Subject: [HAB:] Durkheim, Foucault and Habermas
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 01:22:34 +0000


Ali, List:

Durkheim, Foucault and Habermas

Having said that there is some Durkheim in Foucault I thought I had better 
try and justify this. Following quotes from Division of Labor (Free Press, 
1964) suggest a complementarity:

Durkheim writes:
“This work had its origins in the question of the relations of the 
individual to social solidarity. Why does the individual, while becoming 
more autonomous, depend more upon society? How can he be at once more 
individual and more solidary? Certainly, these two movements, contradictory 
as they appear, develop in parallel fashion.” (p37)

“Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being, one 
quite sufficient unto oneself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of the 
whole, the organ of an organism?”

Similar issues, I think, frame Foucault’s project.

I have also argued for the centrality of Durkheim’s sociology to the 
normative objectives Habermas sets for himself. The following, also from 
-Division of Labor- indicates the fact-to-norm motif in –BFN-:

“But social solidarity is a completely moral phenomenon which, taken by 
itself, does not lend itself to exact observation nor indeed to measurement. 
To proceed to this classification and this comparison, we must substitute 
for this internal fact which escapes us an external index which symbolizes 
it and study the former in the light of the latter. This visible symbol is 
law.” (p64)

Finally, I have been reading some Baudrillard, and thought the following 
pertained to my point that Foucault’s history of the present was, shall we 
say, a little out of date. For, according to Baudrillard, Foucault can only:

“talk with such definitive understanding about power, sexuality, the body, 
and discipline…because at some point all this is here and now over with. And 
because Foucault can only draw such an admirable picture since he works at 
the confines of an area (maybe a ‘classical age,’ of which he would be the 
last great dinosaur), now in the process of collapsing entirely…What if 
Foucault spoke so well concerning power…only because power is dead? Not 
merely impossible to find because of dissemination, but dissolved purely and 
simply in a manner that continues to escape us, dissolved by reversal, 
cancellation, or made hyperreal through simulation (who knows?).”
(Forgetting Foucault, pp11-12 in –Humanities and Society- 3, 1980)

It is obviously a mild polemic against Foucault (Baudrillard's and mine !) 
but I thought I’d throw it in for good measure!
MattP.

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