I was not going to intervene on this one until John said:
>
>
>What we give up is Habermas's ideal speech community. That's a place
>that's supposed to be powerless, a place where only the best and most
>rational argument prevails. And it is by virtue of this exclusive reliance
>on rational argumentation that the ideal speech situation is deemed
>powerless -- a questionable assumption as many have pointed out.
This is totally to misunderstand Habermas I'm afraid. For one, the ideal
speech situation is simply that, an ideal. Habermas never really thought
that it would ever be achievable in practice. The ideal speech situation is
a regulative ideal which emerges out of habermas's claim that truth is
embedded in language (I know of no coherent way in which this can be
refuted, since the refutation of it affirms it. Silence might be an option
on the other hand). But in reality, as Foucault points out power is always
at play (Habermas would accept this BTW), hence language, and thus truth,
may get distorted through this play of power. The notion of the ideal speech
situation functions only so as to make manifest the prevailing power plays
that distort. If we could factor out these power plays then we might attain
truth, since in reality we can't, we would do better to analyse he workings
of power in the hope of assessing the modes of distortion. Truth, for
Habermas is a normative non-transgressible limit.
And this is where I think many are missing the real point that Frazer is
raising. Yes, power itself is not intrinsically good or bad, but how
acording to Foucault do we distinguish between a good exercise of power and
a bad one. To say that Foucault rejects this rather naive lollipop is not
the same as resolving it. Turning one's back on a problem which one feels
unable to solve is not at all the same thing as solving it.
Instead, exercises of power are ambiguous in their effects,
Well not always surely? And certainly not symmetrical. Is the exercise of a
certain form of power to slaughter millions ambigous in the same way as the
example of a capitalist supplied by John?
Thus when capitalists train a workforce to be
>obedient, punctual, and productive, they're not doing something immoral or
>anything, they're just following out the rationality of the power-grid
>they happen to occupy.
If this is so, and if this is a Foucaultian reading, then this is a position
Althusser would have been proud of. Trager, machines determined to act out
these roles.
And when workers resist efforts to dumb them down
>they for their part are not anticipating a utopic community of Renaissance
>humans who write poetry in the morning and transform nature in the
>afternoon, but simply responding to the dynamics of the situation they
>find themselves in.
Ditto. Surely Foucault gets us further than a crude structuralism?
>
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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA
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