CONF 803: MACRO THEORIES OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION
Professor Ho-Won Jeong
George Mason University
Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution
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Student Papers
In Search of Power with Foucault and Habermas
By Ulas Doga Eralp
This paper aims to provide an analytical overview on the relationship between Habermas and Foucault with regard to how they understand the role of power in the modern societies of Western Europe and North America. Both philosophers foresee different ways of emancipation from the overruling reality of the modernity infused in every single of our daily lives. Foucault is especially concerned with how to expand the domain of the human freedom at the expense of the system. Only through the maximisation of the human freedom Foucault believes the real emancipation could take place. Foucault thus can be understood as a historian of genealogy that believes in the discontinuity of human history in the forms of structures. For him there is no dialectical process about the development of societies of homo-economicus. Foucault's analysis of power depends on his attempts to delegitimize moral values through social deconstruction. It is not possible to categorise the human freedom in a dichotomy of good and evil for Foucault, what holds important for Foucault is to interrogate the normative power formations. Habermas on the other hand still preserves his critical Marxist tone when he analyses the interaction between the lifeworld and subsystems in a historicized Hegelian dialectical fashion. He presumes an evident continuum in the development of the modern Western European societies within the last 400 years and situates the power as a medium that serves to bring the systemic infusion deeper into the lifeworld.
This paper starts with the Habermasian understanding of system, lifeworld and his theory of internal colonization with reference to the positioning of power within that framework. Then the Foucaultian critique of power is being discussed with reflection of Habermasian critique on Foucault.
Habermas
Habermasian understanding of power is evident when he describes the relationship between the lifeworld and subsystems. Power is one of the most important media that transfers the effects of the subsystem into the lifeworld. But to have a clear understanding of Habermas we need to start with how he reaches his communicative theoretical model. Habermas builds his hypothesis on Emile Durkeim's idea on how the social life is being built. According to this view social life can naturally organize itself only by unconscious, spontaneous adaptation under the immediate pressure of needs, rather than according to a rational plan of reflective intelligence. Durkheim later on states that 'even the organic form of social solidarity has to be secured by values and norms. Therefore for Habermas it is possible to talk about a self-regulated system in which every event is given a meaning on the basis of its functional significance, is gradually replaced by the communicative theoretic model, according to which actors orient their actions by their own interpretations.
"Communicative action relies on a cooperative process of interpretation in which participants relate simultaneously to something in the objective, the social and subjective worlds, even when they thematically stress only one of the three components in their utterances" (Habermas 1987:119). A situation is a segment of lifeworld contexts of relevance that is thrown into relief by themes and articulated through goals and plans of action. And for the ones involved the action situation is the centre of their lifeworld. According to Habermas both language and culture are constitutive for the lifeworld itself. In everyday practice every situation is perceived as being familiar (1987).
Habermas defines the lifeworld as "the transcendental site where speaker and hearer meet, where they can reciprocally raise claims that their utterances fit the world and where they can criticise and confirm those validity claims, settle their disagreements, and arrive at agreements" (1987:131). The transcendality of the lifeworld situates power as an element of the ongoing exchange between the agents. It is not possible to mention of any power-free nature of the lifeworld. What is crucial in lifeworld is the reciprocity of the claims that in return is supposed to promote co-existence. In our own conflict resolution terms, lifeworld is an ideal situation where it is possible to witness plurality of opinions, refusing to dominate each other: a safe haven of opinion exchange. But the plural and free nature of the opinion reciprocity does not preclude any absence of power. Indeed power is contained and reciprocally activated through a dialogical process of meaning making.
Lifeworld permits the creation of many distinct realities by individuals that somehow manages to contain the negative/ destructive ends of power within the common space of reality creation. This definition is also in line with the common understanding of conflict resolution that does not necessarily oppose power but its malfunctioning. "Collectivities maintain their identities only to the extent that the ideas the members have of their lifeworld overlap sufficiently and condense into unproblematic background convictions" (133). Situations change but the limits of the lifeworld can not be transcended. Thus every conception of a situation relies on a global pre-understanding. Every definition of a situation is an interpretation within the frame of what has already been interpreted within a reality that is typically and fundamentally familiar.
It would not be off the point to say that the continuity and/or transmission of mutual knowledge is somewhat of a Hegelian conceptualisation of the meaning/reality making process. Habermas talks about an ongoing synthetically meaning making process. However he refrains from defining how this synthetical process would function without leading to any frictions or violence. He claims that 'under the functional aspect of mutual understanding, communicative action serves to transmit and renew cultural knowledge; under the aspect of coordinating action, it serves social integration and the establishment of solidarity; finally, under the aspect of socialization, communicative action serves the formation of personal identities'. Thus Habermas prefers to situate the communicative action not as preceding nor as proceeding but rather as a conceding phenomenon with the concept of lifeworld.
The mutual meaning making that's ought to occur in lifeworld therefore is only possible through communicative action which enable coordinating action that serves the social integration. At this point it would be right to question whether the functionalities of power along with its many connotations are also affected, included or pushed aside within the communicative action. Habermas claims that the " communicative action is not only a process of reaching understanding about something in the world; in coming to an understanding of the world, actors at the same time taking part in the interactions through which they develop, confirm, and renew their memberships in social groups and their own identities" (1987:140). Habermas' perception of the communicative action in the sense he mentions above permits the empowerment of the individual through membership to social groups. In that sense communicative action is seen as peaceful empowering tool for individuals. "What binds societed individuals to one another and secures the integration of society as a web of communicative actions that thrives only in the light of cultural traditions" (150). The friction or the potential for conflict lies at the differentiation of the systems and the lifeworld for Habermas. "Systems and subsytems tend to dominate the lifeworlds of the individuals. Otherwise societies would have remained as systemically stabilized complexes of action of socially integrated groups" (1987:152).
Habermas relates the infusion of subsystems into the lifeworlds to the domination of both the collective and individual consciousness of the societies, which is no other than a negative reflection, the power medium. He starts by Weber's definition of rationalization of life's orders as the institutionalization of purposive rational action and reframes it as the generalizing the reification of consciousness into an expression of instrumental reason. In that sense Lukac's theory of reification is not much different since it envisions an administrated, totally reified world in which means-ends rationality and domination are merged in a non class-specific way.
Habermas builds his own theory of instrumental reason on these definitions. "Rationality of knowing and acting subjects is systemically expanded into a purposive rationality of a higher order. Thus the rationality of the self-regulating systems, whose imperatives override the consciousness of its members appear as a totalized purposive rationality" (1987:332).
According to Habermas communicative rationality of the lifeworld, which he defines as the rationalization of worldviews, gives an inner logic to resist against the colonization of the lifeworld by the inner dynamics of autonomous systems. He sees this communicative rationality of the lifeworld as the development of formally organized domains of action that Adorno and Horkheimer fixated by Marxist Theory of Value with Weber's Theory of Purposive Rationality (1987: 333). In that sense when he talks about resistance against the domination of the system presupposes a different kind of power embedded in the lifeworld than the rationalizing instrumental use of the medium of power used by the subsystems. His critique of the Marxist Theory of Value holds an important place in differentiating his approach as a class-free perspective.
Value Theory holds that exchange relation (medium of money) between the labour power and variable capital is both a steering mechanism of a self-regulating process of production and reflexive relation that makes the whole accumulation process intelligible. The most effective medium for Marx is the medium of exchange value that conceals and objectivates the class conflict in the bourgeois society. Marxists presupposes that the medium of money takes over the medium of power. The private economic laws take over the political institutional relations of social force and economic exploitation. Monetarization of labour power becomes the basis of class relations. At this point it would be nice to mention the double character of commodity. As an action commodity, that is the labour of the worker, belongs to the lifeworld; but as a performance becomes the functional nexus of the capitalistic enterprise. Labor power expands in concrete actions and cooperative relationships as a lifeworldly manner, but at the same time is absorbed as an abstract performance by a labour process, organized for purposes of valorization. Thus Habermas reads the Marxist definition of real abstraction as 'the means of objectifying socially integrated contexts of action that take place when interactions are no longer coordinated via norms and values but via the medium of exchange value'. The communal individual life becomes reified. According to Habermas, the Theory of Value has both its strengths and weaknesses, which later would help Habermas, define his Theory of Internal Colonization.
One of the main strengths of the Value Theory according to Habermas is that it specifies translational rules for the fundamental interchange/relationship between the economic system and the lifeworld. And with these rules systematic statements about valorization is translated into historical statements about interaction between social classes. In other words the relationship between the economic subsystem and the lifeworld is historicized. That satisfies the Hegelian side of the Habermasian thought. One other strength of The Value Theory according to Habermas is that it rightfully denounces the self-maintenance of economic subsystem as a dynamics of exploitation that has been made unrecognisable under the veil of objectification. And this theory enables Marx to jump from the level of systems analysis to the level of historical and class theoretical presentation of everyday life. Thus manages to observe the costs of capitalist modernization.
Habermas also observes several weaknesses of the Value Theory; first of all Marx fails to separate the two analytical levels of system and the lifeworld. He does not recognize the intrinsic revolutionary value that media-steered subsystems have, since he conceives the capitalistic society as a totality; he does not differentiate between the state apparatus and the economy; he does not see how this differentiation opens up new steering possibilities and forces the reorganization of old, feudal class relationships. According to Habermas Systems Theory presupposes that the world-historical process of instrumentalizing the lifeworld has already come to a close. Lifeworld can only survive if it transforms into a media-steered subsystem and leaves the communicative practice of everyday life. In that sense Habermas is a pessimist with respect to Marx who views a future where objective samblence of capital has dissolved and the lifeworld became free again and regained its spontaneity. Marx sees the system as the realm of necessity and the lifeworld as the realm of freedom. And socialist revolution will free the lifeworld. The big pessimist Habermas sees this as an impossible dream. According to him, the medium of money depends functionally on the medium of power. Thus reification of lifeworlds absorbs the communicative context of life through both media: power and money. Habermas refuses any claims that medium of power can dominate the medium of money or vica versa.
Habermas' one other strong critique on Marx is the fact that he failed to foresee the compromise structures of late capitalism. According to Habermas ' welfare pacification of class conflict comes about under the condition of a continuing accumulation process whose capitalist drive mechanism is protected and not altered by the intervention of the state'. Habermas proposes that the unequal distribution of social rewards reflect a structure of privilege that can no longer be traced back to class positions. Old sources of inequality are not sealed off, but with inference with welfare state compensations. A new type of reification arises in class-unspecific ways and why these effects- which are filtered naturally through social inequality and spread around differentially- are found in communicatively structured domains of action (lifeworld).
Habermas claims that there is now a modern form of understanding in which communicative actions are increasingly detached from normative contexts and become increasingly dense with an expanded scope for contingencies. Forms of argumentation are institutionally differentiated as well. At this point, it is possible to talk about a loss of meaning in Weberian terms. Habermas talks about institutionalization of a scientific enterprise in the theoretical discourse in a similar fashion to Foucault that I evaluated on the rest of the paper. The moral/practice discourse has also witnessed a process of being framed in the political/public sphere. Aesthetic criticism has been subjugated to the limitations of the artistic and literary enterprise. Habermas although not putting into words reflects upon the institutionalization of power in Foucaultian sense in scientific, artistic and political enterprise through a constant detachment and denial of normative values. During the 19'th century the Western European civilization witnessed a transformation from the sacred to profane realm of action that has been realized in the traditionalist reactions to modernity and modernity's response to them. Modern manifestations of withdrawal; which Habermas defines as deficits inflicted upon lifeworld by societal modernization, and deprivation.
According to Habermas today there is a negative requirement of preventing holistic interpretations from coming into existence (1987:355). Everyday consciousness is robbed of its power to synthesise and becomes fragmented. In other words the Hegelian dialectical progress is stopped through fragmentation. 'Fragmented consciousness replaces the phenomenon of false consciousness thus blocks enlightenment through reification'. When stripped of their ideological veils imperatives of autonomous subsystems make their ways into the lifeworld from the outside/colonial masters coming into a tribal society/ force a process of assimilation upon it.
In his Theory of Late Capitalist Reification Habermas reformulated in terms of system and lifeworld, supplemented by an analysis of cultural modernity that supersedes the theory of consciousness. It would be wrong to understand that as a critique of ideology but rather as an explanation of cultural impoverishment and fragmentation of everyday consciousness, in other words colonization of the lifeworld. Thus Colonization of Lifeworld occurs 'when the traditional forms of life are so far dismantled that the structural components of the lifeworld (culture,society, personality) have been differentiated to a great extent and exchange relations between the susbsystems and the lifeworld are regulated through differentiated roles'. Employment at organised workplaces, consumer demand of private households, relation of clients to government bureaucracies, formal participation in legitimation process are all reflective examples of this on-going process.
Real abstractions that make the labour power available and makes the mobilization of the vote of the electorate possible by those affected as a trade-off against social rewards like time and money that provide an illusionary participation in power mechanisms to those being subjugated. These compensations are financed according to the welfare state pattern from the gains of the capitalistic growth and are canalized into roles which privatise hopes for self-determination in the roles of consumer and client. Habermas sees the juridification process as the steering media between the subsytems and the lifeworld throughout the course of the capitalistic age. For him juridification is nothing but tendency toward an increase in formal law observable in modern society.
He defines the development and infusion of juridification in four main phases in the Western European Societies: Bourgeois State, Bourgeois Constitutional State, Democratic Constitutional State, and Democratic Welfare State. Juridification has been put as the main common denominator that steers the infusion of the subsystem through the medium of money and power. With the juridification process the differentiation of power instrumentals has been masked/unmasked and made easy to understandable and normalized. A temporal outline of the internal colonization demonstrates the efficacy of juridification.
The first wave of juridification according to Habermas has been achieved back in the creation of a bourgeois society. The differentiation of the civil law and public law is perceived as a marker of the beginning of the separation between the medium of power and money. The Civil Law that has been built on general, positive and formal claims about the society guarantees liberty and property of private person, offers security through protection of law and equality before the law and brings the calculability of all legally norms and actions unlike the normative contexture of the lifeworld. The protection of property is one of the fundamental reflections of the praxis of medium of money.
The emergence of a functioning public law on the other hand authorized a state power with monopoly to coerce as the source of the legal authority. Public law defines the sovereignty instrumentally, permits the legal exercise of bureaucratically organized domination and is conceptualised by Habermas as means of effectively allocating power. The period of Bourgeois State creation is the time when Hobbes wrote his realist masterpiece Leviathan that demonstrated the eagerness of the system to swallow the lifeworld that defined the way the masses in Europe had been living. In a Hobbesian sense, the lifeworld is an unspecific reservoir from which the subsystems of economy and money extract what they need for their reproduction. Habermas points out to main expectancies of both media like performance at war and obedience; "real abstraction" in Marxist terms-source of state legitimation. The power that has been legitimised was by then differentiated from the power that is existent in the lifeworld. The textualised and encompassing nature of the systemic power brings in a colonialist nous.
Habermas puts the development of a bourgeois constitutional state as the second wave of juridification. Constitutional regulation of administrative authority/ medium of systemic power which until then was limited and bounded by the legal form and bureaucratic means of exercising its functions attained a more inclusive. Now private individuals, citizens are given actionable civil rights against a sovereign though no democratic participation was offered yet. The constitutions guaranteed the lives, liberties and properties of private persons. This constitution showed that it does not only serve as a functional side of institutionalisation of commerce in civil law but also manages to achieve morally justified constitutional norms. A holistic view of the political structure/order emerged with the Absolutist State. According to Habermas within this period the state, as an institution achieved self-realisation as an agent of subsystems differentiated via money and power (359). The lifeworld still remained as an unformed matter from a systemic point of view. The systemic intervention into the lifeworld occurred through the governmental/systemic protection of citizens as individuals from the systemic perils of the society.
As the third wave of juridification Habermas sees the development
of the democratic constitutional state. In this period the already constitutionalised
state power was democratised. Citizens were given the right of political participation.
The laws were utilised to come into force only when they express a general
interest, if all those affected agree to them. And most important of all the
legislation bowed to the parliamentary will-formation and public discussion.
The third phase introduced another dynamic for the definition of the medium
of power, thus for the infusion of the subsystem into the lifeworld, Habermas
argues: juridification of legitimation. The legitimation of sovereignty has
now to be achieved not only through generating fear but also to a much larger
extent, in forms of general and equal suffrage, recognition of separation
of powers: legislature, executive and the judiciary branches. This separation
has become one of the main definitions of a modern state structure that promotes
liberal democracy accompanied by a capitalist free market economy. According
to Habermas it is possible to mention about the existence of a modern lifeworld.
The modern lifeworld asserts itself against the imperatives of a structure
of domination that abstracts all concrete life relations. This third period
of juridification saw the process of anchoring the medium of power into the
lifeworld that has rationalised differentiated.
The fourth and final wave of juridification, Habermas points out, happened
with the emergence of the democratic welfare state. In Western Europe within
the welfare state the juridification process preserves its freedom-guaranteeing
characteristics. In the preceding two phases bridled administrative system
now bridles the economic system similarly in social democratic states. The
medium of power and the medium of money through the centuries of juridification
has now been clearly defined and categorised leaving no space for the lifeworld
to operate. In Habermasian understanding, juridification that laid continually
in time and space since the 17'Th century managed to close the gap between
the system and the lifeworld.
Granting freedom to organize unions has institutionalised the social power relations anchored in class structure in a legal form. Right to bargain for wages, free social security, protection from lay-offs and limitation on working hours were the gains of the labour power against the capital. The power balancing juridifications within an area of action that has already been constituted by law. Habermas claims that the welfare state both guarantees and takes away the freedom of the citizens. Public welfare policy; juridification and bureaucratization as limits to welfare policy. Restructuring interventions in the lifeworld by beuracratic implementation, monetary redemption of welfare entitlements. The bourgeois law dictates the welfare guarantees as individual.
Habermas observes the dilemmatic nature of a functioning welfare state. While the welfare state guarantees to serve for social integration, it promotes disintegration of life-relations. He understands the Consensual Mechanisms in terms of Coordinating action which in turn puts the media of Power and Money through legalised social intervention. Thus Law according to Foucault serves as a means for organizing media-controlled subsystems (money&power) and takes the role of a steering medium rather than supplementing institutional components of the lifeworld. Legal Institutions as Habermas puts it, can be articulated, as the legal norms that can't be legitimised through a positivistic reference to procedure since the norms need substantive juridification. Because they belong to legitimate orders of the lifeworld and informal forms of conduct from the background of communicative action.
Individualization has been developed by "the subsystems against the solidaristic measures of the lifeworld communities" (1987:370). Citizen evolved into a client, temporarily and spatially distant from the governing/administrating bureaucracy. Computerization of social services has become the consumerist redefinition of therapeutic assistance. State administration of these services contradicts with the aim of independent and self-reliant individual. Class-specific utilisation of services/ prison system, court assignments. According to Habermas the more the welfare state goes beyond pacifying the class-conflict in sphere of production and spreads a net of cliental relationships over private spheres of life, the stronger are the anticipated pathological side effects of juridification that entail both a bureaucratization and moneterization of core areas of lifeworld.
Habermas in this sense sees the social welfare law as a reification effect tailored to domains of action first constituted in legal forms of organization and can be held together only by systemic mechanisms which at the same time applies to informal lifeworld contexts. According to the thesis of internal colonization---- subsystems of economy and state become more and more complex as a result of capitalist growth and penetrate deeper into symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld. The family law and the functions of the youth&welfare office in Germany has been given as one of the remarkable examples of how the lifeworld can be colonized by the subsytem in a welfare society.
Foucault
The structuralist requirement that each unity of discourse be understood strictly in terms of itself seems to be satisfied only if the rules constitutive of discourse assume control as it were, of their institutional basis. Discourse is what links the technological, economic, social and political conditions to the functioning network of practices that then serve to reproduce it (Habermas 1983: 267-68). The discourses of the sciences, and in general the discourses in which knowledge is shaped and transmitted, lose their privileged status; together with other discursive practices, they form power complexes that offer a domain of object sui-generis (269). That is the transcendental-historicist concept of power for Habermas.
Habermas purifies the intelligible from everything empirical, accidental, and particular, and that becomes especially suitable as a medium of power precisely on account of this pretended separation of validity from genesis: thus modern knowledge can conceal from itself and others that impulse which first spurs on a metaphysically isolated subject, thrown back reflectively upon itself, toward restless self-mastery (270). Foucault detaches this will to knowledge from the context of the history of metaphysics and lets it merge with into the category of power in general. This is the main difference of Foucault from Habermas in the analysis of power. Foucault sets the power as an independent factor from the reigns of history.
Foucault says that: "every society has its regime of truth: that is the type of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true" (Foucault 1980: 131). The category of power preserves from its covert historical sources the meaning of a basic concept within a theory of constitution as well; this is what lends the empirical analysis of technologies of power their significance as a critique of reason and secures for genealogical historiography its unmasking effect.
Human sciences become the medium of this power, and the panoptical form of supervision is permitted to penetrate into all the pores of the subjugated body and the objectified soul, it is condensed into a new, precisely modern power complex (Foucault 1979). Foucault treats the transfer from torture to imprisonment as an exemplary process in connection with which he wants to demonstrate the provenance of modern anthropocentric thought in modern technologies of domination (1979).
Habermas reads Foucault as "in their very form, the human sciences are supposed to present an amalgam of knowledge and power; the formation of power and the formation of knowledge compose an indissoluble unity" (1983: 272). In Discipline and Punish Foucault acknowledges that power results in a one-sided picture: " if one wants to analyze the genealogy of the subject in Western societies, one has to take into consideration the interaction between those two types of techniques, the point where technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to process by which the individual acts upon himself" (1980). Psychoanalysis gives the form of scientifically established therapy to those technologies of trust, which do not open up the interior of individuals but produce interiority for the first time by means of an ever-thicker web of relations to self.
For Habermas "empirical role of the analysis on technologies of power is meant to explain the functional social context of the science of man" (1983:274). Idealist idea of transcendental synthesis forged together with the presuppositions of empiricist ontology.
Power is that by which the subject has an effect on objects in successful actions. In this connection, success in action depends upon the truth of judgements that enter in the plan of action; thus power remains dependent on truth.
The concept of power that is supposed to provide a common denominator for the contrary semantic components has been taken from the repertoire of the philosophy of the subject itself. Foucault reverses power's truth-dependency in the power-dependency of truth. Power becomes subjectless; foundational power no longer needs to be bound to the competencies of acting and judging subjects.
According to Habermas Foucault expects to lead his research
out of the circle in which the human sciences are caught. Foucault opposes
the objectification of man, proposes the rise of the true objectivity of knowledge
through the use of genealogical historiography. Genealogical historiography
according to Habermas proposes three substitutes:
1. In place of hermeneutic elucidation of meaning contexts; there is an analysis
of structures that are meaningless in themselves;
2. Validity claims are of interest as long as they are perceived as functions
of power complexes
3. Value judgements are excluded in favour of value-free historical explanations.
(1983:276-280)
Habermas claims that Foucault reduces the validity claims to the effects of power; the "ought" is reduced to "is". Foucault is thinking about the experiences of the groups that are subjugated to power that have never been advanced to the status of official knowledge, that have never been sufficiently articulated. It is the problematic implicit knowledge of the "people" who are the bedrock of the power system, who first experience the technology of power with their bodies, whether as the sufferers or the practitioners. Therefore a genealogists directs its attention to the local marginalised and alternative knowledge which owes its existential force to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything that surrounds it. These elements are normally "disqualified as inadequate to their task: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity" (1983: 280). Genealogy raises these local memories to the level of erudite knowledge. The link with the disqualified knowledge gives the genealogist's work of reconstruction its superiority.
According to Habermas every counterpower already moves within the horizon of power that it fights; and it is transformed, as soon as it is victorious, into a power complex that provokes a new counterpower. In that sense Habermas is very Hegelian and puts emphasis on the continuity of contexts through time and space. In Power/Knowledge Foucault claims that even the genealogy of knowledge can not break out of this cycle while it activates the uprising of the disqualified modes of knowledge and mobilizes this subjected knowledge "against the coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal, and scientific discourse" (1980: 132).
Habermas points out that "those who conquer the theoretical avant-garde of today and overcome the current hierarchization of knowledge themselves establish a new hierarchy of knowledge" (1983: 281). Habermas thinks that Foucault sees himself as a dissident who offers resistance to modern thought and humanistically disguised disciplinary power. Foucault at this point according to Habermas distinguishes himself from the engaged positivistic attitude of Max Weber, who wanted to separate a decisionistically chosen and openly declared value basis from an analysis carried out in a value-free way (1983).
Foucault wants to undermine modernity and its language games. Foucault's resistance according to can not be justified as a mirror image of the current power. "If that were all, there wouldn't be any resistance. Because resistance has to be like power: just as inventive, just as mobile, and just as productive as it is. It has to be organized and stabilized like it is; like it, it has to come from below and be strategically shared" (1977). Habermas proposes that Foucault's disciplinary power whose local, constant, productive, and all-pervasive, multi-layered character as he describes repeatedly invades the bodies rather than the minds. It takes the shape of a biopower that subjects bodies to a relentless normalization process. Disciplinary power without through a necessarily false consciousness shaped within humanistic discourses and hence exposed to the criticism of counterdiscourses. Humanistic critique to practices of power is based on contradictions between legitimate and illegitimate power, conscious and unconscious motives and stands against the representatives of repression, exploitation, suppression. But this mode of critique according to Habermas (1983) is in danger of strengthening a humanism that has been understood as a divine idea and has become a normalizing form of violence.
Foucault addresses the justification of his stance against the disciplinary power by saying: " if one wants... to struggle against the disciplines and disciplinary power, it is not toward the ancient right of sovereignty that one should turn, but toward the possibility of a new form of right, one which must indeed be antidisciplinarian, but at same time liberated from the principle of sovereignty."(1980: 107). Foucault objects the asymmetric relationship between the powerholders and those subject to power, as well as the reifying effect of technologies of power, which violate the moral and bodily integrity of subjects capable of speech and action. Habermas renames the politics of body as biopower for the form of sociation that does away with all forms of natural spontaneity and transforms the creaturely life as a whole into a substrate of empowerment. Foucault sees the power asymmetry embedded in power complexes between the processes of power and the bodies that are crushed with them (Habermas 1983). For Foucault "those technologies of domination expressed today form the common matrix for humanizing punishment and for obtaining knowledge about human beings" (1979: 23).
Foucault begins with analysing the normative language game of rational natural law with respect to the latent functions that the discourse on authority has in the age of Classicism for the establishment and the exercise of absolutist state power. The sovereignty of the state has a monopoly on violence and is expressed in demonstrative form of punishment like torture. Then he mentions about the transformation on the exercise of power from the same functionalist perspective. Habermas puts forth that Foucault does not go into the fact that these in turn serve the revolutionary establishment of a constitutionalized state power of a political order transferred ideologically from the sovereignty of the prince to the sovereignty of the people (1983). Habermas claims that "this kind of regime is, after all, correlated with those normalizing forms of punishment that constitute the proper theme of Discipline and Punish."(1983: 289).
Foucault wants to show the rise of the modern regime of power as "an adaptation and a refinement of the machinery that assumes responsibility for and places under surveillance their everyday behaviour, their identity, their activity, their apparently unimportant gestures."(1979: 77). For him, "the procedures of normalization come to be ever more constantly engaged in the colonization those of the law that forms the society of normalization." (1979: 107).
Habermas accuses Foucault for not seeing the results of the juridification process in welfare states. According to Habermas Foucault neglects the development of the normative structures in connection with the modern formation of power: "As soon as Foucault takes up the threads of the biopolitical establishment of disciplinary power, he lets drop the threads of the legal organization of the exercise of power and of the legitimation of the order of domination" (1983:290). Habermas sees that Foucault's generalization in terms of the theory of power hinders him from perceiving the phenomenon actually in need of explanation: "In welfare-state democracies of the west, the spread of legal regulation has the structure of a dilemma because it is the legal means for securing freedom that themselves endanger the freedom of their presumptive beneficiaries"(291). Habermas thinks that Foucault simplifies the complexity of societal modernization that the disturbing paradoxes of this process like the juridification and individuation that creates new zones of alienation and normalization is not apparent to him.
According to Habermas in all attempts to grasp self-determination and self-realization, one immediately runs up against an ironic inversion of what is actually intended. Repression of the self is the converse side of an autonomy that is pressed into subject-object relationships; "the loss-and the narcissistic fear of the loss-of self is the converse of an expressivity brought under these concepts" (1983: 292).
References
Foucault, M., 1979. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M., 1980. "Howison Lecture on Truth and Subjectivity" on October 20, 1980 at University of California at Berkeley, unpublished manuscript.
Foucault, M., 1979. "Nietzche, Genealogy, History" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Foucault, M., 1980. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon.
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