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 by Brian Milstein
 Submitted originally for the "Field Seminar in Political Theory," Fall 2003, at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, Nancy Fraser, Instructor Cite as: Milstein, Brian. "On Michel Foucault's "Transcendental Claim": A Reply to Jurgen Habermas." Unpublished paper, New School for Social Research, New York (accessed on [DATE] at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/polth-foucault.html). I want to focus on one charge Habermas makes against Foucault that I believe is mistaken, and that is the charge that "Foucault's genealogy of the human sciences enters on the scene in an irritating double role" (1987, 273). Habermas imputes that Foucault's notions of "power" and "knowledge" exist in a one-way constitutive relation, such that "power relationships are of interest as conditions for the rise of scientific knowledge and its social effects" (274). He argues that Foucault uses this precept as a guide for empirical investigations to explain the functional relation of the human sciences to social life. At the same time, Habermas claims, Foucault intends his power-knowledge nexus to serve as the transcendental basis for the very possibility of scientific discourse, period. It is worthwhile to note that Habermas is relying on and employs the vocabulary of the Kantian definition of "transcendental," as a program of inquiry into universal conditions of possibility. It is not apparent to me, however, that Foucault declares any such program. Nor, in fact, does Habermas provide us with any direct textual evidence that Foucault is analyzing technologies of power in order "to explain how scientific discourse about man is possible at all" (274). Earlier on, Habermas had argued that Foucault's archeological project invoked a "transcendental historicism" that seeks to unmask the constitution of worlds of discourse (252). He then notes that Foucault found the archeological approach inadequate, partly due to problematic affinities to Heidegger and to structuralism, but also due to an overdetermined self-sufficiency in the archeological concept of discourse that prevents him from linking his exposition of the human sciences with the effects of their practices. Habermas makes the assumption that Foucault turns to genealogy to supplant the archeological project as a paradigm shift, and seems to interpolate the transcendental interest of the latter onto the former (268, 274). It is true that, in practice, Foucault did seem to abandon the conduct of archeologies and focused exclusively on genealogy, particularly in his works on the prison and sexuality. Yet he maintained a discreet separation of the two approaches throughout the seventies and up to his very last works, refusing to subsume one under the other (see, e.g., Foucault 1984, 46). In any case, the proposition that power relations are "constitutive conditions" for all knowledge is inconsistent with the struggle paradigm Foucault is eliciting as an "insurrection of subjugated knowledges" against "the inhibiting effect of global, totalitarian theories" (Foucault 1980, 80-1). Part of the problem lies in Foucault's failure to explicitly distinguish between "knowledge," "science," and "truth." In Discipline and Punish, published in 1975, Foucault commonly described a relationship between power and "knowledge," proposing that "there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations" (1977, 27). Additional nuance is given to the notion of knowledge when Foucault delivers his famous "Two Lectures" at the CollĖge de France in 1976, when he describes the relation of power to various knowledges, including "subjugated knowledges," which refer to two things: first, an assortment of previously hidden knowledges, camouflaged in a functionalist systematization, that are dug up, "reactivated," and reappropriated by the historian, and second, "a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated" (Foucault 1980, 82). These knowledges are taken together by the genealogist in what may be described as a third category of knowledges, "a historical knowledge of struggles" (83). In the 1976 lectures, Foucault makes use of these various forms of knowledge in relation to "science," which is not meant to denote knowledge per se but a status that invests "discourses and those who uphold them with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse" (85). Foucault declares that it is the aim of the historian of struggles to oppose these reappropriated knowledges to "the scientific hierarchisation of knowledges and the effects intrinsic to their power." He writes: "If we were to characterise it in two terms, then 'archaeology' would be the appropriate methodology of this analysis of local discursivities, and 'genealogy' would be the tactics whereby, on the basis of the descriptions of these local discursivities, the subjected knowledges which were thus released would be brought into play" (85). Nothing in the above suggests a project in transcendental inquiry, but rather a purely critical project. In 1977, an interview was conducted with Foucault that would later be known as "Truth and Power." This too stands among Foucault's most well-known works, and it is the one in which he makes five of his most notorious and controversial claims: first, that "history" as such has no "meaning," and should thus be analyzed not through the structuralist model of language and signs, but "in accordance with the intelligibility of struggles, strategies, and tactics" (114); second, that the notion of "ideology" will be "difficult to make use of" in this endeavor, as it (a) suggests something identifiable as "false" that can be opposed to something identifiable as "true," (b) presumes a constitution of the "subject," and (c) operates within a presupposed "infrastructure" or determinant (118); third, that analyses of power have been narrowly focused on the model of sovereignty, of law, and of repression, and it is time for us "to cut off the King's head" (121); fourth, that there seems to be a myopia in the model of the "great intellectual" who purports himself [sic] to be "the spokesman of the universal," and that more localized, "specific intellectuals" tend to be better attuned to these struggles (126-8); and finally, that "each society has its rĖgime of truth, its 'general politics' of truth" (131). "Truth," however, is a new term in Foucault, for until now he has been concerned with struggles of "knowledge." Foucault describes a general politics of truth as operational with regard to "the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true" (131). Truth is the status accorded in our society to science, and is meant to describe a specifically totalitarian quality accorded to discourses "only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint." It is therefore not identical to knowledge per se, but refers to a system of rules by which knowledges are discriminated, appropriated, or constrained. Closely read, "science," too, gets lighter treatment not simply as the modern notion of truth but as field of discourse upon which struggles over truth are waged; it is no longer "science" itself but "the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it" that is at issue (thus J. Robert Oppenheimer could be a "scientist" and still make a crucial intervention [127-8]). "Multiple forms of constraint" are portrayed by Foucault as a condition of possibility of truth, but truth itself is a contingency that bears no necessary connection to scientific discourses but rather to their situatedness in social contexts. More importantly, Foucault's intention in this context is not to make a transcendental claim about all knowledge, but merely to suggest that all discourses can (and should) be interrogated with regard to possible effects of power. It is not necessarily that power is everywhere, but that power can be anywhere, and it should therefore be searched out and accounted for: "What I am saying here is above all to be taken as a hypothesis...to be further tested and elaborated" (132-3). To make a general claim that a line of research is worthwhile is perfectly consistent with empirical work, and in any case the disclaimer that "This is just a hypothesis" is one that Habermas has used on a number of occasions. The fact that Foucault continuously shifted his uses of "knowledge," "science," and "truth" over this period is confusing and somewhat annoying, and it also lends itself to "cherry-picked" interpretations such as are common among both Foucault's supporters and his critics. Habermas can argue that Foucault is making a transcendental as well as an empirical claim only by conflating these various uses of the terms. Addressing the charge of transcendentalism helps us to begin addressing Habermas's charges of "presentism," "relativism," and "cryptonormativity." I will close with a few brief points: James Schmidt (1997) argues that Habermas is trying to hold Foucault accountable for failing "to answer a question that he regards as essential" -- namely, the problem of subject-centered reason -- without making a case that Foucault was, in fact, trying to answer that question (148). I would suggest that, if there were a transcendental framework that Foucault was trying to break away from, it was the "philosophy of history" in the Hegelian sense of the phrase. This is part of what he suggests when he claims to be writing a "history of the present," which also denotes a specific kind of normative critique. If Foucault is not making transcendental claims about history but is rather trying to depart from them, the criticism that his "history of the present" is presentist loses some of its sting. "Genealogy does not," writes Schmidt, "use the present as the key to understanding the past. Rather, it seeks to view the present...as the fragile result of struggles that could easily have had a different outcome. It...thus deprives us of any comfort that might come from seeing ourselves as somehow grounded and rooted in history" (Schmidt 1997, 161). The charge of relativism also comes from a misconstrual of Foucault's assertions, particularly the status he gives to concepts like "knowledge," "science," and "truth." Habermas argues that Foucault's critique of hegemonic knowledges via an opposition from "subjugated knowledges" functions as the opposition to power by a "counterpower" that, in the end, would only serve to take the former's place as the "new" power complex. Foucault thus traps himself in an endless cycle of equally unsatisfactory paradigms of power, in which even genealogical knowledge is an irredeemable culprit: "Genealogy only confirms that the validity claims of counterdiscourses count no more and no less than those of the discourses in power -- they, too, are nothing else than the effects of power they unleash" (Habermas 1987, 281). This argument, however, depends on Habermas's assertion that, for Foucault, knowledge is solely and always the product of power relations. As we have seen, this is not the case. What Foucault is concerned with are knowledges hegemonically tied, through matrices of local struggles, to institutional social apparatuses, and it is here that we find forms of domination that are linked with rĖgimes of truth. Moreover, it is not the superiority of subjugated knowledges over established ones that Foucault is trying to achieve, but the unmasked contingency of the latter. The difference is made clear in the fact that Foucault never claims, as Habermas seems to think, that the subjected knowledges "overthrow" or "replace" the existing relations of power. The Ancien RĖgime was not overturned by an army of psychiatrists and criminologists. One of Foucault's central points in Discipline and Punish is precisely that the rise of prisons bore no internal relation to the intellectual attitudes of the Revolution, and he illustrates this in part by describing proposed systems of "Enlightened" punishment that were favored by several of the post-Revolutionary reformers -- the so-called "punitive city" (1977, 104-14). Others argued explicitly against imprisonment: "Detention was described by reformers in innumerable statements as a figure and privileged instrument of despotism" (119). Prison, for Foucault, was a particularly counterintuitive successor to the scaffold. It is only by way of his alleged transcendental claim that Habermas can speak of a definitive "theory of power" that is the domain of the genealogist, whose methods are superior and who aspires to replace the scientist as the arbiter of truth: "The name 'antiscience' is to be understood not only by opposition to the reigning human sciences; at the same time, it signals an ambitious attempt to overcome these pseudo-sciences. Genealogical research takes their place; without imitating false models from the natural sciences, its scientific status will someday be comparable to that of the natural sciences" (1987, 275). Foucault, however, clearly intended his genealogical project as a pure critical theory tailored for that puropse. In a 1978 interview, he states that "power" was not meant as an explanation: "For me, power is that which must be explained" (Foucault 1991, 148). If we discard the imputation that power is equally constitutive of all knowledge and all social relations, it becomes easier to gain normative footing. Foucault in fact makes such a charge in his history of the prison, which he declares is intended to "produce," denigrate, and utilize a "criminal class," which is its target: "that, this being the case, it would be hypocritical or naŌve to believe that the law was made for all in the name of all; that it would be more prudent to recognize that it was made for the few and brought to bear upon others..." (1977, 276). "The systems of discipline," he says elsewhere, "are applied by one group upon another" (1991, 167). It is interesting to note that, unlike in Nietzsche, the liberal proposition that "All are created equal" is never challenged, and is implied as an essentialistic presupposition in Foucault's work. "Subjectivation," after all, loses its theoretical value if there existed any distinction among persons (bodies) prior to it. The creation of differences in and among subjects -- normal/abnormal, upstanding/delinquent, rational/insane -- appears a recurring theme in Foucault's work. There is thus clearly more to his project than simply to "undermine modernity and its language games," and there is more to the justification for resisting power than simply being its mirror image (Habermas 1987, 283). Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon. Pantheon Books. (1984) The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. Pantheon Books. (1991) Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, translated by R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. Semiotext(e). Habermas, Jurgen (1987) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. MIT Press. Miller, James (2000) The Passion of Michel Foucault. Harvard University Press. Milstein, Brian (2001) "On Reading Discipline and Punish," unpublished paper, New School for Social Research (available online at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/readingdp.html). Schmidt, James (1997) "Habermas and Foucault" in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, edited by Maurizio Passerin d'EntrĖves and Seyla Benhabib. MIT Press.
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