Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 11:21:57 -0700
Subject: Re: HAB: cryptonormative issues


Hi Antoine,

A longish answer to a shortish question:  "Cryptonormativity" comes from
"Questions concerning the Theory of Power: Foucault Again" in
_Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_.  The idea is based on Nancy
Fraser's critique of Foucault's "normative confusions," specifically her
charge that Foucault smuggles normativity in through the back door by
relying on classical humanist ideals of freedom and autonomy (Fraser,
Unruly Practices, chaps 1 and 3).  According to Fraser, these function as
cultural/normative background notions that can be rhetorically accessed
when needed, even while Foucault *claims* to conduct a value-neutral
history of social practices. Thus Foucault's critique of power does have a
normative basis, according to her, but it's both hidden and potentially
hypocritical.

Habermas cites this line of argument approvingly in PDM and links it to
Foucault's "philosophy of history":  "To the extent that it retreats into
the reflectionless objectivity of a nonparticipatory, ascetic description
of kaleidoscopically changing practices of power [!], genealogical
historiography emerges from its cocoon as precisely the *presentistic,
relativistic, cryptonormative* illusory science that it does not want to
be" (PDM 275-6, emphasis Habermas's).  Fighting words, to be sure.

I think, then, that the philosophy of history casually refered to on BFN p.
3 is Foucault's, not Marx's.  As I remember Habermas's discussion of
"Marxism as Critique" in Theory and Practice, he doesn't attribute
normativity to Marx's view of history.  He's more concerned with its
"theological" tendency to be totalizing and teleological.  (This is
different, by the way, from the charge that Marx's conception of
exploitation is normative:  the labor theory of value isn't a philosophy of
history, and it's straightforwardly normative as opposed to
cryptonormative.)(Well, people argue about that, too.  Marx himself claims
that there's nothing normative about the labor theory--he says that it's
simply an analysis of the bourgeois system of private property and
production.  To that extent, he is himself being cryptonormative:  the
whole thing is based on a Lockean-libertarian notion of "self-ownership"
that Marx may not want to embrace.)

Best,

Kevin Olson
UC Irvine

>In Between Facts and Norms, p. 3, Habermas writes:"This meant that the
>sphere of social practice was approached from the angle of normative or -
>once filtered through a philosophy of history - cryptonormative
>issues." It it that that is a shot at Marx. Is that correct? If it is,
>what is cryptonormative, and how does a philosophy of history filter it
>in, or out?
>Antoine
>
>
>
>
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