Discourse, Power, and Subjectivation

2009 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.
DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION: THE FOUCAULT/HABERMAS DEBATE RECONSIDERED

AMY ALLEN
The Foucault/Habermas debate was a nonevent. The reasons for this were both personalFoucaults untimely deathand philosophicalFoucault and Habermass apparent inability to agree on a topic for debate.1 Whatever the reason, no formal exchange of ideas between Foucault and Habermas ever occurred; instead, what is commonly known as the Foucault/Habermas debate is largely a product of the secondary literature on these two thinkers.2 Moreover, the way the debate has gone so far, Habermas and his defenders have seemed to have the upper hand, for two reasons.3 First, whereas Foucault only mentioned Habermass work in passing in a handful of interviews and essays, Habermas actually offered a sustained critical reading of Foucaults work.4 Thus, to a great extent, Habermas has been
An earlierand shorterversion of this paper was presented at the American Philosophical Association, Central Division, in 2005. Thanks to David S. Owen for his insightful comments on that occasion. Thanks also to Colin Koopman for his feedback on a more recent draft. 1 For Foucaults version of the story, see Michel Foucault, Critical Theory/Intellectual History, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 12425; for Habermass version, see Jrgen Habermas, Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 150. 2 See, for example, Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); David Hoy and Thomas McCarthy, Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Michael Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); and David Owen and Samantha Ashenden, eds, Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory (London: Sage, 1999). 3 On this point, see Owen and Ashenden (1999): 12. 4 For Habermas on Foucault, see Jrgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) lectures 9 and 10; and Habermas (1994). For Foucault on Habermas, see Foucault (1994); Michel Foucault, The Art of Telling the Truth, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 13948; Michel Foucault, The Ethics of Concern for the Self as a Practice of Freedom, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault,
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able to set the terms of the debate, and many of the contributions to the debate from Foucaults side have consisted of efforts to defend him against Habermass critique.5 The second and no doubt related reason is that both Habermas and the Habermasians have tended to be much more interested in engaging with Foucaults work than the Foucaultians have been in engaging with Habermass.6 Ladelle McWhorters complaint that of all of the misguided criticisms of Foucault she has read, the most boring, irritating, and seemingly irrelevant of all were Habermass tortured and contorted critiques [. . .], which became only marginally more intelligible when reiterated by his American followers,7 though unfair, expresses an all-too-common if not often explicitly articulated sentiment among Foucaultians: namely, that Habermass work is so boring and irritating (so German?) that it is beneath discussion. These two factors have led the Foucault/Habermas debate to a peculiar impasse: The Habermasians seem to think they have won, while the Foucaultians act as if they were not even playing. It is a principal aim of this essay to reinvigorate this deadlocked debate. However, one might wonder why this is worth doing at all. After all, who cares about the outcome of this debate, other than a handful of partisan Foucaultians and Habermasians? Why bother rehashing yet again the minutiae of Habermas and Foucaults respective philosophical positions? What, if anything, is at stake here that is of general philosophical interest? The answer to this last question is: a great deal. Habermas and Foucault can be understood as contemporary representatives of opposing traditions of thought in social and political philosophy.8 Habermass focus on the rationality inherent in our social practices and political institutions, a rationality that for him is rooted in their communicative structure, places him in the long and illustrious tradition of political thought stretching back through Kant to Plato. Foucaults emphasis on power, by contrast, traces its lineage back
vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) 281301; and Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge, Power, Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 3, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2000) 34964. Owen and Ashendens edited volume Foucault contra Habermas exemplies this trend. As the editors note in their introduction, the purpose of the volume is to offer a critical response to Habermass position from the perspective of Foucaults practice and thus to reanimate the engagement by providing a Foucauldian rejoinder to the practitioners of [Habermasian] critique [. . .] (Owen and Ashenden [1999]: 2). The Owen/Ashenden volume is a welcome exception to this general rule. Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999) xvi. See Bent Flyvbjerg, Ideal Theory, Real Rationality: Habermas versus Foucault and Nietzsche. Paper for the Political Studies Association Conference, The Challenge for Democracy in the 21st Century, London School of Economics, 2000. Available online at: http://yvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/ IdealTheory.pdf, accessed on July 24, 2006.
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through Nietzsche and Machiavelli to Thrasymachus.9 Indeed, as Bent Flyvbjerg notes, the respective projects of Habermas and Foucault highlight an essential tension in thinking about politics and society: the tension between consensus and conict, ideals and reality, or, to put it more broadly still, between rationality and power.10 Flyvbjerg is right, I think, to call this tension an essential one. Social and political theory cannot afford to give up entirely on the admittedly impossible ideal of a rational organization of social and political life, nor can it afford to turn a blind eye to the complex and insidious workings of power. Thus, unlike the Rawls/Habermas debate, where the differences, though signicant, are more metatheoretical rather than substantive, the Foucault/Habermas debate centers on a substantive tension that lies at the very heart of social and political theorizing. Unfortunately, however, the existing literature on the Foucault/Habermas debate has not, for the most part, brought out these core issues in a productive or fruitful way. As I have already indicated, the majority of this literature either articulates the by now standard Habermasian criticisms of Foucaultcharges of performative contradiction or normative confusion11or offers defenses against these criticisms on Foucaults behalf. A much smaller portion addresses the task of developing a Foucaultian critique of Habermas.12 A still smaller portion takes on the much more difcult but ultimately more productive task of integrating the respective insights of Habermas and Foucault, often because commentators assume, wrongly, that Habermas and Foucault are, as Flyvbjerg puts it, so profoundly different that it would be futile to envision any sort of theoretical or metatheoretical perspective within which these differences could be integrated into a common framework.13 Contra Flyvbjerg, I maintain that there is more basis for a middle ground, at least on certain issues, between Habermas and Foucault
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One can also trace Foucaults lineage through Kant, although Foucaults reading of Kant is quite different from Habermass. Exploring their shared Kantian background is a useful way of articulating a middle ground in their debate, but it is not one that I will pursue here. For a reappraisal of Habermass critique of Foucault in light of Foucaults relationship to Kant, see Amy Allen, Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal, Constellations 10: 2 (2003): 18098, and Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 2008) ch. 2. Flyvbjerg (2000): 1. The rst to make the charge of normative confusion is actually not Habermas, but Fraser. See Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) ch. 1. Habermas takes up this criticism in Habermas (1987): lecture 10. By far, the best example of this approach to the debate is James Tully, To Think and Act Differently: Foucaults Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermass Theory, Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed. David Owen and Samantha Ashenden (London: Sage, 1999) 90142. Flyvbjerg (2000): 12.
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than is commonly acknowledged. However, in order to demonstrate this, it will not sufce simply to assert the complementarity of their philosophical positions. Integrating the insights of these two thinkers will of necessity involve modifying or recasting their views, perhaps in substantial ways. This is not to say that it is possible to bring together into one overarching framework all of the insights of these two prolic and wide-ranging thinkers. Even if this were possible, such a task would most denitely be beyond the scope of a single essay. Thus, my focus in what follows will be on one strandbut it is arguably the central strandof the Foucault/Habermas debate: their respective accounts of subjectivation. My aim is to lay the groundwork for an account of subjectivation that draws on the conceptual insights that are to be found on both sides of the Foucault/Habermas debate, modifying and recasting their views as necessary. In order to accomplish this goal, I begin with a fascinating yet mostly overlooked moment in the Foucault/Habermas debate: Habermass metaethical defense of discourse ethics against moral skepticism. This may seem like a strange place from which to begin a reconsideration of the Foucault/Habermas debate. After all, Habermas devotes very little space in his lengthy defense of discourse ethics to explicit discussion of Foucault. And yet, at the end of the debate that he stages with the moral skeptic in his seminal essay Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justication, he makes it clear that he takes Foucault to be paradigmatic of the most extreme and consistent form of skepticism that he has been arguing against.14 Taking up this vantage point on the Foucault/Habermas debate is productive for several reasons. First, it reveals that Habermass defense of discourse ethics rests, in the end, on the plausibility of his intersubjective account of subjectivation. Second, although one might object that framing the debate in terms of the opposition between discourse ethics and moral skepticism plays too much into Habermass hands, once again allowing him to set the terms of the debate, I shall argue that framing the issue in this way enables us to pose in the most forceful possible way the challenge that Foucaults work presents to the Habermasian position. Finally, shifting the focus of discussion away from Foucault and Habermass respective views on normative justication and toward their respective accounts of subjectivation makes it possible to move the Foucault/ Habermas debate to new and more productive terrain by developing an account of subjectivation that draws on the insights of each. This article consists of four parts. I begin, in section one, by considering briey whether or not Habermas is justied in associating Foucault with moral skepticism. In section two, I reconstruct Habermass argument against moral skepticism
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Jrgen Habermas, Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justication, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) 99.
in the necessary detail. I argue that, in the end, the success or failure of Habermass metaethical argument against moral skepticism depends upon his intersubjective account of subjectivation. In section three, I turn to a discussion of that account and contrast it briey with Foucaults alternative account of subjection. I argue that both Habermas and Foucault offer a one-sided analysis of subjectivation; Habermas stresses its communicative, rational, intersubjective aspects and Foucault emphasizes its power-ladenness. In contrast to each of them, I argue that subjectivation necessarily entails both communicative rationality and power relationships. In the concluding section, I consider the implications of my comparative argument for both Foucault and Habermass broader philosophical projects. With respect to Foucault, I argue that acknowledging the role that communicative rationality plays in the process of subjection would require him to expand his conception of the social. There are hints in Foucaults late work that he was willing to move in this direction, but they remain seriously underdeveloped. With respect to Habermas, I argue that acknowledging the role that power plays in socialization would make it difcult for him to maintain a sharp distinction between power and validity claims, a distinction that he takes to be fundamental for his normative philosophical framework. Accepting this feature of socialization would thus require him to be much more self-critical about the status of his own normative idealizations and to recast his project in a more contextualist and pragmatic way. I. FOUCAULT AND MORAL SKEPTICISM Habermass claim that Foucault is representative of the most consistent and extreme form of moral skepticism raises the complicated question of whether or not Foucault was a skeptic, about morality or anything else, and, if so, what sort of skeptic he was.15 This question is made more complicated by the fact that there are many different varieties of moral skepticism, and Habermas never offers a precise denition of what he means by the term.16 On the face of it, however,
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For a characterization of Foucault as a skeptic, not just about moral norms but about knowledge claims more generally, see John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia UP, 1985). By contrast, Gary Gutting argues that Foucault is not a universal skeptic or relativist with respect to truth, but he seems to concede that Foucault is some sort of a normative skeptic, in the sense that he views all norms as historically contingent constraints on human freedom; see Gary Gutting, Michel Foucaults Archaeology of Scientic Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) 27385. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, for example, delineates ve distinct varieties of moral skepticism. See Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Skepticism and Justication, Moral Knowledge? New Readings in Moral Epistemology, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons (New York: Oxford UP, 1996) 68.
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Habermas certainly seems safe in calling Foucault a moral skeptic. After all, Foucaults genealogical method often involves analyzing the ways in which moral norms are rooted in and bound up with contingent and historically specic power/ knowledge relations, thus, calling into question or problematizing the presumed validity of those norms. For instance, in the following passage, Foucault employs this strategy with respect to the norm of popular sovereignty:
[The theory of sovereignty] made it possible to superimpose on the mechanism of discipline a system of right that concealed its mechanisms and erased the element of domination and the techniques of domination involved in discipline [. . .]. In other words, juridical systems, no matter whether they were theories or codes, allowed the democratization of sovereignty, and the establishment of a public right articulated with collective sovereignty, at the very same time when, to the extent that, and because the democratization of sovereignty was heavily ballasted by the mechanisms of disciplinary coercion.17
Obviously, much more would have to be said here about how Foucault backs up this claim in order to determine its plausibility, but that is not my concern here. Instead, I want to highlight Foucaults methodological move. His strategy is to claim that the norm of popular sovereignty can be shown to be grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion that have been concealed by the system of right that seeks to justify this norm (and other related norms). Moreover, even if Foucault never makes the blanket claim that there can be no non-contingent, universal norms, one certainly get the distinct impression in reading through Foucaults work as a whole that he believes that all of our most deeply cherished moral and political norms can be subjected to the genealogists withering gaze and thus can be seen to be rooted in contingent power/knowledge relations. This would suggest that Foucault believes that no universal moral norms are or can be justied, inasmuch as all such norms can be shown via genealogical analysis to be bound up with contingent power/knowledge relations that problematize their claim to universal validity.18 However, the situation is a bit more complicated than it appears at rst glance. If one were so inclined, one might defend Foucault against the charge of moral skepticism by arguing that he does believe that some norms can be justied, so long as those are understood to be local, provisional, and contextual rather than
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Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France, 197576, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003) 37. Extreme moral skepticism would thus seem to be incompatible with a normative critique of power relations; Foucaults putative attempt to hold both of these commitments is what leads to the charge of normative confusion. Foucault could potentially overcome this objection by claiming that although his critique of power relations is indeed a normative one, it does not appeal to any universal moral norms. I consider this strategy below.
universal. On this interpretation, he does not hold the radical skeptical view that no moral norms are or can be justied; instead, his skeptical critique is aimed only at attempts to claim that any norm can be valid at all times, in all places, for all persons.19 Evidence for this reading can be found in some of Foucaults comments on the role of intellectuals in public political culture. Foucault argues that the intellectual should no longer be thought of as the master of truth and justice or as the spokesman of the universal.20 Intellectuals should be thought of as specic rather than universal; rather than attempting to construct universal theoretical frameworks or utopian ideals, they should conne their work to pointing out the contingency of historical formations and the specic problems that are endemic to them.21 Here, Foucault suggests that the status of the universal intellectual was always illusory because the truths and normative judgments that such intellectuals offered were not, indeed, could not be held true or valid universally. Foucaults reason for this claim is that he regards truth as inseparable from, though not reducible to, power; as he famously puts it, echoing Nietzsche, [t]ruth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.22 I assume that what Foucault says here about truth would apply, mutatis mutandis, to moral judgments as well. The intellectual is not (and cannot be) the bearer or prophet of universal norms or moral truths, for given the unavoidable rootedness of norms and truths in contingent social practices and power/knowledge relations, any claim to the universality of moral norms is open to question. At the very least, one might argue that Foucaults point here shifts the burden of proof back to Habermas, who is charged with demonstrating that his proposed norms are indeed universally valid despite the historical contingencies in which they are rooted. On this line of interpretation, Foucaults own ethical works would be seen as his attempt to spell out a more local and provisional set of norms, which he groups around a variety of concepts in his late work, including care of the self, aesthetics of existence, and parrhesia.23 There is no doubt some sense in which Foucault
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James Tully seems to have something like this view in mind when he writes: Foucaults enlightenment attitude is a specic scepticism (against the claims of a specic limit), not the universal scepticism Habermas argues against in his mock dialogues (Tully [1999]: 120). Michel Foucault, Truth and Power, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980) 126. On this point, see Michel Foucault, What Is Called Punishing? Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 3, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2000) 384. Foucault (1980): 131. See, for example, Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985); The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986); Paul Rabinow, ed., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 1 (New York: The New Press, 1997); and Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001).
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thinks that we should engage in practices of self-fashioning or fearless speech, but these norms have value for us only given our contingent historical situation and the particular sorts of power/knowledge relations against which we are struggling. Foucault never claims universal validity for such norms. It is an open question, I think, how well Foucaults ethical works defend even the local and provisional value of living ones life as work of art. For our purposes, however, this can remain an open question, for even granting Foucault the ability to justify provisional and local norms, this position nonetheless leaves him endorsing what Habermas would legitimately see as a form, though perhaps a more limited form, of moral skepticism. Although it may well be true that Foucault thinks that local norms are the best we can hope for and maybe also all that we need, from Habermass perspective, this stance is enough to call Foucault a moral skeptic, since Habermas specically links the justication of moral norms with their universalizability. Indeed, Habermas maintains that we might call moral only those norms that are strictly universalizable, i.e., those that are invariable over historical time and across social groups.24 Thus, someone who is skeptical of the possibility of the universal validity of moral norms, as Foucault is, would remain a moral skeptic for the purposes of Habermass argument, even if this seems, all things considered, a rather mild form of skepticism.25 II. DISCOURSE ETHICS VS. MORAL SKEPTICISM I will present Habermass defense of discourse ethics against the moral skeptics attack in ve stages.26 The skeptics opening move is to attack moral cognitivism, pointing to the repeated failure of cognitivists to explain satisfactorily what it might mean for moral beliefs or judgments to be candidates for truth. Although
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Habermas (1990): 111, n. 41. Indeed, when Foucault was asked in a 1984 interview if he is a skeptical thinker, he responded: Absolutely. See Michel Foucault, The Return of Morality, Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy, Culture, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988) 254. Actually, in Habermass text, there are seven stages to the debate. I skip over the rst stage, which concerns the skeptics denial of the phenomenology of moral experience. In response, Habermas suggests that the realm of moral phenomena can only be denied when we take up a third-person observers perspective on everyday life and interactions; once we take up a rst-person participants perspective, it is impossible to deny the existence and relevance of these phenomena. This stage of the argument is relevant for the Foucault/Habermas debate quite generally, inasmuch as it links up with Habermass criticisms of Foucaults methodology, which Habermas claims remains stubbornly attached to the observers perspective and denies the usefulness of more hermeneutic, participantcentered approaches. However, it is less relevant for the major issues under consideration here, so I shall leave further discussion of it aside. For the sake of space, I have condensed Habermass fourth and fth stages into a single step.
Habermas does not deny the aws in earlier attempts to defend cognitivism, he maintains that the alternativean embrace of ethical subjectivism which necessarily, on his view, collapses into skepticismdeprive[s] the sphere of everyday moral intuitions of its signicance.27 Moreover, he argues that cognitivism can be successfully defended if we give up the strong claim that normative claims are truth candidates and instead adopt the weaker position that normative claims are analogous to truth claims.28 Habermas notes a prima facie analogy between truth claimsclaims about what the objective world is likeand normative rightness claimsclaims about how the intersubjective world should be ordered: Truth claims are to facts as normative claims are to legitimately ordered interpersonal relations.29 Thus, just as we appeal to facts as reasons for asserting truth claims, we appeal to legitimately ordered interpersonal relations as reasons for our normative judgments. Habermas suggests that this strategy of thinking of normative claims as analogous to though not types of truth claims offers the best way of salvaging discourse ethics commitment to moral cognitivism from the skeptics opening challenge.30 The skeptic, however, responds by questioning Habermass assumption that normative claims are based on reasons. If this were true, then wouldnt we expect reasonable people to reach agreement on moral issues? The overwhelming evidence to the contrary thus emboldens the skeptic to ask whether normative claims are based on reasons after all. In other words, the skeptic appeals to what Habermas calls the pluralism of ultimate value orientations as evidence that even Habermass relatively weak version of cognitivism is awed.31 In response to this second stage of skeptical argument, Habermas offers a theory of moral argumentation that explains how normative rightness claims can be redeemed in practical discourse and thus how a reasoned agreement on normative questions can be achieved. The key component of this theory is the principle of universalization (U). In order to be valid, a norm must fulll (U), which Habermas states as follows:
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Habermas (1990): 55. Ibid: 56. He also acknowledges that there are certain disanalogies between truth and rightness claims; these he discusses in Habermas (1990): 6061. The disanalogies are not as important for our purposes as is the analogy. Recently, Habermas has modied his conception of truth, but not his account of moral rightness, nor his contention that there is an analogy between the two. See Jrgen Habermas, Truth and Justication, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). Habermas (1990): 76.
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(U) All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can be anticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyones interests (and these consequences are preferred to those of known alternative possibilities for regulation).32
(U) serves as a bridging principle between particular values, interests, and commitments, on the one hand, and generalizable norms, on the other. In this way, it plays a role in practical discourse similar to that played by the principle of induction in theoretical discourse.33 The skeptic, however, is unimpressed by the appeal to (U). She replies that (U) seems to be nothing more than a hasty generalization of moral intuitions peculiar to our own Western culture.34 As a result, rather than being a universal principle rooted in the structure of moral argumentation, (U) seems to be a substantive normative principle requiring independent justication. At best, (U) is merely contingent; at worst, it is ethnocentric. Habermas responds to this third stage of skeptical attack with his well-known transcendental-pragmatic argument, designed to show that (U) is a necessary and unavoidable presupposition of any moral argument, including the skeptics own argument against the cognitivist. The aim of this argument is to establish that (U) is, as Habermas puts it, an inescapable presupposition of [an] irreplaceable discourse and in that sense universal.35
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Ibid: 65. Habermass more recent formulation of (U) is this: A norm is valid when the foreseeable consequences and side effects of its general observance for the interests and value-orientations of each individual could be jointly accepted by all concerned without coercion (Jrgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, trans. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998] 42). Habermas distinguishes (U), the general principle of moral argumentation, from the discourse principle (D): Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approval of all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse (Habermas [1990]: 66). In his original account of the relationship between these two principles, Habermas claims that (D) presupposes (U); that is, it presupposes that norms can be justied. Habermass strategy is rst to defend (U), then to make the transition to discourse ethics properly. More recently, Habermas has revised his account of the relationship between (U) and (D); he now argues that (U) is derived from (D), rather than vice versa. See Jrgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 109; and Habermas (1998): 4143. For helpful discussion of the relationship between (U) and (D), see Kenneth Baynes, Democracy and the Rechtstaat: Habermass Faktizitt und Geltung, The Cambridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 20132; and Cristina Lafont, The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy, trans. Jos Medina (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), ch. 7. In any case, Habermas still maintains that (U) is the principle that governs moral discourses. As I am more interested in his defense of (U), in particular against the skeptical charge that (U) is ethnocentric, I shall leave aside further discussion of (D) and of the complicated relationship between the two principles. Habermas (1990): 76. Ibid: 84, emphasis mine.
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Habermas argues that in order to engage in argumentation at all, speakers must presuppose that all participants understand the argument to be a cooperative search for the truth and are motivated to agree or disagree solely on the basis of the unforced force of the better argument.36 The presuppositions themselves stipulate that everyone who stands to make a relevant contribution is included in the discourse, that everyone is able to participate equally in the raising and questioning of validity claims, and that all participants are free of internal and external coercion in the evaluation of such validity claims.37 Establishing these rules38 as unavoidable presuppositions of any argument whatsoever, rather than merely contingent conventions of Western forms of reasoning, involves demonstrating that any violation of one of these rules leads the speaker into a performative contradiction.39 Having established that these rules are unavoidable presuppositions of argumentation, Habermas next claims that (U) can be derived from them. Thus, if we grant that these presuppositions are necessary and universal, then (U) must be necessary and universal as well.40 If this is the case, then the skeptic himself, simply by engaging in an argument with the cognitivist in which he attempts to deny (U), must inevitably subscribe to certain tacit presuppositions of argumentation that are incompatible with the propositional content of his objection.41 The skeptic thus falls into a performative contradiction and defeats himself. Both the defense of Habermass claim that the violation of any of the rules of argument leads to a performative contradiction and the derivation of (U) from those rules are complex tasks. I shall not pursue either, however, because even if we grant that Habermass transcendental-pragmatic argument goes through, the
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See ibid: 8889. Ibid: 89. For a slightly expanded list of argumentative presuppositions, see Habermas (1998): 44. By calling these presuppositions rules, however, Habermas does not mean to imply that in order to count as a discourse, the conversation in question must actually conform completely to these rules. The presuppositions of argument are idealizing assumptions that are implicitly adopted and intuitively known and that must be assumed to be approximated in order for us to enter into argumentation at all. In other words, these are idealizing assumptions that everyone who seriously engages in argumentation must make as a matter of fact ( Jrgen Habermas, Remarks on Discourse Ethics, Justication and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran Cronin [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994] 50). However, given their status as idealizations, Habermas acknowledges that they have to be counterfactually imputed as governing in actual discourses, even though, in such actual discourses, we will always have to settle for approximations. See Habermas (1990): 9091. See ibid: 9293. Habermas does not actually carry out the derivation of (U) from the rules of argumentation; he only indicates that he thinks such a derivation is possible and suggests the direction the argument might take. For a clear and concise attempt to derive (U), see William Rehg, Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jrgen Habermas (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) ch. 3. Habermas (1990): 82.
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skeptic has a fourth line of attack. The skeptic can avoid performative contradiction and thus potentially defeat the transcendental-pragmatic argument simply by refusing to engage in discourse. Habermas describes such a skeptic as follows:
The consistent skeptic will deprive the transcendental pragmatist of a basis for his argument. He may, for example, take the attitude of an ethnologist vis--vis his own culture, shaking his head over philosophical argumentation as though he were witnessing the unintelligible rites of a strange tribe. Nietzsche perfected this way of looking at philosophical matters, and Foucault has now rehabilitated it.42
Habermass initial response to the consistent skeptic is to insist that argumentation is an integral part of our shared form of sociocultural life; as a result, truly consistent skepticism demands the nearly impossible task of cutting oneself off completely from the community of beings who argue. The skeptic cannot, even indirectly, deny that he moves in a shared sociocultural form of life, that he grew up in a web of communicative action, and that he reproduces his life in that web.43 Thus, truly consistent skepticism is inconceivable; it is at best an abstract possibility, and not even a coherent one at that. As Habermas puts it, the radical skeptics refusal to argue is an empty gesture. No matter how consistent a dropout he may be, he cannot drop out of the communicative practice of everyday life, to the presuppositions of which he remains bound. And these in turn are at least partly identical with the presuppositions of argumentation as such.44 But there is something a bit too quick about the move that Habermas makes here. It is true that the presuppositions of the communicative practice of everyday life are partly identical with the presuppositions of argumentation, but the qualication is signicant. For instance, elsewhere Habermas makes it clear that he views argumentative speech as a special casein fact, a privileged derivativeof action oriented toward reaching understanding, that is, of communicative action in general.45 Argumentation is a reective and more highly evolved form of communicative action, a form that emerges phylogenetically with the modern age and ontogenetically with the attainment of a post-conventional ego identity. Thus, argumentation and communicative action are not coextensive; the former is a particular (though in Habermass view, a privileged) form of the latter. This means that although it is indeed the case that by rejecting communicative action, the skeptic also necessarily rejects argumentation, too, it is not the case that
42 43 44 45
Ibid: 99. Ibid: 100. Ibid: 10001. Jrgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) 130.
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by rejecting argumentation, he also necessarily rejects communicative action. Thus, it is not obvious that the skeptic could not opt out of argumentation without opting out of communicative action in general. The plausibility of Habermass argument here relies heavily on his theory of modernity, specically, the claim that argumentation is a key feature of modern societies, such that the skeptic who is situated in such a society does not have the option of rejecting it while still embracing some other form of communicative interaction.46 Obviously, there is not sufcient space to delve into Habermass complex and wide-ranging theory of modernity here; sufce it to say that it involves certain claims about social evolution and cultural learning processesin short, claims about historical progressthat a Foucaultian skeptic would no doubt want to question. Suppose, however, that the Foucaultian skeptic does not take up this line of criticism. Suppose instead that she just bites the bullet, grants Habermas for the sake of the argument on Habermass theory of modernity, and announces that she is nonetheless happy to opt out of both argumentation in particular and communicative interaction in general. In Habermass terminology, the only possible mode of interaction that would be left open to the skeptic would be strategic. Habermass response to this nal skeptical move is to insist that the contexts of communicative action represent an order for which there is no substitute.47 In point of fact, the very idea that one can choose between acting communicatively and acting strategically exists, according to Habermas, only in the abstract; as he puts it, it exists only for someone who takes the contingent perspective of an individual actor.48 In reality, Habermas claims,
The symbolic structures of every lifeworld are reproduced through three processes: cultural tradition, social integration, and socialization. As I have shown elsewhere, these processes operate only in the medium of action oriented toward reaching understanding. There is no other, equivalent medium in which these functions can be fullled. Individuals acquire and sustain their identities by appropriating traditions, belonging to social groups, and taking part in socializing interactions. That is why they, as individuals, have a choice between communicative and strategic action only in an abstract sense, i.e., in individual cases. They do not have the option of a long-term absence from contexts of action oriented toward reaching an understanding. That would mean regressing to the monadic isolation of strategic action, or schizophrenia and suicide. In the long run such absence is self-destructive.49
46
47 48 49
Habermas seems to acknowledge this point when he claims that his justication strategy for (U) must be supplemented with genealogical arguments drawing on premises of modernization theory, if (U) is to be rendered plausible (Habermas [1998]: 45). Habermas (1990): 10102. Ibid: 102. Ibid, emphasis added.
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In short, Habermass response to this line of argument is that it puts the skeptic into a hopeless position, leads her to an existential dead end.50 Foucault seems to have been painted into an unpleasant corner here. To be sure, this corner could have been avoided if we had challenged certain of Habermass argumentative moves along the way. For instance, we could have questioned Habermass claim that the consistent skeptic must opt out of discourse and communicative action altogether by challenging, on Foucaults behalf, Habermass characterization of argumentative discourse. I have refrained from raising these sorts of challenges not because I want to allow Habermas once again to set the terms of the debate, but because it seems to me that following Habermass debate with the moral skeptic to its conclusion leads us to a very interesting point: namely, the point at which it becomes clear that what is ultimately at stake in the debate between the Habermasian discourse ethicist and the Foucaultian moral skeptic is the coherence of the self. The question now becomes whether Habermas is correct in maintaining that the coherence of the self is secured only in the medium of action oriented toward reaching understanding. In order to address this question, we will have to take a closer look at Habermas and Foucaults accounts of the self. III. TWO RIVAL VERSIONS OF SUBJECTIVATION: INDIVIDUATION THROUGH SOCIALIZATION VS. SUBJECTION As I will use it here, the term subjectivation refers to the process by which neonates are transformed into competent subjects who have the capacity to think, deliberate, and act. Both Foucault and Habermas are interested in this process indeed, their accounts of this process are arguably crucial to their respective philosophical projectsbut they understand it differently. Foucaults use of the term subjection underscores what he takes to be the ambivalent nature of subjectivation. As Foucault sees it, in the modern era, individuals become subjects by being subjected to the forces of disciplinary power and normalization. By contrast, Habermass term individuation through socialization suggests a more benign process whereby autonomous individuals are socialized into a communicatively (thus, rationally) structured lifeworld. In this way, each of these accounts captures an important part of the truth about subjectivation, but only a part; each is too one-sided to tell the full story. However, their differences notwithstanding, these accounts also have more in common than has been previously recognized; as a result, a fruitful integration of the insights of these two accounts is possible, even though developing such an integrated perspective will necessitate modifying or recasting certain aspects of their views.
50
Ibid.
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Drawing on work in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, Habermas offers a thoroughly intersubjective account of the self which traces the formation of the self through processes of socialization that are rooted in the lifeworld. According to Habermas, the self has an intersubjective core because it is generated communicatively, on the path from without to within.51 Habermass account of cognitive and linguistic development draws heavily on the work of G. H. Mead, according to whom an individuals sense of herself as a subject, a self-conscious being, an I, rst emerges in interactions with an other for whom she is a me.52 This is the general picture that Habermas has in mind when he says that:
The self [. . .] is dependent upon recognition by addressees because it generates itself as a response to the demands of an other in the rst place [. . .]. The ego, which seems to me to be given in my self-consciousness as what is purely my own, cannot be maintained by me solely through my own power, as it were for me aloneit does not belong to me. Rather, this ego always retains an intersubjective core because the process of individuation from which it emerges runs through the network of linguistically mediated interactions.53
Thus, self-consciousness is dependent upon the recognition of others, specically, their recognition of my claim to uniqueness and irreplaceability.54 The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of moral development. It is because others attribute ethical accountability to me that I gradually transform myself into an accountable moral agent. Following Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, Habermas breaks down the development of moral agency into pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional stages. These stages are distinguished by greater and greater degrees of reexivity, abstraction, and generalization, with particular emphasis placed by Habermas on reexivity: [T]he simple behavioral expectation of the rst level becomes reexive at the next levelexpectations can be reciprocally expected; and the reexive behavioral expectation of the second level again becomes reexive at the third levelnorms can be normed.55 It is this greater degree of reexivity that explains how Habermas can view individuals as
51
52
53 54 55
Jrgen Habermas, Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Meads Theory of Subjectivity, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 177. For an insightful critique of Habermass reading of Mead, see Peter Dews, Communicative Paradigms and the Question of Subjectivity: Habermas, Mead and Lacan, Habermas: A Critical Reader, ed. Dews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 87117. Habermas (1992): 16970. Ibid: 186. Jrgen Habermas, Moral Development and Ego Identity, Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979) 86.
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produced through but not determined by socialization. As he puts it, identity is produced through socialization, that is, through the fact that the growing child rst of all integrates into a specic social system by appropriating symbolic generalities; it is later secured and developed through individuation, that is, precisely through a growing independence in relation to social systems.56 For Habermas, then, the subject is produced through but not determined by socialization processes, and such processes take place in the medium of communicative action. Foucault, for his part, would agree, I think, that the individual is formed on the path from without to within; his disagreement with Habermas would be over how to characterize the without (and, thus, the resulting within). For Foucault, the without, the social relations within which and by which subjects are constituted, is structured by relations of power, where power is understood in basically strategic, rather than communicative, terms.57 Foucault quite infamously suggested that the individual subject is an effect of these omnipresent, strategic power relations. As he put it,
[I]t is [. . .] a mistake to think of the individual as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom or some multiple, inert matter to which power is applied, or which is struck by a power that subordinates or destroys individuals. In actual fact, one of the rst effects of power that it allows bodies, gestures, discourses, and desires to be identied and constituted as something individual. The individual is not, in other words, powers opposite number; the individual is one of powers rst effects.58
Foucaults genealogical works of the 1970s aim to show that disciplinary, normalizing relations of power form, for us, the without from which the within of the modern subject is constituted. At rst glance, then, it looks as if Habermas and Foucault offer diametrically opposed accounts of subjectivation. Although both of them understand subjectivation as a social process, Habermas views it as a rationally and communicatively mediated process of socialization, grounded in reciprocal relations of mutual recognition. Relations of power seem to play no role whatsoever in Habermass account.59 Foucault, by contrast, understands subjectivation as a process of subjection to normalizing, disciplinary (strategic) power. Moreover, his claim that
56 57
58 59
Ibid: 74. For the characterization of power as strategic, see Foucault (1997); and Michel Foucault, Afterword: The Subject and Power, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed., ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 20826. Foucault (2003): 2930. For a critique of Habermas along these lines, see Hans-Herbert Kgler, The Self-Empowered Subject: Habermas, Foucault, and Hermeneutic Reexivity, Philosophy and Social Criticism 22 (1996): 1344.
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power is omnipresent seems to rule out in advance any possible role for nonstrategic, communicative relations in this process.60 However, things are not quite so simple as all that. For one thing, although he emphasizes the role that communicative action plays in socialization processes, in some of his early writings, Habermas also acknowledges the importantindeed, necessaryrole that power plays in this process in the form of asymmetrical power relations between parents (and other authority gures) and children. Following Freud and Mead, Habermas regards the internalization of structures of authority as a necessary feature of the process of subjectivation and the development of moral autonomy. As Habermas puts it:
[T]he task of passing to the conventional stage of interaction consists in reworking the imperative arbitrary will of a dominant gure of this kind [i.e., a parent] into the authority of a suprapersonal will detached from this specic person [. . .]. [P]articular behavior patterns become detached from the context-bound intentions and speech acts of specic individuals and take on the external form of social norms to the extent that the sanctions associated with them are internalized [. . .], that is, to the extent that they are assimilated into the personality of the growing child and thus made independent of the sanctioning power of concrete reference persons.61
The growing child undergoes a transformation from a dependence on a wholly external authority (usually a parent) through an internalization of that authority relation to an ability to reect internally on social norms, relationships, and expectations, and assess their validity. Habermas suggests that this internalization of authority is necessitated by the lack of a common instinctual repertoire that might perform a similar action-coordinating function for non-linguistic beings. For us, this void is [. . .] lled by normatively generalized behavioral expectations, which take the place of instinctual regulation; however, these norms need to be anchored within the acting subject through more or less internalized social controls.62 The internalization of social controls is thus a necessarythough not a sufcientcondition for both adherence to and reection upon moral norms; thus, it is a necessary condition for the achievement of individual autonomy. This point reveals once again, though in a different way, the crucial link between Habermass discourse ethics and his account of subjectivation; discourse ethics is dependent on a form of life that meets it halfway. There has to be a modicum of congruence between morality and the practices of socialization and education.
60
61 62
For the claim that power is omnipresent, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978) 93. For an insightful discussion of this claim, see Richard Lynch, Is Power All There Is? Michel Foucault and the Omnipresence of Power Relations, Philosophy Today 42 (1998): 6570. Habermas (1990): 15354. Habermas (1992): 179.
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The latter must promote the requisite internalization of superego controls and the abstractness of ego identities.63 All of which suggests that, although communicative action plays a crucial role in subjectivation for Habermas, the internalization of power relations and social controls also plays an important, indeed, given certain facts about the human condition, anthropologically unavoidable, role as well. So it is not that Habermas denies that power plays a role in subjectivation, it is just that he is completely sanguine about that role, for at least two reasons. First, he assumes that the social controls that have to be internalized are rational and the authority of the parents who enforce them is legitimate; thus, they are unobjectionable from a normative point of view. Second, he assumes that the outcome of this process is the capacity for autonomy, a capacity that allows the individual subject to reect critically on and assess the validity of the norms, relationships, practices, institutions, and so forth, into and through which the individual has been socialized. I will return to these two points momentarily. For now, I would simply like to note that although Habermas emphasizes the role that communicative action plays in socialization processes, he is nevertheless committed to the belief that communicative action is necessary but not sufcient for socialization. It may be true, as Habermas puts it, that socialization processes operate only in the medium of action oriented toward reaching understanding (my emphasis), but this does not mean that they operate in a medium structured by communicative action alone. Socialization requires exercises of power that are non-reciprocal, and that rest on actual (though not necessarily physical) force, not just the unforced force of rational insight or the better argument. As any parent knows, the force of rational insight is powerless in the face of an intransigent and willful toddler. Try as one may to reason with her about why she should eat her peas or go to bed or brush her teeth or even hold your hand in a parking lot, often it is necessary to resort to strategic interaction (whether that takes the form of threatening negative sanctions or offering positive inducements) in order to get her to comply. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it in a famous passage from The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Humanity had to inict terrible injuries on itself before the selfthe identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beingswas created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.64
63
64
Jrgen Habermas, Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegels Critique of Kant Apply to Discourse Ethics? Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) 207. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002) 26.
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It is here that Habermass use of the term authority is crucial because it implies that the power relation that the growing child must internalize in order to become autonomous is both rational and legitimate. However, even if we grant Habermas this point, the child is incapable of seeing it as rational and legitimate until it has taken up the moral point of view, which it can only do by internalizing the power relation. Indeed, Habermas has acknowledged this: [F]or the growing child this question [of whether a norm is valid] has already been given an afrmative answer before it can pose itself to him as a question.65 The crucial point for Habermas is that the social control exercised via norms that are valid for specic groups is not based on repression alone.66 This way of putting it suggests that Habermas is willing to admit that the social control that is made possible by the internalization of structures of authority is at least partly based in repression. The key point is that such internalization and the autonomy to which it gives rise is not based solely in repression, else it could not obligate the actors to obey but only force them into submissiveness.67 However, the question remains, how is the child ever to be in a position to assess the legitimacy of these structures of power/authority, given that he or she rst has to internalize them in order to be capable of assessing their legitimacy?68 Habermas might respond here by appealing to the distinction between the internal motivating force of reasons and the force of external sanctions; the developmental achievement of the autonomous, post-conventional self yields precisely the capacity to be motivated by the former rather than merely by the latter.69 As he puts it: We do not adhere to recognized norms from a sense of duty because they are imposed upon us by the threat of sanctions but because we give them to ourselves.70 However, this way of putting it overlooks the fact that, as Habermas himself has acknowledged, we are only able to become the sort of beings who are capable of feeling obligated or motivated by reasons in the rst place because of the internalization of structures of authority, a result that is accomplished primarily through the mechanisms of parental discipline and the educational
65
66 67 68
69
70
Jrgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987) 39. Ibid. Ibid: 45. For an insightful discussion of this point, see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997). This is what ultimately distinguishes Habermass view from Meads, who had a somewhat darker view of the implications of this internalization process. For an interesting critical comparison of Habermas and Mead on this point, see Dews (1999). Habermas (1994): 42. For helpful discussion of this point, see Rehg (1994): 2324.
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system.71 Given that this is the case, the worry is that the distinction between external force and internal force (which is, after all, internalized before the child is in a position to make this very distinction) does not cut much ice. The worry here is a Foucaultian one, but it should not be confused with the irrationalist claim that the demands of rationality and autonomy are per se pernicious, that they are nothing more than domination, that they are, as Foucault once put it, the enemy that should be eliminated.72 Foucault did worry that our modern form of rationality is dangerous, a worry that led him to wonder: What is this Reason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?73 But he also believed that the awareness of these intrinsic dangers is perfectly compatible with an acceptance of the necessity, indeed indispensability of such forms of rationality.74 What specically is the danger that Foucault believes to be intrinsic to rationality? Foucault offers as an example the link between the rationality of social Darwinism and the legitimization of Nazi racism. This was, of course, he goes on to acknowledge, an irrationality, but an irrationality that was
71
72
73 74
At this point, one might be tempted to object that this critique of Habermas is guilty of committing the genetic fallacy, and to insist that the origins of our capacity for autonomy are simply not relevant for our assessment of that capacity. For a classic formulation of this objection in the context of the Foucault/Habermas debate, see Fraser (1989): 3554. This objection is often a conversation stopper, but it is not at all obvious to me that it should be. In the rst place, not all genetic arguments are fallacious, and, in this case, I would argue that this genetic argument is not obviously fallacious. To assume that it is fallacious is to assume that the early stages of childhood development are like a ladder that we discard after we have ascended it. Against this assumption, one could cite Freuds contention that in the realm of the mind [. . .], what is primitive is so commonly preserved alongside of the transformed version which has arisen from it that it is unnecessary to give instances as evidence (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey [New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1961] 16). Moreover, as much of the literature on personal autonomy shows (see, for example, John Christman, Autonomy and Personal History, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21 [1991]: 124; and Alfred Mele, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy [Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995]), genetic or historical considerations of how someone came to be autonomous are often relevant to our assessments of whether that person is genuinely autonomous. I discuss these issues more fully in Allen, The Entanglement of Power and Validity: Foucault and Critical Theory, in Timothy OLeary and Christopher Falzon (eds), Foucault and Philosophy (London: Blackwell, forthcoming). For another helpful response on Foucaults behalf to the genetic fallacy objection, see James Wong, Sapere Aude: Critical Ontology and the Case of Child Development, Canadian Journal of Political Science 37 (2004): 86382. Michel Foucault, Space, Knowledge, Power, Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 3, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2000) 358. Interestingly enough, this comment comes in response to a question about Habermass critique of postmodernism. Ibid. Ibid.
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at the same time, after all, a certain form of rationality.75 The example suggests that the danger Foucault has in mind is that, because forms of rationality are historically contingent and rooted in human practices, they can be and indeed often are connected in subtle and insidious ways with power/knowledge relations.76 But the imprimatur of rationality can serve to obscure that very connection, and it is the function of critique to shed light on such connections. So Habermass account of subjectivation is much more complicated than it appears at rst. Habermas acknowledges a crucial role for power in the process of subjectivation, and this acknowledgement opens his account up to the Foucaultian line of criticism that I have articulated. Foucaults account of subjectivation is also more complicated than it appears at rst. Many critics have assumed, wrongly, that Foucault thinks that the subject is merely epiphenomenal, or that it does not really exist, or, at the very least, that it lacks the capacities for thought, deliberation, and action that have been traditionally associated with it.77 Habermas himself claims that, from [Foucaults] perspective, socialized individuals can only be perceived as exemplars, as standardized products of some discourse formationas
75 76
77
Ibid. One might object at this point that, given the normative confusions in his work, Foucault is not able to make normative distinctions between different kinds of power relations; thus, labeling some sorts of power relations pernicious on Foucaults behalf might seem unjustied, insofar as such a judgment seems to rely on a normative conception of social relations that Foucaults work does not provide. It is undeniably true that Foucault never offers a normative conception of subjectivation or of social relations and that he has a tendency to use the word power to cover an overly broad range of phenomenon (which he himself admits; see Foucault [1997]: 299). However, it is also the case if we understand Foucault to be a moral skepticrather than a moral nihilist or an immoralistthen there would be nothing inconsistent or contradictory about him offering normative distinctions between different kinds of power relationsor about others doing so on his behalf. Indeed, in some of his late work, Foucault does distinguish between power, which is not per se pernicious, objectionable, or bad, and domination, which, in his view, is. The key to the distinction is that power relations are reversible and unstable, whereas in relations of domination, the free ow of power is restricted and some individuals or groups are unable to exercise it (see Foucault [1997]: 283). Although there are certainly questions that one could raise about this distinction (and I discuss some of these in Allen, The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity [Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999] ch. 2), it does, I think, provide a compelling response to the foregoing objection. Moreover, this discussion highlights that what is crucially at stake in the debate between Foucault and Habermas is not the substantive content of Habermass normative conceptions of subjectivation and of social relations but the strongly universalistic, context-transcendent status that he tends to claim for them. I shall return to this issue later. See, for example, Linda Alcoff, Feminist Politics and Foucault: The Limits to a Collaboration, Crises in Continental Philosophy, ed. Arlene Dallery and Charles Scott (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990) 6986; Habermas (1987): lectures 9 and 10; Honneth (1991); and McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
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individual copies that are mechanically punched out.78 Thus, Habermas seems to assume that Foucault views the imposition of disciplinary power as both necessary and sufcient for subjectivation, that he thinks of the subjected subject as nothing more than the sum total of the disciplinary, normalizing relations of power that constitute him/her.79 However, Foucaults understanding of individuals as effects of power does not necessitate viewing them as inert, incapable of action, or wholly determined by outside forces. To the contrary, Foucault himself insists that individuals do not simply circulate in those networks [of power]; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always also its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them.80 The process of subjectivation is, for Foucault, always two-sided. The process of being subjected to power relations constitutes one as a subject, but one is simultaneously enabled to be a subject in and through this process. Moreover, although there is a sense in which Foucault does think that normalizing, disciplinary power is necessary for creating the modern subject, he also views the aim of his genealogies to be the exposure of what he calls the contemporary limits of the necessary, that is, toward revealing as contingent forms of constraint that are falsely presented as necessary.81 The role of disciplinary power in the constitution of the modern subject is one such form of constraint. Indeed, Foucaults late interest in practices of the self in antiquity is precisely motivated by a concern with asking how [. . .] the growth of capabilities [can] be disconnected from the intensication of power relations?82 To be sure, it does seem likely that Foucault would maintain that some sort of power relation is necessary for subjectivation. This would seem to follow from his claim that there is no outside to power, that power is omnipresent in social relations. Since subjectivation is a social process, then it will necessarily be inected with power as well. In any case, this view does not distinguish him from Habermas, who also acknowledges a necessary role for power in subjectivation, even if he does not seem particularly worried about the implications of this role. The crucial issue is whether or not Foucault holds the imposition of disciplinary power to be sufcient for subjectivation. Does he view the subject as a mechanically punched-out copy, as nothing more than the relations of power that constitute it? Is he guilty of reducing subjectivity to domination? The answer to these
78 79 80 81
82
Habermas (1987): 293. For similar critiques of Foucault, see McCarthy (1991): ch. 2; and Kgler (1996). Foucault (2003): 29. Foucault, What Is Enlightenment? Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) 313. Ibid: 317.
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questions is no. In fact, Foucault explicitly claims that power is always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action.83 Not only that, but Foucault does not deny the possibility of non-strategic, communicative forms of interaction, nor does he deny that such forms of interaction may play some role in subjectivation. Indeed, Foucault argues that it is [. . .] necessary to distinguish power relations from relationships of communication which transmit information by means of a language, a system of signs, or any other symbolic medium.84 Power and communication do not constitute two distinct domains of social life; rather, they are analytically distinct but practically intertwined types of relationship which in fact always overlap one another, support one another reciprocally, and use each other mutually as means to an end.85 Interestingly, Foucault cites educational institutionswhich play a crucial role in the process of subjectivationas examples of the intertwining of these two distinct types of relationship. Such institutions make use of a whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the value of each person and of the levels of knowledge) and of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy).86 To be sure, these insights in Foucaults late work about the nature of communicative relationships and their connections to power are quite underdeveloped; perhaps had he lived long enough for the planned debate with Habermas to take place, he would have developed them further. In any case, the important point for the purposes of this discussion is that these insights are not, contrary to what is often assumed, incompatible with the Foucaultian claim that there is no outside to power.87 Each of these accounts highlights an important aspect of subjectivation. Habermas emphasizes the role played by communicative rationality, while Foucault highlights that of disciplinary power.Yet each account remains relatively one-sided. Although Habermas acknowledges the role played by power in the internalization
83
84 85 86 87
Foucault (1983): 220. Of course, this quote comes from a relatively late essay, which raises the vexed issue of the relationship between the middle Foucault account of power and the late Foucault account of practices of the self. Many of Foucaults critics have maintained that the return of the subject in the late Foucault stands in contradiction to his earlier analysis of power. See, for example, Peter Dews, The Return of Subjectivity in the Late Foucault, Radical Philosophy 51 (1989): 37 41; Habermas (1994); and McCarthy (1991): ch. 2. For arguments to the contrary, see Allen, The Anti-Subjective Hypothesis: Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject, The Philosophical Forum 31/2 (2000): 11330. Foucault (1983): 217. Ibid: 218. Ibid: 21819. For a helpful discussion of this example, see Tully (1999): 136. On this point, see Lynch (1998): 67.
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of structures of authority, he is overly sanguine about the implications of this role; and although Foucault acknowledges that communicative relationships can and do play a role in disciplinary institutions such as the educational system, these relationships and their connections to disciplinary power remain underdeveloped. Moreover, the one-sidedness of these accounts helps to explain certain persistent features of the critical reception of their respective authors. Habermass relative inattention to the power-ladenness of subjectivation arguably makes it difcult for him to offer a satisfactory critical-theoretical account of some of the most pressing social problems of our time, including sexism and racism, which are reproduced and maintained, in large part, through the production of subordinating modes of identity. Although Foucaults work is widely believed to be more useful for this task, his relative inattention to the communicative dimension of social relations arguably undercuts his ability to satisfactorily theorize the possibilities for individual and collective resistance to and transformation of the relations of domination that his own work helps to expose. In this sense, these two accounts of subjectivation can be seen as complementary: Foucaults account highlights the role that disciplinary practices play in the formation of the autonomous self; Habermass account emphasizes the ways in which the achievement of autonomy enables the self to reect critically on such disciplinary practices.88 However, simply asserting their complementarity is not enough, for Foucaults account of subjection seems to call into question Habermass faith in the reexive capacities of the subject, while the plausibility of Habermass account of the development of autonomy seems to rest on the denial that any signicant consequences follow from the necessary role that power plays in socialization processes. Thus, if the insights of these two accounts are to be integrated, some of the fundamental commitments of these two thinkers will have to be recast. IV. CONCLUSION I have already indicated the principal way in which Foucaults account will have to be recast in light of this discussion. In order to overcome the one-sided emphasis on power in his account of subjectivation, Foucaultians would need to develop some of the very underdeveloped ideas about communication, reciprocity, and the distinction between power and domination that are mentioned in Foucaults late work and to think through how these ideas bear on the issue of subjectivation. Doing so would not only completely undermine Habermass claim that Foucault reduces subjectivation to the imposition of disciplinary power, it
88
For a similar claim, though one that is cast in terms of a contrast between contingent versus universal aspects of subjectivity, see Tully (1999): 10708.
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would also make it possible to develop a more satisfactory Foucaultian account of individual and collective resistance to modern disciplinary power. Given that Foucault himself appeared to be moving in this direction in his late work, there are resources within Foucaults oeuvre for developing such an account. However, putting those resources to work will require that we rethink the relationship between the various periods of Foucaults work, particularly the issue of the compatibility between the early and middle Foucault, on the one hand, and his late account of practices of the self, on the other. Although critics began castigating Foucault for contradicting his earlier analyses of power almost immediately after the publication of volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality, more recent scholarship has argued that there is much more continuity to Foucaults diverse periods than has previously been thought.89 With respect to Habermas, overcoming the one-sided emphasis on communicative rationality in his account of subjectivation would require Habermas to confront more directly the implications of the necessary and unavoidable role that power plays in subjectivation processes. Although, as we have seen, Habermas does not deny this role, he does seem to deny that it has any signicant consequences for his account of autonomy. However, as Judith Butler has recently argued, because power plays an unavoidable role in subjectivation, subjects are vulnerable to becoming psychically attached to and invested in the forms of subjectivity and identity that are subordinating.90 It is precisely this dimension of subjectivation and the psychic cost of the subjugation that Habermass account glosses over. Moreover, because the child cannot distinguish between subordinating and non-subordinating modes of attachment, and because she will attach to painful and subordinating modes of identity rather than not attachfor some form of attachment is necessary for psychic survival and social existenceher psychic attachment to subordination may well precede and inform the development of her capacity for autonomy. This is one way of lling out a claim that Butler makes elsewhere: [P]ower pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic.91 If power invades the conceptual apparatus of the subject who is attempting to reect critically on its nature and effects, however, then it will be difcult to maintain the sharp distinction between power and validity that is so central to
89
90 91
See, for example Thomas Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststructuralist Mapping of History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005). Butler (1997). Judith Butler, Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism, Feminist Contentions: A Philsophical Exchange, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, and Nancy Fraser (New York: Routledge, 1995) 39.
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Habermass normative-philosophical enterprise.92 Indeed, it sometimes seems as if this is precisely why Habermas insists on downplaying the role the power plays in socialization processes. However, the entanglement of power and validity only poses a serious problem if one assumes that there are only two possible ways of understanding the relationship between power and validity: either validity is reduced to nothing more than power and autonomy to nothing more than disciplinary subjectiona position that Habermas rightly sees as normatively and politically disastrous but wrongly imputes to Foucaultor validity is understood as wholly distinct from and unsullied by power relationsin which case the purity of pure reason slips in through the back door, a position that Habermas himself aims to avoid.93 But there is a third, and better, possibility: to give up on the demand for purity altogether. Doing so would mean that acknowledging the unavoidable entanglement of validity and power, but without reducing the former to the latter.94 Moreover, accepting this claim need not completely undermine the foundation of Habermass normative philosophical project, though it does necessitate interpreting it in a much more pragmatic and contextualist way than
92
93 94
Indeed, Habermas acknowledges this point in a roundabout sort of way in the context of his critique of Nietzsche: he rejects Nietzsches account of bad conscience on the grounds that such an account makes it impossible to maintain the distinction between power and validity. See Habermas (1987): 12126. See ibid: 322. One might well wonder about the status of and basis for this claim that power and validity are unavoidably entangled. Is this an empirically based generalization? Or an a priori claim based on philosophical reections about human social interaction? I would suggest that we might view it in the same way that Habermas himself did in his early work: as an empirically grounded claim about the quasi-transcendental anthropologically basic features of human sociocultural forms of life (see Jrgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro [Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971]). The theory of cognitive interests offered in Habermass early work attempts to split the difference between the empirical and the transcendental levels of analysis by uncovering a set of anthropologically basic features of human social life that have a transcendental function but arise from actual structures of human life (Habermas [1971]: 194). (There are interesting connections that could be made here between Habermass notion of cognitive interests and Foucaults account of the historical a priori in his early work; see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith [New York: Pantheon, 1970]. I discuss these similarities in Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, chs. 3 and 6). In Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas himself viewed power (along with work and language or interaction) as an anthropological given, as an ineradicable features of human social life; later, he famously retracted this claim, and viewed power as an unnecessary and potentially eradicable deformation of normatively structured communicative interaction. As I see it, this was a serious mistake. Unfortunately, it seems to me that we have all the inductive evidence that we might possibly need to motivate the conclusion that power is an ineradicable feature of human social interaction. Moreover, even if we could imagine a form of sociocultural life that was completely puried of power relations, such a form of life would arguably not be recognizably human.
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Habermas himself has tended to do.95 In particular, the status of the normative idealizationsthe norms of universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity that form the core of the ideal speech situation96that are central to Habermass critical project would have to be recast. Recognizing the unavoidable entanglement of power and validity necessitates acknowledging the historical and social specicity of these idealizations, their rootedness in a particular historical, social, and cultural contextnamely, the context of late Western modernitywhich, in turn, requires viewing them as open to contestation and revision. In a sense, then, the outcome of this restaging of the debate between Foucault and Habermas is a victory of sorts for the limited form of moral skepticism sketched above. Recasting Habermass metatheoretical claims about the status of his normative idealizations in a more contextualist and pragmatic way moves him much further than he would care to move in the direction of a kind of skepticism about the universalizability of those idealizations and, thus, about the contexttranscendent validity of the moral norms that can be justied by means of them. However, such a move certainly need not result in a collapse into moral nihilism or immoralism, as Habermas seems to fear. Foucaultian moral skepticism is perfectly compatible, as I argued in section one above, with an acceptance of substantive normative commitments, provided that these commitments are understood as specic and local, as rooted in contingent social practices that are connected with relations of power/knowledge. Such skepticism is even compatible with the same kinds of substantive rst-order normative commitmentsto greater political inclusiveness and openness and against, as Foucault once put it, nonconsensualitythat Habermas cherishes. All that is required, on Foucaults view, is that we view such commitments as inescapably rooted in a particular, historically, culturally, and socially specic contextthe context of late Western modernity.97 This, in turn, requires that we be much more cautious than Habermas has
95
96
97
For a convincing defense of such an interpretation of Habermas, see McCarthy in Hoy and McCarthy (1994). One might well argue that Habermas himself has moved in this more pragmatic and contextualist direction over the last decade or so. For an insightful discussion of these issues, see Maeve Cooke, Re-presenting the Good Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). For this formulation of the norms that are fundamental to the ideal speech situation, see Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992). Indeed, Habermas seems to commit himself to just such a view with his recognition of the inherent situatedness or impurity of reason and its ideals. For discussion of this point, see McCarthy (1991): ch. 2. In other words, whatever independent grounds one might have for objecting to this characterization of the normative status of our ideals, Habermas himself seems committed to it. The question then is whether such a commitment is compatible with his commitment to the contexttranscendence and universality of our fundamental normative commitments. As should be clear by now, I think the answer to this question is no. If this is true, then the best way to take up the
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tended to be about claiming a strongly universalistic or context-transcendent status for these commitments.98 In a world in which Western moral and political ideals of freedom and democracy continue to be so closely associated with the morally bankrupt projects of colonialism and empire, however, such a shift might seem less like a loss than a welcomeperhaps even long overduechange for the better. Dartmouth College
98
Habermasian project is to reinterpret it in a more contextualist way than he himself has tended to do. For prominent and productive examples of such ways of interpreting and taking up the Habermasian critical project, see Benhabib (1992), Cooke (2006), and McCarthy (1991). Though we might still understand them as context-transcending, that is, as aiming at transcendence of context, even as we acknowledge that such transcendence is an impossible to achieve ideal. On this point, see Cooke (2006), and McCarthy in Hoy and McCarthy (1994): ch. 3.
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DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION

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