Acta Sociologica (1991) 34:299-308 Habermas Critical on Foucault Remarks Bo Isenberg Department of Sociology, Lund University, Lund ‘The relation between the euores of Jiitgen Habermas and Michel Foucault constitutes an important reference point to several aspects of contemporary social research and philosophical discussion. In this paper I give an account of Habermas's critique of Foucault, acttique which operatcs on three levels- methodology. empirical descriptions, and political implications. I also make some commentaries on the critique, where I propose that Habermas and Foucault work within different ensembles of theories, concepts and discourses. This means, consequently, that on several occasions Habermas's critique is confusing and misses the point. Bo Isenberg, Tomegapsgatan 9, 22350 Lund, Sweden. Habermas and Foucault are the labels we put on two of the most powerful projects within contemporary social analysis. It seems impossible to do social theory or history without — positively or negatively — referring to them. Their discourses con- stitute landmarks that sometimes appear close to each other; most often, however, content and form differ extensively: the space where they are situated, academical, philosophical and political traditions and perspectives, etc. It is true, though, that Habermas as well as Foucault exercise what ‘one could call ‘critical’ analysis, despite many commentators’ views of Foucault as being ‘bourgeois’, ‘neo-conservative’ or even a supporter of Hitler, the latter view being nothing but a result of fear and affec- tion. German and French intellectual tra- ditions present many differences, and if one wants to understand, compare and utilize the analyses of Foucault and Habermas it is necessary to have at least a minimal pic- ture of the ensemble in which they take positions (which is not to say that they are mere functions of any national traditions — it is indeed more complicated than that). We find in this diagram of schools, phil- osophers and discourses one reference point which seems unavoidable: the © Scandinavian Sociological Association, 1991 Enlightenment. This indeed ambiguous and incoherent notion is a source of processes that leads to German Critical Theory as well as French philosophy of science. The question of the Enlightenment had very different destinies in Germany and France (and the Anglo-Saxon countries); it became invested in different domains and according to varied chronologies. Different perspectives are stressed: in Germany, dia- lectical philosophy, sociology, Marxism, reflection on society ‘with one privileged moment: the reformation; and a central problem: religious experience in its relation with the economy and the state’ (Foucault 1989a:10). This trajectory presents such names as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Weber, and classical and contemporary Critical Theory through Adorno, Hork- heimer and Habermas. The Hegelian more contemplative discourse is organized around the value of totality with positive undertones: for Habermas, modernity must take cognizance of its possibilities and of the liberties that are in fact there ~ in reason, in Western society. Nietzsche uti- lizes other legacies of the Enlightenment by taking opposite positions (against German dialectics and French rationalism), and in so doing he becomes one of Habermas's main rivals in the philosophical discourse of modernity. 299In France we can distinguish three dif- ferent paths which either emanate from or pass through the Enlightenment. First, the rationalist philosophy of the subject and the Descartian cogito, which constitutes an important part in French postwar phenom- enology (Merleau-Ponty). Second, posi- tivism with its beginnings in Comte’s sociology. And last, a philosophy of science (epistemology) ~ a philosophy that stresses discontinuities and perspectivism, that pro- blematizes the notions of truth, ‘a phil- osophy of error, concept and the living being’ (ibid. p. 24), all of which are themes penetrated more or less extensively in Fou- cault’s work. French epistemology is repre- sented by Cavailles, Koyré and people whom Foucault worked with, Canguilhem, Bachelard, Hippolyte. Foucault’s discourses, furthermore, also stand in close relation to Nietzsche (partly via Heideg- ger), whose genealogy and emphasis on Power, or will to power (an indeed com- plicated concept which is often used in too literal a way), are crucial ingredients in the Foucauldian mapping of Western discourse practices. Foucault’s contemporaneity in the fifties and sixties was heavily dominated by phenomenology and semiotic and Marxist structuralism. Foucault describes himself as someone who reacted against these currents, the former being insufficient in its explanations based on the Subject and Marxism being equivalent to what the Party dictated. His archaeological analyses of dis- cursive knowledge and the genealogical studies on power/knowledge and the ethics of the self constitute part of what, especially in Anglo-Saxon philosophy and social theory, has been classified as posi-struc- turalism. Foucalt has been appointed in this tradition along with other, mainly French, however among themselves very different, thinkers like Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Lacan, Baudrillard. For Habermas, post- structuralism (or post-modernism or neo- structuralism — he gives this heterogeneity many names) involves an explicit repudi- ation of the modernist tradition and as such it becomes an expression of a new social conservatism. He accuses them for blurring the distinctions between various modes of discourse, and hence the substantive or serious discourses — political and critical discourse — have no basis for claiming their factual and necessary superiority over more playful discourses like art and literature. This ‘post-modern political nihilism’, fur- thermore, goes hand in hand with a methodological/theoretical nihilistic dis- course, characterized by an anything-goes attitude. The true philosophical discourse € of modernity is, says Habermas, one which takes a critical position based on a platform of distinct ‘radical’ and rational norms and values with their roots deeply embedded in the modern project of Enlightenment. Habermas's position within an Hegelian tradition, where totalities, universalism and harmony are emphasized, sharply differs from post-structuralism, which instead and in different forms stresses differences, dis- Tuptions and processes. This opposition can also be rotated in a psychoanalytic direc- tion. Habermas agrees with his antagonists that the modern philosophy of the subject, originating in the cogito, has run its course. In order to break with subjective con- ceptions of philosophical and political ground the modern project of Aufkdarung must be ‘completed’, and a critical com- ponent of this project is to rope off theor- etically the matrix of political critical discourse. Meanwhile the Lacanian pre- scription for doing away with the subject's infatuation with itself is to ‘return to Freud’ and the latter’s Copernican revolution — the decentring of the subject; Foucault focuses on discourses and discursive practices, and sees the subject as an intersection of knowl- edge, power and ethical relations; Derrida deconstructs the subject and stresses the Text. In the collection of essays entitled The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity Hab- ermas departs for a journey into post-struc- turalism, and on his trip he encounters Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Derrida, Foucault. Two of the essays are devoted to € Foucault, presumedly the most reasonable of the post-structuralist thinkers. In this Paper, my intention is to give an account of Habermas's critique of Foucault, and to make some short commentaries on Haber- mas’s remarks. Habermas criticizes Fou- cault on three different levels: first, there is a methodological/theoretical critique which 300focuses on Foucault’s alleged functional- ism, historicism, presentism, relativism and cryptonormativism (1, 2). Second, Foucault's empirical descriptions of power/ knowledge relations are wrong in their gen- erality and totality, and exclude any possi- bility of communicative action and reason (3). This leads, thirdly to a political critique: Foucault's philosophy and histories encour- age political non-commitment and con- servatism (4). 1 Foucault's genealogical analytic is to a large extent derived from and related to Nietzsche and his notion of power, the for- mer’s concept being relational/functional and the latter’s ontological, however. It is a concept which in many senses is ‘unso- ciological’: power is neither an object nor a subject, it is not something that one pos- sesses and utilizes when the need is there, it does not belong to a class, to the state, to the capitalist; rather, power is relational and situational, operates on many levels, is exercised, causes and is an effect of tran- sitions, changes, exchanges, shifts, be they strategical or not, in social and economic relations. Power is always there, latently or manifestly. Power, in Nietzsche and in Foucault, is a polymorphisme, without given demarcations or positions. is on the one hand ‘grey and happy positivism, and on the other it is like the notion of power with which it is juxtaposed: like a carnival with differences and inversions. The genealogist looks for trajectories in history, paths that are suddenly disrupted by discursive and non-discursive clashes and shifts. Expla- nations of changes in history are to a large extent based on notions of power. In fact, the genealogist is more interested in descriptions than explanations: his main @aquestion is not why but how we have become what we are today. And the answers are to be found in history. In his critique of the ‘historian in a pure state’ (Habermas 1990:275), that is Fou- cault, Habermas points to three aspects in the genealogical method which all lead to a ‘merciless transcendental historicism’ mixed up with structuralism, nominalism and materialism. ‘Under the cynical gaze of the genealogist’ identities and origins are done away with and become replaced by differences, displacements and beginnings; hermeneutical search for meaning is replaced by a dismantling of context of ‘effective history’; and global historiogra- phy and macroconsciousness (Hegel) give way to serial history (Annales School), specific history and a dissolution of imagin- ary continuity. What is to be explained and described — discourses of power/knowl- edge —becomes nothing but ‘bizarre shapes’ explained by ‘proximate circumstances’, and ‘the only thing that lasts is power’ (ibid., p. 253). Habermas compares Fou- cault’s discourse formations to the ups and downs of political regimes (and indeed, Foucault does say that a discourse is in a sense a political regime), and the result of this relativization of every aspect in society to power relations is nothing but a mys- tification. Thus, according to Habermas, what we have is a transcendental historicism based on transcendental power relations. A second critique of Foucault's method and his notion of power concerns what Habermas calls Foucault's functionalist shift: from The Archaeology of Knowledge and on, power and practices constitute the functional fundaments for knowledge in general and the human sciences in particu- lar. Foucault ‘subordinates the archaeology of knowledge to the genealogy that explains the emergence of knowledge from practices of power’; ‘discourses emerge and pop like glittering bubbles from a swamp of anony- mous processes of subjugation’ (ibid., p. 268). In Habermas’s interpretation of Fou- cault, there is a universal spatiotemporal will to power at the basis of all knowledge and all truth claims, and he thus quotes Foucault (ibid., p. 270): ‘Every society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true.’ (This is certainly a statement which could also be used to prove the opposite to what Hab- ermas .) Power then serves to explain what is knowledge and what is truth, as well as to constitute a basis for historiography, in which relativism and his- toricism are the main features. Foucault's theory of power, Habermas (ibid., p. 296) 301concludes, appears as a ‘dead end’, cynical in its undertones, false in its ontology and reductible in its methodological applica- tions. Now it is true that Foucault focuses on history in his analyses, and that the gen- ealogies of punishment, of sexuality, etc., cannot do without his notion of power. The ‘one takes the two to exist. In that sense, then, Foucault is the historian in a pure state. But I find it disturbing that Habermas. never acknowledges the flexible notion of power that Foucault describes. Habermas remains in a position from which he affili- ates the notion of power with ‘traditional’ characteristics: power is negative, prohibiting, evil, destructive. In so doing, he reduces Foucault's analytic to something which describes truth, sexuality, madness as based on violence and repression. One of Foucault’s most important inventions is to broaden a traditional concept of power by giving it new meanings: power can be repressive but also productive, power can be prohibiting but also permitting and encouraging. In fact, Foucault says, mod- em power is mainly productive, its repressing functions constituting merely ‘frustrated or extreme forms’ (Foucault 1988:118). Thus I believe Foucault is not reducing his historiographies to a notion of power, and second, the still very important notion of power is highly flexible. Power, in Foucault, is intimately inter- twined in relations of truth, of knowledge, of ethics: it is not a cause, and knowledge is not a pure function of power. Habermas even admits this in a strong statement: ‘in their very form, the human sciences are supposed to present an amalgam of knowl- edge and power; the formation of power and the formation of knowledge compose an indissoluble unity’ (Habermas 1990: 272), but when he then criticizes Foucault, power becomes the condition for knowl- edge. It seems evident to me that Foucault in his analyses creates of power and knowl- edge a unity, a kind of DNA molecule, in which they both need the other in order to exist, and in which they enforce each other. Knowledge about the individual’s sexual experiences and other relations constitute a basis for exercising of power; the individual becomes entangled in a scientia sexualis, in which sexologists and psychoanalysts find out more and more and strengthen the grip of the individual, who is transformed into a case. (Which is not to say that the individual does not constitute his own subjectivity in the same process.) In conclusion, then, I believe Habermas’s accusation of func- tionalism loses its point. ‘ 2 Habermas's second critical remark in fact comprises three such remarks: Genealogy is overtaken by a fate similar to that which Foucault had seen in the human sciences: To the extent that it retreats into the reflectionless objectivity of a non-par- ticipatory, ascetic description of kaleido- scopically changing practices of power, geneal- ogical historiography emerges from its cocoon ly the presentisic, relativistic, crypto- illusory science that it does not want pp. 275-276) 2.1, Presentism Foucault wants to eliminate ‘the her- meneutic problematic’ of self-relatedness in his investigations. It is, writes Habermas, actually one of the genealogist’s main tasks to leave the phenomenology of the fifties and sixties and to reach beyond the narrow horizon of the analyst. The ‘purely struc- tural analysis’ of genealogy is to be exer- cised from ‘outside’; the genealogist takes one step back and reaches an objectivity which is as necessary as possible. Fur- thermore, what Foucault proposes is an analysis of structures that are meaningless in themselves: ‘the understanding of mean- ing by interpreters participating in dis- courses is reduced to the explanation of discourses’ (ibid., p. 276). There is a mean- ing to be found in actions, in statements, etc, only as a part of a whole, that is a discourse. Seen from this description of the inten-€ tions of the genealogist, Habermas's objec- tion seems as obvious as reasonable: an analysis of discourses, as well as anything else, is inevitably done from the geneal- ogist’s ‘own hermeneutic point of depar- ture’ (ibid., p. 277). Foucault is aware of this, writes Habermas, but he refuses to draw any conclusions from it or try to solve 302the problematic. ‘Objectivism’ is impos- sible, instead an analysis of society must ‘remain diagnostic’ in its nature. It goes without saying that Habermas is right in his critique, and I do believe that Foucault in the seventies — his ‘objectivism’ refers mainly to the archaeologies, not to the genealogies — withdraws from these ®@ tendencies in the sixties (his ‘flirtation’ with structuralism in The Order of Things). However, he does hold on to the assump- tion that there is no meaning in the absoluie sense to be found in anything. Meaning is relative, and composed by what we attri- bute to things, processes, actions. The clearest example of this is his view of the subject as being non-essential: the subject creates itself and is created by different social relations. Dreyfus & Rabinow (1989:115), two critical but basically friendly commentators on Foucault, write that since in the Foucauldian discourses ‘we share cultural practices with others, and since these practices have made us what we are, we have, perforce, some common footing from which to proceed, to under- stand, to act. But that foothold is no longer ‘one which is universal, guaranteed, veri- fied, or grounded.” It seems to me that what makes Foucault's discourses rich and in a fruitful way internally contradictory is not that he in fact does possess a position outside dis- course, but rather that he strives to exter- nalize his position, to get away from himself and his contemporaneity. This sransgressive thought is explicitly described in the preface to the second volume of the history of sexu- ality, and in the essay Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside (1989b:18-19), where Foucault mentions some earlier thin- kers whose will to transgress demarcations is explicit: Nietzsche, Mallarmé, Bataille, Blanchot. As Geertz (in Hoy 1989:25, n23) has it: ‘As with so many prisoners, of so ‘many kinds, it is not getting out but wanting out that generates in Foucault a strange and special vision’. Transgression as will, as movement, as tension, that is. 2.2. Relativism Genealogical historiography is supposed to make the discursive practices of power/ knowledge accessible to analysis. From this perspective, not only are truth claims con- fined to the discourses within which they arise, they exhaust their entire significance in the functional contribution they make to the self-maintenance of a given totality of discourse. That is to say, concludes Hab- ermas, the meaning of validity claims con- sists in the power effects they have. If this is correct, it destroys the intentions of gen- ealogy as well, and ‘the entire undertaking of a critical unmasking of the human sciences would lose its point’ (Habermas 1990:279). Foucault's attempt to create a science that is ‘superior’ to the ‘mismanaged human sciences’ fails because his inves- tigations are caught in a self-referentiality similar to that of psychology, of sociology, of history. No matter genealogy is com- posed of an alliance of scholarly and disqualified, subjugated knowledge (dis- courses of madness, homosexuality, crimi- nality), which supposedly is the basis for its superiority: in Habermas's reading, the ‘counter-discourse’ of genealogy counts no more than do ‘the discourses in power’. Habermas emphasizes the ‘anti-scientific’ aspects of genealogy: genealogy wants to ‘do away with’ the human sciences; gen- ealogy is ‘superior’ to the human sciences; genealogy constitutes the Alternative to the human sciences. In so doing, Habermas exaggerates this part of genealogy. Fou- cault does not denounce the human sciences, their methods and theories as such, and he certainly does not want to create a final alternative, which would indeed have as ‘terroristic’ effects as have the human sciences in certain situations. A more fair characterization is that of comp- lement: genealogy forms perspectives, modes of looking at things, in which the attempt to transgress is crucial. Obvious matters are problematized and decon- structed (and one is tempted to say that the point does not always seem to be if it is true, but rather if it works): What I want to do is not the history of solutions, and that’s the reason why I don’t accept the word ‘alternative’. I would like to do genealogy of problems, of problematiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous... If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to 303a hyper- and pessimistic activism. (Foucault 1983:231-232) Genealogy, as well as sociology and psy- chiatry, “are all amalgams of power/ knowledge relations; in this Habermas is absolutely correct. Baudrillard takes one step beyond Habermas in Forget Fourcault, an at once critical and appreciating essay on Foucault, where he penetrates Foucault's seductive genealogies and power dis- courses. Foucault’s mapping of Western power/knowledge diagrams, writes Bau- drillard, can be utilized by the system itself, and thus Foucault unconsciously becomes a collaborator. From Baudrillard’s point of view there is a reinforcing circulation between power and knowledge, no matter how critical this knowledge is. This is of course not to say that knowledge is not necessary in resistance. What Baudrillard is pointing at is the problematique. (The perspective of problematique - a crucial aspect in the works of Foucault, and also very important when one wants to under- stand the inherent contradictions that exist in his works.) ‘Thus the point is - again ~ that Foucault the genealogist tries to externalize himself and his perspectives, to change ways of looking. In René Char’s words: L’histoire des hommes est la longue succession des synonymes d'une méme vocable. Y con- tredire est un devoir. 2.3. Cryptonormativism For Foucault, Habermas writes, genea- logical historiography is intended to reach behind discourse totalities with a purely descriptive attitude in which value judg- ments are to be excluded. The history gen- erated by the genealogist is to be considered not as a critique based on certain normative standards, but as a toolbox, a tactic ‘for waging battle against a normatively unas- sailable formation of power’ (Habermas 1990:283). For Foucault, there exists no ‘right side’: certain discourse formations are not more legitimate — in themselves than are others. Now, for Habermas, Foucault is not at all as value-free as he would like to appear: Foucault understands himself as a dissident who offers resistance to modern thought and humanistically disguised disciplinary power. Engagement marks his learned essays right down to the style and choice of words; the critical tenor dominates the theory no less than the self-definition of the entire work. (ibid., p. 282) His texts are permeated by a solidarity and an engagement — be they difficult to define ~ for the madmen and the criminals. And at € the same time the author is absent; he is everywhere and nowhere. Foucault's engagement is obvious but decentred, intense but abstract. I believe Baudrillard expresses what Habermas thinks. Fou- cault’s writing constitutes an interstitial flowing of power that seeps through the whole porous network of the social, the mental, and of bodies, infini- power... It flows, it invests and saturat entire space it opens. The smallest qualifiers find their way into the slightest interstices of meaning; clauses and chapters wind into spirals .- Foucault's discourse is a mirror of the powers it describes... its strength and its seduction are in the analysis which unwinds the subtle meanderings of its object, describing it with a tactile and tactical exactness, where seduction feeds analytical force and where lan- ‘Buage itself gives birth to the operation of new powers. (Baudrillard 1987:9-10) Habermas thus notices a difference between the genealogist’s intention to be purely descriptive and what he in fact is. But this is only the beginning: Habermas misses a normative platform for resistance as well as goals and standards to struggle for. There must be positions outside of power relations from which the struggle is based, and there must be goals beyond the societal relations of today to fight for. If it is all a matter of mobilizing counter-power, of strategic battles and wily confrontations, ‘why should we muster any resistance at all?’ (Habermas 1990:283-284). Foucault’s genealogy, his theoretical perspectives and methodological assumptions, lead to noth- € ing but a counter-discourse, irrational and/ or conservative in its nature. Foucalt’s lack of a ‘serious discourse’ as a normative basis for his analysis is an effect of his levelling of discourses: no discourse is more ‘serious’ or ‘radical’ or ‘truthful’ than any other per se. Instead they are relative in time and in space. One per- 304spective (political, methodological, theor- etical) is more useful than others at acertain time, because of certain needs, in a certain situation. Habermas, from his perspective, assumes that political activity and philo- sophical investigations must take the form of political and philosophical discourses that are functions of specific but universal features that have developed within mod- ernity. One final remark before we turn to Hab- ermas’s empirical critique. Foucault indeed says that it is impossible to take a position outside power relations. In fact, a power relation requires at least two participators in order to constitute a power relation at all. What is important is, however, to exercise resistance in a flexible way: moves, changes, strivings to externalize, etc., are the strategies he mentions when one wants to change power relations. Power is not evil in itself. Quite the contrary: for Foucault it can be useful and pleasant as well. 3 Let me now turn toa more explicitly empiri- cal critique. Why is it that Foucault's genealogies are considered so sceptical, so gloomy? Hab- ermas is one philosopher who holds this view, and also one whose own politico- philosophical project appears as optimistic and hopeful. Gordon offers a brief but interesting discussion on the (mainly Anglo-American) negative responses to Foucault's scrutiny of Western modernity: It may well be that the sceptical view often taken of genealogical discourse in recent dec- ades has to do with the sense that it has been too exclusively bound up with the experience of political catastrophe, itself symptomatic as well as diagnostic of the cultural traumas of totalitarianism and exile [the exile of Hork- heimer, Adorno, Hayek, Polanyi, Benjamin), too lurid or unbalanced in its conclusions to minister acceptably to the concerns of more stable polities (1986:70). It also seems reasonable to include the gen- eral negative attitude towards Nietzsche that prevails in England and in the United States, as well as in Habermas's modern project, in explaining the reception and evaluation of the Foucauldian genealogy. The rise of the modern regime of power, writes Habermas (and surely Giddens would agree), which places under sur- veillance people’s ‘everyday behavior, their identity, their activity, their apparently unimportant gestures’, is a thesis which is false in its generality. Foucault exaggerates when he proposes that the panopticon is characteristic of the structure of modern society: the panoptic gaze is there, but only to a certain extent and only in certain areas of society. Furthermore, dealing so inten- sively with disciplinary power and biopower, Foucault excludes legal organ- ization of the exercising of power, and in so doing the bourgeois constitutional State becomes ‘a dysfunctional relic from the period of absolutism’ (Habermas 1990: 290). Culture, politics, economy - every- thing in the Foucauldian discourse is levelled down to ‘immediate substrates of the application of violence’ (ibid.). What remains in his descriptions are simplifications, exaggerations and gener- alizations. It is a critique which is altogether too total, on the verge of being fatal. Foucault's empirical descriptions become all the more annoying for Habermas since the genealogies penetrate an object domain where all traces of communication and reason entangled in social life world con- texts are ‘erased’: Foucault’s ‘cynical’ the- ory allows no meaning, no subjectivity, no spontaneity, no mutual understanding. In the theory of communicative action all these concepts appear as crucial. Communicative reason is the discourse on which Habermas establishes his project on modernity. Contrary to Foucault's dis- courses, it is a theory in the more traditional, contemplative sense: it stresses universalism, totality, consensus. (See Habermas 1990, especially lecture XI. Deleuze & Guattari 1988 in A Thousand Plateaus call this ‘kind’ of thought the arborescent schema or model of thought: the Philosopher conducts his class on con- sensus and le bien-étre in society under the proudly erected tree, that is the state.) ‘Communicative reason and action are mediums for a distortion-free — or ‘noise- free’ — life world where agents through interpretive performances reach common understanding and action on a more or less 305equal basis. Habermas’s speech community moves toward a political and moral uni- versalism. It seems to me as if Habermas in his theory ignores such sociological tru- isms as social, political, ethnic and other differences between people. Post-struc- turalist thinkers often stress differences and heterogeneities (on abstract as well as con- crete levels), and one of Habermas's ‘post- modernist’ enemies, Lyotard, concludes his reading of Habermas with some relevant questions, or problematiques: My question is to determine what sort of unity ‘Habermas has in mind. Is the aim of the project ‘of modemity the constitution of sociocultural unity within which all the elements of daily life and of thought would take their places as in ‘an organic whole? Or does the passage that has to be charted between heterogencous language ‘games ~ those of cognition, of ethics, of poli- tics — belong to a different order from that? Andifso, would it be capable of effecting areal synthesis between them? (Lyotard 1984:72-3) Habermas's own politico-philosophical dis- course thus contains several inherent prob- lems. Also, let me point to the notion of possibility which is explicit in Foucault's work. Through the sceptic attitude towards contemporary culture Foucault creates new pictures, new perspectives. Of course it is Possible to hold the view that he draws conclusions that are ‘beyond reason’, but that is to miss the point. Rather, what Fou- cault does is to sharpen, elucidate, give clear contours to something undefined. The new picture then creates possibilities for thinking, for action. Foucault is anything but cynical; he would, indeed, be cynical if his aim were to attack every form of power and undermine every truth claim. In closing this section, a question: does Foucault really make the ontological prop- sition that modern society functions like a panopticon where every detail is illumi- nated? Or does he just use one part of society ~ the prison understood as a pan- opticon — as a picture or perspective of social relations in general? The point, then, would not be whether there exists a causal con- nection between the carceral institutions and the human sciences, but rather that we use different aspects or parts of our reality in order to think each other. Dreyfus & Rabinow (1989:116) make a similar remark: ‘Foucault does not claim that bio- power is the only thing going on with us. Rather he makes the interpretive claim that if you look at things this way a lot will fall into place’. 4 Habermas surely agrees with Perry And- erson in claiming that Paris after 1968 became the centre of reaction. Post-struc- turalism — ‘with its wholesale rejection of modern forms of life’ ~ arose as a result of that praxis philosophy in general and Marxism in particular suffered a loss in credibility in the sixties and early seventies. At that time, Foucault ‘joined the choir of disappointed Maoists of 1968” by turning towards Nietzsche and his brand of ‘nihil- istic irrationalism’. Also, he was ‘taken by the moods to which one must look if one wants to explain the remarkable success of the New Philosophers in France’ (Hab- ermas 1990:257). The social conservatism of Foucault is based on his nihilistic levelling of discourses. Actions, statements, thoughts, power ~ everything turns into a mere ‘play- ful game’ which permits no serious discourses, no serious action, no serious philosophy. Instead of earnestness and intentionality - an ironic laughter! It is a discourse which is all the more dangerous because of its powerful and seductive gram- mar and its alleged radicalism. Foucault not only seems to represent these familiar motifs [the terrorist consequences of global interpretations of history; tanspo- sitions of theoretically pretentious human sciences into contemptuous practices; counter- Enlightenment; the narrow-minded will to power of the intellectuals) with a gesture of , but actually to sharpen them with his critique of reason and to generalize them with his theory of power. (ibid., p. 414, n26) An interesting tension appears in Haber- mas’s description of the political and methodological/theoretical effects of the Foucauldian discourse. The nihilism that it brings is on the one hand conservative, not to say reactionary; it permits anything whatsoever, which makes it susceptible to totalitarian political currents. On the other hand, Foucault’s discourse appears as 306anarchistic and irrational: resistance is pref- erably resistance against something in the shape of a meaningless counter-discourse. The politics and philosophy of Foucault, then, in the reading of Habermas become situated where two ‘extreme’ ical and philosophical courses converge. This in turn points to a common phenomenon among commentators: the difficulties in situating Foucault in a firm context, be it politically, theoretically or academically. (Which, of course, makes this ‘masked philosopher’ more interesting.) 1 believe it is nonsense to characterize Foucault as an adherent of totalitarianism. Quite the contrary, far more than academic philosophers and sociologists in general, he exercised a practical engagement for mar- ginal groups and distrust of totalizing i tutions. But at the same time it trying to confine him in a political defi- nition: Foucault appears as a splendid expression of a type of activist who appeared in the seventies and who belongs to no political parties or institutions, but who exercises local ~ agonistic — resistances within the framework of new social move- ments, perhaps even beyond the left/right paradigm. This kind of politics is what Hab- ermas the modernist occasionally calls ‘post-modernist’. I have tried in this paper to contrast Habermas and Foucault and their different discourses. Habermas and Foucault talk different languages: they operate within dif- ferent ensembles of perspectives, theories, concepts and logics. This sometimes makes the comparison confusing. It sometimes also results in that Habermas’s critique fails to produce the desired effects. He assigns Foucault a position where he can reason about him, test the theories and meth- odologies and the political implications. The critique seems sharp, but at a closer look it might have missed its point. From ime to time, however, Habermas's critique ns well grounded and productive: it is not a mere polemics but leads somewhere. Habermas criticizes Foucault on three levels. On a methodological level, Foucault becomes a functionalist who’ explains phenomena and relations from a totalizing notion of power: his transcendental his- toricism describes a series of power strug- gles to which everything is related. Furthermore, Foucauit’s genealogies are characterized by presentism, relativism and cryptonormativism, thus precisely those characteristics of the human sciences that Foucault wants to escape. Foucault's empirical descriptions generalize and exag- gerate the role of disciplinary power in modern society, and thereby communi- cative action and reason are excluded from the agenda of everyday life. Politically this results in a two-fold discourse — it is at once rationally anarchistic and conservative - which encourages non-commitment or, at best, an irrational struggle without fun- dament and goals. So, we're back in Habermas's modernity. Philosophy and Politics can go on playing their traditional roles, Order and Con- sensus are established, progress towards Freedom and Truth can continue. And the position of the intellectual in the philo- sophical discourse of modernity is secured. All's well that ends well - Habermas returns safely into modernity. Scrupulously he has penetrated and haunted the contradictions and vagueness in Foucault's euvre, and he has opposed Foucault’s specific histories against the great theoretical project of the communicative society. It is, in a sense, an opposition between on one hand the philosophy of modern age — philosophy as. theory, the truth appearing as firm knowl- edge (Gewifheit) - and on the other hand the philosophy of classical antiquity, to which Foucault returns via Heidegger and Nietzsche ~ the philosophy of praxis, truth as a practical consideration (Denken). Received March 1991 Accepted October 1991 References Baudrillard, J. 1987. Forget Foucault. New York: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. 1988. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Min- neapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dreyfus, H. L. & Rabinow, P. 1989. What is Maturity? Habermas and Foucault on ‘What is Enlightenment?’ In Hoy 1989. Foucault, M. 1983. On the Genealogy of Ethics. In. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (eds.) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Her- 307meneste. Chicago: University of Chicago eau M. 1984, What is Enlightenment? In P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault Reader. New ‘York: Pantheon Books. 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