From: "matthew piscioneri" <mpiscioneri-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: HAB: Habermas on Foucault
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2001 09:46:45 


Dear List,

To my mind there appeared to be an increasing interplay between Habermas and 
Foucault ON CERTAIN POINTS before Foucault's death. Peter Dews in his essay 
in the Habermas reader (which he edited, 1999) tends to exaggerate the one 
way *traffic* (Habermas's way) in the signs that Foucault and Derrida were 
at least taking notice of Habermas's argued for paradigm change to a 
communicative conception of reason.

Still, I can't help but hear Foucauldian echoes throughout Habermas's 
juridification thesis in both _TCA_ and _BFN_. Maybe - preempting Gary's 
reply - I need my hearing checked :-).

So without taking sides in this very useful debate ( seeing as i am writing 
on precisely this issue in my thesis as I mail this) I think there was some 
degree of fusing of horizons going on between Habermas and Foucault.

Still, there appear to be issues which I don't think either would have given 
much ground on, yet this sort of speculation belongs to that wonderful 
category of *after-dinner philosophy*.

Presently I am tangled up in trying to make sense of either's conception of 
what strategies are available to *mollify/overcome/resist*  the oppressive 
dialectic each of them identify in their work.

The question I have for the list is fairly tame, but I would appreciate 
anyone's views on the following matter.

Do List members consider that both Foucault and Habermas regard the 
dialectic of - in Foucault's case - disciplinary knowledge and social 
control, and in Habermas's case - of empowerment and tutelage, to be 
*irrepressible* ?

If yes, does this mean that their strategies of resistance and ethos, and 
the institutional guarantees Habermas suggests in _BFN_ can only take place 
- as it were - always inside the framework of these dialectics?

This seems more clearly the case for Habermas and it seems to be 
Scheuerman's reading also in his essay _Between Radicalism and Resignation_ 
in the aforementioned Dews' reader. Given that Habermas *abandons* the 
holistic aspirations/pretensions of emancipatory struggles or social 
movements it seems that Habermas has moved closer to fully functionalizing 
the concept of *emancipation* (which is fine by me!).

Yet in several recent posts attention still gets drawn to utopian traces in 
Habermas's later critical theory. Surely by the time of _BFN_ these traces 
of utopianism have been functionalized into the social systemic processes of 
communicative power generation, conversion, implementation etc?

Isn't this the autopoietic/second order cybernetical strain in _BFN_? 
Utopian/emancipatory behaviours are systemic self-observings? Is this how 
list members read Habermas in _BFN_ or have I drank too much coffee recently 
:-)

Regards to all

Matthew Piscioneri
School of Philosophy
University of Tasmania



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