3.4 - Ingram, David B. - Foucault and The Frankfurt School. A Discourse On Nietzsche, Power and Knowledge (En)

FoucaultandtheFrankfurtSchool.
ADiscourseonNietzsche,Powerand Knowledge
FoucaultandtheFrankfurtSchool.ADiscourseonNietzsche,Powerand Knowledge

byDavidB.Ingram

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:3/1986,pages:311327,onwww.ceeol.com.
FOUCAULT AND THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL

A DISCOURSE ON NIETZSCHE, POWER AND KNOWLEDGE David Ingram Now that his corpus has been delivered up to the gnawing criticism of professional hermeneutisists, it is only a matter of time before Michel Foucaults wry observation that commentaries say what has already been said and repeat tirelessly what was nevertheless never said is fully confirmed.1 That being the case, one may be permitted a certain interpretative license, if only to comment on the commentaries and thus eliminate gratuitous meaning by way of double negation. However, it is another matter altogether when the commentaries in question are those of the author. Here one is especially reminded of Foucaults adamant refusal to categorize his own work: Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. Leave it to our bureaucrats and police to see that our papers are in order.2 An authors request to be spared the agony of ideological, methodological, and disciplinary straightjacketing can be respected, however, without foregoing the useful task of measuring his work against that of his contemporaries. And here, at least, Foucault provides us with an insightful comparison. The following essay attempts to explore some of the affinities between Foucault and the Frankfurt School. Part I examines the Nietzschean roots of Adorno and Horkheimers critique of the Enlightenment. While the psychological strands of Nietzsches philosophy imply an identification of rational self-determination with domination, his theory of the bermensch develops a model of emancipation which appeals to the creative, mimetic spontaneity of the aesthetic imagination. I shall argue that, by accepting Nietzsches identification of reason (knowledge) and power, Adorno and Horkheimer could not rationally justify their own stance without entering into contradiction. Part II shows that the above contradiction led Foucault to retrieve a different aspect of Nietzsches thought, the theory of social conflict and power underlying genealogical historiography. Part III concludes with a discussion of Habermas criticism of Foucault. Habermas argues that Foucaults genealogical method is incapable of accounting for its own critical significance without falling prey to transcendental historicism, thereby in effect repeating the dialectic of humanism. Habermas points out that the dialectic of humanism as well as the paradox of rationality implicit in the work of first-generation critical theorists are dissolved once rationality is understood to be operating in everyday communication. This resolution, however, does not mitigate the tension between the reflective demands of our Enlightenment heritage and the situational, strategic realities of concrete practice. In the final analysis, I argue that Foucault and Habermas with differing degrees of emphasis acknowledge the importance of consensus as well as its
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limitations, both agreeing that contemporary ethical and political practice must take its point of departure from communication and aesthetic experience. I Foucault sought on numerous occasions to delineate his own program in relation to those either directly or indirectly affiliated with the Frankfurt School.3 This is hardly surprising, since the latter shared his interest in the peculiar interpenetration of knowledge and power exemplified by the human sciences and incorporated in to the dominant economic, political, and cultural institutions of modern society. Like Foucault, they allied themselves with those classes of persons who were principally excluded from participating in these institutions while at the same time exposing relations of power so impersonal, visceral, and ubiquitous as to transcend the political and economic stratifications indigenous to Western capitalism. Inspired by the legacy of Nietzsches thought in the social theories of Freud, Weber, and Bataille, the deviation of Foucault and the Frankfurt School from Marxist orthodoxy signalled a radical break with the dominant tenets of occidental rationality, thereby preparing the way for a critique of society capable of penetrating the ideological veneer of emancipation, progress, and objectivity associated with Enlightenment humanism. The earnestness with which this project was undertaken is perhaps nowhere more clearly documented than in Horkheimer and Adornos masterpiece, Dialectic of Enlightenment. The principal thesis of this remarkable work is that myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to mythology, or simply, power and knowledge are synonymous.4 If myth constitutes a reaffirmation of the primal powers of collective fate, it is just as true that it enables the self to differentiate itself from, and thereby rationally control, those very same forces.5 Enter Odysseus, the prototype of the bourgeois individual, who practices the quaint deception of getting more out of his bargain with Polyphemus and Circe by far the most treacherous of primal forces than was originally stipulated.6 This cunning extrication from passion is purchased, however, at the cost of incurring a new debt. Accordingly, we read that Odysseus is delivered up to the mercy of the waves whence he is forced to recklessly pursue his own self-interest.7 What Freud called the return of the repressed the power of primal instincts to resurface in neurotic episodes is here joined with the anarchy of production imputed to capitalism by Marx and the bureaucratic reification of political life imputed to rationalized society by Weber to produce a global dystopia in which the gods of reason devour their own children. The diremption which the self inflicts upon itself in the course of individuation (self-consciousness as self-objectification) is not an isolated incident, but is symptomatic of a far-reaching disenchantment which extends to nature in its entirety, The authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment had fewer illusions than Weber about the nihilistic consequences of this process. The rational dissolution of
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the Thomistic world view into distinct cognitive, practical, and aesthetic value-spheres marked out by the Kantian architectonic, they claimed, ultimately had the effect of depriving truth, right, and beauty of any semblance of objectivity. With the advent of capitalism, science increasingly fell sway to the imperatives of self-preservation and instrumental domination, while the subsumption of ethical life under formal legal procedures consigned evaluations to the humble rank of arbitrary preferences.8 This reversion to arbitrary power as the ultimate source of valuation is reflected in the debasement of art for purposes of mass consumption, which all too often ends up reinforcing the anaesthetic regimen of working life.9 It was Nietzsche, however, and not Weber to whom the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment turned for inspiration, albeit, not without reservations. Nietzsches panegyric to the agonal culture of Homeric civilization, especially its glorification of natural beauty and strength, was seen by them as a harbinger of Fascism. At the same time, however, they conceded that the realization of Nietzsches assertions both refutes them and at the same time reveals their truth.10 Thus, they could agree with Nietzsche that the task of enlightenment was fundamentally ambiguous: To make princes and statesmen unmistakably aware that everything they do is sheer falsehood and to show how even in democracy the reduction and malleability of men are worked for as Progress.11 As Nietzsche so eloquently put it in the Genealogy of Morals: What an enormous price man had to pay for reason, seriousness, and control over his emotions those grand human prerogatives and cultural showpieces! How much blood and horror lies behind all good things!12 Just how much blood and horror lies behind all good things finds ample testimony in the rational interiorization of the instincts whereby the soul that wild beast hurling itself against the bars of its cage is born.13 The recurring motifs of Nietzsches genealogy that resonate in the Dialectic of Enlightenment the relationship between exchange and justice as equivalence-retribution-revenge; between guilt, punishment, responsibility, rational calculation, domination, and asceticism are indeed ambivalent monuments to a protean will to power which can just as easily affirm life as deny it. For Nietzsche, the will to power enshrined by Socratic rationalism and later inscribed in modern science and Judeo-Christian morality more often than not expresses resentment towards time, a craving for eternal repose in the empty oblivion of the transcendent, which inevitably issues in a devaluation of values.14 To this purely negative nihilism Nietzsche juxtaposes a positive nihilism in which the possibilities of the past are creatively recycled in a continuous transvaluation. In place of scepticism, conformism, utilitarianism, and fanaticism all symptoms of modern subjectivism that stifle creativity and breed weakness Nietzsche offers the life affirming vision of aesthetic modernity: a dionysian self-forgetfulness wherein the suspension of linear time is achieved in and through the celebration of creative spontaneity. Now it may be objected that Heideggers ringing indictment of Nietzsches will to power doctrine, namely, that it brought to culmination the very tradition it sought to overcome the nihilistic subjectivism of Western metaphysics hits closer to the mark than Nietzsches own intentions would
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otherwise indicate.15 The members of the Frankfurt School could concur by and large with this assessment of Nietzsches will to power doctrine without., however, abandoning what they took to be the core of his aestheticism a mimetic reconciliation with nature free of domination. In the aesthetics of Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas this venerable relic of German Idealism is tossed together with that other dionysian trait commonly associated with the countercultural aspirations of the avant-garde a synthesis that, as Jean-Franois Lyotard has pointed out, could hardly be more problematic.16 Benjamin especially deserves credit for having introduced the notion of post-auratic art into the conceptual arsenal of the Frankfurt School. Exemplified in the poetry of the French Symbolists and by such avant-garde movements as Dadaism, surrealism, and futurism, post-auratic art exploits technical decontextualization and juxtaposition of images through photographic, lithographic, and cinematographic reproduction and montage in order to strip away the cultic, ideological aura, or authoritative representation of existing reality as evincing a reconciliation of opposed forces. It is the shocking combination of conflicting images, not the promise of reconciliation, that exposes society as a reified, fragmented totality and reveals new possibilities of synthetic perception.17 Precisely how all this relates to a critical conception of rationality is left unclear by Benjamins epigones for whom, as in the case of Adorno and Marcuse especially, the utopian wish-fulfillment remains indelibly stamped with the prediscursive residues of subconscious nature.18 Whether their insistence upon a domination-free basis for rational critique was, as Adorno once conceded,19 a contradiction that critical theory must live with is, in any case, a question that cannot be answered without first examining Foucaults philosophy. II Asserting the prerogative of reason against itself or imputing a rational authority to ones own declamations that are without absolute foundation appear to be contradictions that Foucault has sought to avoid. In refusing to invoke the name of reason, he has perhaps more consistently trodden the Nietzschean path. Citing Nietzsches transvaluation of the monumental, antiquarian, and critical uses traditionally invested in historiography, Foucault characterizes his own genealogical method in terms that leave little doubt as to his anti-Platonic sympathies. The first (historical sense) is . . . directed against reality, and opposes the theme of history as reminiscence or recognition; the second is dissociative, directed against identity, and opposes history as continuity or representative of a tradition; the third is sacrificial, directed against truth, and opposes history as knowledge.20 Nothing could be more contrary to the spirit of idealism and its fable of humanity progressing from victory to victory until it arrives at universal reciprocity than genealogical historiography, which traces the noble accomplishments of reason liberty, justice, truth, and logic back to a pudendo origo, the
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arbitrary installation of violence in systems of rules serving the interests of class domination.21 We wished to awaken the feeling of mans sovereignty by showing his divine birth; this path is now forbidden, since a monkey stands at the entrance.22 Nietzsches parody of the historical subject as a sovereign being is taken up by Foucault in his treatment of man as a subject-object, transcendental-empirical doublet. The aporias endemic to humanism and the modern epistem generally have their basis in the analytic of finitude first expounded by Kant, which proclaims that man is sovereign by virtue of his limitations. As a transcendental-empirical doublet man is at once causally predetermined object and spontaneous source of meaningful reality.23 This duality is articulated further in that peculiar tension between the cogito and the unthought wherein the modern impulse aims at neutralizing the coercive effects of language, work, tradition, and instinct in the self-transparency of objectifying reflection without depriving itself of worthwhile motivations.24 Humanism, finally, is caught between a retreat from and a return to primordial origins. The prelapsarian innocence of the beginning, which for Nietzsche and the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment antedates the Western understanding of being and truth, remains forever alive and elusive.25 The image of man adumbrated above bears striking resemblance to some of the themes developed by Adorno in Negative Dialectics save for one difference: whereas Adorno consciously affirmed the above dialectic as the only authentic expression of a reason deprived of social legitimation, Foucault rejected it and sought to undercut its methodological presuppositions by means of a double-bracketing of meaning and validity. His first venture in this direction, entitled The Archaeology of Knowledge, sketched out a structuralist methodology that would show how, for any discursive formation or field of knowledge, the selection of possible true, meaningful statements is a function of a system of rules determining semantic-denotative transformations and exclusions. Because the notion of regulative function deployed in the test played upon the transcendental-empirical, prescriptive-descriptive ambiguities inherent in the image of man, Foucault seemed to recognize a need even in that work to supplement discourse analysis with genealogical explanation.26 By situating discourse against a prior background of cultural practices, the regulative function could be ascribed solely to the empirical effects of power relations without having recourse to ideal significations of right, wrong, essential, or necessary.27 This Nietzschean reversion to power and conflict as the source of meaning, truth, and validity underscores another difference between Foucault and the Frankfurt School, though one which is often misunderstood. Foucault occasionally chided Marcuse and Reich for their Freudian equation of repression and power, arguing that this obscured the contribution of power in constituting the self as dual subject-object.28 Yet as anyone familiar with the historical roots of psychotherapy knows, it was none other than Nietzsche himself who provided Freud with the model of repressive introjection integral to his explanation of the ego-id split. As for Foucaults insistence on the
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increasing discursiveness of sexuality was this not already anticipated by Marcuses category of repressive desublimation?29 I mention such seemingly trite cavils only because they detract from the real source of disagreement: the Frankfurt Schools insistence on reinscribing the dynamics of power within a theory of reason. The members of the School took seriously Webers view that political power could only be efficiently exercised under the guise of legitimate authority.30 Given their Marxist orientation, they naturally undertook an expos of existing power relations from the perspective of ideology critique an indictment grounded in a demand for a truly rational society. Commensurate with this categorical imperative was the Utopian vision of an emancipated Gemeinschaft in which a power that is collectively and rationally exercised remains ever transparent and publicly accountable. Foucaults methodology, by contrast, enabled him to rethink the notion of political sovereignty independent of rationalistic conceptions of legitimacy and functional adaptation. Neither the liberal conception of a rationally accountable chain of command grounded in a social contract nor the Marxist conception of a hegemonic system of production is adequate for grasping the nature of political sovereignty, since normative and functionalistic perspectives invariably invoke global rationalizations of power.31 From the nontheoretical standpoint of the genealogist, power appears as something wholly anonymous and pre-ideological that insinuates itself in corporeal habits and micro-technologies of a local nature such as the religious confessional, the clinical examination, and the military exercise.32 It was the fortuitous overlapping and cross-fertilization of these techniques in the nineteenth century that produced the peculiar capillary effect whereby power was intensified, concentrated, and globally extended to form the more advanced strategies of detention, surveillance, behavioral conditioning, statistical measurement, classification and therapy associated with modern carceral society.33 This new type of domination what Foucault calls bio-power utilizes accounting, statistics, demographics, therapeutics, and other disciplines within the human sciences to mold individuals into productive self-monitoring subjects who collude in their own manipulation as objects. The behavioral sciences, which have played and continue to play a decisive role in the reform of penal institutions, drew upon the objectifying techniques of normalizing judgement, hierarchical observation, and examination which, having already been deployed in hospitals and monasteries, soon spread to schools, factories, and ultimately households.34 The hermeneutic sciences, especially psychoanalysis, reflected the Victorian bourgeois familys preoccupation with hysteria, masturbation, eugenics, and perversion. Deploying techniques developed in the religious confessional, psychoanalysis furthered the constitution of persons as subjects possessing a hidden and dangerous sexuality that needed to be brought to light, interpreted, and controlled.35 It is largely owing to the introduction of psychotherapy into the judicial process that punishment has become detached from the rectification of an objectively determined criminal act and made over into a highly discretionary instrument for evaluating, reforming, and thereby pre-empting deviant tendencies
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indicated by the case histories of delinquents a regression from formal legality which in certain respects parallels the breakdown of the German justice system as recorded by Otto Kirchheimer and other members of the Frankfurt School during the thirties.36 So far I have argued that Foucaults genealogical method prohibited him from reinscribing the empirical description of power relations within a normative conception of reason. However, a perusal of his writing shows that it is charged with such value-pregnant expressions as domination, subjugation, the carceral archipelago, and so on that clearly have critical implications. Moreover, it is plain from numerous interviews and from his own involvement in political struggles that he was a staunch advocate of civil libertarian and democratic reform. Nevertheless, he refused to justify this partisanship in the name of reason, preferring instead to situate his appeal within the counter-knowledge-discourse of prisoners, mental patients, homosexuals, and other social pariahs. In effect, this strategy amounted to fighting fire with fire mobilizing largely isolated enclaves of dissent with the aim of dismantling, overthrowing, or transforming dominant centres of power responsible for their exclusion. Reversing Clausewitz famous nostrum to read, Politics is war continued by other means, Foucault left no doubt as to the true vocation of the radical reformer: not the elimination of domination per se but its transformation into a more tolerant and democratic form. III For Habermas, who is just enough of an old European rationalist to bristle at the thought of might making right, the refusal of the genealogist to ground his critique in reason reveals a trenchant dilemma. The genealogist is either trapped in the dialectic of humanism or, like a true positivist, is guilty of neglecting the normative dimension of social life. In his most recent book,
Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (1985), Habermas indicts Foucault on
both counts. First, the supplementation of archaeology by genealogy does not dispel the transcendental-empirical, prescriptive-descriptive ambiguity which plagued Foucaults earlier account of the structural rules of exclusion, but simply pushes the problem back further by transferring the transcendental force of validity claims to empirical power relations. Second, if Foucault really wants to avoid transcendental historicism by returning to a positivistic suspension of meaning and validity, then how can his work presume to claim any critical significance?37 Habermas is less concerned with the insouciance of a self-proclaimed anti-science that would wrap itself in the dignified mantle of established authority than he is with the misguided assumption that a methodological bracketing of meaning and validity will somehow assure objectivity. Marshalling Gadamers well known objections to historicism, Habermas argues that so long as the historians historicity, or participation within a continuous horizon of shared meaning, remains bracketed and the interpretation of traditional validity claims is bypassed in favor of a description of their effects, the conditions necessary for a dialogue in which the historians
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own prejudices are checked and the autonomy of the past preserved will be lacking. The irony of Foucaults historicism is further compounded by his contempt so reminiscent of Benjamins Theses on the Philosophy of History for those immodest historians who see the past as but a barbaric and wholly insignificant stepping stone to the golden age of the present.38 The methodological reliance upon philosophical hermeneutics is what, in Habermas opinion, enables him to avoid the paradoxes of man and reason that haunted Foucault and first generation critical theorists. The tetters mistake lay in identifying reason with but one of its manifestations the purposive-rational calculation of efficient means for achieving given ends. Actual social reification and a suspect subject-object model of knowledge contrived to make it appear as if reason were so truncated that one could only achieve individuation and autonomy by withdrawing into the inner recesses of ones subjectivity and dominating the objectivity forces that constrain one from without. That Foucault and the others failed to grasp the dynamics of individuation and socialization must in part be attributed to their neglect of that one domain of practical interaction, the social life world, which resists assimilation to the instrumental rationality of economy and bureaucracy.39 In the pioneering work of Husserl and especially Schutz, the lifeworld denoted the shared meanings and competencies that form the background, or Gestalt, against which cognitions and actions are constituted. For Habermas, the most important of these contextual reference points are those universal communicative structures that underwrite our ability to speak, for it is in and through consensus-oriented communication that the mutual recognition necessary for identity formation, cultural reproduction, and social integration is secured. Rationally accountable speakers raise validity claims to truth, rightness, and sincerity which, if challenged, must be redeemed in argumentation. The pragmatic presuppositions of rational argumentation in turn circumscribe ideal conditions of reciprocity and freedom which warrant the critique of de facto social consensus as ideologically constrained. Moreover, as the threat of ideology is replaced by social reification, or by the parochialization and colonization of the lifeworld (caused respectively, by the splitting off of elite cultures and the subsumption of communication contexts under purposive-rational steering media of power and money), the ideal speech situation takes on added stature as a critical bulwark against the unlimited, pathological growth of economic and administrative systems.40 However, because critics of modernity from Nietzsche to Derrida reduce the logic of communication to the rhetoric of poetic creativity and deconstruction, they end up ignoring the principle of social solidarity in favor of a subjectivistic aestheticism. Not only is the latter wholly ineffectual as a barrier against anomic disintegration, but it seems to hasten it by condoning the proliferation of expressivistic countercultures.41 Habermas is convinced that the communicative paradigm of rationality circumvents the paradoxes associated with the image of man as well as those associated with the concept of reason. As for the former, it is argued that the universal validity claims underwriting communicative action can be shown to be directly constitutive of actual speech in much the same way that rules of
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everyday speech constitute the logical meanings of words. So construed, rational discourse designates ideals of reciprocity and freedom which are verifiable through Piagetian-type developmental studies. The paradox of man as both free and conditioned, creator and created is likewise dissolved once it is understood that freedom and individuation are only achieved through communicative insertion within horizons of shared meaning. Such horizons can never themselves become fully transparent to consciousness, but always retain the implicit sense of performative competencies, or know-how that escape our control.42 As for the paradox of reason, Habermas insists that the rational dissolution of the Thomistic worldview into distinct cognitive, practical, and aesthetic value spheres need not, as Weber and first-generation critical theorists believed, issue in a loss of freedom and meaning. The relativization of values, the undermining of a shared sense of meaning and purpose, and the assimilation of life to the sterile canons of instrumental reason are premised on the existence of an irremedial contradiction between value spheres which no longer seems tenable as soon as one and the same communicative paradigm is seen as globally encompassing all three domains of rationality. Of course, Habermas frank admission that arguments play different roles with different degrees of discursive binding force depending upon the domain in question raises certain doubts about the universality of the consensus model of justice. 43 Even the freedom to adopt differing cognitive, practical, and expressive attitudes with respect to the three domains of objective, subjective, and social reality can become a source of conflict as soon as different cultural value spheres simultaneously penetrate the same institutional domains, so that rationalization processes of different types compete with one another in the same place.44 Unfortunately, the systemic dynamics imputed by Habermas to post-liberal capitalism exacerbate such conflicts by encouraging precisely that selective rationalisation which deprives communicative rationality of a structure building effect for society as a whole, thereby threatening the absorption of the lifeworld into the combined economic-administrative apparatus. The ideal speech situation cannot, in this instance, serve as a standard for criticizing pathologies stemming from social disequilibria, since it is itself specialized over the value of justice (as Kant, not Plato, would have understood it). A holistic model of social critique of the sort Habermas now proposes would be oriented instead toward values of global well-being and happiness.45 This poses a dilemma for Habermas theory of communicative action. On the one hand, Habermas concurs with Weber in holding that health is not a universal value. 46 On the other hand, whenever he implies that it is, the concept of communication suddenly takes on new dimensions. For example, we are told that the balanced interplay and interpenetration of rationality complexes will only occur once the specialized disciplines cease to remain split off from the lifeworld and communicate with one another through the medium of ordinary language in which all three major validity claims are simultaneously raised.47 This dissolution of specialized, rational discourses in the speculative solvent of the lifeworld transforms the very nature of
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communication by absolving it of strictly theoretical, non-performative duties. However., the reinsertion of communication in the practical context of intuitive speech competencies and behavioral know-how is also regarded by Habermas as a kind of privation, since this context remains indelibly imbued with the largely preconscious and prediscursive residues of traditional life. Gadamer and Ricoeur are among those who have sought to excise this residual Platonism in Habermas thought by extending the overly methodological (or epistemological?) concept of communicative rationality to include a moment of pre-discursive hermeneutical reflection a line of inquiry that Habermas himself has lately, albeit somewhat hesitantly, pursued.48 Hermeneutical reflection designates a preunderstanding of the lifeworld in its totality that enables us to generate an indefinite number of possible improvisations through the application of a finite repertory of general rules. What Plato calls poisis the metaphoric capacity to discern likenesses between heterogeneous experiences, to subsume diverse particulars under unitary ideas, or what is the same thing, to generate novel applications out of a prior unity has much in common with Aristotles notion of phronsis, or the application of general rules of conduct in everyday practice. Both forms of understanding involve art as well as taste the mimetic emulation of exemplary models of speech and virtue which the Greeks took to be essential for the aesthetic cultivation of character. If this, the most substantial part of our practical lives, is to be accorded the dignity of reason, then Habermas analysis of the discursiveness of communicative rationality will have to incorporate a countervailing moment of aesthetic reflection and intuition.49 Judging from some of his more recent remarks concerning aesthetic rationality, Habermas seems to have come to the same conclusion. In addition to discursive claims to normative correctness and expressive authenticity, works of art, Habermas observes, also raise claims to Stimmigkeit, i.e., harmony and integrity. The latter bear a strong resemblance to Kants (or Schillers) conception of a free play of faculties in which distinct activities, or functions of experience, are harmonized. In the words of Abrecht Wellmer, who Habermas cites, We can explain the way in which truth and truthfulness and even normative correctness are metaphorically interlaced in works of art only by appealing to the fact that the work of art, as a symbolic formation with an aesthetic validity claim, is at the same time an object of the lifeworld experience, in which the three validity domains are intermeshed (my stress).50 On this reading, arts potential for truth would denote a kind of learning process, based, if you will, on a mediating, or dereifying reflection in the sense of a concentrically expanding, advanced exploration of a realm of possibilities rather than in the sense of an accumulation of epistemic contents. In contrast to the negative moment of concentrated distraction celebrated by Benjamin, in which art remains unassimilated in the interpretative achievements of pragmatic, epistemic, and moral mastery of the demands and challenges of everyday situations, the positive moment of truth articulates the intention of redeeming a promise of happiness, whose superabundance radiates beyond art. 51 We here find Habermas
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reaffirming the other side of Benjamins rescuing criticism, whose aim it was to preserve the primal power of nature in language, especially its relationship to mundane suffering and happiness, and to release it from the bondage of esoteric, autonomous art.52 As against the false Aufhebung of art into life effected by the precipitous liquidation of appearance contained in so much surrealist art, the determinate negation, or mediation, of artistic truth reaches into our cognitive interpretations and normative expectations and transforms the totality in which these moments are related to each other. In this respect, modern art harbors a Utopia that becomes reality to the degree that the mimetic powers sublimated in the work of art find resonance in the mimetic relations of a balanced and undistorted intersubjectivity of everyday life (my stress).53 The resurrection of Dionysus in Habermas thought, I believe, is auspicious in that it parallels some of Foucaults last reflections on the possibility of a post-modern ethos. In some interviews conducted in Berkeley in 1983-4, Foucault conceded that similar forms of experience could well harbor universal structures and that the idea of consensus, though not itself a regulative principle, was a critical idea to maintain at all times. Foucault acknowledged that the aim of the social critic was to ask oneself what proportion of nonconsensuality is implied in such a power relation, and whether that degree of nonconsensuality is necessary or not, then one may question every power relation to that extent. However, he allowed that this meant only that perhaps one must not be for consensuality, but one must be against nonconsensuality.54 All this, of course, stands in stark contrast to his earlier identification of communication and conflict. Who would have believed that this very same Foucault would proclaim a decade later that in the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion?55 Despite the remarkable convergence of opinion uniting the two thinkers, Foucault confessed to being somewhat disturbed by a conversation he had with Habermas in which the latter expressed his concern about the political implications of Heideggers thought. According to Foucault, the key to the personal poetic attitude of a philosopher is not to be sought in his ideas, as if it could be deduced from them, but rather in his philosophy-as-life, in his philosophical life, in his ethos. 56 Elsewhere Foucault elucidated this sentiment with respect to the techn tou biou, or art of life, which distinguished the Greek economy of pleasure from the Christian hermeneutics of the self. What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldnt everyones life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life.? 57 The themes of Foucaults monumental History of Sexuality thus take us back once again to the dionysian strains of Nietzsches Zarathustra a harmony that reverberates just as perceptibly in the speculative rationalism of the Frankfurt School. We should not, therefore, be too surprised to find even
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Habermas extolling the rhetorical virtues of philosophy which enable it more than everyday communication to expand and enrich the specialized vocabularies of expert cultures so as to enable them to communicate indirectly with the lifeworld.58 The rhetorical dimension and aesthetic preunderstanding of critical theory like that of truth and truthfulness in mimetic art ultimately means that practical reason can only admit of degrees, of being more or less appropriate, more or less convincing, more or less free from constraint. It is the denial of this non-meritricious contextuality and relativity that seems to animate the dialectic of enlightenment. Commenting on the formalism of Kantian ethics, Adorno once remarked that,
The de-practicalizaton of Kants practical reason in other words, its rationalism is coupled with its de-objectification; it must have been de-objectified before it can become that absolutely sovereign reason which is to have the capacity to work empirically irrespective of experience . . . Since freedom, to Kant, amounts to reasons invariant identity with itself, even in the practical realm, it loses what in common usage distinguishes reason from the will. Due to its total rationality, the will becomes irrational.59
Implicit in Adornos caveat is a Nietzschean aversion to the Platonic resentment against time that informs all transcendental efforts at justification. This healthy aversion to nihilism, however, does not dissolve the paradox of rationality. We owe it to Habermas to have at least clarified the dynamics of this crisis: the tension between our emancipatory and consensual ideals, as reflected in the grands rcits of legitimation bequeathed to us from the Enlightenment, and the stubborn historicity, ethnicity, multivocity, and strategic impurity of daily practice. Counterfactual conceptions of rational consensus can function as regulative ideas guiding local practices, but they cannot serve as operational criteria for evaluating the justice of large scale communities without succumbing to Utopian extremism. The other side of this tension which Lyotard has characterized as an incommensurability between the pragmatic legitimation of transmitted narratives effected by the habitual and mimetic repetition of speech competencies and the decontextualizing legitimation of propositions through arguments (metanarratives) is misperceived by Habermas as a pragmatic contradiction affecting only post-modern attempts at self-justification. As Richard Rorty has eloquently argued, where the Nietzschean enthusiasts of post-modernity go astray in what is otherwise a commendable debunking of grand metanarratives and where they succumb to the neoconservativism for which Habermas reproaches them, is in their sublime disregard for communication and social consensus.60 In their haste to distance themselves from existing social institutions and traditions that putatively stifle authentic criticism, post-modern thinkers forget that they cannot simply write-off their enlightenment heritage without indeed contradicting themselves. Habermas parlays this riposte against traditionalists as well. The naive Pre-Socratic reliance upon a pure aesthetic ethos, a rhetoric of life if you prefer, in which humanity is delivered over to a fate that is at once
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beautiful and tragic, is no longer a real possibility for us. Nor, however, is that equally naive confidence in the power of reason to soar above the historicity of tradition. Weber was right: the eternal conflict between the gods of critical reflection and the gods of living tradition is the only fate which we moderns can play out. Any attempt to extricate ourselves from this fate cannot but lead to nihilism; a dogmatism that will not countenance a critical appropriation of tradition just as surely contributes to the annihilation of living values as does a rationalism that demands universal and univocal consensus as a condition for bestowing recognition. This conclusion is inescapable even for an old European rationalist like Habermas, who, in a particularly revealing moment, admits that the participants in discourse,
. . . know, or at least they are able to know, that even the presupposition of an ideal speech situation is only necessary because convictions are formed and contested in a medium which is not pure nor removed from the world of appearance in the manner of Platonic ideals. Only a discourse which admits this everlasting impurity can perhaps escape the myth, thus freeing itself, as it were, from the entwinement of myth and enlightenment. 61
1 M. Foucault, The Discourse on Language in The Archaeology of Knowledge (AK), trans. by Rupert Swyer (New York, 1972), p. 221. This paper was first presented at the 1985 annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy at Loyola University in Chicago. The author wishes to express his gratitude to Roger Paden for his helpful commentary during that session as well as to the members of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Northern Iowa for their critical remarks. 2 AK, p. 17. 3 The following is just a sampling of the secondary literature which addresses this issue: J. Arac, The Function of Foucault at the Present Time in: Humanities in Society (HS), 3, 1980; David Couzens Hoy, Taking History Seriously: Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 34, 1979; Stanley Aronowitz, History as Disruption: On Benjamin and Foucault, in: HS 2, 1979; Mark Poster, Foucaults True Discourses (HS) 2, 1979; and Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Hermeneutics and Structuralism (Chicago, 1982), pp. 165-7. 4 M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (DoE), trans. by J. Cumming (New York, 1972), pp. xvi & 4. 5 Ibid., p. 27. 6 Ibid., p. 43. Circe, the Sirens, and the Lotus Eaters represent the undifferentiated stage of polymorphous erotic attachment, Polyphemus the higher (because differentiated) but equally primitive stage of rationally unmoderated hedonism. 7 Ibid., p. 63. 8 This is the principal theme of Horkheimers, Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1974). The reversion to power as the ultimate source of valuation reminds us that it is only a short distance separating the self-imposed legal domination of the categorical imperative from the explosive sexual violence of Sades Juliette (DoE, p. 93). For further discussion of this issue see Horkheimers essay, The End of Reason, in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gebhardt (New York, 1982), pp. 26 ff. 9 DoE, p. 120-67. 10 Ibid., p. 101.
NOTES
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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Ibid., p. 44. F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. by F. Golffing, (Garden City, 1956), p. 194. Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., p. 221; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by W. Kaufmann, (New York, 1954), p. 140. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche IV: Nihilism, ed. by David Krell and trans. by Frank Capuzzi (New York, 1978), p. 79. Jean-Franois Lyotard, Rponse la Question: quest-ce que le postmodern? in Critique no. 419 (1982), p. 358. See Walter Benjamin, What is Epic Theater, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. by H. Arendt (New York, 1968). According to Adorno, authentic works of art... have always stood in relation to the actual life-process of society from which they distinguished themselves. Their very rejection of the guilt of a life which blindly and callously reproduces itself, their insistence on independence and autonomy, on separating from the prevailing realm of purposes, implies, at least as an unconscious element, the promise of a condition in which freedom were realized (Prisms: London, 1967; p. 32). The fullest account of Marcuses understanding of the relationship between the unconscious and art is contained in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (Boston, 1962), Ch. 8. T. W. Adorno, Eingriffe (Frankfurt, 1963), p. 13. M. Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. by D. F. Bouchard (New York, 1977), p. 160. In the last years of his life, Foucault sought to emphasize the underlying continuity in ascetic practices linking the Greek, Roman and Christian economies of pleasure without obscuring their structural differences. Corresponding to this change in emphasis we find thought playing a more important role in genealogical analysis than was previously acknowledged. See, for example, pp. 27 ff. and 44 ff. in M. Foucault, Histoire de la Sexualit: Lusage des Plaisirs (Gallimard: Paris, 1984). Cf. in this issue R. Schrmann, On Constituting Oneself an Anarchistic Subject (Eds. Note). Ibid., p. 151. F. Nietzsche, The Dawn, p. 49. M. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1973), p. 320. Ibid., pp. 322-8. Ibid., p. 334. AK, pp. 79-85. Foucault, for example, talks about a unity that makes possible and governs the discursive formation (p., 72), and the complex group of relations that function as a rule and lay down (prscrit) what must be related (p., 74). Dreyfus and Rabinow, Beyond Hermeneutics and Structuralism, pp. 90-100. M. Foucault, Knowledge/Power (KP) (New York, 1980), pp. 58, 80, and 100. See Posters essay (op. cit.) for a discussion of Freud, Foucault and Reich. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston, 1964). See, for example, Herbert Marcuse, Industrialization and Capitalism in Max Weber, Negations (Boston, 1968), pp. 201 ff; and Jrgen Habermas, Technology and Science as Ideology, Toward a Rational Society (Boston, 1968), pp. 81 ff. KP, pp. 88 ff. Foucaults depiction of Nietzschean genealogy as a mere play of dominations reminds one of Gilles Deleuzes reading of Nietzsches interpretation of the body: Every body lives as the arbitrary product of the forces that compose it (The New Nietzsche: New York, 1977; p. 80). For a criticism of Foucaults reading of Nietzsche, see R. Pippin, Nietzsche and the Origin of the Idea of Modernism in: Inquiry, pp. 26, (1983).
19 20
21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
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33 KP, p. 39. 34 M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, (DP), trans. by A Sheridan (New York, 1979), p. 226. 35 M. Foucault, The History of Human Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. by R. Hurley (New York, 1979), pp. 9-19. Foucaults anti-Freudian interpretation was influenced by Deleuze and Guattaris LAnti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et Schizophrenie (Paris, 1972), which argues that the sexual feelings children have for their parents are not natural, but are elicited and then prohibited by their parents. 36 DP, pp. 17-9; and Otto Kirchheimer, Criminal Law in National Socialist Germany, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, VIII, 3 (1939) and The Legal Order of National Socialism, SPSS, IX 3 (1941). 37 J. Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwlf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt, 1985), pp. 296-303. 38 According to Benjamin, there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism, Theses on the History of Philosophy, in: Illuminations, p. 255-66. 39 Habermas, Diskurs der Moderne, pp. 394 ff. 40 Habermas develops this theory extensively in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt, 1981), vols. 1 and 2. For a concise reprise of its argument, see my Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason (Forthcoming Spring, 1987, Yale University Press). 41 Habermas Diskurs der Moderne p. 394 ff. 42 Ibid., pp. 344 ff. 43 J. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (TCA), Vol. I, trans. by T. McCarthy (Boston: 1985), p. 249. 44 Ibid., pp. 252-3. 45 Ibid., pp. 73-4. In a recent article, Die neue Unbersichtlichkeit: Die Krise des Wohlfahrtsstaates und die Erschpfung utopischer Energien in Merkur (Winter, 1985), pp. 1-14, Habermas goes so far as to say that even the expression ideal speech situation invites misunderstanding insofar as it suggests a concrete form of life (p. 14), thereby emphatically underscoring the extremely tenuous relationship between necessary communicative conditions and the possible social alternatives that might emerge therein. 46 TCA, I, pp. 252-3. 47 Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Vol. II, p. 492. 48 Jrgen Habermas, Diskursethik Notizen zu einem Begrndungsprogramm in: Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln (Frankfurt, 1983), pp. 114-9, and Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln, Ibid., pp. 189-94. Habermas emphasizes the rational, dialogical structure of hermeneutical reflection, but he clearly distinguishes the process of ethical application from rational critique and validation, or what he regards as practical reason proper. Habermas and Gadamer agree that natural language functions as the ultimate metalanguage mediating formally specialized discourses with one another and with the lifeworld. Hence, the priority of hermeneutical reflection in critically mediating different spheres of value. Habermas nevertheless maintains that the priority of a participatory hermeneutic reflection over a distantiating ideology critique, or psychotherapeutic depth interpretation, must be reversed whenever social theory is confronted with systematically distorted communication. Compare Hans-Georg Gadamer, On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection and Replik in Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik, ed. by Karl-Otto Apel (Frankfurt, 1971) and Jrgen Habermas, Die Universalittsanspruch der Hermeneutik, in the same anthology. 49 As Fred Dallmayr notes in The Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a Post-Individualist Theory of Politics (University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), a quasi-Kantian trend can
326
also be detected in (Habermas) discursive theory of truth, a conception which tends to divorce rational discourse entirely from the context of practical experience, despite the concession that some requisites of ideal speech (especially truthfulness) cannot be ascertained apart from the domain of practice (292). In his more recent study, Language and Politics (Notre Dame Press, 1984), Dallmayr draws upon Michael Oakshotts essay, The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind and Paul Ricoeurs, The Rule of Metaphor, to show the prediscursive, poetic element of political reasoning (174-83). The speculative identity of imagination and reason need not degenerate into subjectivistic aestheticism (Nietzsche) as Habermas seems to fear, so long as the poetic moment is seen as a dynamic, harmonizing force within customary life forms (being). Despite his criticism of Adornos notion of aesthetic mimesis for succumbing to the sort of ontological conception of language and poetic thought espoused by Heidegger, Habermas today seems less anxious than before to reject the validity of such thinking. Jrgen Habermas, Questions and Counter-Questions, Praxis International, vol. 4, no. 3 (1984), pp. 237-8. There is no denying that this dialectical, objective aesthetic coexists in uneasy harmony with the predominantly subjectivistic, or expressivistic, aesthetic developed by Habermas in the Theory of Communicative Action. Whether the Hegelian and Kantian sides can be reconciled or what is the same thing, whether a cognitive aesthetics claiming a kind of truth claim about society as a felicitous, Utopian harmony of opposed moments can be integrated within a model which sharply distinguishes cognitive, moral, and aesthetic domains of rationality is a question that cannot be pursued here. Ibid., pp. 236-7. In his 1980 Dankrede for receiving the Theodor W. Adorno Prize from the city or Frankfurt, Habermas alluded to the role of modern art in breaking down the reification of everyday practice. It was precisely the intention of the surrealists attack on lart pour Fart and on the museum conception of art generally to illuminate in a profane way, as Benjamin would have it, the everyday lifeworld and its seamless web of cognitive, moral, and aesthetic significations (Modernity Versus Post-Modernity in New German Critique (1984), no. 22, p. 34). Habermas sympathy for Benjamins redemptive critique as opposed to the consciousness-raising ideology criticism espoused by Marcuse and Adorno, does not diminish his reservations concerning the technological de-auratization of art. If the former approach relies upon the suspect standpoint of autonomous art, whose ideal of an anticipated reconciliation perpetuates cultic enjoyment as a beautiful illusion, the latter and here Habermas echos Adorno can just as easily signify the degeneration of art into propagandists mass art or into commercialized mass culture (Legitimation Crisis: Boston, 1975: p. 86). See Habermas critique of Benjamin in Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Criticism: The Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin in Philosophical-Political Profiles (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 129-63. For a further discussion of Habermas interpretation of Benjamin see Philip Brewster and Carl Howard Buchner, Language and Criticism: Jrgen Habermas on Walter Benjamin, in New German Critique, no. 17 (1979); and Martin Jay, Habermas and Modernism, in Praxis International, vol. 4, no. 1 (1984). Questions, p. 237. Lyotard ( op. cit.) points out that Habermas nostalgia for the harmonistic impulse implicit in the traditional aesthetic ideal of the beautiful not only contrasts with the true aesthetic ideal of modernity which, however romantically inclined it may be toward reconciliation, ultimately champions the sublime but it also exposes itself to the totalitarian impulse to assimilate autonomous spheres of practice. Although Martin Jay eschews the deconstructionist critique of rationality and defends Habermas against Lyotards accusation that he favors an aesthetics of beauty, he nonetheless hesitates to embrace as rational that critique of the false wholeness of affirmative culture which proceeds by redeeming the semantic potentials that Benjamin
50
51 52
53
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54 55 56 57
58 59 60
61
saw preserved in art as a residue of its original mimetic-expressive relationship with nature. Given that Habermas himself warns against attributing to mimesis the role of representative of an original reason, whose place has been usurped by instrumental rationality (TkH I, p. 512), Jay concludes that there may even be a contradictory relationship between increased artistic rationalization and its redemptive function (Habermas on Modernism, op. cit.). Jays position underestimates the extent to which Habermas attributes to aesthetic mimesis an original rationality-one, to be sure, which is not prior to communicative rationality, but is coeval with it. Politics and Ethics: An interview with Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. by P. Rabinow (New York, 1984), p. 379. Polemics, Politics, and Problemizations: An interview with Michel Foucault in Rabinow, ed. op. cit., p. 381. Politics and Ethics, p. 374. On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress in Rabinow, p. 350. Habermas notes that there are traces of vitalism in Foucaults account of the bodys experience of itself as well as speculative passages at the end of The History of Sexuality that suggest a visceral aestheticism. Habermas concludes, however, that Foucaults method is incompatible with any naturalistic metaphysics which postulates pre-discursive referents. It seems to me that this reading neglects the importance of prediscursive practice in Foucaults philosophy an aspect that is stressed in Dreyfus and Rabinows interpretation. The latter maintain that Foucault does not dismiss the meaningfulness of practice as Habermas suggests, but only its cognitive, or representational function vis--vis consciousness. If I am not mistaken, however, this would make his approach more amenable to an aesthetic reading than Habermas thinks. Habermas, Diskurs der Moderne, p. 245. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York, 1973), pp. 236-7. See J-F. Lyotard, The Post-Modem Condition: A Report On Knowledge, trans. by G. Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984), pp. 23 ff., 65-6. Rorty thinks that Habermas and the French thinkers he criticizes share a mistaken conception of reason in part due to their taking the Kantian diremption of knowledge, practice and artistic expressiveness into separate enclaves of existence too seriously which generates a need to establish either a beautiful reconciliation under the auspices of transcendental reason or the opposite: a sublime dereification and decentration of culture. Rorty sides with the post-modernists in rejecting foundationalist epistemology, but he prefers to retain an admittedly ethnocentric deference to Occidental rationality (bluff philistinism), interpreting the latter in terms of a non-reductive tolerance for cultural pluralism hence his sympathy for Gadamers hermeneutics. See Habermas and Lyotard on PostModernity, Praxis International (1984) vol. 4, no. 1; and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1979), pp. 315-6, 377; and my critique of his interpretation of Gadamer and Habermas in Hermeneutics and Truth, in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 15, no. 1 (1984), pp. 62-78. Rorty is undoubtedly right in holding that the formation of trade unions, the meritocratization of education, the expansion of the franchise, and cheap newspapers were more instrumental in shaping the peoples sense of themselves as free citizens in free countries (38) than the theoretical paroxysms of German philosophy. But it may be going a bit too far to insinuate that Baconian pragmatism with its identification of self-assertion, knowledge, and power provides a better explanation of this event than the metanarratives of the Enlightenment. Jrgen Habermas, The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment, in New German Critique, no. 26 (1982), p. 30.

3.4 - Ingram, David B. - Foucault and The Frankfurt School. A Discourse On Nietzsche, Power and Knowledge (En)

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