Discourse, Power, And Subjectivation

DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION:THE FOUCAULT/HABERMAS DEBATE RECONSIDERED

AMY ALLEN

The Foucault/Habermas debate was a nonevent. The reasons for this were bothpersonal––Foucault’s untimely death––and philosophical––Foucault and Haber-mas’s apparent inability to agree on a topic for debate.1 Whatever the reason, noformal exchange of ideas between Foucault and Habermas ever occurred; instead,what is commonly known as the Foucault/Habermas debate is largely a product ofthe secondary literature on these two thinkers.2 Moreover, the way the debate hasgone so far, Habermas and his defenders have seemed to have the upper hand, fortwo reasons.3 First, whereas Foucault only mentioned Habermas’s work in passingin a handful of interviews and essays, Habermas actually offered a sustainedcritical reading of Foucault’s work.4 Thus, to a great extent, Habermas has been

An earlier—and shorter—version of this paper was presented at the American Philosophical Associa-tion, Central Division, in 2005. Thanks to David S. Owen for his insightful comments on that occasion.Thanks also to Colin Koopman for his feedback on a more recent draft.1 For Foucault’s version of the story, see Michel Foucault, “Critical Theory/Intellectual History,”

Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1994) 124–25; for Habermas’s version, see Jürgen Habermas, “Taking Aim at the Heartof the Present,” Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. Michael Kelly(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 150.

2 See, for example, Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical SocialTheory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); David Hoy and Thomas McCarthy,Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Michael Kelly, ed., Critique and Power: Recasting theFoucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); and David Owen and SamanthaAshenden, eds, Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Criti-cal Theory (London: Sage, 1999).

3 On this point, see Owen and Ashenden (1999): 1–2.4 For Habermas on Foucault, see Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:

Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) lectures 9 and 10; andHabermas (1994). For Foucault on Habermas, see Foucault (1994); Michel Foucault, “The Art ofTelling the Truth,” Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate, ed. MichaelKelly (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994) 139–48; Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of Concern for the Selfas a Practice of Freedom,” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault,

© 2009 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.

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able to set the terms of the debate, and many of the contributions to the debatefrom Foucault’s side have consisted of efforts to defend him against Habermas’scritique.5 The second and no doubt related reason is that both Habermas and theHabermasians have tended to be much more interested in engaging with Fou-cault’s work than the Foucaultians have been in engaging with Habermas’s.6

Ladelle McWhorter’s complaint that of all of the misguided criticisms of Fou-cault she has read, the “most boring, irritating, and seemingly irrelevant of allwere Habermas’s tortured and contorted critiques [. . .], which became only mar-ginally more intelligible when reiterated by his American followers,”7 thoughunfair, expresses an all-too-common if not often explicitly articulated senti-ment among Foucaultians: namely, that Habermas’s work is so boring andirritating (so German?) that it is beneath discussion. These two factors haveled the Foucault/Habermas debate to a peculiar impasse: The Habermasians seemto think they have won, while the Foucaultians act as if they were not evenplaying.

It is a principal aim of this essay to reinvigorate this deadlocked debate.However, one might wonder why this is worth doing at all. After all, who caresabout the outcome of this debate, other than a handful of partisan Foucaultians andHabermasians? Why bother rehashing yet again the minutiae of Habermas andFoucault’s respective philosophical positions? What, if anything, is at stake herethat is of general philosophical interest? The answer to this last question is: a greatdeal. Habermas and Foucault can be understood as contemporary representativesof opposing traditions of thought in social and political philosophy.8 Habermas’sfocus on the rationality inherent in our social practices and political institutions, arationality that for him is rooted in their communicative structure, places him inthe long and illustrious tradition of political thought stretching back through Kantto Plato. Foucault’s emphasis on power, by contrast, traces its lineage back

vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) 281–301; and Michel Foucault, “Space,Knowledge, Power,” Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 3, ed. Paul Rabinow (NewYork: The New Press, 2000) 349–64.

5 Owen and Ashenden’s edited volume Foucault contra Habermas exemplifies this trend. As theeditors note in their introduction, the purpose of the volume is to offer “a critical response toHabermas’s position from the perspective of Foucault’s practice” and thus “to reanimate the engage-ment by providing a Foucauldian rejoinder to the practitioners of [Habermasian] critique [. . .]”(Owen and Ashenden [1999]: 2).

6 The Owen/Ashenden volume is a welcome exception to this general rule.7 Ladelle McWhorter, Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999) xvi.8 See Bent Flyvbjerg, “Ideal Theory, Real Rationality: Habermas versus Foucault and Nietzsche.”

Paper for the Political Studies Association Conference, The Challenge for Democracy in the 21stCentury, London School of Economics, 2000. Available online at: http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk/IdealTheory.pdf, accessed on July 24, 2006.

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http://flyvbjerg.plan.aau.dk

through Nietzsche and Machiavelli to Thrasymachus.9 Indeed, as Bent Flyvbjergnotes, the respective projects of Habermas and Foucault highlight an “essentialtension” in thinking about politics and society: the tension between “consensus andconflict, ideals and reality,” or, to put it more broadly still, between rationalityand power.10 Flyvbjerg is right, I think, to call this tension an essential one. Socialand political theory cannot afford to give up entirely on the admittedly impossibleideal of a rational organization of social and political life, nor can it afford to turna blind eye to the complex and insidious workings of power. Thus, unlike theRawls/Habermas debate, where the differences, though significant, are more meta-theoretical rather than substantive, the Foucault/Habermas debate centers on asubstantive tension that lies at the very heart of social and political theorizing.

Unfortunately, however, the existing literature on the Foucault/Habermasdebate has not, for the most part, brought out these core issues in a productive orfruitful way. As I have already indicated, the majority of this literature eitherarticulates the by now standard Habermasian criticisms of Foucault—charges ofperformative contradiction or normative confusion11—or offers defenses againstthese criticisms on Foucault’s behalf. A much smaller portion addresses the taskof developing a Foucaultian critique of Habermas.12 A still smaller portion takes onthe much more difficult but ultimately more productive task of integrating therespective insights of Habermas and Foucault, often because commentatorsassume, wrongly, that Habermas and Foucault are, as Flyvbjerg puts it, “soprofoundly different that it would be futile to envision any sort of theoretical ormetatheoretical perspective within which these differences could be integratedinto a common framework.”13 Contra Flyvbjerg, I maintain that there is more basisfor a middle ground, at least on certain issues, between Habermas and Foucault

9 One can also trace Foucault’s lineage through Kant, although Foucault’s reading of Kant is quitedifferent from Habermas’s. Exploring their shared Kantian background is a useful way of articu-lating a middle ground in their debate, but it is not one that I will pursue here. For a reappraisal ofHabermas’s critique of Foucault in light of Foucault’s relationship to Kant, see Amy Allen,“Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal,” Constellations 10: 2 (2003): 180–98, andAllen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory(New York: Columbia UP, 2008) ch. 2.

10 Flyvbjerg (2000): 1.11 The first to make the charge of normative confusion is actually not Habermas, but Fraser. See Nancy

Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minne-apolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989) ch. 1. Habermas takes up this criticism in Habermas (1987): lecture10.

12 By far, the best example of this approach to the debate is James Tully, “To Think and ActDifferently: Foucault’s Four Reciprocal Objections to Habermas’s Theory,” Foucault contra Hab-ermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory, ed. David Owen andSamantha Ashenden (London: Sage, 1999) 90–142.

13 Flyvbjerg (2000): 1–2.

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than is commonly acknowledged. However, in order to demonstrate this, it will notsuffice simply to assert the complementarity of their philosophical positions.Integrating the insights of these two thinkers will of necessity involve modifyingor recasting their views, perhaps in substantial ways.

This is not to say that it is possible to bring together into one overarchingframework all of the insights of these two prolific and wide-ranging thinkers. Evenif this were possible, such a task would most definitely be beyond the scope of asingle essay. Thus, my focus in what follows will be on one strand––but it isarguably the central strand––of the Foucault/Habermas debate: their respectiveaccounts of subjectivation. My aim is to lay the groundwork for an account ofsubjectivation that draws on the conceptual insights that are to be found on bothsides of the Foucault/Habermas debate, modifying and recasting their views asnecessary. In order to accomplish this goal, I begin with a fascinating yet mostlyoverlooked moment in the Foucault/Habermas debate: Habermas’s metaethicaldefense of discourse ethics against moral skepticism. This may seem like a strangeplace from which to begin a reconsideration of the Foucault/Habermas debate.After all, Habermas devotes very little space in his lengthy defense of discourseethics to explicit discussion of Foucault. And yet, at the end of the debate that hestages with the moral skeptic in his seminal essay “Discourse Ethics: Notes on aProgram of Philosophical Justification,” he makes it clear that he takes Foucault tobe paradigmatic of the most extreme and consistent form of skepticism that he hasbeen arguing against.14 Taking up this vantage point on the Foucault/Habermasdebate is productive for several reasons. First, it reveals that Habermas’s defenseof discourse ethics rests, in the end, on the plausibility of his intersubjectiveaccount of subjectivation. Second, although one might object that framing thedebate in terms of the opposition between discourse ethics and moral skepticismplays too much into Habermas’s hands, once again allowing him to set the termsof the debate, I shall argue that framing the issue in this way enables us to pose inthe most forceful possible way the challenge that Foucault’s work presents to theHabermasian position. Finally, shifting the focus of discussion away from Fou-cault and Habermas’s respective views on normative justification and toward theirrespective accounts of subjectivation makes it possible to move the Foucault/Habermas debate to new and more productive terrain by developing an account ofsubjectivation that draws on the insights of each.

This article consists of four parts. I begin, in section one, by considering brieflywhether or not Habermas is justified in associating Foucault with moral skepti-cism. In section two, I reconstruct Habermas’s argument against moral skepticism

14 Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” MoralConsciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) 99.

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in the necessary detail. I argue that, in the end, the success or failure of Haber-mas’s metaethical argument against moral skepticism depends upon his intersub-jective account of subjectivation. In section three, I turn to a discussion of thataccount and contrast it briefly with Foucault’s alternative account of subjection. Iargue that both Habermas and Foucault offer a one-sided analysis of subjectiva-tion; Habermas stresses its communicative, rational, intersubjective aspects andFoucault emphasizes its power-ladenness. In contrast to each of them, I argue thatsubjectivation necessarily entails both communicative rationality and power rela-tionships. In the concluding section, I consider the implications of my compara-tive argument for both Foucault and Habermas’s broader philosophical projects.With respect to Foucault, I argue that acknowledging the role that communicativerationality plays in the process of subjection would require him to expand hisconception of the social. There are hints in Foucault’s late work that he waswilling to move in this direction, but they remain seriously underdeveloped. Withrespect to Habermas, I argue that acknowledging the role that power plays insocialization would make it difficult for him to maintain a sharp distinctionbetween power and validity claims, a distinction that he takes to be fundamentalfor his normative philosophical framework. Accepting this feature of socializationwould thus require him to be much more self-critical about the status of his ownnormative idealizations and to recast his project in a more contextualist andpragmatic way.

I. FOUCAULT AND MORAL SKEPTICISM

Habermas’s claim that Foucault is representative of the most consistent andextreme form of moral skepticism raises the complicated question of whether ornot Foucault was a skeptic, about morality or anything else, and, if so, what sortof skeptic he was.15 This question is made more complicated by the fact that thereare many different varieties of moral skepticism, and Habermas never offers aprecise definition of what he means by the term.16 On the face of it, however,

15 For a characterization of Foucault as a skeptic, not just about moral norms but about knowledgeclaims more generally, see John Rajchman, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (NewYork: Columbia UP, 1985). By contrast, Gary Gutting argues that Foucault is not a universal skepticor relativist with respect to truth, but he seems to concede that Foucault is some sort of a normativeskeptic, in the sense that he views all norms as historically contingent constraints on humanfreedom; see Gary Gutting, Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Scientific Reason (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1989) 273–85.

16 Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, for example, delineates five distinct varieties of moral skepticism. SeeWalter Sinnott-Armstrong, “Moral Skepticism and Justification,” Moral Knowledge? New Readingsin Moral Epistemology, ed. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Mark Timmons (New York: Oxford UP,1996) 6–8.


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Habermas certainly seems safe in calling Foucault a moral skeptic. After all,Foucault’s genealogical method often involves analyzing the ways in which moralnorms are rooted in and bound up with contingent and historically specific power/knowledge relations, thus, calling into question or problematizing the presumedvalidity of those norms. For instance, in the following passage, Foucault employsthis strategy with respect to the norm of popular sovereignty:

[The theory of sovereignty] made it possible to superimpose on the mechanism of discipline asystem of right that concealed its mechanisms and erased the element of domination and thetechniques of domination involved in discipline [. . .]. In other words, juridical systems, no matterwhether they were theories or codes, allowed the democratization of sovereignty, and the estab-lishment of a public right articulated with collective sovereignty, at the very same time when, to theextent that, and because the democratization of sovereignty was heavily ballasted by the mecha-nisms of disciplinary coercion.17

Obviously, much more would have to be said here about how Foucault backs upthis claim in order to determine its plausibility, but that is not my concern here.Instead, I want to highlight Foucault’s methodological move. His strategy is toclaim that the norm of popular sovereignty can be shown to be grounded in“mechanisms of disciplinary coercion” that have been concealed by the system ofright that seeks to justify this norm (and other related norms). Moreover, even ifFoucault never makes the blanket claim that there can be no non-contingent,universal norms, one certainly get the distinct impression in reading throughFoucault’s work as a whole that he believes that all of our most deeply cherishedmoral and political norms can be subjected to the genealogist’s withering gaze andthus can be seen to be rooted in contingent power/knowledge relations. This wouldsuggest that Foucault believes that no universal moral norms are or can bejustified, inasmuch as all such norms can be shown via genealogical analysis tobe bound up with contingent power/knowledge relations that problematize theirclaim to universal validity.18

However, the situation is a bit more complicated than it appears at first glance.If one were so inclined, one might defend Foucault against the charge of moralskepticism by arguing that he does believe that some norms can be justified, solong as those are understood to be local, provisional, and contextual rather than

17 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans.David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003) 37.

18 Extreme moral skepticism would thus seem to be incompatible with a normative critique of powerrelations; Foucault’s putative attempt to hold both of these commitments is what leads to the chargeof normative confusion. Foucault could potentially overcome this objection by claiming thatalthough his critique of power relations is indeed a normative one, it does not appeal to anyuniversal moral norms. I consider this strategy below.

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universal. On this interpretation, he does not hold the radical skeptical view that nomoral norms are or can be justified; instead, his skeptical critique is aimed only atattempts to claim that any norm can be valid at all times, in all places, for allpersons.19 Evidence for this reading can be found in some of Foucault’s commentson the role of intellectuals in public political culture. Foucault argues that theintellectual should no longer be thought of as the “master of truth and justice” oras “the spokesman of the universal.”20 Intellectuals should be thought of as “spe-cific” rather than “universal”; rather than attempting to construct universal theo-retical frameworks or utopian ideals, they should confine their work to pointingout the contingency of historical formations and the specific problems that areendemic to them.21 Here, Foucault suggests that the status of the universal intel-lectual was always illusory because the truths and normative judgments that suchintellectuals offered were not, indeed, could not be held true or valid universally.Foucault’s reason for this claim is that he regards truth as inseparable from,though not reducible to, power; as he famously puts it, echoing Nietzsche, “[t]ruthis a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms ofconstraint.”22 I assume that what Foucault says here about truth would apply,mutatis mutandis, to moral judgments as well. The intellectual is not (and cannotbe) the bearer or prophet of universal norms or moral “truths,” for given theunavoidable rootedness of norms and truths in contingent social practices andpower/knowledge relations, any claim to the universality of moral norms is opento question. At the very least, one might argue that Foucault’s point here shifts theburden of proof back to Habermas, who is charged with demonstrating that hisproposed norms are indeed universally valid despite the historical contingencies inwhich they are rooted.

On this line of interpretation, Foucault’s own ethical works would be seen as hisattempt to spell out a more local and provisional set of norms, which he groupsaround a variety of concepts in his late work, including care of the self, aestheticsof existence, and parrhesia.23 There is no doubt some sense in which Foucault

19 James Tully seems to have something like this view in mind when he writes: “Foucault’s enlight-enment attitude is a ‘specific’ scepticism (against the claims of a specific limit), not the universalscepticism Habermas argues against in his mock dialogues” (Tully [1999]: 120).

20 Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980) 126.

21 On this point, see Michel Foucault, “What Is Called Punishing?” Power: The Essential Works ofMichel Foucault, vol. 3, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2000) 384.

22 Foucault (1980): 131.23 See, for example, Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans.

Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985); The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3,trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986); Paul Rabinow, ed., Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth:The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol. 1 (New York: The New Press, 1997); and MichelFoucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2001).


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thinks that we should engage in practices of self-fashioning or fearless speech, butthese norms have value for us only given our contingent historical situation andthe particular sorts of power/knowledge relations against which we are struggling.Foucault never claims universal validity for such norms. It is an open question, Ithink, how well Foucault’s ethical works defend even the local and provisionalvalue of living one’s life as work of art. For our purposes, however, this can remainan open question, for even granting Foucault the ability to justify provisional andlocal norms, this position nonetheless leaves him endorsing what Habermas wouldlegitimately see as a form, though perhaps a more limited form, of moral skepti-cism. Although it may well be true that Foucault thinks that local norms are thebest we can hope for and maybe also all that we need, from Habermas’s perspec-tive, this stance is enough to call Foucault a moral skeptic, since Habermasspecifically links the justification of moral norms with their universalizability.Indeed, Habermas maintains that we might “call moral only those norms that arestrictly universalizable, i.e., those that are invariable over historical time andacross social groups.”24 Thus, someone who is skeptical of the possibility of theuniversal validity of moral norms, as Foucault is, would remain a moral skeptic forthe purposes of Habermas’s argument, even if this seems, all things considered, arather mild form of skepticism.25

II. DISCOURSE ETHICS VS. MORAL SKEPTICISM

I will present Habermas’s defense of discourse ethics against the moral skep-tic’s attack in five stages.26 The skeptic’s opening move is to attack moral cogni-tivism, pointing to the repeated failure of cognitivists to explain satisfactorily whatit might mean for moral beliefs or judgments to be candidates for truth. Although

24 Habermas (1990): 111, n. 41.25 Indeed, when Foucault was asked in a 1984 interview if he is a skeptical thinker, he responded:

“Absolutely.” See Michel Foucault, “The Return of Morality,” Michel Foucault: Politics, Philoso-phy, Culture, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988) 254.

26 Actually, in Habermas’s text, there are seven stages to the debate. I skip over the first stage, whichconcerns the skeptic’s denial of the phenomenology of moral experience. In response, Habermassuggests that the realm of moral phenomena can only be denied when we take up a third-personobserver’s perspective on everyday life and interactions; once we take up a first-person participant’sperspective, it is impossible to deny the existence and relevance of these phenomena. This stage ofthe argument is relevant for the Foucault/Habermas debate quite generally, inasmuch as it links upwith Habermas’s criticisms of Foucault’s methodology, which Habermas claims remains stubbornlyattached to the observer’s perspective and denies the usefulness of more hermeneutic, participant-centered approaches. However, it is less relevant for the major issues under consideration here, soI shall leave further discussion of it aside. For the sake of space, I have condensed Habermas’sfourth and fifth stages into a single step.

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Habermas does not deny the flaws in earlier attempts to defend cognitivism, hemaintains that the alternative—an embrace of ethical subjectivism which neces-sarily, on his view, collapses into skepticism—“deprive[s] the sphere of everydaymoral intuitions of its significance.”27 Moreover, he argues that cognitivism can besuccessfully defended if we give up the strong claim that normative claims aretruth candidates and instead adopt the weaker position that normative claimsare analogous to truth claims.28 Habermas notes a prima facie analogy betweentruth claims––claims about what the objective world is like––and normative right-ness claims––claims about how the intersubjective world should be ordered: Truthclaims are to facts as normative claims are to legitimately ordered interpersonalrelations.29 Thus, just as we appeal to facts as reasons for asserting truth claims, weappeal to legitimately ordered interpersonal relations as reasons for our normativejudgments. Habermas suggests that this strategy of thinking of normative claimsas analogous to though not types of truth claims offers the best way of salvagingdiscourse ethics’ commitment to moral cognitivism from the skeptic’s openingchallenge.30

The skeptic, however, responds by questioning Habermas’s assumption thatnormative claims are based on reasons. If this were true, then wouldn’t we expectreasonable people to reach agreement on moral issues? The overwhelming evi-dence to the contrary thus emboldens the skeptic to ask whether normative claimsare based on reasons after all. In other words, the skeptic appeals to what Haber-mas calls the “pluralism of ultimate value orientations” as evidence that evenHabermas’s relatively weak version of cognitivism is flawed.31 In response to thissecond stage of skeptical argument, Habermas offers a theory of moral argumen-tation that explains how normative rightness claims can be redeemed in practicaldiscourse and thus how a reasoned agreement on normative questions can beachieved. The key component of this theory is the principle of universalization(U). In order to be valid, a norm must fulfill (U), which Habermas states asfollows:

27 Habermas (1990): 55.28 Ibid: 56.29 He also acknowledges that there are certain disanalogies between truth and rightness claims; these

he discusses in Habermas (1990): 60–61. The disanalogies are not as important for our purposes asis the analogy.

30 Recently, Habermas has modified his conception of truth, but not his account of moral rightness, norhis contention that there is an analogy between the two. See Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justifi-cation, trans. Barbara Fultner (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

31 Habermas (1990): 76.


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(U) All affected can accept the consequences and the side effects its general observance can beanticipated to have for the satisfaction of everyone’s interests (and these consequences are preferredto those of known alternative possibilities for regulation).32

(U) serves as a bridging principle between particular values, interests, and com-mitments, on the one hand, and generalizable norms, on the other. In this way, itplays a role in practical discourse similar to that played by the principle ofinduction in theoretical discourse.33

The skeptic, however, is unimpressed by the appeal to (U). She replies that (U)seems to be nothing more than “a hasty generalization of moral intuitions peculiarto our own Western culture.”34 As a result, rather than being a universal principlerooted in the structure of moral argumentation, (U) seems to be a substantivenormative principle requiring independent justification. At best, (U) is merelycontingent; at worst, it is ethnocentric. Habermas responds to this third stageof skeptical attack with his well-known transcendental-pragmatic argument,designed to show that (U) is a necessary and unavoidable presupposition of anymoral argument, including the skeptic’s own argument against the cognitivist. Theaim of this argument is to establish that (U) is, as Habermas puts it, an “inescap-able presupposition of [an] irreplaceable discourse and in that sense universal.”35

32 Ibid: 65. Habermas’s more recent formulation of (U) is this: “A norm is valid when the foreseeableconsequences and side effects of its general observance for the interests and value-orientations ofeach individual could be jointly accepted by all concerned without coercion” (Jürgen Habermas,The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, trans. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo de Greiff[Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998] 42).

33 Habermas distinguishes (U), the general principle of moral argumentation, from the discourseprinciple (D): “Only those norms can claim to be valid that meet (or could meet) with the approvalof all affected in their capacity as participants in a practical discourse” (Habermas [1990]: 66). Inhis original account of the relationship between these two principles, Habermas claims that (D)presupposes (U); that is, it presupposes that norms can be justified. Habermas’s strategy is first todefend (U), then to make the transition to discourse ethics properly. More recently, Habermas hasrevised his account of the relationship between (U) and (D); he now argues that (U) is derived from(D), rather than vice versa. See Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to aDiscourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996) 109;and Habermas (1998): 41–43. For helpful discussion of the relationship between (U) and (D), seeKenneth Baynes, “Democracy and the Rechtstaat: Habermas’s Faktizität und Geltung,” The Cam-bridge Companion to Habermas, ed. Stephen K. White (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995) 201–32;and Cristina Lafont, The Linguistic Turn in Hermeneutic Philosophy, trans. José Medina (Cam-bridge: MIT Press, 1999), ch. 7. In any case, Habermas still maintains that (U) is the principle thatgoverns moral discourses. As I am more interested in his defense of (U), in particular against theskeptical charge that (U) is ethnocentric, I shall leave aside further discussion of (D) and of thecomplicated relationship between the two principles.

34 Habermas (1990): 76.35 Ibid: 84, emphasis mine.

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Habermas argues that in order to engage in argumentation at all, speakers mustpresuppose that all participants understand the argument to be a cooperativesearch for the truth and are motivated to agree or disagree solely on the basis of theunforced force of the better argument.36 The presuppositions themselves stipulatethat everyone who stands to make a relevant contribution is included in thediscourse, that everyone is able to participate equally in the raising and question-ing of validity claims, and that all participants are free of internal and externalcoercion in the evaluation of such validity claims.37 Establishing these rules38 asunavoidable presuppositions of any argument whatsoever, rather than merelycontingent conventions of Western forms of reasoning, involves demonstratingthat any violation of one of these rules leads the speaker into a performativecontradiction.39 Having established that these rules are unavoidable presupposi-tions of argumentation, Habermas next claims that (U) can be derived from them.Thus, if we grant that these presuppositions are necessary and universal, then (U)must be necessary and universal as well.40 If this is the case, then the skeptichimself, simply by engaging in an argument with the cognitivist in which heattempts to deny (U), “must inevitably subscribe to certain tacit presuppositionsof argumentation that are incompatible with the propositional content of hisobjection.”41 The skeptic thus falls into a performative contradiction and defeatshimself.

Both the defense of Habermas’s claim that the violation of any of the rules ofargument leads to a performative contradiction and the derivation of (U) fromthose rules are complex tasks. I shall not pursue either, however, because even ifwe grant that Habermas’s transcendental-pragmatic argument goes through, the

36 See ibid: 88–89.37 Ibid: 89. For a slightly expanded list of argumentative presuppositions, see Habermas (1998): 44.38 By calling these presuppositions “rules,” however, Habermas does not mean to imply that in order

to count as a discourse, the conversation in question must actually conform completely to theserules. The presuppositions of argument are idealizing assumptions that are implicitly adopted andintuitively known and that must be assumed to be approximated in order for us to enter intoargumentation at all. In other words, these are “idealizing assumptions that everyone who seriouslyengages in argumentation must make as a matter of fact” ( Jürgen Habermas, “Remarks on Dis-course Ethics,” Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics, trans. Ciaran Cronin[Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994] 50). However, given their status as idealizations, Habermas acknowl-edges that they have to be counterfactually imputed as governing in actual discourses, even though,in such actual discourses, we will always have to settle for approximations.

39 See Habermas (1990): 90–91.40 See ibid: 92–93. Habermas does not actually carry out the derivation of (U) from the rules of

argumentation; he only indicates that he thinks such a derivation is possible and suggests thedirection the argument might take. For a clear and concise attempt to derive (U), see William Rehg,Insight and Solidarity: The Discourse Ethics of Jürgen Habermas (Berkeley: U of California P,1994) ch. 3.

41 Habermas (1990): 82.


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skeptic has a fourth line of attack. The skeptic can avoid performative contradic-tion and thus potentially defeat the transcendental-pragmatic argument simply byrefusing to engage in discourse. Habermas describes such a skeptic as follows:

The consistent skeptic will deprive the transcendental pragmatist of a basis for his argument. Hemay, for example, take the attitude of an ethnologist vis-à-vis his own culture, shaking his head overphilosophical argumentation as though he were witnessing the unintelligible rites of a strange tribe.Nietzsche perfected this way of looking at philosophical matters, and Foucault has now rehabili-tated it.42

Habermas’s initial response to the consistent skeptic is to insist that argumentationis an integral part of our shared form of sociocultural life; as a result, trulyconsistent skepticism demands the nearly impossible task of cutting oneself offcompletely from the community of beings who argue. The skeptic “cannot, evenindirectly, deny that he moves in a shared sociocultural form of life, that he grewup in a web of communicative action, and that he reproduces his life in that web.”43

Thus, truly consistent skepticism is inconceivable; it is at best an abstract possi-bility, and not even a coherent one at that. As Habermas puts it, “the radicalskeptic’s refusal to argue is an empty gesture. No matter how consistent a dropouthe may be, he cannot drop out of the communicative practice of everyday life, tothe presuppositions of which he remains bound. And these in turn are at leastpartly identical with the presuppositions of argumentation as such.”44

But there is something a bit too quick about the move that Habermas makeshere. It is true that the presuppositions of the communicative practice of every-day life are partly identical with the presuppositions of argumentation, but thequalification is significant. For instance, elsewhere Habermas makes it clearthat he views “argumentative speech as a special case––in fact, a privilegedderivative––of action oriented toward reaching understanding,” that is, of com-municative action in general.45 Argumentation is a reflective and more highlyevolved form of communicative action, a form that emerges phylogenetically withthe modern age and ontogenetically with the attainment of a post-conventional egoidentity. Thus, argumentation and communicative action are not coextensive; theformer is a particular (though in Habermas’s view, a privileged) form of the latter.This means that although it is indeed the case that by rejecting communicativeaction, the skeptic also necessarily rejects argumentation, too, it is not the case that

42 Ibid: 99.43 Ibid: 100.44 Ibid: 100–01.45 Jürgen Habermas, “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action,” Moral Consciousness and

Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MITPress, 1990) 130.

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by rejecting argumentation, he also necessarily rejects communicative action.Thus, it is not obvious that the skeptic could not opt out of argumentation withoutopting out of communicative action in general. The plausibility of Habermas’sargument here relies heavily on his theory of modernity, specifically, the claimthat argumentation is a key feature of modern societies, such that the skepticwho is situated in such a society does not have the option of rejecting itwhile still embracing some other form of communicative interaction.46 Obviously,there is not sufficient space to delve into Habermas’s complex and wide-rangingtheory of modernity here; suffice it to say that it involves certain claimsabout social evolution and cultural learning processes––in short, claimsabout historical progress––that a Foucaultian skeptic would no doubt want toquestion.

Suppose, however, that the Foucaultian skeptic does not take up this line ofcriticism. Suppose instead that she just bites the bullet, grants Habermas for thesake of the argument on Habermas’s theory of modernity, and announces that sheis nonetheless happy to opt out of both argumentation in particular and commu-nicative interaction in general. In Habermas’s terminology, the only possiblemode of interaction that would be left open to the skeptic would be strategic.Habermas’s response to this final skeptical move is to insist that “the contexts ofcommunicative action represent an order for which there is no substitute.”47 Inpoint of fact, the very idea that one can choose between acting communicativelyand acting strategically exists, according to Habermas, only in the abstract; as heputs it, “it exists only for someone who takes the contingent perspective of anindividual actor.”48 In reality, Habermas claims,

The symbolic structures of every lifeworld are reproduced through three processes: cultural tradi-tion, social integration, and socialization. As I have shown elsewhere, these processes operate onlyin the medium of action oriented toward reaching understanding. There is no other, equivalentmedium in which these functions can be fulfilled. Individuals acquire and sustain their identities byappropriating traditions, belonging to social groups, and taking part in socializing interactions. Thatis why they, as individuals, have a choice between communicative and strategic action only in anabstract sense, i.e., in individual cases. They do not have the option of a long-term absence fromcontexts of action oriented toward reaching an understanding. That would mean regressing to themonadic isolation of strategic action, or schizophrenia and suicide. In the long run such absence isself-destructive.49

46 Habermas seems to acknowledge this point when he claims that his “justification strategy” for (U)“must be supplemented with genealogical arguments drawing on premises of modernization theory,if (U) is to be rendered plausible” (Habermas [1998]: 45).

47 Habermas (1990): 101–02.48 Ibid: 102.49 Ibid, emphasis added.


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In short, Habermas’s response to this line of argument is that it puts the skepticinto a hopeless position, leads her to “an existential dead end.”50

Foucault seems to have been painted into an unpleasant corner here. To be sure,this corner could have been avoided if we had challenged certain of Habermas’sargumentative moves along the way. For instance, we could have questionedHabermas’s claim that the consistent skeptic must opt out of discourse andcommunicative action altogether by challenging, on Foucault’s behalf, Haber-mas’s characterization of argumentative discourse. I have refrained from raisingthese sorts of challenges not because I want to allow Habermas once again to setthe terms of the debate, but because it seems to me that following Habermas’sdebate with the moral skeptic to its conclusion leads us to a very interesting point:namely, the point at which it becomes clear that what is ultimately at stake in thedebate between the Habermasian discourse ethicist and the Foucaultian moralskeptic is the coherence of the self. The question now becomes whether Habermasis correct in maintaining that the coherence of the self is secured “only in themedium of action oriented toward reaching understanding.” In order to addressthis question, we will have to take a closer look at Habermas and Foucault’saccounts of the self.

III. TWO RIVAL VERSIONS OF SUBJECTIVATION:INDIVIDUATION THROUGH SOCIALIZATION VS. SUBJECTION

As I will use it here, the term “subjectivation” refers to the process by whichneonates are transformed into competent subjects who have the capacity to think,deliberate, and act. Both Foucault and Habermas are interested in this process––indeed, their accounts of this process are arguably crucial to their respectivephilosophical projects––but they understand it differently. Foucault’s use of theterm “subjection” underscores what he takes to be the ambivalent nature ofsubjectivation. As Foucault sees it, in the modern era, individuals become subjectsby being subjected to the forces of disciplinary power and normalization. Bycontrast, Habermas’s term “individuation through socialization” suggests a morebenign process whereby autonomous individuals are socialized into a com-municatively (thus, rationally) structured lifeworld. In this way, each of theseaccounts captures an important part of the truth about subjectivation, but only apart; each is too one-sided to tell the full story. However, their differences not-withstanding, these accounts also have more in common than has been previouslyrecognized; as a result, a fruitful integration of the insights of these two accountsis possible, even though developing such an integrated perspective will necessitatemodifying or recasting certain aspects of their views.

50 Ibid.

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Drawing on work in cognitive, developmental, and social psychology, Haber-mas offers a thoroughly intersubjective account of the self which traces theformation of the self through processes of socialization that are rooted in thelifeworld. According to Habermas, the self has an intersubjective core because itis generated communicatively, “on the path from without to within.”51 Habermas’saccount of cognitive and linguistic development draws heavily on the work ofG. H. Mead, according to whom an individual’s sense of herself as a subject, aself-conscious being, an “I,” first emerges in interactions with an other for whomshe is a “me.”52 This is the general picture that Habermas has in mind when he saysthat:

The self [. . .] is dependent upon recognition by addressees because it generates itself as a responseto the demands of an other in the first place [. . .]. The ego, which seems to me to be given in myself-consciousness as what is purely my own, cannot be maintained by me solely through my ownpower, as it were for me alone––it does not “belong” to me. Rather, this ego always retains anintersubjective core because the process of individuation from which it emerges runs through thenetwork of linguistically mediated interactions.53

Thus, self-consciousness is dependent upon the recognition of others, specifically,their “recognition of my claim to uniqueness and irreplaceability.”54

The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of moral development. It is because othersattribute ethical accountability to me that I gradually transform myself into anaccountable moral agent. Following Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, Haber-mas breaks down the development of moral agency into pre-conventional, con-ventional, and post-conventional stages. These stages are distinguished by greaterand greater degrees of reflexivity, abstraction, and generalization, with particularemphasis placed by Habermas on reflexivity: “[T]he simple behavioral expecta-tion of the first level becomes reflexive at the next level––expectations can bereciprocally expected; and the reflexive behavioral expectation of the second levelagain becomes reflexive at the third level––norms can be normed.”55 It is thisgreater degree of reflexivity that explains how Habermas can view individuals as

51 Jürgen Habermas, “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory ofSubjectivity,” Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992) 177.

52 For an insightful critique of Habermas’s reading of Mead, see Peter Dews, “CommunicativeParadigms and the Question of Subjectivity: Habermas, Mead and Lacan,” Habermas: A CriticalReader, ed. Dews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 87–117.

53 Habermas (1992): 169–70.54 Ibid: 186.55 Jürgen Habermas, “Moral Development and Ego Identity,” Communication and the Evolution of

Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979) 86.


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produced through but not determined by socialization. As he puts it, “identity isproduced through socialization, that is, through the fact that the growing child firstof all integrates into a specific social system by appropriating symbolic generali-ties; it is later secured and developed through individuation, that is, preciselythrough a growing independence in relation to social systems.”56

For Habermas, then, the subject is produced through but not determined bysocialization processes, and such processes take place in the medium of commu-nicative action. Foucault, for his part, would agree, I think, that the individual isformed “on the path from without to within”; his disagreement with Habermaswould be over how to characterize the “without” (and, thus, the resulting“within”). For Foucault, the “without,” the social relations within which and bywhich subjects are constituted, is structured by relations of power, where power isunderstood in basically strategic, rather than communicative, terms.57 Foucaultquite infamously suggested that the individual subject is an effect of these omni-present, strategic power relations. As he put it,

[I]t is [. . .] a mistake to think of the individual as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom orsome multiple, inert matter to which power is applied, or which is struck by a power thatsubordinates or destroys individuals. In actual fact, one of the first effects of power that it allowsbodies, gestures, discourses, and desires to be identified and constituted as something individual.The individual is not, in other words, power’s opposite number; the individual is one of power’s firsteffects.58

Foucault’s genealogical works of the 1970s aim to show that disciplinary, nor-malizing relations of power form, for us, the “without” from which the “within”of the modern subject is constituted.

At first glance, then, it looks as if Habermas and Foucault offer diametricallyopposed accounts of subjectivation. Although both of them understand subjecti-vation as a social process, Habermas views it as a rationally and communicativelymediated process of socialization, grounded in reciprocal relations of mutualrecognition. Relations of power seem to play no role whatsoever in Habermas’saccount.59 Foucault, by contrast, understands subjectivation as a process of sub-jection to normalizing, disciplinary (strategic) power. Moreover, his claim that

56 Ibid: 74.57 For the characterization of power as strategic, see Foucault (1997); and Michel Foucault, “After-

word: The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2nd ed.,ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 208–26.

58 Foucault (2003): 29–30.59 For a critique of Habermas along these lines, see Hans-Herbert Kögler, “The Self-Empowered

Subject: Habermas, Foucault, and Hermeneutic Reflexivity,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 22(1996): 13–44.

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power is omnipresent seems to rule out in advance any possible role for non-strategic, communicative relations in this process.60

However, things are not quite so simple as all that. For one thing, although heemphasizes the role that communicative action plays in socialization processes, insome of his early writings, Habermas also acknowledges the important––indeed,necessary––role that power plays in this process in the form of asymmetricalpower relations between parents (and other authority figures) and children. Fol-lowing Freud and Mead, Habermas regards the internalization of structures ofauthority as a necessary feature of the process of subjectivation and the develop-ment of moral autonomy. As Habermas puts it:

[T]he task of passing to the conventional stage of interaction consists in reworking the imperativearbitrary will of a dominant figure of this kind [i.e., a parent] into the authority of a suprapersonalwill detached from this specific person [. . .]. [P]articular behavior patterns become detached fromthe context-bound intentions and speech acts of specific individuals and take on the external formof social norms to the extent that the sanctions associated with them are internalized [. . .], that is,to the extent that they are assimilated into the personality of the growing child and thus madeindependent of the sanctioning power of concrete reference persons.61

The growing child undergoes a transformation from a dependence on a whollyexternal authority (usually a parent) through an internalization of that authorityrelation to an ability to reflect internally on social norms, relationships, andexpectations, and assess their validity. Habermas suggests that this internalizationof authority is necessitated by the lack of a common instinctual repertoire thatmight perform a similar action-coordinating function for non-linguistic beings.For us, “this void is [. . .] filled by normatively generalized behavioral expecta-tions, which take the place of instinctual regulation; however, these norms needto be anchored within the acting subject through more or less internalized socialcontrols.”62 The internalization of social controls is thus a necessary––though nota sufficient––condition for both adherence to and reflection upon moral norms;thus, it is a necessary condition for the achievement of individual autonomy. Thispoint reveals once again, though in a different way, the crucial link betweenHabermas’s discourse ethics and his account of subjectivation; discourse ethics is“dependent on a form of life that meets it halfway. There has to be a modicum ofcongruence between morality and the practices of socialization and education.

60 For the claim that power is omnipresent, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1:An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978) 93. For an insightful discussion ofthis claim, see Richard Lynch, “Is Power All There Is? Michel Foucault and the ‘Omnipresence’ ofPower Relations,” Philosophy Today 42 (1998): 65–70.

61 Habermas (1990): 153–54.62 Habermas (1992): 179.


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The latter must promote the requisite internalization of superego controls and theabstractness of ego identities.”63

All of which suggests that, although communicative action plays a crucialrole in subjectivation for Habermas, the internalization of power relations andsocial controls also plays an important, indeed, given certain facts about thehuman condition, anthropologically unavoidable, role as well. So it is not thatHabermas denies that power plays a role in subjectivation, it is just that he iscompletely sanguine about that role, for at least two reasons. First, he assumesthat the social controls that have to be internalized are rational and the authorityof the parents who enforce them is legitimate; thus, they are unobjectionablefrom a normative point of view. Second, he assumes that the outcome of thisprocess is the capacity for autonomy, a capacity that allows the individualsubject to reflect critically on and assess the validity of the norms, relationships,practices, institutions, and so forth, into and through which the individual hasbeen socialized. I will return to these two points momentarily. For now, I wouldsimply like to note that although Habermas emphasizes the role that communi-cative action plays in socialization processes, he is nevertheless committed tothe belief that communicative action is necessary but not sufficient for social-ization. It may be true, as Habermas puts it, that socialization processes “operateonly in the medium of action oriented toward reaching understanding” (myemphasis), but this does not mean that they operate in a medium structured bycommunicative action alone. Socialization requires exercises of power that arenon-reciprocal, and that rest on actual (though not necessarily physical) force,not just the unforced force of rational insight or the better argument. As anyparent knows, the force of rational insight is powerless in the face of an intran-sigent and willful toddler. Try as one may to reason with her about why sheshould eat her peas or go to bed or brush her teeth or even hold your hand ina parking lot, often it is necessary to resort to strategic interaction (whether thattakes the form of threatening negative sanctions or offering positive induce-ments) in order to get her to comply. As Horkheimer and Adorno put it in afamous passage from The Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Humanity had to inflictterrible injuries on itself before the self––the identical, purpose-directed, mas-culine character of human beings––was created, and something of this processis repeated in every childhood.”64

63 Jürgen Habermas, “Morality and Ethical Life: Does Hegel’s Critique of Kant Apply to DiscourseEthics?” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and ShierryWeber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) 207.

64 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002) 26.

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It is here that Habermas’s use of the term “authority” is crucial because itimplies that the power relation that the growing child must internalize in orderto become autonomous is both rational and legitimate. However, even if wegrant Habermas this point, the child is incapable of seeing it as rational andlegitimate until it has taken up the moral point of view, which it can only do byinternalizing the power relation. Indeed, Habermas has acknowledged this:“[F]or the growing child this question [of whether a norm is valid] has alreadybeen given an affirmative answer before it can pose itself to him as a ques-tion.”65 The crucial point for Habermas is that “the social control exercised vianorms that are valid for specific groups is not based on repression alone.”66 Thisway of putting it suggests that Habermas is willing to admit that the socialcontrol that is made possible by the internalization of structures of authority isat least partly based in repression. The key point is that such internalization andthe autonomy to which it gives rise is not based solely in repression, else it“could not obligate the actors to obey but only force them into submissive-ness.”67 However, the question remains, how is the child ever to be in a positionto assess the legitimacy of these structures of power/authority, given that he orshe first has to internalize them in order to be capable of assessing theirlegitimacy?68

Habermas might respond here by appealing to the distinction between theinternal motivating force of reasons and the force of external sanctions; thedevelopmental achievement of the autonomous, post-conventional self yields pre-cisely the capacity to be motivated by the former rather than merely by the latter.69

As he puts it: “We do not adhere to recognized norms from a sense of duty becausethey are imposed upon us by the threat of sanctions but because we give them toourselves.”70 However, this way of putting it overlooks the fact that, as Habermashimself has acknowledged, we are only able to become the sort of beings who arecapable of feeling obligated or motivated by reasons in the first place becauseof the internalization of structures of authority, a result that is accomplishedprimarily through the mechanisms of parental discipline and the educational

65 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2: Lifeworld and System: ACritique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987) 39.

66 Ibid.67 Ibid: 45.68 For an insightful discussion of this point, see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in

Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1997).69 This is what ultimately distinguishes Habermas’s view from Mead’s, who had a somewhat darker

view of the implications of this internalization process. For an interesting critical comparison ofHabermas and Mead on this point, see Dews (1999).

70 Habermas (1994): 42. For helpful discussion of this point, see Rehg (1994): 23–24.


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system.71 Given that this is the case, the worry is that the distinction betweenexternal force and internal force (which is, after all, internalized before the childis in a position to make this very distinction) does not cut much ice.

The worry here is a Foucaultian one, but it should not be confused with theirrationalist claim that the demands of rationality and autonomy are per se perni-cious, that they are nothing more than domination, that they are, as Foucault onceput it, “the enemy that should be eliminated.”72 Foucault did worry that our modernform of rationality is dangerous, a worry that led him to wonder: “What is thisReason that we use? What are its historical effects? What are its limits, and whatare its dangers? How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed topracticing a rationality that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers?”73

But he also believed that the awareness of these intrinsic dangers is perfectlycompatible with an acceptance of the necessity, indeed “indispensability” of suchforms of rationality.74 What specifically is the danger that Foucault believes to beintrinsic to rationality? Foucault offers as an example the link between the ratio-nality of social Darwinism and the legitimization of Nazi racism. “This was, ofcourse,” he goes on to acknowledge, “an irrationality, but an irrationality that was

71 At this point, one might be tempted to object that this critique of Habermas is guilty of committingthe genetic fallacy, and to insist that the origins of our capacity for autonomy are simply not relevantfor our assessment of that capacity. For a classic formulation of this objection in the context of theFoucault/Habermas debate, see Fraser (1989): 35–54. This objection is often a conversation stopper,but it is not at all obvious to me that it should be. In the first place, not all genetic arguments arefallacious, and, in this case, I would argue that this genetic argument is not obviously fallacious. Toassume that it is fallacious is to assume that the early stages of childhood development are like aladder that we discard after we have ascended it. Against this assumption, one could cite Freud’scontention that “in the realm of the mind [. . .], what is primitive is so commonly preservedalongside of the transformed version which has arisen from it that it is unnecessary to give instancesas evidence” (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey [New York:W.W. Norton and Co., 1961] 16). Moreover, as much of the literature on personal autonomy shows(see, for example, John Christman, “Autonomy and Personal History,” Canadian Journal of Phi-losophy 21 [1991]: 1–24; and Alfred Mele, Autonomous Agents: From Self-Control to Autonomy[Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995]), genetic or historical considerations of how someone came to be“autonomous” are often relevant to our assessments of whether that person is genuinely autono-mous. I discuss these issues more fully in Allen, “The Entanglement of Power and Validity: Foucaultand Critical Theory,” in Timothy O’Leary and Christopher Falzon (eds), Foucault and Philosophy(London: Blackwell, forthcoming). For another helpful response on Foucault’s behalf to the geneticfallacy objection, see James Wong, “Sapere Aude: Critical Ontology and the Case of Child Devel-opment,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 37 (2004): 863–82.

72 Michel Foucault, “Space, Knowledge, Power,” Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, vol.3, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 2000) 358. Interestingly enough, this commentcomes in response to a question about Habermas’s critique of postmodernism.

73 Ibid.74 Ibid.

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at the same time, after all, a certain form of rationality.”75 The example suggeststhat the danger Foucault has in mind is that, because forms of rationality arehistorically contingent and rooted in human practices, they can be and indeedoften are connected in subtle and insidious ways with power/knowledge rela-tions.76 But the imprimatur of rationality can serve to obscure that very connection,and it is the function of critique to shed light on such connections.

So Habermas’s account of subjectivation is much more complicated than itappears at first. Habermas acknowledges a crucial role for power in the process ofsubjectivation, and this acknowledgement opens his account up to the Foucaultianline of criticism that I have articulated. Foucault’s account of subjectivation is alsomore complicated than it appears at first. Many critics have assumed, wrongly, thatFoucault thinks that the subject is merely epiphenomenal, or that it does not reallyexist, or, at the very least, that it lacks the capacities for thought, deliberation, andaction that have been traditionally associated with it.77 Habermas himself claimsthat, “from [Foucault’s] perspective, socialized individuals can only be perceivedas exemplars, as standardized products of some discourse formation––as

75 Ibid.76 One might object at this point that, given the normative confusions in his work, Foucault is not able

to make normative distinctions between different kinds of power relations; thus, labeling some sortsof power relations “pernicious” on Foucault’s behalf might seem unjustified, insofar as such ajudgment seems to rely on a normative conception of social relations that Foucault’s work does notprovide. It is undeniably true that Foucault never offers a normative conception of subjectivation orof social relations and that he has a tendency to use the word power to cover an overly broad rangeof phenomenon (which he himself admits; see Foucault [1997]: 299). However, it is also the caseif we understand Foucault to be a moral skeptic––rather than a moral nihilist or an immoralist––thenthere would be nothing inconsistent or contradictory about him offering normative distinctionsbetween different kinds of power relations––or about others doing so on his behalf. Indeed, in someof his late work, Foucault does distinguish between power, which is not per se pernicious, objec-tionable, or bad, and domination, which, in his view, is. The key to the distinction is that powerrelations are reversible and unstable, whereas in relations of domination, the free flow of power isrestricted and some individuals or groups are unable to exercise it (see Foucault [1997]: 283).Although there are certainly questions that one could raise about this distinction (and I discuss someof these in Allen, The Power of Feminist Theory: Domination, Resistance, Solidarity [Boulder, CO:Westview Press, 1999] ch. 2), it does, I think, provide a compelling response to the foregoingobjection. Moreover, this discussion highlights that what is crucially at stake in the debate betweenFoucault and Habermas is not the substantive content of Habermas’s normative conceptions ofsubjectivation and of social relations but the strongly universalistic, context-transcendent status thathe tends to claim for them. I shall return to this issue later.

77 See, for example, Linda Alcoff, “Feminist Politics and Foucault: The Limits to a Collaboration,”Crises in Continental Philosophy, ed. Arlene Dallery and Charles Scott (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,1990) 69–86; Habermas (1987): lectures 9 and 10; Honneth (1991); and McCarthy, Ideals andIllusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1991).


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individual copies that are mechanically punched out.”78 Thus, Habermas seems toassume that Foucault views the imposition of disciplinary power as both necessaryand sufficient for subjectivation, that he thinks of the subjected subject as nothingmore than the sum total of the disciplinary, normalizing relations of power thatconstitute him/her.79

However, Foucault’s understanding of individuals as effects of power does notnecessitate viewing them as inert, incapable of action, or wholly determined byoutside forces. To the contrary, Foucault himself insists that “individuals do notsimply circulate in those networks [of power]; they are in a position to both submitto and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power;they are always also its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals.It is not applied to them.”80 The process of subjectivation is, for Foucault, alwaystwo-sided. The process of being subjected to power relations constitutes one as asubject, but one is simultaneously enabled to be a subject in and through thisprocess. Moreover, although there is a sense in which Foucault does think thatnormalizing, disciplinary power is necessary for creating the modern subject, healso views the aim of his genealogies to be the exposure of what he calls “thecontemporary limits of the necessary,” that is, toward revealing as contingentforms of constraint that are falsely presented as necessary.81 The role of disciplin-ary power in the constitution of the modern subject is one such form of constraint.Indeed, Foucault’s late interest in practices of the self in antiquity is preciselymotivated by a concern with asking “how [. . .] the growth of capabilities [can] bedisconnected from the intensification of power relations?”82 To be sure, it doesseem likely that Foucault would maintain that some sort of power relation isnecessary for subjectivation. This would seem to follow from his claim that thereis no outside to power, that power is omnipresent in social relations. Sincesubjectivation is a social process, then it will necessarily be inflected with poweras well. In any case, this view does not distinguish him from Habermas, who alsoacknowledges a necessary role for power in subjectivation, even if he does notseem particularly worried about the implications of this role.

The crucial issue is whether or not Foucault holds the imposition of disciplinarypower to be sufficient for subjectivation. Does he view the subject as a mechani-cally punched-out copy, as nothing more than the relations of power that constituteit? Is he guilty of reducing subjectivity to domination? The answer to these

78 Habermas (1987): 293.79 For similar critiques of Foucault, see McCarthy (1991): ch. 2; and Kögler (1996).80 Foucault (2003): 29.81 Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel

Foucault, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) 313.82 Ibid: 317.

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questions is no. In fact, Foucault explicitly claims that power is “always a way ofacting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or beingcapable of action.”83 Not only that, but Foucault does not deny the possibility ofnon-strategic, communicative forms of interaction, nor does he deny that suchforms of interaction may play some role in subjectivation. Indeed, Foucault arguesthat “it is [. . .] necessary to distinguish power relations from relationships ofcommunication which transmit information by means of a language, a system ofsigns, or any other symbolic medium.”84 Power and communication do not consti-tute two distinct domains of social life; rather, they are analytically distinct butpractically intertwined “types of relationship which in fact always overlap oneanother, support one another reciprocally, and use each other mutually as means toan end.”85 Interestingly, Foucault cites educational institutions––which play acrucial role in the process of subjectivation––as examples of the intertwining ofthese two distinct types of relationship. Such institutions make use of “a wholeensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders,exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the ‘value’of eachperson and of the levels of knowledge)” and of “a whole series of power processes(enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy).”86

To be sure, these insights in Foucault’s late work about the nature of commu-nicative relationships and their connections to power are quite underdeveloped;perhaps had he lived long enough for the planned debate with Habermas to takeplace, he would have developed them further. In any case, the important point forthe purposes of this discussion is that these insights are not, contrary to what isoften assumed, incompatible with the Foucaultian claim that there is no outside topower.87

Each of these accounts highlights an important aspect of subjectivation. Haber-mas emphasizes the role played by communicative rationality, while Foucaulthighlights that of disciplinary power.Yet each account remains relatively one-sided.Although Habermas acknowledges the role played by power in the internalization

83 Foucault (1983): 220. Of course, this quote comes from a relatively late essay, which raises thevexed issue of the relationship between the middle Foucault account of power and the late Foucaultaccount of practices of the self. Many of Foucault’s critics have maintained that the “return” of thesubject in the late Foucault stands in contradiction to his earlier analysis of power. See, for example,Peter Dews, “The Return of Subjectivity in the Late Foucault,” Radical Philosophy 51 (1989): 37–41; Habermas (1994); and McCarthy (1991): ch. 2. For arguments to the contrary, see Allen, “TheAnti-Subjective Hypothesis: Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject,” The PhilosophicalForum 31/2 (2000): 113–30.

84 Foucault (1983): 217.85 Ibid: 218.86 Ibid: 218–19. For a helpful discussion of this example, see Tully (1999): 136.87 On this point, see Lynch (1998): 67.


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of structures of authority, he is overly sanguine about the implications of this role;and although Foucault acknowledges that communicative relationships can anddo play a role in disciplinary institutions such as the educational system, theserelationships and their connections to disciplinary power remain underdeveloped.Moreover, the one-sidedness of these accounts helps to explain certain persistentfeatures of the critical reception of their respective authors. Habermas’s relativeinattention to the power-ladenness of subjectivation arguably makes it difficult forhim to offer a satisfactory critical-theoretical account of some of the most pressingsocial problems of our time, including sexism and racism, which are reproducedand maintained, in large part, through the production of subordinating modes ofidentity. Although Foucault’s work is widely believed to be more useful for thistask, his relative inattention to the communicative dimension of social relationsarguably undercuts his ability to satisfactorily theorize the possibilities for indi-vidual and collective resistance to and transformation of the relations of dominationthat his own work helps to expose. In this sense, these two accounts of subjectiva-tion can be seen as complementary: Foucault’s account highlights the role thatdisciplinary practices play in the formation of the autonomous self; Habermas’saccount emphasizes the ways in which the achievement of autonomy enables theself to reflect critically on such disciplinary practices.88 However, simply assertingtheir complementarity is not enough, for Foucault’s account of subjection seems tocall into question Habermas’s faith in the reflexive capacities of the subject, whilethe plausibility of Habermas’s account of the development of autonomy seems torest on the denial that any significant consequences follow from the necessary rolethat power plays in socialization processes. Thus, if the insights of these twoaccounts are to be integrated, some of the fundamental commitments of these twothinkers will have to be recast.

IV. CONCLUSION

I have already indicated the principal way in which Foucault’s account willhave to be recast in light of this discussion. In order to overcome the one-sidedemphasis on power in his account of subjectivation, Foucaultians would need todevelop some of the very underdeveloped ideas about communication, reciprocity,and the distinction between power and domination that are mentioned in Fou-cault’s late work and to think through how these ideas bear on the issue ofsubjectivation. Doing so would not only completely undermine Habermas’s claimthat Foucault reduces subjectivation to the imposition of disciplinary power, it

88 For a similar claim, though one that is cast in terms of a contrast between contingent versusuniversal aspects of subjectivity, see Tully (1999): 107–08.

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would also make it possible to develop a more satisfactory Foucaultian account ofindividual and collective resistance to modern disciplinary power. Given thatFoucault himself appeared to be moving in this direction in his late work, there areresources within Foucault’s oeuvre for developing such an account. However,putting those resources to work will require that we rethink the relationshipbetween the various periods of Foucault’s work, particularly the issue of thecompatibility between the early and middle Foucault, on the one hand, and his lateaccount of practices of the self, on the other. Although critics began castigatingFoucault for contradicting his earlier analyses of power almost immediately afterthe publication of volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality, more recentscholarship has argued that there is much more continuity to Foucault’s diverseperiods than has previously been thought.89

With respect to Habermas, overcoming the one-sided emphasis on commu-nicative rationality in his account of subjectivation would require Habermas toconfront more directly the implications of the necessary and unavoidable rolethat power plays in subjectivation processes. Although, as we have seen, Hab-ermas does not deny this role, he does seem to deny that it has any significantconsequences for his account of autonomy. However, as Judith Butler hasrecently argued, because power plays an unavoidable role in subjectivation, sub-jects are vulnerable to becoming psychically attached to and invested in theforms of subjectivity and identity that are subordinating.90 It is precisely thisdimension of subjectivation and the psychic cost of the subjugation that Hab-ermas’s account glosses over. Moreover, because the child cannot distinguishbetween subordinating and non-subordinating modes of attachment, and becauseshe will attach to painful and subordinating modes of identity rather than notattach––for some form of attachment is necessary for psychic survival andsocial existence––her psychic attachment to subordination may well precede andinform the development of her capacity for autonomy. This is one way of fillingout a claim that Butler makes elsewhere: “[P]ower pervades the very conceptualapparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of thecritic.”91

If power invades the conceptual apparatus of the subject who is attemptingto reflect critically on its nature and effects, however, then it will be difficult tomaintain the sharp distinction between power and validity that is so central to

89 See, for example Thomas Flynn, Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume 2: A Poststruc-turalist Mapping of History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005).

90 Butler (1997).91 Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’,” Feminist

Contentions: A Philsophical Exchange, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, andNancy Fraser (New York: Routledge, 1995) 39.


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Habermas’s normative-philosophical enterprise.92 Indeed, it sometimes seems as ifthis is precisely why Habermas insists on downplaying the role the power plays insocialization processes. However, the entanglement of power and validity onlyposes a serious problem if one assumes that there are only two possible ways ofunderstanding the relationship between power and validity: either validity isreduced to nothing more than power and autonomy to nothing more than disci-plinary subjection––a position that Habermas rightly sees as normatively andpolitically disastrous but wrongly imputes to Foucault––or validity is understoodas wholly distinct from and unsullied by power relations––in which case the purityof pure reason slips in through the back door, a position that Habermas himselfaims to avoid.93 But there is a third, and better, possibility: to give up on thedemand for purity altogether. Doing so would mean that acknowledging theunavoidable entanglement of validity and power, but without reducing the formerto the latter.94 Moreover, accepting this claim need not completely undermine thefoundation of Habermas’s normative philosophical project, though it does neces-sitate interpreting it in a much more pragmatic and contextualist way than

92 Indeed, Habermas acknowledges this point in a roundabout sort of way in the context of his critiqueof Nietzsche: he rejects Nietzsche’s account of bad conscience on the grounds that such an accountmakes it impossible to maintain the distinction between power and validity. See Habermas (1987):121–26.

93 See ibid: 322.94 One might well wonder about the status of and basis for this claim that power and validity are

unavoidably entangled. Is this an empirically based generalization? Or an a priori claim based onphilosophical reflections about human social interaction? I would suggest that we might view it inthe same way that Habermas himself did in his early work: as an empirically grounded claim aboutthe quasi-transcendental anthropologically basic features of human sociocultural forms of life (seeJürgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro [Boston, MA: BeaconPress, 1971]). The theory of cognitive interests offered in Habermas’s early work attempts to splitthe difference between the empirical and the transcendental levels of analysis by uncovering a setof anthropologically basic features of human social life that “have a transcendental function butarise from actual structures of human life” (Habermas [1971]: 194). (There are interesting connec-tions that could be made here between Habermas’s notion of cognitive interests and Foucault’saccount of the historical a priori in his early work; see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: AnArchaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A. Sheridan-Smith [New York: Pantheon, 1970]. Idiscuss these similarities in Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, chs. 3 and 6). In Knowledge andHuman Interests, Habermas himself viewed power (along with work and language or interaction) asan anthropological given, as an ineradicable features of human social life; later, he famouslyretracted this claim, and viewed power as an unnecessary and potentially eradicable deformation ofnormatively structured communicative interaction. As I see it, this was a serious mistake. Unfor-tunately, it seems to me that we have all the inductive evidence that we might possibly need tomotivate the conclusion that power is an ineradicable feature of human social interaction. Moreover,even if we could imagine a form of sociocultural life that was completely purified of powerrelations, such a form of life would arguably not be recognizably human.

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Habermas himself has tended to do.95 In particular, the status of the normativeidealizations––the norms of universal respect and egalitarian reciprocity that formthe core of the ideal speech situation96––that are central to Habermas’scritical project would have to be recast. Recognizing the unavoidableentanglement of power and validity necessitates acknowledging the historicaland social specificity of these idealizations, their rootedness in a particularhistorical, social, and cultural context––namely, the context of late Westernmodernity––which, in turn, requires viewing them as open to contestation andrevision.

In a sense, then, the outcome of this restaging of the debate between Foucaultand Habermas is a victory of sorts for the limited form of moral skepticismsketched above. Recasting Habermas’s metatheoretical claims about the status ofhis normative idealizations in a more contextualist and pragmatic way moves himmuch further than he would care to move in the direction of a kind of skepticismabout the universalizability of those idealizations and, thus, about the context-transcendent validity of the moral norms that can be justified by means of them.However, such a move certainly need not result in a collapse into moral nihilismor immoralism, as Habermas seems to fear. Foucaultian moral skepticism isperfectly compatible, as I argued in section one above, with an acceptance ofsubstantive normative commitments, provided that these commitments are under-stood as specific and local, as rooted in contingent social practices that areconnected with relations of power/knowledge. Such skepticism is even compatiblewith the same kinds of substantive first-order normative commitments––to greaterpolitical inclusiveness and openness and against, as Foucault once put it, non-consensuality––that Habermas cherishes. All that is required, on Foucault’s view,is that we view such commitments as inescapably rooted in a particular, histori-cally, culturally, and socially specific context––the context of late Western moder-nity.97 This, in turn, requires that we be much more cautious than Habermas has

95 For a convincing defense of such an interpretation of Habermas, see McCarthy in Hoy andMcCarthy (1994). One might well argue that Habermas himself has moved in this more pragmaticand contextualist direction over the last decade or so. For an insightful discussion of these issues,see Maeve Cooke, Re-presenting the Good Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

96 For this formulation of the norms that are fundamental to the ideal speech situation, see SeylaBenhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics(New York: Routledge, 1992).

97 Indeed, Habermas seems to commit himself to just such a view with his recognition of the inherentsituatedness or impurity of reason and its ideals. For discussion of this point, see McCarthy (1991):ch. 2. In other words, whatever independent grounds one might have for objecting to this charac-terization of the normative status of our ideals, Habermas himself seems committed to it. Thequestion then is whether such a commitment is compatible with his commitment to the context-transcendence and universality of our fundamental normative commitments. As should be clear bynow, I think the answer to this question is no. If this is true, then the best way to take up the


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tended to be about claiming a strongly universalistic or context-transcendentstatus for these commitments.98 In a world in which Western moral and politicalideals of freedom and democracy continue to be so closely associated with themorally bankrupt projects of colonialism and empire, however, such a shift mightseem less like a loss than a welcome––perhaps even long overdue––change for thebetter.

Dartmouth College

Habermasian project is to reinterpret it in a more contextualist way than he himself has tended to do.For prominent and productive examples of such ways of interpreting and taking up the Habermasiancritical project, see Benhabib (1992), Cooke (2006), and McCarthy (1991).

98 Though we might still understand them as context-transcending, that is, as aiming at transcendenceof context, even as we acknowledge that such transcendence is an impossible to achieve ideal. Onthis point, see Cooke (2006), and McCarthy in Hoy and McCarthy (1994): ch. 3.

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Documents

Discourse, Power, And Subjectivation