Rorty, R. (1984), Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity.pdf

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HABERMAS AND LYOTARD ON POST-

MODERNITY

"universalistic," seems to Habermas to betray the social hopes which have

been central to liberal politics.

So we find French critics of Habermas ready to abandon liberal politics in

order to avoid universalistic philosophy, and Habermas trying to hang on to

universalistic philosophy, with all its problems, in order to support liberal

politics. To put the opposition in another way, the French writers whom

Habermas criticizes are willing to drop the opposition between "true consen-

sus" and "false consensus," or between "validity" and "power," in order not

to have to tell a metanarrative in order to explicate "true" or "valid." But

Habermas thinks that if we drop the idea of "the better argument" as opposed

to "the argument which convinces a given audience at a given time," we shall

have only a "context-dependent" sort of social criticism. He thinks that falling

back on such criticism will betray "the elements of reason in cultural mod-

ernity which are contained in ... bourgeois ideals," e.g., "the internal

theoretical dynamic which constantly propels the sciences — and the self-

reflexion of the sciences as well — beyond the creation of merely technologi-

cally exploitable .knowledge" (EME, p. 18).

Lyotard would respond to this last point by saying that Flabermas mis-

understands the character of modern science. The discussion of "the pragma-

tics of science" in The Postmodern Condition is intended to "destroy a belief

that still underlies Habermas' research, namely that humanity as a collective

(universal) subject seeks its common emancipation through the régularisation

of the 'moves' permitted in all language games, and that the legitimacy of any

statement resides in' its contribution to that emancipation" (PC, p. 66).

Lyotard claims to have shown that-"consensus is only a particular state of

discussion fin the sciences],"not its end. Its end, on the contrary, is paralogy"

(PC, pp. 65-66). Part of his argument fpr this odd suggestion is that "Post-

modern science — by concerning itself with such things as undccidablcs, the

limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information,

'fracta', catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes-^- is theorizing its own evolu-

tion as discontinuous, catastrophic, non-rectifiablc and paradoxical" (PC,

p. 60).

I do not think that such examples of matters of current scientific concern do

anything to support the claim that "consensus is not the end of discussion."

Lyotard argues invalidly from the current concerns of various scientific disci-

plines to the claim that science is somehow discovering that it should aim at

permanent revolution, rather than at the alternation between normality and

revolution made familiar by Kuhn. To say that "science aims" at piling

paralogy on paralogy is like saying that "politics aims" at piling revolution on

revolution. No inspection of the concerns of contemporary science or

contemporary politics could show anything of the sort. The most that could be

shown is that talk of the aims of either is not particularly useful.

On the other hand, Lyotard does have a point, the point he shares with

MJUT Hesse's criticism of Habermas' Dilthcyan account of the distinction

"Between natural science andhcrmcncutic inquiry. Hesse .thinks that "it has

been sufficiently demonstrated [by what she calls "post-empiricist" Anglo-

American philosophy of science] that the language of theoretical science is

Richard Rorty

In Knowledge and Human Interests Habermas tried to generalize what Marx

and Freud had accomplished by grounding their projects of "unmasking" in a

more comprehensive theory. The strand in contemporary French thought

which Habermas criticizes as "ncoconscrvative" starts off from suspicion of

Marx and Freud, suspicion of the masters of suspicion, suspicion of

"unmasking." Lyotard, for example, says that he will

use the term "modern" to designate any science that legitimates itself with

reference to a metadiscourse of this kind [i.e., "a discourse of legitimation

with respect to its own status, a discourse called philosophy"] making an

explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit,

the hcrmcneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working

subject, or the creation of wealth. 1

He goes on to define "postmodern" as "incredulous towards metanarratives"

(PC, xxiv), and to ask "Where, after the metanarratives, can legitimacy

reside?" (PC, xxiv-xxv). From Lyotard's point of view, Habermas is offering

one more metanarrative, a more general and abstract "narrative of emancipa-

tion" (PC, p. 60) than the Freudian and Marxian metanarratives.

For Habermas, the problem posed by "incredulity towards metanarratives"

is that unmasking only makes sense if we "preserve at least one standard for

[the] explanation of the corruption of all reasonable standards." 2 If we have no

such standard, one which escapes a "totalizing self-referential critique," then

distinctions 'between the naked and the masked, or between theory and

ideology, lose their force. If we do not have these distinctions, then we have to

give up the Enlightenment notion of "rational criticism of existing institu-

tions," for "rational" drops out. We can still, of course, have criticism, but it

will be of the sort which Habermas ascribes to Horkheimer and Adorno: "they

abandoned any theoretical approach and practiced ad hoc determinate nega-'

tion . . . The praxis of negation is what remains of the 'spirit of ... unremit-

ting theory'" (EME, p. 29). Anything that Habermas will count as retaining a

"theoretical approach" will be counted by an incredulous Lyotard as a "meta-

narrative". Anything that abandons such an approach will be counted by

Habermas as "ncoconscrvative," because it drops the notions which have been

used to justify the various reforms which have marked the history of the

Western democracies since the Enlightenment, and which are still being used

to criticize the socio-economic instilulions of both the Free and the Commun-

ist worlds. Abandoning a standpoint which is, if not transcendental, at least

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irreducibly metaphorical and unformalizable, and that the logic of science isf

circular interpretation, re-interpretation, and self-correction of data in terms 1

of theory, theory in terms of data.'^This kind of debunking of empiricist I

philosophy of science is happily appropriated by Lyotard^ Unfortunately,

however, he does not think of it as a repudiation of a bad armnnt of science

but as indicating a recent change in the nature of science. He thinks that

science used to be what empiricism described it as being. This lets him accuse

Habermas of not being up to date.

If one ignores this notion of a recent change in the nature of science (which

Lyotard makes only casual and anecdotal attempts to justify), and focuses

instead on Lyotard's contrast between "scientific knowledge" and "narra-

tive," that turns out to be pretty much the traditional positivist contrast

between "applying the scientific method" and "unscientific" political or reli-

gious or common-sensical discourse. Thus Lyotard says that a "scientific

statement is subject to the rule that a statement must fulfill a given set of

conditions in order to be accepted as scientific" (PC, p. 8). He contrasts this

with "narrative knowledge" as the sort which "does not give priority to the

question of its own legitimation, and . . . certifies itself in the pragmatics of its

own transmission without having recourse to argumentation and proof." He

describes "the scientist" as classifying narrative knowledge as "a different

mentality: savage, primitive, under-developed, backward, alienated, com-

posed of opinions, customs, authority, prejudice, ignorance, ideology" (PC,

p. 27). Lyotard, like Hesse, wants to soften this contrast and to assert the

rights of "narrative knowledge." In particular, he wants to answer his initial

question by saying that once we get rid of the metanarratives legitimacy

resides where it always has, in the first-order narratives:

There is, then, an incommensurability between popular narrative pragma-

tics, which provides immediate legitimation, and the language game

known as the question of legitimacy . . . Narratives . . . determine criteria

of competence and/or illustatc how they ;irc to he applied. They thus

define what has the right lo be said and done in the culture in question,

, and since they are themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by

the simple fact that they do what they do. (PC, p. 23)

This last quotation suggests that we read Lyotard as saying: the trouble

with Habermas is not so much that he provides a metanarrative of emancipa-

tion as that he feels the need to legitimize, that he is not content to let the

narratives which hold our culture together do their stuff. He is scratching

where it does not itch. On this reading, Lyotard's criticism would chime with

the Hesse-Feyerabend line of criticism of empiricist philosophy of science,

and in particular with Feyerabend's attempt to see scientific and political

discourse as continuous. It would also chime with the criticisms offered by

many of Habermas' sympathetic American critics, such as Bernstein, Geuss,

and McCarthy. These critics doubt that studies of communicative competence

can do what transcendental philosophy failed to do in the way of providing

"universalistic" criteria. 4 They also doubt that universalism is as vital to the

needs of liberal social thought as Habermas thinks it. Thus Gcuss, arguing

that the notion of an "ideal speech situation" is a wheel which plays no part in

the mechanism of social criticism, and suggesting that we reintroduce a

position "closer to Adorno's historicism," says:

If rational argumentation can lead to the conclusion that a critical theory

[defined as "the 'self-consciousness' of a successful process of emancipa-

tion and enlightenment"] represents the most advanced position of con-

sciousness available to us in our given historical situation, why the obses-

sion with whether or not we may call it 'true'? 5

Presumably by "rational argumentation"_Gcuss means not "rational by

reference to an extra-historical, universalistic, set of criteria" but something

like "uncoerced except in the ways in which all discourse everywhere is

inevitably coerced — by being conducted in the terms and according to the

practices of a given community at a given time." He is dubious that we need a

theoretical account which gets behind that vocabulary and those conventions!

to something "natural" by reference to which they can be criticized/As Gcuss

says, the "nightmare which haunts the Frankfurt School" is something like

Huxley's Brave New World, in which

agents are actually content, but only because they have been prevented

from developing certain desires which in the 'normal' course of things they

would have developed, and which cannot be satisfied within the

framework of the present social order. 6

To take the scare-quotes out from around "normal," one would have to have

just the sort of metanarrative which Lyotard thinks we cannot get. But we

think we need this only because an overzealous philosophy of science has

created an impossible ideal of ahistorical legitimation.

The picture of social progress which Gcuss' more historical line of thought

offers is of theory as emerging at dusk, the belated "self-consciousness" of

emancipation rather than a condition for producing it. It thus has links with

the anti-rationalist tradition of Burke and Oakcshott, as Well as with Deweyan

pragmatism. It departs from the notion that the intellectuals can form a

revolutionary vanguard, a notion cherished even by French writers who claim

to have dispensed with Marx's melanarrative:*On this account of social

change, there is no way for the citizens of Brave New World to work their way

out from their happy slavery by theory, and, in particular, by studies of

communicative competence/For the narratives which go to make up their

sense of what counts as "rational" will see to it that such studies produce a

conception of undistorted communication which accords with the desires they

presently have. There is no way for us to prove to ourselves that we are not

happy slaves of this sort, any more than to prove that our life is not a dream.

So whereas Habermas compliments "bourgeois ideals" by reference to the

"elements of reason" contained in them, it would be better just to compliment

those untheoretical sorts of narrative discourse which make up the political

speech of the Western democracies. It would be better to be frankly

ethnocentric.

If one is ethnocentric in this sense, one will see what Habermas calls "the

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internal theoretical dynamic which constantly propels the sciences . . . ^

beyond the creation of technologically exploitable knowledge" not as a theore- '.)

tical dynamic, but as a social practice. One will see the reason why modern A

science is more than engineering not as an ahistorical teleology — e.g., an |.

evolutionary'drive towards correspondence with reality, or the nature of >;*

language — but as a particularly good example of the social virtues of the

European bourgeoisie. The reason will simply be the increasing self-

confidence of a community dedicated to (in Blumenberg's phrase) "theoretical

curiosity." Modern science will look like something which a certain group of

human beings invented in the same sense in which these same people can be

said to have invented Protestantism, parliamentary government, and Roman-

tic poetry. What Habermas calls the "self-reflection of the sciences" will thus

consist not in the attempt to "ground" scientists' practices (e.g., free exchange

of information, normal problem-solving, and revolutionary paradigm-

creation) in something larger or broader, but rather of attempts to show how

these practices link up with, or contrast with, other practices of the same

group or of other groups. When such attempts have a critical function, they

will take the form of what Habermas calls "ad hoc determinate negation."

Habermas thinks that we need not be restricted, as Horkheimer and

Adorno were, to such merely socio-historical forms of social criticism. He

views Horkheimer, Adorno, Heidegger, and Foucault as working out new

versions of "the end of philosophy":

no matter what name it [philosophy] appears under now — whether as

fundamental ontology, as critique, as negative dialectic, or genealogy —

these pseudonyms are by no means disguises under which the traditional

[i.e., Hegelian] form of philosophy lies hidden; the drapery of philo-

sophical concepts more likely serves as the cloak for a scantily concealed

end of philosophy. 7

Habermas' account of such "end of philosophy" movements is offered as part

of a more sweeping history of philosophy since Kant. He thinks that Kant was

right to split high culture up into science, morality, and art and that Hegel was

right in accepting this as "the standard (massgebliche) interpretation of mod-

ernity" (1-17). He thinks that "The dignity specific to cultural modernism

consists in what Max Weber has called the stubborn differentiation of value-

spheres" (EME, p. 18). He also thinks that Hegel was right in believing that

"Kant does not perceive the ... formal divisions within culture ... as

diremptions. Hence he ignores the need for unification that emerges with the

separations evoked by the principle of subjectivity" (1-17). He takes as

seriously as Hegel did the question "How can an intrinsic ideal form be

constructed from the spirit of modernity, that neither just imitates the histor-

ical forms of modernity nor is imposed upon them from the outside?" (1-18).

From the historicist point of view I share with Geuss, there is no reason to

look for an intrinsic ideal that avoids "just imitating the historical forms of

modernity." All that social thought can hope to do is to play the various

historical forms of modernity off against one ancther in the way in which,

e.g., Blumenberg plays "self-assertion"'off against "self-grounding." 8 But

because Habermas agrees with Hegel that there is a "need for unification" in

order to "regenerate the devastated power of religion in the medium of

reason" (1-18), he wants to go back to Hegel and start again. He thinks that in

order to avoid the disillusionment with "the philosophy of subjectivity" which

produced Nietzsche and the two strands of post-Nietzschcan thought which

he distinguishes and dislikes (the one leading to Foucault, and the other to

Heidegger), we need to go back to the place where the young Hegel took the

wrong turn (111-30). That was the place where he still "held open the option of

using the idea of uncoerced will formation in a communication community

existing under constraints of cooperation as a model for the reconciliation of a

bifurcated civil society" (111-15). He thus suggests that it was the lack of a sense

of rationality as social that was missing from "the philosophy of the subject"

which the older Hegel exemplified (and from which he believes the "end-of-

philosophy" thinkers have never really escaped — see 111-30).

But whereas Habermas thinks that the cultural need which "the philosophy

of the subject" gratified was and is real, and can perhaps be fulfilled by his

own focus on a "communication community," I would urge that it is an

artificial problem created by taking Kant too seriously. On this view, the

wrong turn was taken when Kant's split between science, morals, and art was

accepted as a donnée, as die massgebliche Selbstauslegung der Moderne. Once

that split is taken seriously, then the Selbstvergewisserung der Moderne, which

Hegel and Habermas both take to be the "fundamental philosophical prob-

lem" (see 1-12), will indeed seem urgent. For once the philosophers swallow

Kant's "stubborn differentiation," then they are condemned to an endless

series of reductionist and anti-reductionist moves. Reductionists will try to

make everything scientific ("positivism"), or political (Lenin), or aesthetic

(Baudelaire, Nietzsche). Anti-reductionists will show what such attempts

leave out. To be a philosopher of the "modern" sort is precisely to be

unwilling either to let these spheres simply co-exist uncompctitively, or to

reduce the other two to the remaining one/Modern philosophy has consisted!

in forever realigning them, squeezing them together, and forcing them apart

again. But it is not clear that these efforts have done the modern age much

good (or, for that matter, harm).

Habermas thinks that the older Hegel "solves the problem of the self-

reassurance of modernity too well," because the Philosophy of Absolute Spirit

"removes all importance from its own present age . . . and deprives it of its

calling to self-critical renewal" (11-28). He sees the popularity of "cnd-of-

philosophy" thought as an over-reaction to this over-success. But surely part

of the motivation for this kind of thought is the belief that Hegel too was

scratching where it did not really itch. Whereas Habermas thinks that it is

with Hegel's own over-success that philosophy becomes what Hegel himself

called "an isolated sanctuary" whose ministers "form an isolated order of

priests . . . untroubled by how it goes with the world," it is surely possible to

sec this development as having been Kant's fault, if anybody's, and precisely

the fault of his "three-sphere" picture of culture. On this latter view, Kant's

attempt to deny knowledge to make room for faith (by inventing 'transcen-

dental subjectivity' to serve as a fulcrum for the Copcrnican revolution)

was provoked by an unnecessary worry about the spiritual significance, or

insignificance, of modern science. Like Habermas, Kant thinks that modern

f-r\

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science has a "theoretical dynamic," one which can be identified with (at least

a portion of) "the nature of rationality." Both think that by isolating and

exhibiting this dynamic, but distinguishing it from other dynamics (e.g.,

"practical reason" or "the emancipatory interest"), one can keep the results of

science without thereby disenchanting the world. Kant sugested that we need

not let our knowledge of the world qua matter in motion get in the way of our

moral sense. The same suggestion was also made by Hume and Reid, but

unlike these pragmatical Scotchmen, Kant thought that he had to back up this

suggestion with a story which would differentiate and "place" the three great

spheres into which culture must be divided. From the point of view common

to Hume and Reid (who disagreed on so much else) no such metanarrative is

needed. What is needed is a sort of intellectual analogue of civic virtue —

tolerance, irony, and a willingness to let spheres of culture flourish without

worrying too much about their "common ground," their unification, the

"intrinsic ideals" they suggest, or what picture of man they "presuppose."

In short, by telling a story about Kant as the beginning of modern philoso-

phy (and by emphasizing the difference between modern and pre-modern

philosophy) one might make the kind of fervent end-of-philosophy writing

Habermas deplores look both more plausible and less interesting. What links

Habermas to the French thinkers he criticizes is the conviction that the story

of modern philosophy (as successive reactions to Kant's diremptions) is an

important part of the story of the democratic societies' attempts at self-

reassurance. But it may be that most of the latter story could be told as the

history of reformist politics, without much reference to the kinds of theore-

tical backup which philosophers have provided for such politics. It is. after

all, things like the formation of trade unions, the mcritocratization of educa-

tion, the expansion of the franchise, and cheap newspapers, which have

figured most largely in the willingness of the citizens of the democracies to see

themselves as part of a "communicative community" — their continued

willingness 19 say "us" rather than "them" when they speak of their respective

countries. This sort of willingness has made religion progressively less impor-

tant in the self-image of that citizenry. One's sense of relation to a power

beyond the community becomes less important as one becomes able to think

of oneself as part ofa body of public opinion, capable of making a difference

to the public fate/That ability has been substantially increased by the various

"progressive" changes I have listed.

Weber was of course right in saying that some of these changes have also

worked the other way (to increase our sense of being controlled by "them").

But Habermas is so preoccupied with the "alienating" effects of such changes

that he allows himself to be distracted from the concomitant increase in

people's sense of themselves as free citizens of free countries. The typical

German story of the self-consciousness of the modern age (the one which runs

from Hegel through Marx, Weber, and Nietzche) focuses on figures who were

preoccupied with the world we lost when we lost the religion of our ancestors.

But this story may be both too pessimistic and too exclusively German. If so,

then a story about the history of modern thought which took Kant and Hegel

less seriously and, for example, the relatively untheoretical socialists more

seriously, might lead us to a kind of "cnd-of-philosophy" thinking which

would escape Habermas' strictures on Deleuze and Foucault. For these

French writers buy in on the usual German story, and thus tend to share

Habermas" assumption that the story of the realignment, assimilation, and

expansion of the three "value-spheres" is essential to the story of the Selbsi-

vergewisserung of modern society, and not just to that of the modern

intellectuals.

In order to interpret this problem of the three spheres as a problem only for

an increasingly "isolated order of priests," one has to see the "principle of the

modern" as something other than that famous "subjectivity" which post-

Kantian historians of philosophy, anxious to link Kant with Descartes, took

as their guiding thread. One can instead attribute Descartes' role as "founder

of modern philosophy" to his development of what I earlier called "an

overzealous philosophy of science" — the sort of philosophy of science which

saw Galilean mechanics, analytic geometry, mathematical optics, and the like,

as having more spiritual significance than they in fact have. By taking the

ability to do such science as a mark of something deep and essential to

human nature, as the place where we got closest to our true selves, Descartes

preserved just those themes in ancient thought which Bacon had tried to

obhtcratc. The preservation of the Platonic idea that our most distinctively

human faculty was our ability to manipulate "clear and distinct ideas," rather

than to accomplish feats of social engineering, was Descartes' most important

and most unfortunate contribution to what we now think of as "modern

philosophy." Had Bacon — the prophet of self-assertion, as opposed to

self-grounding — been taken more seriously, we might not have been struck

with a canon of "great modern philosophers" who took "subjectivity" as their

theme. We might, as J.B. Schneewind puts it, have been less inclined to

assume that epistemology (i.e., reflection on the nature and status of natural

science) was the "independent variable" in philosophical thought and moral

and social philosophy the "dependent variable." We might thereby see what

Blumenberg calls "self-assertion" — the willingness to center our hopes on the

future of the race, on the unpredictable successes of our descendants — as the

"principle of the modern." Such a principle would let us think of the modern

age as defined by successive attempts to shake off the ' sort of ahistorical

structure exemplified by Kant's division of culture into three "value-

spheres."

On this sort of account, the point I claimed Lyotard shared with

Feyerabend and Hesse — the point that there are no interesting epistemolo-

gical differences between the aims and procedures of scientists and those of

politicians — is absolutely fundamental. The recovery of a Baconian, non-

Cartesian attitude towards science would permit us to dispense with the idea

of "an internal theoretical dynamic" in science, a dynamic which is something

more than the "anything goes that works" spirit which unites Bacon and

Feyerabend. It would break down the opposition between what Habermas

calls "merely technologically exploitable knowledge" and "emancipation," by

seeing both as manifestations of what Blumenberg calls "theoretical curios-

ity." It would free us from preoccupation with the purported tensions

between the three "value-spheres" distinguished by Kant and Weber, and

between the three sorts of "interests" distinguished by Habermas.

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In the present space, I cannot do more than gesture towards the various

rosy prospects which appear once one suggests that working through "the

principle of subjectivity" (and out the other side) was just a side-show,

something which an isolated order of priests devoted themselves to for a few

hundred years, something which did not make much difference to the succes-

ses and failures of the European countries in realizing the hopes formulated by

the Enlightenment. So I shall conclude by turning from the one issue on

which I think Lyotard has a point against Habermas to the many issues about

which Habermas seems to me in the right.

The thrust of Habermas' claim that thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, and

Lyotard are "neoconservative" is that they offer us no "theoretical" reason

to move in one social direction rather than another. They take away the

dynamic which liberal social thought (of the sort represented by Rawls in

America and Habermas himself in Germany) has traditionally relied upon,

viz., the need to be in touch with a reality obscured by "ideology" and

disclosed by "theory". Habermas says of Foucault's later work that it

It is this remoteness which reminds one of the conservative who pours cold

water on hopes for reform, who affects to look at the problems of his

fellow-citizens with the eye of the future historian. Writing "the history of the

present," rather than suggestions about how our children might inhabit a

better world in the future, gives up not just on the notion of a common human

nature, and on that of "the subject," but on our unthcoretical sense of social

solidarity. It is as if thinkers like Foucault and Lyotard were so afraid of being

caught up in one more metanarrative about the fortunes of "the subject" that

they cannot bring themselves to say "we" long enough to identify with the

culture of the generation to which they belong. Lyotard's contempt for "the

philosophy of subjectivity" is such as to make him abstain from anything that

smacks of the "metanarrative of emancipation" which Habermas shares with

Blumenberg and Bacon. Habermas' socialization of subjectivity, his philoso-

phy of consensus, seems to Lyotard just one more pointless variation on a

theme which has been heard too often.

But although disconnecting "philosophy" from social reform — a discon-

nection previously performed by analytic philosophers who were "emotiv-

ist" in meta-ethics while being fiercely partisan in politics — is one way of

expressing exasperation with the philosophical tradition, it is not the only

way. Another would be to minimize the importance of that tradition, rather

than seeing it as something which urgently needs to be overcome, unmasked,

or genealogized. Suppose, as I suggested above, one sees the wrong turn as

having been taken with Kant (or better yet, with Descartes) rather than (like

Habermas) with the young Hegel or the young Marx. Then one might sec the

canonical sequence of philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche as a distrac-

tion from the history of concrete social engineering which made the contem-

porary North Atlantic culture what it is now, with all its glories and all its

dangers. One could try to create a new canon — one in which the mark of a

"great philosopher" was awareness of new social and religious and institu-

tional possibilities, as opposed to developing a new dialectical twist in

metaphysics or epistemology. That would be a way splitting the difference

between Habermas and Lyotard, of having things both ways. We could agree

with Lyotard that we need no more metanarratives, but with Habermas that

we need less dryness. We could agree with Lyotard that studies of the

communicative competence of a transhistorical subject arc of little use in

reinforcing our sense of identification with our community, while still insist-

ing on the importance of that sense.

If one had such a de-theoreticized sense of community, one could accept the

claim that valuing "undistorting communication" was of the essence of liberal

politics without needing a theory of communicative competence as backup.

Attention would be turned instead to some concrete examples of what was

presently distorting our communication — e.g., to the sort of "shock" we get

when, reading Foucault, we realize that the jargon we liberal intellectuals

developed has played into the hands of the bureaucrats. Detailed historical

narratives of the sort Foucault offers us would take the place of philosophical

metanarratives. Such narratives would not unmask something created by

power called "ideology" in the name of something not created by power called

replaced the model of repression and émancipation developed by Marx

and Freud with a pluralism of power/discourse formations. These forma-

tions intersect and succeed one another and can be differentiated accord-

ing to their style and intensity. They cannot, however, be judged in terms

of validity, which was possible in the case of the repression and emancipa-

tion of conscious as opposed to unconscious conflict resolutions. (EME,

P- 29)

This description is, I think, quite accurate, as is his remark that "the shock"

which Foucault's books produce "is not caused by the flash of insight into a

confusion which threatens identity" but instead by "the affirmed de-

differentiation and by the affirmed collapse of those categories which alone

can account for category mistakes of existential relevance." Foucault affects to

write from a point of view light-years away from the problems of contempor-

ary society. His own efforts at social reform (e.g., of prisons) seem to have no

connection with his exhibition of the way in which the "humane" approach to •

penal reform tied in with the needs of the modern state. It takes no more than

a squint of the inner eye to read Foucault as a stoic, a dispassionate observer of

the present social order, rather than its concerned critic. Because the rhetoric

of emancipation — the notion of a kind of truth which is not one more

production of power — is absent from his work, he can easily be thought of

reinventing American "functionalist" sociology. The extraordinary dryness of

Foucault's work is a counterpart of the dryness which Iris Murdoch once

objected to in the writing of British analytic philosophers. 9 It is a dryness

produced by a lack of identification with any social context, any communica-

tion. Foucault once said that he would like to write "so as to have no face." He

forbids himself the tone of the liberal sort of thinker who says to his fellow-

citizens: "We know that there must be a better way to do things than this; let

us look for it together." There is no "we" to be found in Foucault's writings,

nor in those of many of his French contemporaries.

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