On the 'Habermas-Foucault' debate of the 80s: A note of memory and reassessment

Habermas is a Kantian who provides an ideal form for what Lacanians call the 'university discourse', or for the bureaucratic form of communicative capitalism. Habermasians are typically university-educated left-liberals who are or want to be employed in a managerial and professional capacity. Habermasianism should be taken seriously as a kind of socialism, perhaps as ethics for its ruling class, which historically has been the university-educated professional class, functioning somewhat more autonomously than in liberal and neoliberal capitalism, which can use such people but needs them less, and which generally has few pretensions to be democratic. Left-liberals or 'progressives' in America generally follow an ideology of which Habermasianism is one of the more well-developed forms, obviously shaped by German social democracy. It is certainly a distinct theory of governance from neoliberalism, and I would say it comes out of the democratic (parliamentary) republican tradition in distinction from (more than convergence with) the liberal one. 

The appeal of Habermasianism in my generation (I went to Berkeley in the 80s, and Foucault had been there and just died and had enormous influence, include on the 'New Historicist' school of literary criticism), while Habermas was also big--the appeal was to an idea of radical or participatory democracy. And there I think its appeal remains. This was historically one of the 'utopian' ideals of the left, among the 'models' sometimes constructed of a more democratic society. Workers' Soviets or factory councils, cooperatives (with all their political ambiguities, as capitalists pretending they are socialists, and building socialism in one private company where the workers become a labor bourgeoisie, if not aristocracy, to use Lenin's term that describes mainstream labor unions unconnected, as in America, to socialist parties or traditions, wanting to share in the spoils of capitalism and signing no-strike pledges while advertising themselves to capital as able to collaborate in management), kibbutzim, and related models that appeared in radical socialist and workers' movements from 1848 to at least 1956. Of course, Habermasianism is a politics as "discourse ethics," so it obviously empowers managers with a technical or professional training in 'discourse.' I did not like the bureaucratic managers at the university I had to deal with, who were usually former students, as it happens overwhelmingly female and sometimes gay (I mean that not to blame women or gays, of course, nor feminism and gay liberation, but to point out what the specificity of this form of discursive authority found itself in), and I noticed most of them seemed idealistic people who had some ideology or ethical theory of correct communication. That was very important. Women functionaries especially tended to like this, and they would often get training in 'communication skills' or 'social skills.' This included emotional management and representation (the tactical deployment of claims to feel an authorizing emotion (for a boss if female) or observe a de-authorizing emotion (for a subordinate, or student, I think especially if male--for it was also the days of a kind of 'radical feminism' (or a set of legitimating gestures towards it, seeking 'radical' support--because university students have a tendency, or did since the 60s, to want to be 'radical', which may mean implacable in expressing will against some idea of what is an 'oppressive' norm of 'the system'--funny, since this can be reversed and misrecognized). There were correct and incorrect ways to 'communicate'; that is, participate in discursive regimes of management and its self-legitimation (apparently a constant need, as if there were a built-in 'legitimation crisis', to misuse Habermas's term from his eponymous work that is perhaps his sole truly 'Marxist' one, which shared in the general assessment of the time (the 70s) that classical class conflict was over and done with, but, following Marcuse and in line with others, like Castoriadis, he thought other possible anti-systemic conflicts existed, largely in cultural spheres.

I think what persists of Habermasianism, such as perhaps in the work of American pragmatist philosopher of language Robert Brandom, is the idea and desire for something like radical or participatory democracy. The idea is that language itself is intrinsically democratic because not only, as in Wittgenstein, are all meanings public, but, on Fregean grounds, statements are truth- or validity-claims (an order implies that it is just, and can be contested as such--though one could also contest an order just by refusing, even half-consciously or in an almost bodily reflex, as bodies resist power also, says Foucault; one can say "I prefer not to" and not give reasons; why must we assume we live in a divine order of Reason? Reason may be the instrument of justice, especially in a discursive regime, but it is perhaps insufficient for happiness, which is the true object of ethics, though not that corner of it that is morality, and law; justice is law's ideal. Now, if you make a claim, you are asserting a continent possibility, but as true and so normatively binding. This is a truth about the pragmatics of language use that Anglo-American liberals tend to overlook, pushing themselves thereby into sophism, with its claim that there are no truths, only opinions validated merely by preference or taste. Now, it is easy to say that just as in the ideal labor contract, which Marx shows rests on a de facto exclusion and difference of power that makes it essentially false, in legitimating de jure what de facto cannot be legitimated. Like that I sell my labor power or potentialities to you as employer for a wage, and this is fair because equal goods are exchanged or we agree. This is why Habermas is not a Marxist. 

Foucault's very different approach to discourse is elaborated throughly in Archaeology of Knowledge. I would say that he sees discourses as closed totalities, historical variable, strategic and tactical, and as 'actual' rather than representational and calling for a hermeneutics that asks, "If this appears as X, what is the Y that it is really?" A Foucaultian politics when statements are in question will not appeal to the transcendent legitimating power of needs, desires, interests, and will or motives, as Habermas does, to 'decide' on what is legitimate or just, a notion that Foucaultians have no real use for. 

I think it is pretty clear that Foucault's oeuvre as a whole is the most sustained contribution and challenge to a radical left social theory (even if the question of theory and thus totality and representation become somewhat questionable in themselves, with the 'danger' that what remains is only a history, with its absolute contingency, -- along with the work of Heidegger (in fact) and perhaps Deleuze, Foucault's close philosophical 'friend' (a philosophical friend thinks with you agonistically) -- to Marx and Marxism itself. In 1975 it already was seeming like Marxism is dead. 

Can that be said today? I think not, and its 'orthodox' notions of political economy and class may once again be the most important ones after all. In a world it is now increasingly recognized that Marx does not equal Stalin and the enemy of workers and citizens who want to live free is not communists but capital.

People often say things to me that seem wrong, and I want to argue. I wish I could, generally. When I try, I prefer it if I am able actually to be recognized as making legitimate claims that should be answered--and that, without having any particular rank and title to authority, I should be able to make, and freely and easily, and with little opposition. But at Berkeley already I learned that the opposition to this is relentless and massive. Usually it 'seems' liberal, and reasonable in itself, on their terms, that do not require considering what I say, and if they do will consider what I say only in their terms. Sadly, both liberal 'humanist' and 'anti-crime' (crime seen everywhere) and 'feminist' memes were involved. So much work has been done more recently from a left wing standpoint on carceral feminisms and liberalism. Habermasianism is socialism for coffee houses (indeed, he has a book extolling this, on the 18th century 'public sphere' formed around newspapers and coffee houses) and for people naive enough to think that a syllogism will bring down capital's house and initiate the free life of the commune. Well, we're not against logic; Rimbaud, poet of the Paris Commune, the first worker's democratic state, defeated and murdered in 1871 by the French police, spoke of "logical revolt." 

Which leads me to want to add: Habermas Kantianizes not only Marx but Freud; his Freud has no unconscious, only statements that are 'distorted' and not clear, because like the tutor of the young emperor in his tutelage in Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, he pedantically things people can and should "say what they say mean" so that they can "mean what they say." That's one way to rule.