet Habermas is not convinced that class conflict is the only explanation for the subsumption of the lifeworld under the system. Having taken on the legacy of Weber, he draws our attention to the role played by the state and the bureaucracy in advancing this process. Habermas offers here a model of the two subsystems that compensate for the weaknesses in each other. Both market and state intervene in the lifeworld in order to pacify potential conflict and political alienation. The citizen is transformed into a client of the bureaucracies. Rights are passive and the modern citizen has been reduced to the negative function of voting. Thereby some of the possibilities for political participation opened up by the rationalisation of the lifeworld have been significantly neutralised. While these strategies have been largely successful, Habermas believes that colonisation of the lifeworld beyond a certain threshhold is likely to provoke resistance. The emergence of new social movements in the last twenty years--ecology, feminist, alternative lifestyles, gay liberation and movements for local autonomy--whose demands go beyond the compensations of the welfare state to defending and restoring endangered forms of life is, for Habermas, an empirical index of this protest potential.
6. It is clear that Habermas’ model of modernity, like Foucault’s, has been heavily influenced by the changed character and agenda of political protest in the last two decades. For Habermas, the welfare-state mass democracy is an arrangement that rendered latent the class conflicts still built into the capitalist economic system. However, the intricacies of this mutally supportive dual subsystem of market and political bureaucracy has greatly increased system complexity and compelled not only an extension in the reach of the formally organised domains of action but also an increase in their internal density (concentration, centralisation). Thus colonisation of the lifeworld assumes such forms as the increasing juridification of the public dimension of social life and the increasing commodification of its private dimension. As examples of the former, we might cite the extension of legal regulation into new territory like family law or race discrimination while in the latter category we could mention the commercialization of a whole range of services formerly embedded in the structures of the lifeworld like child care. Habermas maintains it is an open question how far these tendencies could extend. He clearly doubts that they could usurp the integrative function of the lifeworld as a whole. As mentioned, the spheres of social life integrated via mechanisms of communicative interaction are resistive to integration by system mechanisms. The spheres of the lifeworld, which depend for their reproduction upon action orientated to understanding will become pathologised "in some way or other" when uncoupled from communicative action and subjected to mechanisms of system integration.
7. The second form of pathology noted by Habermas concerns the cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld. We have already seen that Habermas takes over from Weber the idea of cultural rationalisation. He does not view this process as some momentary historical phase that will be overcome by a reunification of culture. On the contrary, it represents the cultural engine of the processes of communicative interaction orientated to mutual understanding, a vital moment of historical learning processes. However, it is also the bearer of potential ambiguities. Corresponding to the differentiation of the value spheres we see the institutionalisation of science, moral and legal theory and art as specialist domains of experts linked to professional knowledges. This process of professionalisation of culture creates a gradually widening distance between the so-called expert cultures of the specialists and the general public. Habermas' contention is that the learning processes involved in this sort of cultural specialisation do not automatically flow back into everyday communicative practice. The blockage of this cultural flow leads to the drying up of vital traditions and the impoverishment of everyday practice. Thus it appears that the uncoupling of economic and administrative subsystems from the lifeworld that we have seen associated with material reproduction have their corollary in the cultural domain with the uncoupling of expert cultures. Habermas does not provide an elaborated argument for the linkage between these two processes although he clearly believes that colonization of the life world by the functional imperatives of the economy and administration only accentuates cultural specialization. For example, cultural developments in science, legal theory and art are now very much enmeshed in economic and bureaucratic systems in ways that condition key aspects of their evolution. For him the only solution is that social modernization be steered in a different direction that sets limits to the internal dynamics and to the imperatives of the semi-autonomous economic and political subsystems.
8. Habermas argues that this blockage of cultural infusion into everyday life is accompanied in late capitalist society by a fragmentation of consciousness that is the functional equivalent of ideology. He accepts the "end of ideology" thesis that globalising interpretations of the whole have collapsed under the pressure of rationalisation. Ideologies relied on the fact that some categories of belief remained immune from problemisation. However, the extension of the processes of communicative action and rational scrutiny to all aspects of social existence means that ideology has nowhere to hide and can no longer evade skepticism. But this does not mean that modern societies have all of a sudden become fully transparent. It is not the case that the conflict between social integration by communicative processes in the lifeworld and system integration by functional mechanisms has been acknowledged. This is because the de-centered functionality of modern societies prevents interpretations of the whole coming into existence. However, Habermas would reject the view that society has become so de-centered that it no longer constitutes a whole. Rather he would argue that everyday knowledge remains diffuse and below the level of articulation that meets the validity standards of cultural modernity. Thus everyday consciousness is unable to grasp the whole and remains fragmented. This problem is clearly compounded by the uncoupling of expert cultures from the lifeworld because this means that theoretically articulated knowledge does not flow back into the everyday in a way that would counteract the fragmentation of consciousness.
2. Habermas' own initial theory of modernity is born from a critique of the Western Marxist theory of reification. But Habermas no longer uses the language of alienation but describes what he calls the pathologies of modernity. He identifies two types of these pathologies: the colonisation of the lifeworld by the mechanism of functional subsystems and the cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld According to Habermas, modernity is characterised by processes that increasingly rationalise the lifeworld. The notion of the lifeworld taken over from phenomenology refers to the taken-for-granted, common intersubjective meanings, norms and rules that underpin an individual’s interpretation of experience. However, Habermas wants to make this notion useful for social theory. This requires that it be emended so as to incorporate the structural elements of the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld. He identifies three structural elements--culture, society and person -- which form the nodal points of cultural reproduction in terms of cultural knowledge, social integration and socialisation. This means that the lifeworld includes all those non-symbolic aspects of life like family, informal social interaction and civil society. Reproduction involves the constant assimilation of new experience to the continuity of the past in a way that irons out dissonances, fuses horizons and incorporates innovation and cognitive advances. Habermas views the lifeworld as the centre of modern decentred society (a society broke up into specialised functional subsystems) in the sense that it is out of collision and working through of the differences between lifeworlds that a diffuse common consciousness emerges.
3. Increasingly in modernity the actions, interpretations and practices of individuals are detached from these taken-for-granted normative contexts and submitted to examination, critique and negotiation oriented towards mutual understanding. In other words, modernity sees the demise of tradition and its displacement by processes of communicative interaction where meaning is not "given" but arrived at through processes orientated to mutual understanding. According to Habermas the process of cultural rationalisation plays a vital role here insofar as it allows us to progressively distinguish and clarify our experience. The modern subject is potentially able to discriminate in terms of the formal world concepts between the various sorts of validity claim (truth, rightness and authenticity) and such claims can be redeemed through dialogue and discourse orientated to mutual understanding. As ever more domains of social life underwent this displacement of tradition by processes orientated to understanding, the medium of communication became overburdened. When the task of social integration depends less on tradition and more on the interpretive capacities of individuals and their greater commitment to the negotiation of agreements, there are great risks of disagreement and increasing pressure to create relief mechanisms, to reduce the possibility of breakdowns.
4. Relief mechanisms take two essential forms. One involves the condensation of communicative action in the sense that communicative action is not replaced but simply made more dense and abstract. An example of this would be the mass media where communicative processes are released from the provincialism of local contexts and a broader arena of public discussion emerges. A good example of this is the development of the modern newspaper. This sort of condensation has ambiguous consequences. On the one hand, it hierarchises issues, increases the prerogative of experts and removes knowledge from everyday communicative practices. On the other, it removes local restrictions on the horizon of possible understanding and opens them to alternative perspectives. The second form of relief mechanism involves the complete replacement of communicative interaction by the steering mechanisms of money and power that uncouple action coordination from language and the lifeworld and submit it to quasi-automatic functional subsystems. Habermas has in mind here the economic and administrative systems that provide the basis for a functional co-ordination of action beyond the lifeworld. They bypass the individual’s own interpretative acts and self-responsibility with the creation of almost norm-free systemic structures (of course this autonomy from the lifeworld and normative constraints is only relative as they remain linked with everyday communicative practice through basic legal institutions like private law and election).
5. Unlike Marx, who tended to view the automaticity of the market in terms of the reification of the world of commodities that dominated living labor, Habermas does not view the uncoupling of the subsystems from the lifeworld as intrinsically problematic. It does not automatically signify the subjugation of the lifeworld to the imperatives of the functional systems. Thus the emphasis is on differentiation rather than fragmentation or alienation. On the contrary, it may liberate agents from time consuming tasks of co-ordination and promote various efficiencies. The institutions that anchor the economic and administrative subsystems in the lifeworld like civil and public law and political representation ideally offer a reciprocal two-way channel for influence between the lifeworld and the organised functional systems. However, at this point while sometimes Habermas talked of inflexible lifeworld structures withdrawing motivation and legitimacy, the colonisation thesis suggested mainly that it was the communicatively structured domains of the private and public lifeworld that are most under threat from the dynamism of the functional economic and administrative systems. This may seem like Habermas' concession to the power of the Marxian argument that domination arises from differential economic power. Yet Habermas is not convinced that class conflict is the only explanation for the subsumption of the lifeworld under the system. Having taken on the legacy of Weber, he draws our attention to the role played by the state and the bureaucracy in advancing this process. Habermas offers here a model of the two subsystems that compensate for the weaknesses in each other. Both market and state intervene in the lifeworld in order to pacify potential conflict and political alienation. The citizen is transformed into a client of the bureaucracies. Rights are passive and the modern citizen has been reduced to the negative function of voting. Thereby some of the possibilities for political participation opened up by the rationalisation of the lifeworld have been significantly neutralised. While these strategies have been largely successful, Habermas believes that colonisation of the lifeworld beyond a certain threshhold is likely to provoke resistance. The emergence of new social movements in the last twenty years--ecology, feminist, alternative lifestyles, gay liberation and movements for local autonomy--whose demands go beyond the compensations of the welfare state to defending and restoring endangered forms of life is, for Habermas, an empirical index of this protest potential.
6. It is clear that Habermas’ model of modernity, like Foucault’s, has been heavily influenced by the changed character and agenda of political protest in the last two decades. For Habermas, the welfare-state mass democracy is an arrangement that rendered latent the class conflicts still built into the capitalist economic system. However, the intricacies of this mutally supportive dual subsystem of market and political bureaucracy has greatly increased system complexity and compelled not only an extension in the reach of the formally organised domains of action but also an increase in their internal density (concentration, centralisation). Thus colonisation of the lifeworld assumes such forms as the increasing juridification of the public dimension of social life and the increasing commodification of its private dimension. As examples of the former, we might cite the extension of legal regulation into new territory like family law or race discrimination while in the latter category we could mention the commercialization of a whole range of services formerly embedded in the structures of the lifeworld like child care. Habermas maintains it is an open question how far these tendencies could extend. He clearly doubts that they could usurp the integrative function of the lifeworld as a whole. As mentioned, the spheres of social life integrated via mechanisms of communicative interaction are resistive to integration by system mechanisms. The spheres of the lifeworld, which depend for their reproduction upon action orientated to understanding will become pathologised "in some way or other" when uncoupled from communicative action and subjected to mechanisms of system integration.
7. The second form of pathology noted by Habermas concerns the cultural impoverishment of the lifeworld. We have already seen that Habermas takes over from Weber the idea of cultural rationalisation. He does not view this process as some momentary historical phase that will be overcome by a reunification of culture. On the contrary, it represents the cultural engine of the processes of communicative interaction orientated to mutual understanding, a vital moment of historical learning processes. However, it is also the bearer of potential ambiguities. Corresponding to the differentiation of the value spheres we see the institutionalisation of science, moral and legal theory and art as specialist domains of experts linked to professional knowledges. This process of professionalisation of culture creates a gradually widening distance between the so-called expert cultures of the specialists and the general public. Habermas' contention is that the learning processes involved in this sort of cultural specialisation do not automatically flow back into everyday communicative practice. The blockage of this cultural flow leads to the drying up of vital traditions and the impoverishment of everyday practice. Thus it appears that the uncoupling of economic and administrative subsystems from the lifeworld that we have seen associated with material reproduction have their corollary in the cultural domain with the uncoupling of expert cultures. Habermas does not provide an elaborated argument for the linkage between these two processes although he clearly believes that colonization of the life world by the functional imperatives of the economy and administration only accentuates cultural specialization. For example, cultural developments in science, legal theory and art are now very much enmeshed in economic and bureaucratic systems in ways that condition key aspects of their evolution. For him the only solution is that social modernization be steered in a different direction that sets limits to the internal dynamics and to the imperatives of the semi-autonomous economic and political subsystems.
8. Habermas argues that this blockage of cultural infusion into everyday life is accompanied in late capitalist society by a fragmentation of consciousness that is the functional equivalent of ideology. He accepts the "end of ideology" thesis that globalising interpretations of the whole have collapsed under the pressure of rationalisation. Ideologies relied on the fact that some categories of belief remained immune from problemisation. However, the extension of the processes of communicative action and rational scrutiny to all aspects of social existence means that ideology has nowhere to hide and can no longer evade skepticism. But this does not mean that modern societies have all of a sudden become fully transparent. It is not the case that the conflict between social integration by communicative processes in the lifeworld and system integration by functional mechanisms has been acknowledged. This is because the de-centered functionality of modern societies prevents interpretations of the whole coming into existence. However, Habermas would reject the view that society has become so de-centered that it no longer constitutes a whole. Rather he would argue that everyday knowledge remains diffuse and below the level of articulation that meets the validity standards of cultural modernity. Thus everyday consciousness is unable to grasp the whole and remains fragmented. This problem is clearly compounded by the uncoupling of expert cultures from the lifeworld because this means that theoretically articulated knowledge does not flow back into the everyday in a way that would counteract the fragmentation of consciousness.
Donnerstag, 11. Oktober 2007
Lecture 11: Jürgen Habermas (1929- )
1. Habermas is the last thinker to be considered in this course. However, I do not want to therefore give the impression that he represents the last word in contemporary theorisation of modernity. He has been chosen because he and Foucault are the two most influential continental thinkers over the last thirty years. Habermas is still very much alive and internationally prominent. In 2005 he was awarded the Kyoto prize for his contribution to philosophy and letters. Born in Düsseldorf in 1929, he come from a middle class family and his father was a local public servant; he grew up during the period of National Socialism and the Second World War. He entered a largely unreformed university system in the late forties and wrote a dissertation on Schelling. He became Adorno's assistant in the early fifties. Despite his good relation with Adorno, Horkheimer thought him too radical. Ironically he latter assumed Horkheimer's chair when the latter retired in the early sixties. Despite a predominantly academic existence, Habermas has always been a very engaged, leftist intellectual keen to enter public debate over contemporary political and cultural issues. Beginning with issues like educational reform and the political role of student protest in the sixties, he was also a key protagonist in many later politico-cultural debates like the historians debate in the late eighties. He wrote critically about the rapid German reunification, the resurgence of anti-foreign neo-Nazism in the early nineties and more recently entered contemporary debates over the European Union, terrorism and the war in Iraq. This public profile is very much in conformity with his understanding of critical theory as a practically motivated cultural self-reflection. He believed that Horkheimer and Adorno had retreated so far into traditional philosophical speculation after the Dialectic of Enlightenment that they detached themselves from a practical engagement with the contradictions of post-war German society. Habermas is a member of a generation that had to learn the historical lessons of the German slide into National Socialist totalitarianism and rebuild the institutions of a liberal democratic society in the post-second World War period.
2. Habermas’ project is very ambitious and he is both a very systematic thinker and also quite eclectic in regard to sources. His systematic intention must be clearly understood in his terms as a fallible synthesis of philosophy and the social sciences. He is also especially conscious of his relation to the philosophical and sociological tradition. He uses analysis of earlier thinkers as creative building blocks in his own system, in very Hegelian fashion taking over their "partial truths" and pointing to the inadequacies that force him to go beyond them and borrow insights from others. By saying something about his early preoccupations and his relation to his great theoretical predecessors Marx, Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno we get some sense of the comprehensiveness of this project and the constitutive elements of his theory of modernity. His work can be viewed at least in part, as a massive pincer movement: as immanent critique of both liberal democratic modernity and of the Marxian Left.
3. In his magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) Habermas addresses the problem of rationality and present an alternative account. Habermas acknowledges that from the outset 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 critical self-awareness. Without unmediated access to the whole or being, philosophy had been compelled to direct its attention to the formal conditions of rationality. 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 multiple conditionedness of knowing. Without an ontology of being, philosophy loses the self-sufficiency that had once underwritten its claim to be queen of the sciences. It cannot even sustain its Kantian role by constructing a transcendental account of consciousness in general and acting as the judge of reason and arbiter of culture. Nevertheless, Habermas wants to view it as 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. Reason here is not the substantive concept but a formal or procedural notion. Habermas finds the roots of this procedural concept in everyday communication and its social practices of justification. This everyday communication makes validity claims that transcend the specific conversational context. Speakers make dialogical claims seeking agreement and expect to give reasons if challenged. These reasons compel the interlocutor into "yes" "no" responses. Habermas sees here an element of unconditionality that makes a validity claim different from mere de facto acceptance. Thus he finds in everyday communication the roots of the traditional critical enterprise of philosophy that might still sustain its claim to be the guardian of rationality.
4. But in this new configuration philosophy cannot work alone and must work in harness with the reconstructive social sciences. What is required was a new relationship between philosophy and science where philosophy employs the sciences to test its hypothetical universality claims. His works can often be viewed as exercises in “reconstruction”: philosophical claims are tempered by the epistemic demands of science while the results of the latter are interpreted for their everyday significance. Amongst the specialist sciences the one most favourably deposed to the problem of rationality was sociology. Other social sciences like political economy and political science had found it easy to abstract out some specific subsystem or aspect of the societal whole and transform it into its exclusive scientific object, However sociology had to deal with the residual problems. Sociology became the science of crisis: it dealt with the problems of fractured social integration in the era of great historical transition from the traditional community to the new bourgeois society.
5. Habermas devoted his first major work to the diagnosis of the crisis of the bourgeois public sphere. On its first appearance in 1962 this may have looked like an Adornoian influenced work of cultural critique that fitted into the thesis of the “fully administered society”. However, the difference of perspective is evident from the outset as Habermas clearly takes the ideology of the bourgeois public sphere much more seriously than did the first generation of the Frankfurt School. He takes the ideology of the bourgeois public sphere seriously than the first generation of the Frankfurt School ever did. 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, he wants to underline its practical significance. 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, the public sphere rendered political domination legitimate by providing an arena in which the views of private individuals could circulate and be filtered into a powerful public opinion. This was a crucial link in the nascent institutions of bourgeois democracy. Private individuals had a forum where they could informally exercise their political judgement in shaping the laws they would have to obey. This classical model begins to fragment under the pressures of modern dynamism in the course of the last century. The public sphere 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 saw 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. Big players in both the private sphere and government public agencies used their resources to invade and manipulate the public sphere increasingly orientated to mass media in their own interests. Publicity remains but it no longer primarily serves rational public consensus but only public relations, to display conflicts of interest and affirm compromises and deals worked out behind closed doors. It is no longer the guaranteed linkage between a rational critical public debate and the democratic legislature. Having charted the demise of the bourgeois public sphere, however, Habermas refuses to call it a sham. Even after these structural transformations the original idea of the public sphere remains a crucial normative idea to the modern understanding of modern democratic constitutionalism. The task remains to further democratise those private and public agencies that now dominate the public sphere.
6. Thus Habermas departs from the notion of the “crisis” of the bourgeois public sphere. In a similar way, it is the interest of classical sociology in the problem of the whole that allows him to also incorporate his critical reflections on Marx. He critiqued the Marxian understanding of history and its underlying paradigm of work. Marx had conceived history as an emancipatory process of human self-constitution through labor. Social labor acts as a constant revolutionising force enhancing productive forces and creating a reservoir of new capacities, needs, skills and aspirations; it functions as the decisive learning process whereby human subjects simultaneously renew and transform both themselves and 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. Habermas raises a whole range of empirical objections to Marx's optimistic historical scenario that we don't have time to go into now. But his critique is not confined to empirical objections. More fundamentally, he also raises basic theoretical problems with this emancipatory account of history. Marx had simply equated the development of the productive forces with the workers cause of social emancipation. 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 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; it enhances the possibilities of socio-political emancipation. Marx's mistake had been to identify the progress in this with the expansion of the productive forces. This overly hasty assimilation of communicative progress to instrumental progress accounts for a normative deficit in Marx's outlook. He failed 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 labor. However, 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 cultural reflection, new modes of social interaction and social integration. These issue in sublimated institutional oppression, dispelling conventional dogma and more unconstrained communication. Habermas does not deny the inter-dependence between these two forms of rationalisation but he argues that the problem solving logic of purposive-rational progress can trigger but cannot bring about an overthrow the relations of production. He even suggests that the communicative learning processes 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. On the basis of this critique Habermas calls for a paradigm shift to what he called the paradigm of communicative interaction. 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 perhaps there are also deep reasons for these failures in certain metaphysical residues with the Marxist project. Habermas 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 individuals even within a class can be integrated is inter-subjective processes of communication and deliberation that implies democratic opinion and will formation.
7. The promise of a paradigm shift was made good with The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). As we have already seen, this work addresses itself to the question of a contemporary account of rationality. It is at this point that Habermas takes over the legacy of Max Weber. For Habermas, Weber is the great embodiment of this principal sociological interest in the question of rationality. Habermas in fact argues that there are two notions of rationalisation in Weber: cultural and societal rationalisation. However, using a strategy similar to the one already evident in his critique of Marx, Habermas maintains that Weber unconsciously allows this second concept of rationalisation to completely dominant his understanding of the historical process of rationalisation as a whole. As a result, his understanding of history, like Marx, is distorted by a one-sided concentration on capitalist rationalisation as a triumph of purposive-instrumental reason. For Habermas, the difference between Marx and Weber on this point is vital. Marx had identified the rationalisation of purposive-rational action and rationalisation of the systems of communicative interaction in a single idea of the expansion of the productive forces. Weber's great virtue was that he allowed us to understand this other aspect of rationalisation as a process of cultural rationalisation in his account of the rationalisation of the great world religions. Habermas brings these two together under the notion of the rationalisation as communicative action.
8. As we have seen, Weber's notion of rationalisation presupposes the idea of disenchantment. The myths and religious worldviews had ascribed to the world a unified and harmonious meaning. As culture loses its religious anchorage, it fragments into increasingly autonomous and competing spheres. These cultural spheres are culturally and institutionally grounded in their own practices and logics. Each sphere has its own cultural value --truth, goodness or rightness and beauty-- which is pursued through cultural activities orientated to the logic of the value in question. Weber recognises the emancipatory potential of this process of cultural rationalisation insofar as it dissolves traditional meaning and allows individuals to be more self-reflective about their world and to give shape and meaning to their own lives through creative effort and commitment to, and within, the rationalised value spheres. However, the emancipatory potential of this process is swamped in Weber’s analysis of modernity by the process of societal rationalisation. This form of rationalisation is largely associated with the expanded orbit and influence of purposive-instrumental rationality in the economic and political subsystems of modern society. Habermas views this subsumption of the theme of cultural rationalisation into that of societal rationalisation as a grave distortion in Weber's account of modern processes of rationalisation. In his view, Weber's account of cultural rationalisation supplies a fruitful theoretical framework for understanding the processes of communicative rationalisation that were missing from Marx’s emancipatory view of history. What may look like a process of fragmentation from the standpoint of the great religious worldviews, can also viewed as one of functional differentiation. The process of increased cultural differentiation into autonomous spheres with their own validity claims corresponds to the individual being able to distinguish their relations to three differentiated worlds-- the objective world of states of affairs, the social world of normatively regulated rules and the subjective world of privileged personal experiences. In the mythic and religious worldview, culture and nature are not differentiated and language and the world form a seamless continuum. Within these cultural worlds technical ineptitude and moral guilt, evil and harmful, good and healthy can be identical because they are all undifferentiated and interwoven. Only the process of cultural differentiation opens up the possibility of learning processes that challenge dogmas, encourage freer communication, deepen subjectivity and self-reflection and promote new consensual and non-traditional modes of social interaction. In fact, it is this ongoing process of cultural rationalisation as differentiation of the value spheres that leads to a more comprehensive concept of rationality that allows us to distinguish the differences between the types of rationality and initiates the open-ended procedures of critical questioning and redeeming validity claims in all of these cultural spheres.
9. This insight into a more comprehensive understanding of rationality was lost to Weber because his attention became fixated on the problem of societal rationalisation. Adorno and Horkheimer followed Weber down this road and found themselves in the cul de sacs of which I have already spoke in regard to the Dialectic of Enlightenment. They want to view the evolution of Western civilisation as the story of the historical unfolding of self-preservative instrumental reason. In Habermas' view they therefore were unable to appreciate the other side of the dialectic of enlightenment that he associates with the processes of cultural differentiation that have liberated the learning processes associated with communicative interaction. 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 and 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 spheres of science, morality-law and aesthetic expression. Habermas is no apologist for bourgeois society but he is concerned to overcome the undialectical tenor of the earlier Frankfurt School's identification of rationalisation with instrumental reason.
2. Habermas’ project is very ambitious and he is both a very systematic thinker and also quite eclectic in regard to sources. His systematic intention must be clearly understood in his terms as a fallible synthesis of philosophy and the social sciences. He is also especially conscious of his relation to the philosophical and sociological tradition. He uses analysis of earlier thinkers as creative building blocks in his own system, in very Hegelian fashion taking over their "partial truths" and pointing to the inadequacies that force him to go beyond them and borrow insights from others. By saying something about his early preoccupations and his relation to his great theoretical predecessors Marx, Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno we get some sense of the comprehensiveness of this project and the constitutive elements of his theory of modernity. His work can be viewed at least in part, as a massive pincer movement: as immanent critique of both liberal democratic modernity and of the Marxian Left.
3. In his magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) Habermas addresses the problem of rationality and present an alternative account. Habermas acknowledges that from the outset 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 critical self-awareness. Without unmediated access to the whole or being, philosophy had been compelled to direct its attention to the formal conditions of rationality. 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 multiple conditionedness of knowing. Without an ontology of being, philosophy loses the self-sufficiency that had once underwritten its claim to be queen of the sciences. It cannot even sustain its Kantian role by constructing a transcendental account of consciousness in general and acting as the judge of reason and arbiter of culture. Nevertheless, Habermas wants to view it as 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. Reason here is not the substantive concept but a formal or procedural notion. Habermas finds the roots of this procedural concept in everyday communication and its social practices of justification. This everyday communication makes validity claims that transcend the specific conversational context. Speakers make dialogical claims seeking agreement and expect to give reasons if challenged. These reasons compel the interlocutor into "yes" "no" responses. Habermas sees here an element of unconditionality that makes a validity claim different from mere de facto acceptance. Thus he finds in everyday communication the roots of the traditional critical enterprise of philosophy that might still sustain its claim to be the guardian of rationality.
4. But in this new configuration philosophy cannot work alone and must work in harness with the reconstructive social sciences. What is required was a new relationship between philosophy and science where philosophy employs the sciences to test its hypothetical universality claims. His works can often be viewed as exercises in “reconstruction”: philosophical claims are tempered by the epistemic demands of science while the results of the latter are interpreted for their everyday significance. Amongst the specialist sciences the one most favourably deposed to the problem of rationality was sociology. Other social sciences like political economy and political science had found it easy to abstract out some specific subsystem or aspect of the societal whole and transform it into its exclusive scientific object, However sociology had to deal with the residual problems. Sociology became the science of crisis: it dealt with the problems of fractured social integration in the era of great historical transition from the traditional community to the new bourgeois society.
5. Habermas devoted his first major work to the diagnosis of the crisis of the bourgeois public sphere. On its first appearance in 1962 this may have looked like an Adornoian influenced work of cultural critique that fitted into the thesis of the “fully administered society”. However, the difference of perspective is evident from the outset as Habermas clearly takes the ideology of the bourgeois public sphere much more seriously than did the first generation of the Frankfurt School. He takes the ideology of the bourgeois public sphere seriously than the first generation of the Frankfurt School ever did. 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, he wants to underline its practical significance. 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, the public sphere rendered political domination legitimate by providing an arena in which the views of private individuals could circulate and be filtered into a powerful public opinion. This was a crucial link in the nascent institutions of bourgeois democracy. Private individuals had a forum where they could informally exercise their political judgement in shaping the laws they would have to obey. This classical model begins to fragment under the pressures of modern dynamism in the course of the last century. The public sphere 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 saw 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. Big players in both the private sphere and government public agencies used their resources to invade and manipulate the public sphere increasingly orientated to mass media in their own interests. Publicity remains but it no longer primarily serves rational public consensus but only public relations, to display conflicts of interest and affirm compromises and deals worked out behind closed doors. It is no longer the guaranteed linkage between a rational critical public debate and the democratic legislature. Having charted the demise of the bourgeois public sphere, however, Habermas refuses to call it a sham. Even after these structural transformations the original idea of the public sphere remains a crucial normative idea to the modern understanding of modern democratic constitutionalism. The task remains to further democratise those private and public agencies that now dominate the public sphere.
6. Thus Habermas departs from the notion of the “crisis” of the bourgeois public sphere. In a similar way, it is the interest of classical sociology in the problem of the whole that allows him to also incorporate his critical reflections on Marx. He critiqued the Marxian understanding of history and its underlying paradigm of work. Marx had conceived history as an emancipatory process of human self-constitution through labor. Social labor acts as a constant revolutionising force enhancing productive forces and creating a reservoir of new capacities, needs, skills and aspirations; it functions as the decisive learning process whereby human subjects simultaneously renew and transform both themselves and 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. Habermas raises a whole range of empirical objections to Marx's optimistic historical scenario that we don't have time to go into now. But his critique is not confined to empirical objections. More fundamentally, he also raises basic theoretical problems with this emancipatory account of history. Marx had simply equated the development of the productive forces with the workers cause of social emancipation. 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 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; it enhances the possibilities of socio-political emancipation. Marx's mistake had been to identify the progress in this with the expansion of the productive forces. This overly hasty assimilation of communicative progress to instrumental progress accounts for a normative deficit in Marx's outlook. He failed 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 labor. However, 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 cultural reflection, new modes of social interaction and social integration. These issue in sublimated institutional oppression, dispelling conventional dogma and more unconstrained communication. Habermas does not deny the inter-dependence between these two forms of rationalisation but he argues that the problem solving logic of purposive-rational progress can trigger but cannot bring about an overthrow the relations of production. He even suggests that the communicative learning processes 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. On the basis of this critique Habermas calls for a paradigm shift to what he called the paradigm of communicative interaction. 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 perhaps there are also deep reasons for these failures in certain metaphysical residues with the Marxist project. Habermas 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 individuals even within a class can be integrated is inter-subjective processes of communication and deliberation that implies democratic opinion and will formation.
7. The promise of a paradigm shift was made good with The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). As we have already seen, this work addresses itself to the question of a contemporary account of rationality. It is at this point that Habermas takes over the legacy of Max Weber. For Habermas, Weber is the great embodiment of this principal sociological interest in the question of rationality. Habermas in fact argues that there are two notions of rationalisation in Weber: cultural and societal rationalisation. However, using a strategy similar to the one already evident in his critique of Marx, Habermas maintains that Weber unconsciously allows this second concept of rationalisation to completely dominant his understanding of the historical process of rationalisation as a whole. As a result, his understanding of history, like Marx, is distorted by a one-sided concentration on capitalist rationalisation as a triumph of purposive-instrumental reason. For Habermas, the difference between Marx and Weber on this point is vital. Marx had identified the rationalisation of purposive-rational action and rationalisation of the systems of communicative interaction in a single idea of the expansion of the productive forces. Weber's great virtue was that he allowed us to understand this other aspect of rationalisation as a process of cultural rationalisation in his account of the rationalisation of the great world religions. Habermas brings these two together under the notion of the rationalisation as communicative action.
8. As we have seen, Weber's notion of rationalisation presupposes the idea of disenchantment. The myths and religious worldviews had ascribed to the world a unified and harmonious meaning. As culture loses its religious anchorage, it fragments into increasingly autonomous and competing spheres. These cultural spheres are culturally and institutionally grounded in their own practices and logics. Each sphere has its own cultural value --truth, goodness or rightness and beauty-- which is pursued through cultural activities orientated to the logic of the value in question. Weber recognises the emancipatory potential of this process of cultural rationalisation insofar as it dissolves traditional meaning and allows individuals to be more self-reflective about their world and to give shape and meaning to their own lives through creative effort and commitment to, and within, the rationalised value spheres. However, the emancipatory potential of this process is swamped in Weber’s analysis of modernity by the process of societal rationalisation. This form of rationalisation is largely associated with the expanded orbit and influence of purposive-instrumental rationality in the economic and political subsystems of modern society. Habermas views this subsumption of the theme of cultural rationalisation into that of societal rationalisation as a grave distortion in Weber's account of modern processes of rationalisation. In his view, Weber's account of cultural rationalisation supplies a fruitful theoretical framework for understanding the processes of communicative rationalisation that were missing from Marx’s emancipatory view of history. What may look like a process of fragmentation from the standpoint of the great religious worldviews, can also viewed as one of functional differentiation. The process of increased cultural differentiation into autonomous spheres with their own validity claims corresponds to the individual being able to distinguish their relations to three differentiated worlds-- the objective world of states of affairs, the social world of normatively regulated rules and the subjective world of privileged personal experiences. In the mythic and religious worldview, culture and nature are not differentiated and language and the world form a seamless continuum. Within these cultural worlds technical ineptitude and moral guilt, evil and harmful, good and healthy can be identical because they are all undifferentiated and interwoven. Only the process of cultural differentiation opens up the possibility of learning processes that challenge dogmas, encourage freer communication, deepen subjectivity and self-reflection and promote new consensual and non-traditional modes of social interaction. In fact, it is this ongoing process of cultural rationalisation as differentiation of the value spheres that leads to a more comprehensive concept of rationality that allows us to distinguish the differences between the types of rationality and initiates the open-ended procedures of critical questioning and redeeming validity claims in all of these cultural spheres.
9. This insight into a more comprehensive understanding of rationality was lost to Weber because his attention became fixated on the problem of societal rationalisation. Adorno and Horkheimer followed Weber down this road and found themselves in the cul de sacs of which I have already spoke in regard to the Dialectic of Enlightenment. They want to view the evolution of Western civilisation as the story of the historical unfolding of self-preservative instrumental reason. In Habermas' view they therefore were unable to appreciate the other side of the dialectic of enlightenment that he associates with the processes of cultural differentiation that have liberated the learning processes associated with communicative interaction. 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 and 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 spheres of science, morality-law and aesthetic expression. Habermas is no apologist for bourgeois society but he is concerned to overcome the undialectical tenor of the earlier Frankfurt School's identification of rationalisation with instrumental reason.
Donnerstag, 4. Oktober 2007
Lecture 10 : Foucault (cont) Resistance and Normative Confusions
21. As mentioned, Foucault was fascinated by revolution and 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 the continuance of transgressions that break existing institutions, moulds, constraining and limiting shapes and values. It is worthwhile noting that Foucault went to Iran to report on the uprising there against the Shah. And it was there that 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 rational and controllable history, was in fact the colonisation of an inexplicable, and therefore, truly historical event, by Realpolitik. He even continued to publicly support the revolution in the press even after its fundamentalist character became clear and it was in the process of murdering and persecuting its opponents. 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. Interestingly, here Foucault speaks of the peoples uprising as the self introduction of a subjectivity (no that of great men, but that of anyone) 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 because 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 here appears to be 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 potentiality 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 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 revealed a degree of political romanticism that would horrify Weber. Foucault clearly has no taste for the the slow boring of hard boards but does have a real kinship with an 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, this account is hardly reassuring. Resistance and revolt for Foucault are shadowy figures -- the mere limit, as the other of power, as an undifferentiated will of the oppressed that is necessarily by its very unanimity unpolitical, their status appears nothing more than a theoretical postulate or an inexplicable brute fact. Given that Foucault made it his life's work to question all conventional facts and expose their historical conditions of possibility, his reticence is the face of revolt is troubling but not inexplicable. Perhaps this is the residual humanism in Foucault: one he refuses to call by its name, a humanism just as essentialist as those he critiques in the Western tradition. 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 normative load but without any real normative credentials. Despite this romantic affirmation of the irrepressible and untamable, almost immediately Foucault 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.
22. Despite Foucault's theoretical bracketing of normative claims, he has repeatedly stressed the political character of his own work. He goes so far as to speak of his theoretical works as "only a function" of the local struggles in which he involved himself. We have already seen that he is convinced that we are all on one side or another in the battle that rages silently within stable civil existence. He also makes the point that there cannot be a neutral subject. Genealogy takes up the standpoint of the subjugated in these struggles and acclaims itself as an anti-science that attempts 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. The specific intellectual uses his/her expertise to develop strategies that recover suppressed knowledges, which raise the local to the threshold of scientificity and facilitate local struggles. Foucault’s embrace of the specific intellectual is at one with his whole rejection of the juridical model of sovereign power and the authority that accrues to the bearer of legitimacy. Foucault can challenge this by offering knowledges that claim not truth, but problemisation: he characterised his own works as a "toolbox", "fictions", as "fireworks". He seems to explicitly repudiate the claim to theoretical truth and positive knowledge in a way quite reminiscent of Adorno’s recourse to an aesthetic mode. 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.
Even the very one-dimensionality of his vision of modernity can be explained as a rhetorical device designed to motivate "pessimistic activism" and the right of the subjugated. An image of the depth of crisis generates action. However, as mentioned, 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 engaged 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 of joining some new regime of power/knowledge. Yet, Foucault was not always consistently sceptical of normative claims. In his last years he involved himself in a number of much publicised human rights campaigns such as support for the Polish Trade Union Solidarity. Here Foucault employed "rights talk" and stressed the need for civic organisations to monitor rights independently of the state. Yet how this "rights talk" could be reconciled with his global critique of enlightenment values and bracketing of normative claims is not clear.
23. 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. Without normative criteria, however, the social critic seems to disempower his/her own critique. Not only are they 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". 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 bring into existence new schemas of politicisation. (Lemke, T. ‘Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalisation’ 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 as finely tuned as we would like.
24.However one decides this dispute between Foucault and his critics, it is clear that Foucault sees his task as to bring into question conventional normativity. This is very clear in 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 (1982/3), “ in the mind of a Roman or a Greek, neither obedience to the rule nor obedience tout court 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 concretely 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 positive model of active subjectivisation that gives ontological priority to self-care. However, it is very important to understand what he means by this. He wants to resituate the philosophical ideal of self-knowledge in the broader context of its original spiritual exercise as a practice of self-transformation through which the subject gains access to their ontological homeland of essence and truth. Again the basis of this model is Platonic: its elements are ignorance, the discovery of ignorance through an event, question or crisis, leading to the realisation of the need to care for the self which then takes the form of knowing one’s self. This knowing is that of reflexivity, a recollection where the subject rediscovers access to what is has already seen, its homeland (H of S, p255) 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.
25. 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" 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.
26. These are all undoubtedly important insights. Yet, it is possible to take them all on board without succumbing to sceptical myopia that results from a totalising, global critique of modernity. Foucault's vision of modernity largely ignores the contradictory aspects and lacks a certain discrimination of judgement. The democratic revolutions are occasionally mentioned, but usually only to emphasize their darker side and family linkages to the growing carceral and its disciplinary matrix of micro-mechanisms and techniques. This emphasis might be justified by the novelty of Foucault's perspective and his desire to underscore the facts that had formally been swept under the carpet. Yet, strangely, Foucault's pervasive scepticism is linked to what I would argue is a vague sort of revolutionary-anarcho-romanticism. As we saw in the Iran case, he extols elemental revolt despite is real costs in terms of life and human rights. But concessions to the transgressive imagination have to be matched by a Weberian sense of responsibility that doesn’t seem to come into Foucault’s calculations.
27. For most of his theoretical output Foucault, like Horkheimer and Adorno, remained content to be a negative critic with only gestures towards transgression. Only in his last incomplete work and interviews on the ethics of subjectivity does he reject his former exclusive concentration on the subjectivity of domination. He then takes a more positive direction using Greek and Roman models of care of the self not so much as contemporary paradigms but as demonstrations that there have been alternatives to the modern universal notion of subjectivity. Until this late turn that remained unelaborated and unfinished Foucault had sustained a vigil against the imminent domination of the contemporary regime of truth and modes of subjection. The great bulk of his work stands as a counter-discourse to humanism.
28. This total scepticism is backed by a reluctance to privilege any aspect of the present. Vigilance needs to be constant and danger is everywhere. Yet, there is reason to doubt whether such universal scepticism is sustainable not to mention ultimately productive. We have already mentioned Foucault’s uncritical appropriation of revolt and his late indulgence in "rights talk". These are instances where Foucault was compelled by his own political commitments and his own desire to resolve the theoretical impasses of his work in the seventies to move beyond universal scepticism. While it remains vitally important to know that in principle we can turn critical eyes to any aspect of our modern lives and that no value is beyond suspicion, it is practically just as relevant to acknowledge where we stand and what we value. Making choices involves discrimination. Foucault was right that such discrimination cannot occur outside of history but nor can we refuse to discriminate, rely on global scepticism or refuse to acknowledge the choices we make as real choices. We choose on the basis of what we hold to be essential and most valuable. While this was the practice of Foucault's own political life, this does not always receive its full theoretical acknowledgement.
22. Despite Foucault's theoretical bracketing of normative claims, he has repeatedly stressed the political character of his own work. He goes so far as to speak of his theoretical works as "only a function" of the local struggles in which he involved himself. We have already seen that he is convinced that we are all on one side or another in the battle that rages silently within stable civil existence. He also makes the point that there cannot be a neutral subject. Genealogy takes up the standpoint of the subjugated in these struggles and acclaims itself as an anti-science that attempts 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. The specific intellectual uses his/her expertise to develop strategies that recover suppressed knowledges, which raise the local to the threshold of scientificity and facilitate local struggles. Foucault’s embrace of the specific intellectual is at one with his whole rejection of the juridical model of sovereign power and the authority that accrues to the bearer of legitimacy. Foucault can challenge this by offering knowledges that claim not truth, but problemisation: he characterised his own works as a "toolbox", "fictions", as "fireworks". He seems to explicitly repudiate the claim to theoretical truth and positive knowledge in a way quite reminiscent of Adorno’s recourse to an aesthetic mode. 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.
Even the very one-dimensionality of his vision of modernity can be explained as a rhetorical device designed to motivate "pessimistic activism" and the right of the subjugated. An image of the depth of crisis generates action. However, as mentioned, 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 engaged 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 of joining some new regime of power/knowledge. Yet, Foucault was not always consistently sceptical of normative claims. In his last years he involved himself in a number of much publicised human rights campaigns such as support for the Polish Trade Union Solidarity. Here Foucault employed "rights talk" and stressed the need for civic organisations to monitor rights independently of the state. Yet how this "rights talk" could be reconciled with his global critique of enlightenment values and bracketing of normative claims is not clear.
23. 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. Without normative criteria, however, the social critic seems to disempower his/her own critique. Not only are they 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". 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 bring into existence new schemas of politicisation. (Lemke, T. ‘Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalisation’ 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 as finely tuned as we would like.
24.However one decides this dispute between Foucault and his critics, it is clear that Foucault sees his task as to bring into question conventional normativity. This is very clear in 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 (1982/3), “ in the mind of a Roman or a Greek, neither obedience to the rule nor obedience tout court 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 concretely 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 positive model of active subjectivisation that gives ontological priority to self-care. However, it is very important to understand what he means by this. He wants to resituate the philosophical ideal of self-knowledge in the broader context of its original spiritual exercise as a practice of self-transformation through which the subject gains access to their ontological homeland of essence and truth. Again the basis of this model is Platonic: its elements are ignorance, the discovery of ignorance through an event, question or crisis, leading to the realisation of the need to care for the self which then takes the form of knowing one’s self. This knowing is that of reflexivity, a recollection where the subject rediscovers access to what is has already seen, its homeland (H of S, p255) 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.
25. 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" 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.
26. These are all undoubtedly important insights. Yet, it is possible to take them all on board without succumbing to sceptical myopia that results from a totalising, global critique of modernity. Foucault's vision of modernity largely ignores the contradictory aspects and lacks a certain discrimination of judgement. The democratic revolutions are occasionally mentioned, but usually only to emphasize their darker side and family linkages to the growing carceral and its disciplinary matrix of micro-mechanisms and techniques. This emphasis might be justified by the novelty of Foucault's perspective and his desire to underscore the facts that had formally been swept under the carpet. Yet, strangely, Foucault's pervasive scepticism is linked to what I would argue is a vague sort of revolutionary-anarcho-romanticism. As we saw in the Iran case, he extols elemental revolt despite is real costs in terms of life and human rights. But concessions to the transgressive imagination have to be matched by a Weberian sense of responsibility that doesn’t seem to come into Foucault’s calculations.
27. For most of his theoretical output Foucault, like Horkheimer and Adorno, remained content to be a negative critic with only gestures towards transgression. Only in his last incomplete work and interviews on the ethics of subjectivity does he reject his former exclusive concentration on the subjectivity of domination. He then takes a more positive direction using Greek and Roman models of care of the self not so much as contemporary paradigms but as demonstrations that there have been alternatives to the modern universal notion of subjectivity. Until this late turn that remained unelaborated and unfinished Foucault had sustained a vigil against the imminent domination of the contemporary regime of truth and modes of subjection. The great bulk of his work stands as a counter-discourse to humanism.
28. This total scepticism is backed by a reluctance to privilege any aspect of the present. Vigilance needs to be constant and danger is everywhere. Yet, there is reason to doubt whether such universal scepticism is sustainable not to mention ultimately productive. We have already mentioned Foucault’s uncritical appropriation of revolt and his late indulgence in "rights talk". These are instances where Foucault was compelled by his own political commitments and his own desire to resolve the theoretical impasses of his work in the seventies to move beyond universal scepticism. While it remains vitally important to know that in principle we can turn critical eyes to any aspect of our modern lives and that no value is beyond suspicion, it is practically just as relevant to acknowledge where we stand and what we value. Making choices involves discrimination. Foucault was right that such discrimination cannot occur outside of history but nor can we refuse to discriminate, rely on global scepticism or refuse to acknowledge the choices we make as real choices. We choose on the basis of what we hold to be essential and most valuable. While this was the practice of Foucault's own political life, this does not always receive its full theoretical acknowledgement.
Donnerstag, 20. September 2007
Lecture 9: Foucault (cont) On the Carcarel and Power
11. The birth of the prison ushers in a new age where the economy and society require a new form of individual subordination. The systemic demands of this new dynamic social ensemble geared to order and productivity engendered a whole range of disciplinary mechanisms and professionals whose principal task it was to ensure the normality of the population. The imperatives of the new political economy required productive service from individuals in the interstices of their concrete lives. The regime has to gain access to the bodies of individuals and exercise control over attitudes and acts; to be most productive power had to be internalised. This degree of control was obtainable only when the teacher, the social worker and the factory manager complemented the network of penal institutions. These are all agents of an overarching, yet de-centred and anonymous system of normalizing power that was able to supervise and judge the individual from the cradle to the grave, shaping body, gestures, aptitudes and behaviour to become orthopaedists of individuality. Modern society is a complex, de-centred matrix of many mechanisms that somehow interlock without any designer or controller. The nascent human sciences prove indispensable at this junction by conjuring a whole arsenal of theories, therapies and techniques especially crafted to assist in the production of the required new shape of subjectivity. In conjunction with the subjecting disciplinary practices, these new sciences objectify this subject in a whole range of scientific discourses (cases, management files, reports, investigations, knowledges) that become indispensable organs of a new social power whose domination is infinitely productive, de-centred and inescapable. In this new regime, the position of the professional and the administrator may be enhanced but they do not control the workings of the whole. The judges of normality are nevertheless ubiquitous. They are like tentacles of a normalising power, all the more effective as a result of its radical dispersion.
12. While both the Frankfurt School and Foucault paint uncompromisingly
harrowing portraits of the extent and depth of modern domination, neither entirely relinquishes the possibility of resistance. I have already underscored the weaknesses of Horkheimer and Adorno's emancipatory outlook. Nevertheless, while they see no sociologically significant addressee for their revamped negative critical theory, their message itself implies the possibility of resistance. Secondly, at various points in their exposé of the history of instrumental rationality they indicate that there have been opportunities to reverse the march of domination. Domination is thus a contingent fact of history not its necessary and irreversible meaning. Finally, the theories of non-identity and mimesis hint at a residue of nature that remains non-compliant to the requirements of domination. Here is another minimal platform for resistance.
13. Foucault builds resistance into his account of modernity at a more fundamental theoretical level. While his description of the “carceral” creates the impression of a pervasive discipline infiltrating every pore and crevice, resistance remains a vital element of his novel theory of power. He says in Discipline and Punish “this does not mean that it (the prison system) cannot be altered, nor that it is once and for all indispensable in our kind of society” (D&P, p.305). His works presuppose and articulate the resistance in modernity of those marginalised groups like the mentally ill, the deviant and prisoners. He conceives “resistance” itself as dispersed in accord with the multiple struggles that characterises the post-68 political terrain. Yet, Foucault provides this empirical resistance with a theoretical supplementation. He renews the Nietzschean inspired assertion that all social life is constituted by struggle and that all discourses carry a hidden power and derive from the practices of power.
14. This renewed interest in power required a rethinking of its available understandings. Foucault wants to depict and analyse the forms and techniques of a modality of power that is uniquely modern. At first glance he pursues a line of argument not unlike Marx. Those who did the first part of this course will recall that Marx views the democratic and legal forms of bourgeois society as a veneer that both masked and facilitated the oppression of workers. So the core categories of civil society--law, rights, autonomy, personhood, plurality, publicity, and parliament--rather than articulating the limits of domination instead support it. The classic example here is the labour contract: ostensibly a reciprocal exchange of equivalents amongst autonomous agents, in reality it encodes and conceals the asymmetrical power relations that exist in the economic sphere resulting from unequal control of the means of production. Foucault universalises this critique to the social contract in general and argues that bourgeois rights and forms obscure a deeper level of asymmetrical relations, deeper control and oppression associated with the disciplines. But he wants to radicalise this critique by revisiting the mechanisms of oppression involved and linking them to the new power relations that now pervade social life. It was not the 19th century bourgeoisie that invented and imposed relations of domination. The relations of production signify a complex level of reality that is only relatively independent. The power relations inscribed in them were inherited from the disciplinary technology of earlier times and simply modified and intensifying for their own purposes. These power relations do not emanate from a single source like the new economy and its labour relations. Rather the extension of disciplinary technology and norms make it possible to organise labour in a way the facilitates capitalist efficiency and domination.
15. This brings Foucault to a more fundamental challenge what he calls the juridical model of power. The legal edifice of Western societies operates with a discourse of sovereign power. Even after the challenge to monarchical rule, legal right is that of sovereign power. Sovereignty is defined in juridical terms. Power is viewed as the legitimate right or possession of the sovereign when it is lawfully constituted. Legality also allows power to be put in question and see its prerogatives challenged when it is not the legitimate expression of that unified will. This juridical model articulates a specific conception of the way power is exercised. It effaces the domination intrinsic to power by legitimising it: sovereign power is the rightful expression of a lawful form of violence. Foucault argues that while the judicial model has not been completely superseded, it lacks the flexibility to capture the new modalities of power. It may have corresponded to the way power functioned under absolutist monarchies but it is now outdated. Foucault views it as merely repressive; it has only one force, the force of denial, it is the power of negation and limits. It is expensive, poor in resources, methods, monotonous in tactics, unproductive.
16. Foucault's thesis is that a new type of power began to emerge in the late 18th century that becomes global and perfected in the 19th and 20th centuries. As should be already clear, he refuses to equate this new type of power with the democratic struggles against absolutism and limited suffrage. Liberal political theory established the contractarian illusion that power issues from discreet primitive elements like subjects, that it can be made visible, localised and restricted to the political state whose authority issues and is delimited and regulated by the free social community. Here Foucault's radical scepticism regarding enlightenment and its values of rationality and progress is clearly evident. He suggests that the idea that democracy, reformist humanitarianism and human rights have restricted power, made it the servant and the instrument of a genuinely common will is an illusion produced by entrapment within the juridical model of power. This is because new forms of power cannot be comprehended in juridical concepts as relations between sovereigns and subjects or in terms of the opposition between state and society. They in fact predate these relations and oppositions and were absolutely crucial to their emergence. Before personhood was the disciplinary technology and normalising processes that shaped the modern subject as such a bearer of bourgeois right. For Foucault, the state is not sole or even primary source of these relations. They emerged beneath the visible struggles over sovereignty in the revolutions of the bourgeois period within the grid of disciplinary institutions (convent, army, the clinic, the school, hospital, the factory and the prison). Because these institutions emerged almost silently within the womb of the old society, their essential shape is not constrained by the new forms of state legitimacy and the sphere of bourgeois publicity. They remained largely outside the specific projects of liberalisation and democratisation. One of Foucault's major points is that the public, impersonal, rule-bound character of the administrative power of state bureaucracies and agencies does nothing to restrict or limit the reach or scope of disciplinary power. Remember this is counter-law. Rather, the lawyer and the bureaucrat legitimate the free scope to a whole other tier of power: that of the teacher, doctor, judge, social worker, psychiatrist and warden that renders the multiple processes of discipline and normalisation more effective and efficient. Simultaneously, they soften the very idea of punishment rendering it not only just but also humane and constructive.
17. The Foucauldian notion of power fundamentally demarcates itself from the juridical notion that power as something to be possessed either by individuals or groups. In its place power is conceives 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, 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)
18. 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 hostile, asymmetrical relation of social forces. To completely capture the fluidity and relationality of power, 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 is a little cagey as to how far he is prepared to push the analogy between social life and battle. However, he clearly views the paradigm of war as a more appropriate metaphor to get beyond the sovereign model of power and its vision of society as a unified expression of subjects, unitary power and law. Foucault’s hunch is the Nietzschean conviction 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. (SMD pp50/51)
Foucault traces the genealogy of this war within the counter official historiography that emerged in the 17th century. According to these historians, society exists in the binary mode of a race war. Race here need not stand as 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 of appearance civil peace and political unity. Of course, Nietzsche is not Foucault’s only forerunner in viewing social struggle as a primal fact 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 idea of dialectic does not actually validate war and struggle philosophically but codified them within a comprehensive logic . This means they are actually totalised into a rationality that was more basic and irreversible. 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 Nietzsche as his closest predecessor.
19. Foucault puts special emphasis on the productivity of modern power. In fact he introduce a distinction between disciplinary power and bio-power. The former is a normalising power focused on the subjugation of the individual body through the techniques of discipline. This includes devices to ensure their spatial distribution, their individuation and their visibility, like separation and surveillance as well as micro technologies like drill, inspection and exercises aimed at taking control of bodies and making them more productive forces. They also rationalise and economise power by internalising norms of control and appropriate conduct. Bio-power, on the other hand, is applied to living man or man as a species. This is more regulatory power in so far as it aims to control the general conditions of birth, death, production and illness that impinge on populations as a global mass. It concerns are town planning, public hygiene, sexuality, life expectancy in general, the security, health and productivity of the population. Its aim is to control the random event, to predict its probability and compensate for its effects and preserve the homeostasis of the whole. These two forms of modern power are not mutually exclusive and can be articulated with each other; they constitute two poles around which the productive organisation of power in modernity is deployed while each has its own specific level, techniques and aims. Bio-power is a latecomer because regulating the bio-sociological processes of the human masses implied more complex systems of co-ordination and centralisation and therefore of a more prominent role for a sophisticated bureaucratic state. However, together these two powers, at the level of both detail and of mass, cover the entire surface of modernity and take control of life.
20. In his self-criticism towards the end of his life, Foucault will suggest that the work of the Discipline and Punish period gave too great a priority to disciplinary power and had not sufficiently theorised how the subject constituted itself through certain practices and games of truth. His later solution to this shortcoming was to move to a more comprehensive model that he called “Governmentality” where he attempted to redress the balance. Government is here understood in the broadest possible sense as the totality of strategies and practices whereby individuals regulate their conduct in regard to themselves and others.
If we understand by governmentality a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability and reversibility, then I don not think that reflection on this notion of governmentality can avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of the subject defined by the relationship of self to self…Quite simply, this means that in the type of analysis I have been trying to advance for some time you can see that power relations, governmentality, the government of the self and of others, and the relationship of the self to self constitute a chain, a thread, and I think it is around these notions that we should be able to connect together the question of politics and the question of ethics. (H of S, p252)
This model prioritises the self relation as a care of the self, but 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. Foucault gives priority to the self-relation because he maintains that an ethics of the self may be an urgent, fundamental and politically indispensable task and that “there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself”(H of S, p252)
21. Where power is dispersed, so is resistance. 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 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 ideas gave expression to this new configuration of resistances. But on a theoretical level, Foucault’s interpretation inflects these developments in the light of Nietzsche’s idea of the "will to power" as a ubiquitous, anonymous power in general. While Nietzsche chose to anchor the will to power in life itself, Foucault prefers to view it traversing the social body but metaphysically adrift. He therefore denied that he was offering an alternative theory 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. Yet, 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, dominated by purely strategic considerations. The dispersion of anonymous power presupposes the generalised proliferation of resistance as the mere other of power. The result of all this is that resistance loses all historical and sociological specificity. It is simply posited by the theory as ubiquitous and amorphous. Where there is a power relation there is the possibility of resistance.
12. While both the Frankfurt School and Foucault paint uncompromisingly
harrowing portraits of the extent and depth of modern domination, neither entirely relinquishes the possibility of resistance. I have already underscored the weaknesses of Horkheimer and Adorno's emancipatory outlook. Nevertheless, while they see no sociologically significant addressee for their revamped negative critical theory, their message itself implies the possibility of resistance. Secondly, at various points in their exposé of the history of instrumental rationality they indicate that there have been opportunities to reverse the march of domination. Domination is thus a contingent fact of history not its necessary and irreversible meaning. Finally, the theories of non-identity and mimesis hint at a residue of nature that remains non-compliant to the requirements of domination. Here is another minimal platform for resistance.
13. Foucault builds resistance into his account of modernity at a more fundamental theoretical level. While his description of the “carceral” creates the impression of a pervasive discipline infiltrating every pore and crevice, resistance remains a vital element of his novel theory of power. He says in Discipline and Punish “this does not mean that it (the prison system) cannot be altered, nor that it is once and for all indispensable in our kind of society” (D&P, p.305). His works presuppose and articulate the resistance in modernity of those marginalised groups like the mentally ill, the deviant and prisoners. He conceives “resistance” itself as dispersed in accord with the multiple struggles that characterises the post-68 political terrain. Yet, Foucault provides this empirical resistance with a theoretical supplementation. He renews the Nietzschean inspired assertion that all social life is constituted by struggle and that all discourses carry a hidden power and derive from the practices of power.
14. This renewed interest in power required a rethinking of its available understandings. Foucault wants to depict and analyse the forms and techniques of a modality of power that is uniquely modern. At first glance he pursues a line of argument not unlike Marx. Those who did the first part of this course will recall that Marx views the democratic and legal forms of bourgeois society as a veneer that both masked and facilitated the oppression of workers. So the core categories of civil society--law, rights, autonomy, personhood, plurality, publicity, and parliament--rather than articulating the limits of domination instead support it. The classic example here is the labour contract: ostensibly a reciprocal exchange of equivalents amongst autonomous agents, in reality it encodes and conceals the asymmetrical power relations that exist in the economic sphere resulting from unequal control of the means of production. Foucault universalises this critique to the social contract in general and argues that bourgeois rights and forms obscure a deeper level of asymmetrical relations, deeper control and oppression associated with the disciplines. But he wants to radicalise this critique by revisiting the mechanisms of oppression involved and linking them to the new power relations that now pervade social life. It was not the 19th century bourgeoisie that invented and imposed relations of domination. The relations of production signify a complex level of reality that is only relatively independent. The power relations inscribed in them were inherited from the disciplinary technology of earlier times and simply modified and intensifying for their own purposes. These power relations do not emanate from a single source like the new economy and its labour relations. Rather the extension of disciplinary technology and norms make it possible to organise labour in a way the facilitates capitalist efficiency and domination.
15. This brings Foucault to a more fundamental challenge what he calls the juridical model of power. The legal edifice of Western societies operates with a discourse of sovereign power. Even after the challenge to monarchical rule, legal right is that of sovereign power. Sovereignty is defined in juridical terms. Power is viewed as the legitimate right or possession of the sovereign when it is lawfully constituted. Legality also allows power to be put in question and see its prerogatives challenged when it is not the legitimate expression of that unified will. This juridical model articulates a specific conception of the way power is exercised. It effaces the domination intrinsic to power by legitimising it: sovereign power is the rightful expression of a lawful form of violence. Foucault argues that while the judicial model has not been completely superseded, it lacks the flexibility to capture the new modalities of power. It may have corresponded to the way power functioned under absolutist monarchies but it is now outdated. Foucault views it as merely repressive; it has only one force, the force of denial, it is the power of negation and limits. It is expensive, poor in resources, methods, monotonous in tactics, unproductive.
16. Foucault's thesis is that a new type of power began to emerge in the late 18th century that becomes global and perfected in the 19th and 20th centuries. As should be already clear, he refuses to equate this new type of power with the democratic struggles against absolutism and limited suffrage. Liberal political theory established the contractarian illusion that power issues from discreet primitive elements like subjects, that it can be made visible, localised and restricted to the political state whose authority issues and is delimited and regulated by the free social community. Here Foucault's radical scepticism regarding enlightenment and its values of rationality and progress is clearly evident. He suggests that the idea that democracy, reformist humanitarianism and human rights have restricted power, made it the servant and the instrument of a genuinely common will is an illusion produced by entrapment within the juridical model of power. This is because new forms of power cannot be comprehended in juridical concepts as relations between sovereigns and subjects or in terms of the opposition between state and society. They in fact predate these relations and oppositions and were absolutely crucial to their emergence. Before personhood was the disciplinary technology and normalising processes that shaped the modern subject as such a bearer of bourgeois right. For Foucault, the state is not sole or even primary source of these relations. They emerged beneath the visible struggles over sovereignty in the revolutions of the bourgeois period within the grid of disciplinary institutions (convent, army, the clinic, the school, hospital, the factory and the prison). Because these institutions emerged almost silently within the womb of the old society, their essential shape is not constrained by the new forms of state legitimacy and the sphere of bourgeois publicity. They remained largely outside the specific projects of liberalisation and democratisation. One of Foucault's major points is that the public, impersonal, rule-bound character of the administrative power of state bureaucracies and agencies does nothing to restrict or limit the reach or scope of disciplinary power. Remember this is counter-law. Rather, the lawyer and the bureaucrat legitimate the free scope to a whole other tier of power: that of the teacher, doctor, judge, social worker, psychiatrist and warden that renders the multiple processes of discipline and normalisation more effective and efficient. Simultaneously, they soften the very idea of punishment rendering it not only just but also humane and constructive.
17. The Foucauldian notion of power fundamentally demarcates itself from the juridical notion that power as something to be possessed either by individuals or groups. In its place power is conceives 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, 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)
18. 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 hostile, asymmetrical relation of social forces. To completely capture the fluidity and relationality of power, 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 is a little cagey as to how far he is prepared to push the analogy between social life and battle. However, he clearly views the paradigm of war as a more appropriate metaphor to get beyond the sovereign model of power and its vision of society as a unified expression of subjects, unitary power and law. Foucault’s hunch is the Nietzschean conviction 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. (SMD pp50/51)
Foucault traces the genealogy of this war within the counter official historiography that emerged in the 17th century. According to these historians, society exists in the binary mode of a race war. Race here need not stand as 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 of appearance civil peace and political unity. Of course, Nietzsche is not Foucault’s only forerunner in viewing social struggle as a primal fact 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 idea of dialectic does not actually validate war and struggle philosophically but codified them within a comprehensive logic . This means they are actually totalised into a rationality that was more basic and irreversible. 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 Nietzsche as his closest predecessor.
19. Foucault puts special emphasis on the productivity of modern power. In fact he introduce a distinction between disciplinary power and bio-power. The former is a normalising power focused on the subjugation of the individual body through the techniques of discipline. This includes devices to ensure their spatial distribution, their individuation and their visibility, like separation and surveillance as well as micro technologies like drill, inspection and exercises aimed at taking control of bodies and making them more productive forces. They also rationalise and economise power by internalising norms of control and appropriate conduct. Bio-power, on the other hand, is applied to living man or man as a species. This is more regulatory power in so far as it aims to control the general conditions of birth, death, production and illness that impinge on populations as a global mass. It concerns are town planning, public hygiene, sexuality, life expectancy in general, the security, health and productivity of the population. Its aim is to control the random event, to predict its probability and compensate for its effects and preserve the homeostasis of the whole. These two forms of modern power are not mutually exclusive and can be articulated with each other; they constitute two poles around which the productive organisation of power in modernity is deployed while each has its own specific level, techniques and aims. Bio-power is a latecomer because regulating the bio-sociological processes of the human masses implied more complex systems of co-ordination and centralisation and therefore of a more prominent role for a sophisticated bureaucratic state. However, together these two powers, at the level of both detail and of mass, cover the entire surface of modernity and take control of life.
20. In his self-criticism towards the end of his life, Foucault will suggest that the work of the Discipline and Punish period gave too great a priority to disciplinary power and had not sufficiently theorised how the subject constituted itself through certain practices and games of truth. His later solution to this shortcoming was to move to a more comprehensive model that he called “Governmentality” where he attempted to redress the balance. Government is here understood in the broadest possible sense as the totality of strategies and practices whereby individuals regulate their conduct in regard to themselves and others.
If we understand by governmentality a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability and reversibility, then I don not think that reflection on this notion of governmentality can avoid passing through, theoretically and practically, the element of the subject defined by the relationship of self to self…Quite simply, this means that in the type of analysis I have been trying to advance for some time you can see that power relations, governmentality, the government of the self and of others, and the relationship of the self to self constitute a chain, a thread, and I think it is around these notions that we should be able to connect together the question of politics and the question of ethics. (H of S, p252)
This model prioritises the self relation as a care of the self, but 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. Foucault gives priority to the self-relation because he maintains that an ethics of the self may be an urgent, fundamental and politically indispensable task and that “there is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself”(H of S, p252)
21. Where power is dispersed, so is resistance. 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 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 ideas gave expression to this new configuration of resistances. But on a theoretical level, Foucault’s interpretation inflects these developments in the light of Nietzsche’s idea of the "will to power" as a ubiquitous, anonymous power in general. While Nietzsche chose to anchor the will to power in life itself, Foucault prefers to view it traversing the social body but metaphysically adrift. He therefore denied that he was offering an alternative theory 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. Yet, 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, dominated by purely strategic considerations. The dispersion of anonymous power presupposes the generalised proliferation of resistance as the mere other of power. The result of all this is that resistance loses all historical and sociological specificity. It is simply posited by the theory as ubiquitous and amorphous. Where there is a power relation there is the possibility of resistance.
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