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Security, Strategy, and Critical Theory
Richard Wyn Jones
Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.
1999
3. Redemption: Renewing the Critical Project
The transformation in the attitudes of the first generation of critical theorists between the period of “Traditional and Critical Theory” and the aftermath of Dialectic of Enlightenment is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in Horkheimer’s address at the official opening of the new IfS building in Frankfurt in 1951 (the best account of the return of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Pollock to the Federal Republic is in Wiggershaus 1994). In his speech, Horkheimer “expressed the basic intention of Critical Theory in a way that transformed social change into a kind of ethical requirement for sociologists, like the Hippocratic Oath for doctors” (Wiggershaus 1994: 445). While continuing to contend that an intellectual orientation toward social change was necessary to allow research questions to be framed in the correct way, Horkheimer apparently now believed that this orientation involved no real–world political implications or commitments. So even if the need, even necessity, for social transformation was still admitted, such rhetoric was devoid of substance: It was formulaic and depoliticized. For the first generation of critical theorists, social change became a mantra in the literal sense, an instrument of thought that had little or no relevance to real political and social struggles. Thus Wiggershaus correctly characterizes the IfS in the postwar Federal Republic as a “Critical Ornament of a Restoration Society” (Wiggershaus 1994: 431). While the members of the Frankfurt School may have remained intellectually unreconciled with liberal capitalist society, they certainly provided no threat to it.
However, as if to confirm the persistence of the creative, rather than merely negative, potential of the dialectic, a new generation of critical theorists gradually emerged who were not content to remain bound by the contradictions and elisions within which the founding fathers had become entangled. This second generation was determined to rescue the critical project from what Goran Therborn has described as the “paralysed virtuosity” of its post–Dialectic of Enlightenment incarnation, and in particular from its political passivity (Therborn 1970: 96). Although part of the stimulus for their work was undoubtedly intratheoretical in nature—that is, aimed at addressing the aporias in the Horkheimer–Adorno legacy—there can be little doubt that it was real–world, extratheoretical developments that provided the driving force.
The global upsurge of radical student activism in the 1960s had a particularly profound impact in West Germany, a society that was in many ways deeply conformist and conservative. While this conservatism was undoubtedly reinforced by the ways in which the Federal Republic remained, de facto if not de jure, an occupied country whose very existence was defined by World War II and the subsequent Cold War, its root cause lay in the unmastered nature of Germany’s recent past. In a society in which so many had acquiesced to, or actively supported, Nazi inhumanity, becoming “Hitler’s willing executioners,” pressure to conform to the postwar status quo was overwhelming. Nowhere was this more apparent than in academia, a sector that the Nazis had placed under strict party control and where many faculty members had benefited directly from the persecution of their Jewish and leftist colleagues. It is striking that Horkheimer and Adorno were among the very few academics hounded from their posts by the Nazis who managed to rebuild their careers successfully in the postwar Federal Republic, and even they were subject to a significant amount of resistance and resentment by their academic colleagues. In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the struggle between radical German students and the educational authorities was particularly acute and bitter.
The radicalization of the student body—a gradual process extending over a decade or more before the tumultuous events of 1968—created deep divisions within the institute. The old guard was hostile. As noted in Chapter 2, Adorno and Horkheimer regarded the idea that any group within society had the potential to initiate and inspire a genuinely emancipatory politics as a dangerous delusion. Their unease with the radical German student movement was compounded by the way that many of its leading figures cited the influence of the early work of the IfS and by the fact that Marcuse was a vocal supporter of their activities. Horkheimer was particularly disturbed. Not only was this pillar of establishment respectability embarrassed by the use of some of his more extreme Marxist formulations as student slogans—“He who wishes to speak of fascism cannot remain silent on the question of capitalism”—but he also appears to have been genuinely fearful that the students would provoke a reactionary backlash that could once again engulf Germany’s fragile liberal polity.
Adorno was marginally more sympathetic to the students, yet even he was to declaim despairingly: “When I made my theoretical model, I could not have guessed that people would want to realize it with Molotov cocktails” (Jay 1984: 55). This type of comment may well be considered disingenuous to the extent that the Frankfurt School’s apparently undifferentiated theoretical analysis of contemporary society—which can be summarized by adapting the well–known Third International slogan as “Soviet Marxism = Liberal Democracy = Fascism”—encouraged some of the most extreme manifestations of student radicalism. However, it does underline the extent of the distance between the old guard of critical theory and the would–be critical practitioners of the student movement.
There was no such distancing by the younger theorists who had studied with Horkheimer and Adorno after their return to Germany. Figures such as Albrecht Wellmer, Oskar Negt, and, most notably of all, Jürgen Habermas were prominent in their support for the general tenor of the students’ demands, if not for every specific element of their program or practice (Wiggershaus 1994: 609–636). Horkheimer in particular attempted to discourage them—to the extent that he effectively drove Habermas out of the institute—but the members of this younger generation of critical theorists were not to be dissuaded. For them, the upsurge in radicalism was confirmation that emancipatory change remained more than simply an instrument of thought; it was an actually–existing potential that might be realized. The new radicalism was also a challenge to their thinking. How could their type of critical intellectual endeavor link up with progressive political practice? Could they actually provide the vision of a more emancipated society demanded by the students? What were the deep–seated sources of emancipatory impulse or instincts that had managed to defy the tyranny of instrumental reason and reemerge so dramatically? If the analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment was too “one–dimensional,” then what was the correct understanding of contemporary society?
In their attempt to address questions of this nature, the second generation of critical theorists gave new impetus to the critical theory project. In this chapter I will examine some of their arguments related to the theoretical issues that have been raised in the previous chapters. I want to emphasize, however, that the approach adopted is neither systematic nor comprehensive. The proliferation of work by second generation critical theorists, and indeed a subsequent generation of scholars, is so great that to attempt to produce an all–embracing survey would go well beyond the bounds of this study. Critical theory is now a truly international enterprise with “branches” or “outposts,” to use IfS terminology, in most developed countries (on critical theory in Germany see Hohendahl 1991; on the United States see Kellner 1989: 176–223).
Furthermore, as I have demonstrated in the first two chapters, the legacy with which they have been working is hardly unified. Thus some scholars, such as Hauke Brunkhorst, Susan Buck–Morss, Oskar Negt, and Alexander Kluge, have attempted to develop themes in Adorno’s work; others, often influenced by Marcuse and including Stephen Bronner and Douglas Kellner, have attempted to reengage with the “Traditional and Critical Theory” version of critical theory; and the work of Habermas has generated a minor industry of its own. Inevitably this means that those theorists who see themselves as inheritors of the critical theory tradition have widely different understandings of the nature of the intellectual project in which they are engaged.
Rather than attempt the major task of theoretical taxonomy involved in identifying and explaining every contemporary variant of contemporary critical theory, I will adopt a different, more thematic approach. I will focus on how the central themes discussed in the previous chapters have been addressed by some of those thinkers whose work has figured prominently in efforts to renew critical theory. By focusing the discussion on theory, emancipation, and technology, I will not only illuminate some of the main routes through which critical theorists have sought to avoid the impasse represented by Dialectic of Enlightenment but also continue in the task of laying the groundwork for the discussion of security and strategy in Part 2.
Theory: Grounding the Possibility of Emancipation
Emancipation is arguably the one common concern of all critical theorists. It is the sine qua non of their thought. Indeed, Bronner, in the light of the fractured nature and varied concerns of contemporary critical theory, argues that the only plausible definition of this school of thought is “a cluster of themes inspired by an emancipatory intent” (Bronner 1994: 3, emphasis in original). Thus critical theory stands or falls by the possibility that emancipatory potential exists. Epistemologically, it is only this possibility that gives critical theory coherence and, indeed, purpose. Without it, critical theory cannot demur from the positivist/traditional theory emphasis on repetition, calculability, and predictability. Even Adorno, despite his utter pessimism concerning the real world, depended on the mimetic capacity of avant–garde art to express the possibility of the “totally other”—a more emancipated world—to give his theory critical purchase on that reality. This is also why, it might be added parenthetically, so many poststructuralist–inspired writers continually imply notions of emancipation despite their much–vaunted distaste for such metanarratives. Without the ability to claim that a better world is possible or even conceivable, there is no means by which the present can be criticized.
That said, the problem for critical theorists is to identify the locus of this promise of a better world—the site of emancipatory potential. The version of critical theory outlined in “Traditional and Critical Theory” located the possibility of emancipation in the realm of production. Specifically, it identified emancipation as the domination of nature within the context of a planned society in which the means of production were socialized. But as I discussed in Chapter 2, Horkheimer came to realize that the socialization of production (through state control, planning, etc.) had no necessary progressive consequences. Indeed, in conjunction with Adorno, he came to identify the process whereby humanity has gained instrumental mastery over nature with domination. In response, Horkheimer came to locate the source of emancipatory impulses in what he argued was an anthropologically based propensity for pity and human solidarity. Adorno, for his part, pointed to the “non–identical”—that which is beyond communication and which may only be grasped through art mediated by philosophy—as the site in which echoes of the possibility of emancipation might be located. None of these arguments on the “grounding” 1 of critical theory have satisfied most of its contemporary adherents. In this section I will elucidate and evaluate two of the main attempts that have been made to provide critical theory with a more secure basis, those of Habermas and Honneth.
Habermas on Communication
By locating the potential for emancipation in the sphere of production, the founding fathers of critical theory were adopting an understanding of emancipatory possibility entirely in accordance with—indeed, derivative of—that which featured in the classical version of Marxism (Postone 1993 disputes whether this in fact coincided with Marx’s own views). Thus, when the impasse generated by Dialectic of Enlightenment led Jürgen Habermas to reassess the critical theory conception of emancipation, this also involved recasting the very Marxist legacy on which that tradition rests. Crucially, Habermas’s “reconstruction of historical materialism”—the title of his 1976 book—is based on a move to distinguish between production, work, and labor on the one hand and interaction and communication on the other (for useful commentaries, see Honneth 1982, 1994; Outhwaite 1994). Habermas argues that these realms of social activity are characterized by two distinct types of human behavior: The realm of work or production is characterized by instrumental action and the realm of interaction is characterized by communicative action. He further charges that Marxism tends to reduce communicative action—activity oriented toward the generation of mutual understanding—to instrumental action, “the productive activity which regulates the material interchange of the human species with its natural environment” (Habermas 1986b: 169). This reduction becomes all too apparent in the tendency of Marxists, including the Horkheimer of “Traditional and Critical Theory,” to equate progress in terms of the efficient utilization of the forces of production with general progress in human relations, that is, emancipation. According to Habermas:
To set free the technical forces of production... is not identical with the development of norms which could fulfil the dialectic of moral relationships in an interaction free of domination.... Liberation from hunger and misery does not necessarily converge with liberation from servitude and degradation; for there is no automatic developmental relation between labour and interaction. (Habermas 1986b: 169)
This realization spurred Habermas to investigate the basis of emancipation within the realm of interaction, a project that ultimately bore fruit in the publication of the two–volume study The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987) and in his subsequent work.
Habermas’s analysis of communicative action is enormous in both its sheer volume and its scope (the best critical overview of his work is Outhwaite 1994; also useful is White 1988). It is also still very much a work in progress. Habermas is continually revising his ideas, in part as a response to the massive critical scrutiny afforded to his every utterance and also as a result of his own attempt to extend his analysis into new areas—most recently, for example, law (Habermas 1996). Although this great output serves to underline his status as the towering figure in contemporary social theory, it also makes his work almost impossible to summarize in a form that respects both its subtlety and its breadth. Nevertheless, two moments in his work are particularly relevant to this discussion. The first relates to Habermas’s notion of universal pragmatics and the claim that truth is inherent in language, and the second relates to the analysis of society that he then develops as a result of this conception of language.
Habermas’s basic claim concerning communication, and indeed his basic argument concerning the locus of emancipatory promise, is summarized in his Knowledge and Human Interests:
The human interest in autonomy and responsibility is not mere fancy, for it can be apprehended a priori. What raises us out of nature is the only thing whose nature we can know: language. Through its structure, autonomy and responsibility are posited for us. Our first sentence expresses unequivocally the intention of a universal and unconstrained consensus. (Habermas 1986b: 314)
Although Habermas’s subsequent writing has largely superseded the work from which this quotation is taken, he has still maintained this basic line of argument. In The Theory of Communicative Action, for example, he proclaims that “reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech” (Habermas 1984: 287). Although this is certainly subtly different from the previous position—note how “consensus” has become “understanding”—the broad claim is the same. Habermas argues that there is something inherent in speech that acts, in effect, as a promissory note for the possibility of a better world. The nature of this “something” is delineated via his universal pragmatics.
“Universal pragmatics” is the name given by Habermas to his attempt to “identify and reconstruct the universal conditions of possible understanding” (Habermas 1979: 1). 2 He argues that speech actions—note that here he reduces consideration of communication to the analysis of speech—necessarily involve a series of presuppositions if they are to be valid (Habermas 1979: 1–68). Specifically, four “validity–claims” are isolated by Habermas: If a speech act is to be valid, this presupposes that the utterance is meaningful, true, justified, and sincere. Given the complexity of Habermas’s arguments in this regard, Anthony Giddens provides a welcome, succinct summary of their main thrust:
When one person says something to another, that person implicitly (sometimes explicitly) makes the following claims: (1) That what is said is intelligible—that is to say, that it obeys certain syntactical and semantic rules so that there is a “meaning” which can be understood by the other. (2) That the propositional content of whatever is said is true. The “propositional content” refers to the factual assertions which the speaker makes as part of what he or she says. (3) That the speaker is justified in saying whatever is said. In other words, certain social rights or “norms” are invoked in the use of speech in any given context of language–use. (4) That the speaker is sincere in whatever is said—that he or she does not intend to deceive the listener. (Giddens 1990: 128)
These validity–claims are presupposed in all speech acts—lying, for example, depends on these presuppositions.
The implications of this argument, if correct, are far reaching. If everyday linguistic and communicative activity does indeed depend on “intersubjectively criticizable validity claims,” then, inter alia, language use depends on the existence of an intramundane form of rationality (i.e., existing immanently in actually existing social practices) (Cooke 1994: xii). The existence of this communicative rationality allows Habermas’s thought to steer between the Scylla of poststructuralist skepticism concerning reason and the Charybdis of positivism’s constriction of the realm of rationality to a calculus of means.
Against poststructuralist arguments that reason is merely the cloak to an instrumental will to power (to employ a Nietzschean trope with obvious echoes in the work of Adorno), Habermas can point to what Maeve Cooke terms a “nonrepressive conception of reason—that is, a conception that provides standards for the critique of irrational or unjust forms of individual and social life while avoiding possibly repressive metaphysical projections” (Cooke 1994: ix). The standard of critique is provided by the fact that the possibility of unforced understanding is inherent in speech—indeed, speech depends upon it. (As Bronner explains, “Everyday speech, even of the most distorted sort, [must] both anticipate and presuppose an undistorted form of communication” [Bronner 1994: 293].) Thus any structures or practices that hinder this process of mutual understanding are open to criticism and revision. Note that such a critique is procedural in focus rather than concerned with advocating a particular end point—thus eluding the postmodern criticism that Marxist–inspired social theory attempts to impose a metanarrative on its subjects (Lyotard 1986: xxiv; Hunter and Wyn Jones 1995).
Although positivism is not hostile to notions of rationality per se, it does confine its scope to the instrumental realm—to questions of means (see Horkheimer’s critique of traditional theory outlined in Chapter 1). Ends are treated as normative questions that are not susceptible to rational arbitration. But of course, the presuppositions of speech as reconstructed by Habermas and as sketched above themselves contain normative elements. Normative elements form part of the rational core of speech. Thus communicative rationality splits asunder positivist attempts to constrict the bounds of rationality.
Communicative rationality also provides critical theorists with the assurance that the possibility of a better world—specifically, a world of unconstrained communication leading to unforced understanding—is already immanent within the present. Speech is the locus of the emancipatory promise. But what are the processes within society that hinder this type of communicative action? By which practices could the already–existing progressive potential of speech be realized? And what are the prospects for such a realization?
Habermas’s answers to these questions are developed in the sociological analysis of Theory of Communicative Action, as well as in his subsequent work. His basic argument is that developmental processes in Western societies increasingly threaten the human capacity for intersubjectively achieved understanding. This judgment arises from Habermas’s basic conceptual model of the evolution of modern society. This model is based on a distinction between system and lifeworld. These refer, respectively, to the material and cultural domains of society (or “base” and “superstructure” in Marxist terminology). The system is the realm of the market and state bureaucracy: structures that articulate themselves via money and power—what Habermas characterizes as the system’s “steering media.” The lifeworld is defined negatively by Habermas as “the totality of action domains which cannot be bent to conform to a description of media–steered sub–systems” (Honneth and Joas 1991: 257). More positively, lifeworld refers to the interrelated realms of society, culture, and subjectivity. Or in Habermas’s own words, “Processes of cultural reproduction, social integration and socialization are the structural components of the lifeworld”—thus, the lifeworld is a “culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns” through which individuals orient themselves (Habermas 1987: 124). Further, and crucially, it is the realm of communicative action and intersubjectively achieved mutual understanding.
According to Habermas’s analysis, society is facing a pathological development whereby the system is increasingly colonizing the lifeworld. Honneth summarizes his argument as follows:
Habermas’s theory of society leads to a diagnosis of the times according to which the power of self–steering systems has grown to such an extent that they threaten the communicative achievements of the lifeworld: under the corrosive force with which the steering media of money and bureaucratic power currently invade everyday culture, the human potential for reaching understanding in language is dissolving. (Honneth 1994: 259)
This analysis leads Habermas to advocate a politics of resistance to the colonization of the lifeworld, a politics that is, of course, ultimately concerned with defending the conditions for intersubjective understanding. In a passage in the second volume of The Theory of Communicative Action, which, significantly, immediately precedes his attempt to rearticulate critical theory in the light of his general analysis of society, Habermas writes:
The point is to protect areas of life that are functionally dependent on social integration through values, norms, and consensus formation, to preserve them from falling prey to the systemic imperatives of economic and administrative subsystems growing with dynamics of their own, and defend them from becoming converted over, through the steering medium of law, to a principle of the law, to a principle of sociation that is, for them, dysfunctional. (Habermas 1987: 372–373)
Furthermore, Habermas wishes to control the steering media themselves by subjecting the technocratic cultures that surround them to public scrutiny and control—in other words, by rendering them susceptible to communicative processes of intersubjective understanding.
As even this rather crude summary indicates, Habermas’s work is quite dazzling in its eclecticism and ambition. Through his “communicative turn” Habermas provides what at first sight appears to be a coherent and plausible account of the intramundane locus of emancipatory promise. Furthermore, he claims to identify the tendencies within modern society that stifle the achievements of humanity’s rational potential. Habermas would certainly claim that he has provided a new paradigm in which critical theory can transcend some of the limitations highlighted in Dialectic of Enlightenment. Although this is hotly disputed by those who remain more enamored of Adorno’s work than they are of that of his former student (e.g., Bernstein 1994), many critical theorists have accepted the broad thrust of Habermas’s work and contented themselves with developing—or disputing—particular aspects of it.
A number of important points have emerged from the massive literature stimulated by Habermas’s work (see, in particular, Thompson and Held 1982; Honneth and Joas 1991; Benhabib and Passerin d’Entrèves 1996). Some are of particular relevance to the central theme of this section.
A major reservation is that doubt has been cast on the ability of Habermas’s theory of communicative action to bear the normative weight that he wishes to rest upon it. Bronner provides the following commentary, which, although it is rather brutal in its disregard for the myriad qualifications and categorical subtleties that Habermas builds into his work, nevertheless summarizes these concerns:
“Communication” lies at the root of the undertaking. It is seen as presupposing an unrestrained discourse, the willingness of each to place himself or herself in the position of the other, the discipline to engage in a rational justification of claims, and a willingness to bracket self–interest so that the “better argument” can win out. Concretely, however, every discourse is necessarily “constrained” both in terms of the agenda and those participating in the discussion. Also, if each is able to put himself or herself in the place of the other, then... there will remain very little to discuss. Finally, even if participants are sometimes willing to engage in a rational justification of claims, history suggests that there is no reason whatsoever why the “better argument” should intrinsically prove victorious without extra–discursive activities being brought into play. (Bronner 1994: 305)
So even if there are, as Habermas claims, normative elements inherent in the presuppositions of speech, the question remains: How important is this?
Further doubt has been cast on the basic categories upon which Habermas has constructed his theory of society. In particular, the differentiation between work and interaction and the identification of the former with instrumental action and the latter with communicative action seem to set up a series of unnecessarily antinomic dualisms. How useful is it to imply that instrumental and communicative activity are somehow governed by separate logics and practices? After all, “just as every moral norm can be employed for strategic purposes... so are political and economic activities often inspired by morality and ideology” (Bronner 1994: 304). Is it not better to recognize and reflect on the fact that discourse oriented toward success (characteristic of work) and discourse oriented toward understanding (characteristic of interaction) are invariably mutually implicated rather than distinct?
Such mutual implication underlines the problematic implications of Habermas’s tendency simply to ignore work—the sphere of production and labor—and concentrate his theoretical attention solely on interaction. One need not make grandiose claims about the dignity of labor to recognize that the realm of work cannot simply be reduced to simple relations of instrumentality; one need not be an economic reductionist to accept that people’s positions in the realm of production have major implications for their role and status within society; and one need not posit that the proletariat is a universal class uniquely placed to emancipate humanity to argue that emancipatory politics can be generated through people’s experiences in the realm of work.
Interaction does not occur in a vacuum; rather, it occurs in a context that is at least partly structured by people’s economic activities—indeed by their relationship with nature. Thus to refuse to engage seriously with economic relationships—as if these relationships do not also embody social, political, moral, and even aesthetic elements—is to constrain the critical edge of critical theory. Even in terms of Habermas’s own theory, it is clear that inequalities inherent in the structures of economic accumulation have major distorting effects on the pursual of mutual understanding. Simply to decry those effects without attempting to expose their causes or search for remedies—effectively Habermas’s position—seems to cast doubt on the whole theoretical enterprise. This is all the more so because Habermas himself, in standard Marxist fashion, is candid in his recognition of the primacy of productive relationships (Habermas 1994: 117).
Further baneful effects of dubious categorical distinctions are also evident if we consider the separation of system and lifeworld, which has underlain so much of Habermas’s theory of society since the early 1980s.
Bronner charges that lifeworld is ultimately “little more than a vague anthropological postulate for the understanding of the non–institutional features of everyday life” (Bronner 1994: 304). As a result, neither lifeworld nor its antonym, system, is “ontologically grounded nor historically articulated” (Bronner 1994: 305). This in turn leads to an overly abstract and ahistorical theory of society that is unable to account for—or intervene in—particular forms of life or social struggle. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a consideration of the adequacy of Habermas’s theoretical framework to what has historically been the central problematic of international relations, interstate relations. Writing in 1983, John B. Thompson noted:
It is striking... that a “society” or a nation–state remains the pierre de touche of Habermas’s account. Nowhere does he examine in detail the international system of nation–states, the multi–national alliances which greatly affect economic development and threaten one another’s survival with the accumulated means of waging war. It is at best incomplete to interpret the conflicts and protest movements of our societies from within a framework that filters out the confrontation of nation–states and the politics of mass destruction. (J. Thompson 1983: 293)
Although some of Habermas’s recent works, such as the 1994 volume The Past as Future, pay more attention to interstate relations, his comments in these works do not seem to relate to—or arise from—his theory of society. They reflect a general left–liberal sensibility rather than any specific or conscious attempt to apply a critical theory perspective to interstate relations (see, for example, Habermas 1994: 76–83). This should come as no surprise given that key concepts such as lifeworld and system do not seem to provide Habermas with any useful opening onto this realm.
Craig Calhoun broadens this line of criticism when he argues that Habermas’s theory of communicative action is so abstract as to render it unable to account for particular sociocultural identities (Calhoun 1995: 193–230). Such is Habermas’s concern with the general and universal that he fails to give sufficient or due weight to the specific identity contexts in which communicative action takes place. This unease is given more concrete form in the work of perhaps the most creative of the latest generation of German critical theorists, Axel Honneth.
Honneth on Recognition
Although Honneth certainly concurs with the broad thrust of Habermas’s communicative turn—the attempt to locate emancipatory potential and politics in the realm of interaction rather than work—he disagrees with Habermas’s emphasis on language. Honneth’s worry is that in understanding communication solely in terms of speech (viewed generically and abstractly), Habermas fails to meet what Honneth regards as “an unrenounceable premise” of the “Frankfurt tradition of social theory” (Honneth 1994: 255). According to Honneth, “Critical theory in its innermost core—whatever its congruence with other forms of social critique may be—is dependent upon the quasi–sociological specification of an emancipatory interest in social reality itself” (Honneth 1994: 256). That is, contemporary critical theory must be able to identify “empirical experiences and attitudes which indicate, already pretheoretically, that its normative standpoints” have a “basis in social reality” (Honneth 1994: 260). But Honneth is unconvinced that Habermas’s emphasis on speech and his diagnosis of the ills of modern society in terms of the denial of the immanent possibility for unforced mutual understanding actually grasp those real–world pretheoretical experiences that generate emancipatory impulses.
Furthermore, Honneth argues that Habermas’s tendency to understand pathological tendencies within society by reference to the levels of development of human rationality means that he has no analytical handle on problems that do not fit into this framework. For example, Honneth notes that the breakdown of community—a concern of many political theorists and activists—“is only indirectly related to changes in human rationality” (Honneth 1994: 264–265). As a result, Habermas cannot give a convincing account of why this breakdown might be occurring nor, indeed, why it is important.
Honneth’s response to the problems he claims to have identified in Habermas’s work is to attempt to reconstruct the communicative turn in a way that satisfies the basic premise that critical theory must be able to ground its critique in real–world experience. He asserts that
the emancipatory process in which Habermas socially anchors the normative perspective of his Critical Theory is not at all reflected as such in an emancipatory process in the moral experiences of the subjects involved; for they experience an impairment of what we can call their moral experiences, that is, their “moral point of view”, not as a restriction of intuitively mastered rules of language, but as violation of identity claims acquired in socialization. (Honneth 1994: 261)
He states more concretely:
Normative presuppositions of social interaction cannot be fully grasped if they are defined solely in terms of the linguistic conditions of reaching an understanding free from domination; rather what must be considered above all is the fact that the assumption of social recognition is precisely what subjects associate with normative expectations when entering communicative relationships. (Honneth 1994: 263)
Honneth’s contention is that human beings have “intuitive notions of justice” premised on respect for their “dignity, honour, or integrity” and that they “encounter each other within the parameters of the reciprocal expectation that they receive recognition as moral persons and for their social achievements” (Honneth 1994: 262). When these expectations are not met this has serious consequences:
Because the experience of social recognition presents a condition on which the development of the identity of human beings depends, its denial, that is, disrespect, is necessarily accompanied by the sense of a threatening loss of personality... [and resulting] shame, anger, or indignation. (Honneth 1994: 263)
By shifting the communicative paradigm from a theory of language (“linguistic–theoretic”) to a theory of recognition (“intersubjectivity–theoretic”), Honneth argues that he can demonstrate which intramundane experiences generate emancipatory political action, thereby—he believes—providing a more convincing underpinning for the critical theory project itself:
Those feelings of injustice which accompany structural forms of disrespect represent a pretheoretical fact on the basis of which a critique of the relations of recognition can identify its own theoretical perspective in social reality. (Honneth 1994: 263)
The sociological presumption of recognition of identity becomes, for Honneth, the locus of emancipatory promise and potential.
The logic of Honneth’s argument concerning the grounding of critical theory leads him to develop an alternative analysis of society to the one proffered by Habermas. In place of the latter’s emphasis on the system/lifeworld relationship and the structural distortions of the possibility of unforced mutual understanding, Honneth focuses on “the societal causes responsible for the systematic violation of the conditions of recognition” (Honneth 1994: 264). He argues that the task of critical theory becomes the unmasking of those structures and practices within society that “are constituted such that they do not provide the amount of recognition necessary... in forming an identity” (Honneth 1994: 265). In particular, Honneth concentrates on the
three forms of social recognition which can be regarded as the communicative presuppositions of a successful formation of identity: emotional concern in an intimate social relationship such as love or friendship, rights–based recognition as a morally accountable member of society, and, finally, the social esteem of individual achievements and abilities. (Honneth 1994: 265–266)
One interesting consequence of this attempt to refigure the communicative paradigm toward relations of recognition is that it returns the experience of human labor to a position of prominence in critical theory because economic activity is central to human social relations and moral experiences (Honneth 1994: 266–268).
Honneth’s attempt to reintegrate labor into critical theory is only one of several positive elements of his theoretical framework. Another important advantage that arises from his intersubjectivity–theoretic version of the communicative turn is that it provides critical theorists with the analytical tools to understand how apparently particularistic struggles for the recognition of localized identities can form part of a broader process of emancipation. Of course, Honneth is aware that “the struggle for recognition”—the title of his 1995 book—is “an extremely ambivalent source of motivation for social protest and resistance” (Honneth 1994: 268). It can give rise not only to the pacifistic internationalism that, for example, overwhelmingly characterizes Welsh nationalism (Wyn Jones 1995, 1996b) but also, as Honneth himself points out, to the neo–Nazi groups that have developed in Germany. Thus a crucial question that critical theorists must address is
how a moral culture could be so constituted as to give those affected, disrespected and ostracized, the individual strength to articulate their experiences in the democratic public sphere, rather than living them out in the countercultures of violence. (Honneth 1994: 269)
The importance of this question need hardly be underlined in a world convulsed by barbaric manifestations of identity politics, such as ethnic cleansing. Honneth’s theoretical model certainly provides an innovative means by which it might be framed.
Honneth’s work is not without its problematic aspects, however. Peter Osborne, for example, provides a short but devastating critique of the particular analysis of contemporary society developed in The Struggle for Recognition (1996). Because the focus of this section is the grounding of critical theory rather than the detailed analysis of particular versions of a critical theory of society, neither Honneth’s argument nor Osborne’s critique need be pursued. It will suffice to introduce two arguments that have important implications for the application of Honneth’s work to the discussion of security.
First, although Honneth aims to uncover and analyze the struggle for recognition, his argument seems to be based on the assumption of an essential harmony between the identity claims of individual subjects. That is, his argument is premised on the notion that the full development of an individual’s identity can take place without impinging upon the identity of another. But is this really the case? For example, the Bosniac national identity, based as it is on a multiethnic, multiconfessional civic nationalism, must surely conflict with the exclusive ethnic nationalism of many Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs. These identities are fundamentally incompatible. In this case at least, the successful development of identity for one group can take place only at the expense of another, thus calling into question Honneth’s presumption of an essential—or at least potential—harmony between identity claims.
Second, it is not clear that Honneth is sufficiently cognizant of the extent to which interests and identities are entwined and, indeed, the extent to which the latter are often an expression of the former. Bill McSweeney focuses on this relationship in his discussion of the so–called troubles in Northern Ireland. Discussing the seemingly intractable conflict between unionists and nationalists, Protestants and Catholics, he writes:
In each case, the roots of identity can be traced to the pursuit of interests and to the dominance of particular interests over some others which might have defined the group identity differently. In each case also, the identities which emerged from these struggles gradually acquired a primordial character which entered interactively into the definition of interests, inhibiting any attempt to expose their human fabrication and to separate the instrumental interests at stake at any time from the symbolic meaning which they sustained. (McSweeney 1996a: 174)
Among the implications of this is that The Struggle for Recognition is in many if not all cases also a struggle between different material interests. Therefore, to conceive such conflicts solely in terms of (narrowly understood) identity is to ignore some of the most basic sources and dynamics of tension and contention.
Because Honneth’s project is still in its formative stages, it is too early to judge whether his arguments concerning the grounding of critical theory will prove to be a substantial improvement over those developed by Habermas. There are certainly lacunae at the heart of his project of which Honneth himself is well aware. For example, he has not demonstrated, even to his own satisfaction, that “the expectation of social recognition belongs to the structure of communicative action” (Honneth 1994: 263), or, in other words, that his ideas on recognition are part of the communicative turn in critical theory initiated by Habermas.
The question arises whether we should be concerned by the inability of critical theorists to provide a fully satisfactory account of the intramundane basis for the belief that emancipatory transformation is possible. Honneth himself believes that demonstrating the grounding of the emancipatory promise of critical theory is absolutely vital:
Without proof—however this may be provided—that the critical perspective is supported by a need or a movement within social reality, Critical Theory cannot be continued in any way today; for it no longer distinguishes itself from other models of social critique by claiming a superior sociological explanatory substance or in its philosophical procedures of justification, but solely by its attempt (which still has not been abandoned) to give the standards of critique an objective foothold in pretheoretical praxis. (Honneth 1994: 257–258)
So, for Honneth, without an adequate account of grounding, the critical theory project fails.
However, Bronner argues that this belief is unwarranted. Like Habermas and Honneth, Bronner is critical of the emphasis that Adorno and Horkheimer, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, place on “pure negation.” Bronner argues that this stance, by definition, makes verifying the claims of critical theory impossible, and creates the dangers of dogmatism and detaching the theory from “practical interests, institutions, and actual movements” (Bronner 1994: 324). But in an implicit criticism of Habermas, he argues that the correct response to the problems inherent in a position of pure negation is not to concentrate on grounding as a philosophical problem or puzzle. After all, as he reminds his readers:
Foundations [read groundings] were precisely what critical theory sought to deny. They smacked of “traditional theory” with its finished claims, fixed systems, and attempts to subsume the particular in the general. (Bronner 1994: 323)
For Bronner, the real problem “was less a matter of ‘grounding’ in the abstract than an inability to deal concretely with concepts like democracy and the rule of law, socialism and equality, internationalism and cosmopolitanism” (Bronner 1994: 324). Seen in this light, grounding becomes a “matter for political and social theory rather than philosophy” (Bronner 1994: 325).
Bronner’s own solution to the grounding issue seems to rely more on history than on political and social theory. Rather than attempting to anchor emancipatory potential in the presuppositions inherent in communication—whether this is understood in terms of a theory of language or recognition—Bronner believes that a review of the historical record is sufficient to justify certain institutions and practices over others:
It is enough to look back at real systems and see that, with few historical exceptions, the extent to which the liberal rule of law is employed is the extent to which grievances are open to consistent forms of equitable redress. It is enough to note that the extent to which reciprocity is denied is the extent to which popular sovereignty is subverted, inequality is legitimated, and the subject’s security is lost. It is enough to know from the past that the arbitrary exercise of power is grounded in terror. (Bronner 1994: 325)
Furthermore, in a statement that resonates with the sentiments of the early critical theory of “Traditional and Critical Theory,” Bronner argues:
The interests of critical theory in justice and happiness are validated by those who suffer from their denial. They need not “justify” their experience of oppression, only the manner in which they seek to mitigate it—and that because, in fact, they will assuredly bear the burden for its failure. (Bronner 1994: 326)
Critical theory must be partisan in its concern for the oppressed and the marginalized.
Although the 1930s exiles were unable—and, as their subsequent history perhaps indicates, unwilling—to transform their concern for the downtrodden into practical suggestions for the transformation of their situation, Bronner is adamant that:
Critical theory cannot ignore substance in the name of form; it must prove willing to confront power and offer criteria for judging how one response to exploitation or oppression might work better for the exploited than another. (Bronner 1994: 327)
Indeed, Bronner believes that the critical theory project may become invalidated if it concentrates on metatheoretical issues—such as grounding—at the expense of more practically oriented theoretical concerns.
Bronner’s comments are well taken. They are a salutary warning against the persistent tendency of critical theory to collapse into “nothing more than an academic exercise” (Bronner 1994: 325). Although metatheory is important, as Bronner recognizes, its importance must be measured in terms of its contribution to the generation of theory, which is oriented toward real–world social transformation. It is this social transformation that is the point of critical theory and it is according to its adequacy for this task that critical theory must be judged. As Nancy Fraser more elegantly argues: “It is in the crucible of political practice that critical theories meet the ultimate test of vitality” (Fraser 1989: 2). Furthermore, in good dialectical fashion, it is important that those critical theorists who choose to concentrate their efforts in metatheoretical activity remind themselves that just as theory offers insights for practical struggle, the converse is also true.
Nevertheless, Bronner’s argument that the historical record in effect speaks for itself on issues of grounding is too complacent. Consider, for example, his short account, quoted earlier, of what history proves (Bronner 1994: 325). Bronner argues that history demonstrates that the liberal rule of law and accountability (democracy) is demonstrably superior to any previous or present alternative. This would seem to be not only plausible but irrefutable. But note his subsequent comment that “the extent to which reciprocity is denied is the extent to which popular sovereignty is subverted, inequality is legitimated, and the subject’s security is lost” (Bronner 1994: 325). What Bronner seems to be suggesting, contrary to Habermas and Honneth, is that there is no need to worry unduly about the source(s) of expectations concerning reciprocity; it is enough to recognize that popular sovereignty, equality, and security are the necessary prerequisites for reciprocity in the real world.
Bronner’s argument should, however, be considered in the light of the Marxian critique of capitalism of which critical theory is an intellectual heir. Marxist political economy argues that capitalism generates inequality and insecurity and that the reified separation of economics and politics into separate spheres—a move characteristic of capitalism—undermines the claim of liberal democracies to be polities based on popular sovereignty. The important point to note in the present context is that none of this critique is based on pointing to historical or contemporary examples of an actually–existing alternative order. History certainly does not prove the superiority of a mode of production alternative to that of capitalism. Neither can the Marxian critique of capitalism be reduced to an immanent critique in the sense of juxtaposing the present order to the justifications that are supplied for it—for example, “This is a society that claims to be based on equality, yet this principle is not enacted in relation to this particular group (women, linguistic minority, etc.) within it.” Rather, as Norman Geras has persuasively argued in Marx and Human Nature (1983), Marx and his adherents have also argued on the basis of another form of critique, a critique that—often implicitly—measures the present on the basis of a conception of actually–existing but not yet actualized human potential.
The debate over grounding is in essence a debate about delineating both the source and the character of this potential. By abandoning the latter form of immanent critique and concentrating solely on the former—a move that is implicit in Bronner’s position—critical theory would be narrowing the basis of its critique in an unwarranted and unhelpful fashion. As the Marxian critique of capitalist political economy illustrates, accounts of human potential form an important part of the critical theorist’s theoretical armory.
If this argument is correct, there is certainly justification for critical theorists to pursue the issue of grounding, and as we have seen, there remains much work to be done. Although both Habermas and Honneth offer interesting insights, their work contains significant drawbacks. Habermas is a theorist whose ideas on grounding appear to be of limited relevance to those societies in which the basic struggle for survival is still very obviously ongoing. Honneth appears to be resting a rather elaborate edifice on some questionable assumptions. Indeed, it may well be, as Postone argues (1993), that a return to Marx’s broader notion of labor—a concept that contained those features that Habermas has separated out under the heading “interaction”—remains the best way forward for critical theory in this respect.
Nevertheless, however unfinished and preliminary the theories of grounding developed by critical theorists are—and their theoretical precepts should remind them that they will always be engaged in a work in progress—this should not preclude others from relating their insights to empirical examples. This is the task I will undertake in the following chapters.
Theory and Practice
The first generation of critical theorists signally failed to produce a convincing account of the relationship between their theoretical activity and political practice. As I have already stressed in the previous chapters, there were contingent historical circumstances that made this failure all too understandable. Nevertheless, the fact remains that their theoretical endeavor, oriented as it was toward human emancipation, could not account for its own role—real or potential—in generating the conditions for progressive social change. With the collapse of faith in the proletariat as both subject and object of revolutionary transformation, critical theorists were unable to identify an addressee for their work—a target audience to which critical theory, in however mediated a form, could be or might become relevant. As a result, neither could they provide an account of their own social role qua theorists. Adorno’s solution, which was to argue that critical theorists were producing “messages in a bottle” for addressees at a time and place unknown, was certainly a striking and indeed poignant image. However, it merely deferred the issues rather than resolved them.
As I have already discussed, much of the impetus for attempts to renew the critical theory project was generated by the perceived failure of the old guard to relate their thinking to radical political activity. One of the challenges for the successor generations was thus to provide more plausible accounts of the theory–practice nexus. In this section I will consider their efforts in reference to the work of Habermas.
Habermas’s work has been characterized by a somewhat paradoxical oscillation between, on the one hand, ambitious claims about what his work successfully demonstrates or proves at the theoretical level and, on the other, a series of cautious and modest claims about his theory’s practical political import. For example, in the context of his work on discourse ethics, work that develops directly out of his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas admits to making
an outrageously strong claim... that there is a universal core of moral intuition in all times and in all societies... [and that] these intuitions have the same origin. In the last analysis, they stem from the conditions of symmetry and reciprocal recognition which are unavoidable presuppositions of communicative action. (Habermas 1992b: 201)
And yet, despite this boldness, in the course of the same interview in which he makes this comment, Habermas also argues that “philosophers are not the teachers of a nation,” and that “only rarely” can they “be useful people” to society as a whole (Habermas 1992b: 199).
Habermas’s emphasis on the attenuated societal relevance of theoretical activity is a recurrent feature of his work, from his 1963 essay “Theory and Practice” to his most recent interviews (Habermas 1992b). Habermas wishes to underscore his belief that social theorists possess no special insight that should lead to their views being accorded a privileged position in the area of political activity. Some of the impetus for this argument can no doubt be attributed to a well–founded desire on Habermas’s part to distance himself from some of the dogmatic excesses of those leftist ideologues who, despite their radical rhetoric, have tended to accord themselves a role bearing more than a passing resemblance to that suggested by Plato for the philosopher–kings of Callipolis. However, although the more circumscribed role that Habermas posits for theorists, and indeed for intellectuals more generally, may betoken a welcome humility and sense of perspective, it is questionable whether his account of the relationship between theory and practice is adequate.
In another interview (it is striking that it is from this source that his views on the theory–practice nexus emerge most clearly) Habermas discusses his own multiple roles in the following terms:
[I try] to keep various spheres separate: first of all these political–journalistic things, then “real” philosophizing.... After that, scientific work in a narrower sense; and finally teaching and, when the time is ripe, a political praxis which goes beyond journalism. In the last ten years I have also had to play the role of institutional director. I keep these various kinds of work separate, but I am not saying that this is the kind of division of labour in which one thing has nothing to do with another, or in which it is a matter of a combination of various roles. I would rather play each of these roles in such a way that the others remain visible at the same time. (Habermas 1992b: 127)
This general position is further clarified through a consideration of Habermas’s comments on John Rawls. According to Habermas, the acclaimed author of Theory of Justice has not
systematically cared when he speaks as a philosopher and when he speaks as a committed liberal in his society. This is what philosophers should also do; forget about their professional role and bring what they can do better than others into a common business. (Habermas 1992b: 199–200)
But what is the “common business” to which Habermas refers? And what does he believe that philosophers—in particular, critical theorists—“can do better than others”? Or rather, who should critical theorists be talking to, and what should they be talking to them about?
Habermas’s account of his own audience is typically modest and self–deprecating:
I work as a philosopher and sociologist, and therefore the people to whom my work is addressed primarily occupy positions in the scientific and educational system: now and again I dabble in political journalism and write in daily and weekly newspapers, or in so–called cultural periodicals. In both cases it tends to be the left intellectuals who are interested in what I write—and of course my old sparring–partners on the other side. (Habermas 1992b: 184)
This account, however, does less than justice to Habermas’s own prominence as a public intellectual in Germany. Indeed, his own biography suggests that the impact and influence of the theorist can reach well beyond the rather narrowly conceived academic and intellectual circles whom he claims to be attempting to address (see Robert Holub 1991; Habermas 1993b).
In terms of Habermas’s own theory, we can understand his various public interventions as contributions to the debates—or communicative action—taking place in the various overlapping lifeworlds that exist within and overflow the geographical space known as Germany. But what is the status of these contributions? The comments cited earlier in this section (“Philosophers are not the teachers of a nation”) suggest that Habermas does not believe that his own eminence as a social theorist should lead to his political views being accorded any special attention. This interpretation is supported by comments such as “Everyday moral intuitions have no need of the clarification of the philosopher” (Habermas 1992b: 199). Thus Habermas seems to be implying that he and other theorists are entering the debates of the lifeworld(s) simply as ordinary citizens—their theoretical expertise should not allow them to trump political arguments. Nevertheless, this implication is belied by numerous other statements in Habermas’s oeuvre in which he posits a more prominent role for theorists and theoretical activity. In “Theory and Practice,” for example, Habermas describes his ambition to “develop the idea of a theory of society conceived with a practical intention” (Habermas 1992b: 168), whereas in The Theory of Communicative Action, he argues that the task of critical theory involves “bringing to consciousness potentialities that have emerged within the maturing historical situation itself” (Habermas 1987: 382).
The question arises whether Habermas is contradicting himself in suggesting, on the one hand, that philosophers—including critical theorists—“are not teachers of a nation” while arguing, on the other hand, that critical theory should “perform the task of making possible enlightening interpretations of situations, which affect our self–understanding and orientate us in action” (Habermas 1992b: 168). I think not. Rather, what he seems to be saying is that political discourse cannot be reduced to a philosophical exercise. Theory and theorists can inform political debates. Positively, they can raise the level of those debates by pointing to unrealized possibilities or probable but unintended consequences of certain forms of action. But practical political questions cannot be settled at the level of theory. Indeed, any attempt to do so is likely to lead to highly undesirable, dogmatic outcomes. In summary, for Habermas, theory and practice are not identical, but neither are they totally autonomous enterprises. Nor should they be collapsed one into the other. Rather, both interact dialectically with each other.
This is a plausible position and one that is certainly closer in spirit to that propounded in the early articulation of critical theory than the Dialectic of Enlightenment version. However, it remains underdeveloped in at least two important ways. First, Habermas has not paid enough attention to the role of intellectuals. In his understandable desire to privilege democracy and democratic procedures, Habermas has been reticent in admitting that even within participatory democracies, some will play a leading role in the conceptualization and articulation of political possibilities. If critical theory is to have a practical impact, this role needs to be explored and explicated.
Whereas this deficiency can certainly be addressed and accommodated within Habermas’s theoretical framework, a second objection raises more fundamental questions. Quite simply, Habermas’s conceptualization of public debate and the possible contribution of critical theorists to this debate is too consensual. He seems to imply—to exaggerate only slightly—that after intellectuals contribute their insights to the “public sphere,” 3 the “force of the better argument” will somehow prevail and these insights will be taken up and become influential. But what is missing here is any notion of struggle—of how ideals and interests intermingle and interact, of how movements take up, adapt, and utilize ideas as part of an interactive process within and between societies. In other words, Habermas’s understanding of politics is underdeveloped.
This represents a serious problem in Habermas’s understanding of the relationship between theory and practice. It also highlights a problem at the heart of Habermas’s understanding of his key concept of lifeworld. Habermas uses the term in two distinct ways. In the usage encountered earlier, it refers to “relatively informal ways of life, contrasted with market and administrative systems” (Outhwaite 1996: 369)—that is, the ensemble of relationships now commonly referred to as “civil society” (Cohen and Arato 1992). Its second usage refers to those background, taken–for–granted, or “commonsensical” assumptions on the basis of which communicative activity occurs (Habermas 1992b: 109–110, 205). Notwithstanding these different meanings that Habermas attaches to the term, the problem is that in neither case does he seem to recognize that the lifeworld is suffused with politics. It hardly needs to be underscored that lifeworld in the civil society sense is very much a realm of political struggle. But the same is equally true of lifeworld understood in the second sense. Yet Habermas seems to ignore how and why certain opinions come to be regarded as common sense; he thus glosses over the relationship between knowledge and interests.
Although one may sympathize with Habermas’s motives in defending a strong (procedural) notion of truth, especially in light of the contemporary tendency simply to reduce knowledge to interests, one may ask whether this defense has led him to develop an apolitical theory of society. Indeed, this line of criticism could well be pushed further. Could it be that in his reconstruction of historical materialism, Habermas ultimately develops an ahistoric theory that effectively ignores material interests? Even if this verdict is too sweeping, there can surely be little doubt that Habermas’s theory of society pays too little attention to politics in its conception of the lifeworld. To regard politics as somehow extrinsic to the lifeworld is naive, yet by making comments such as “Politics has become an affair of a functionally specialized subsystem,” Habermas seem to suggest that politics is a systemic phenomenon (Habermas 1991: 360). Although not everything can be reduced to politics, little can be understood without reference to it.
In the light of both its underdeveloped notion of the role of intellectuals and theorists and its lack of understanding of how politics revolves around the interplay of ideas and interests, Habermas’s conceptualization of the relationship between theory and practice is inadequate. These are important gaps in the development of a critical theory of security. In Chapter 6, I will develop an alternative conceptualization based on the work of Antonio Gramsci and on the historical experience of the relationship between the theory and practice of alternative (critical) notions of security.
Emancipation: Concrete Utopias
Politics involves making choices: choices between different visions of the ends pursued and choices between different means of pursuing them. But choices are seldom clear–cut. Means and ends may conflict, short–term goals may contradict longer–term objectives, and of course, actions often have unintended consequences. Thus part of the task of theory with emancipatory intent is to delineate and clarify the choices being faced in the practical realm and to examine and illuminate conflicts and contradictions between them. In this way, theory can give direction to action; theory and practice can be consciously unified in praxis.
But in order for this to happen, theoretical reflection cannot remain at the very abstract level. In contrast to the refusal of Adorno and Horkheimer to supply descriptions of an emancipated order—a refusal they often justified in terms of the Judaic prohibition on the portrayal of Jehovah (see Jay 1984: 20)—critical theorists must go beyond generalized exhortations concerning emancipation, empowerment, freedom, and happiness. If critical theory is to have practical relevance, it must reflect on what emancipation means in terms of actual institutions and relationships. As radical German students demanded in the 1960s, critical theorists should seek to outline positive visions of concrete utopias (Wiggershaus 1994: 623).
The work of the first generation of critical theorists does not offer much specific guidance in the task of outlining what emancipation might mean in practice, but the preceding discussion of their work suggests three points that those attempting to overcome this failing should bear in mind. First, and most obviously, visions of concrete utopias must be consistent with whatever deeper notions of the grounding of emancipatory potential are deployed. Thus, for example, if the possibility of emancipation is grounded in the economic realm, then, logically, depictions of a more emancipated order cannot simply concentrate on (narrowly defined) political institutions. Second, descriptions—indeed, prescriptions—of a more emancipated order must focus on realizable utopias. Critical theorists must not lose sight of the fact that the coherence of their project is dependent on their utilization of the critical potential of immanence. If they succumb to the temptation of suggesting a blueprint for an emancipated order that is unrelated to the possibilities inherent in the present—a tendency that Marx and Engels argued was characteristic of “utopian socialists” such as Robert Owen (Marx and Engels 1948: 44–46)—then critical theorists have no way of justifying their arguments epistemologically. After all, to justify a utopia that is not already present in some form within the prevailing order requires the existence of an Archimedean point according to whose standards this utopia might be envisioned—a possibility rejected by critical theorists.
Thus immanent critique (understood in broad terms) remains a vital part of the metatheoretical armory of critical theory. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that a vision of an emancipated order that is not based on immanent potential will be politically efficacious. Unless anchored in a realistic assessment of actually existing possibilities, emancipatory ideas are hardly likely to convince their target audience (whoever they might be) that progressive change is not only desirable but also plausible and achievable, and therefore worth the effort or risk of trying to secure. Thus, for both epistemological and purely instrumental reasons, concrete utopias must be based on practices that have some basis in preexisting behavior.
Finally, in addition to basing their visions of concrete utopias on realizable, immanent possibilities, critical theorists should also restate their understanding of emancipation as a process rather than an end point, a direction rather than a destination (Nye 1987: 245–247; Booth 1991b). Such an understanding is, of course, inherent in a dialectical approach that regards each order or condition as the bearer of its own negation. Indeed, one of the defining features of the Western Marxist tradition of which critical theory forms a part is its hostility toward the tendency of “orthodox Marxism” (a term that may be historically obsolete but remains a useful shorthand) to succumb to some notably undialectical notions about the future. The idea, for example, that history would effectively come to an end once the proletariat had gained power may well have been given credence by Marx’s own work, but for critical theorists, and Western Marxists more generally, it flew in the face of the basic principles of Marx’s method. Each order is susceptible to criticism. Even if a more emancipated order is brought into existence, the process of emancipation remains incomplete. There is always room for improvement; there is always unfinished business in the task of emancipation.
One of the benefits of explicitly recognizing emancipation as a process whose culmination or fulfillment remains forever deferred is that it deflects Adorno and Horkheimer’s objection to calls for critical theory to detail which arrangements it regards as preferable to those that currently prevail. The authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment argued that by supporting particular structures and practices, theory becomes reified and loses its critical edge. The experience of Marxism as an official state ideology confirms that this argument contains a kernel of truth. But the lessons that Horkheimer and particularly Adorno drew from this experience effectively threw out the baby with the bath water. They argued, as part of their more general critique of instrumental reason, that the only response to this danger of reification was to adopt a position of resolute and unrelieved negativity—a move whose basis and consequences were criticized in Chapter 2.
In contrast, I would argue that if one adopts an explicit understanding of emancipation as a process rather than an end point, the undoubted dangers of reification are minimized. If emancipation is understood in terms of a journey that is never completed, then the theoretical justifications—as opposed to psychological and other justifications—for complacency and conformism are removed. With these basic injunctions in mind, I will now examine efforts to delineate the broad contours of concrete utopias as found in the works of Habermas and Ulrich Beck.
Habermas on Democracy and Emancipation
The overall thrust of Habermas’s thinking on the contours of emancipation is procedural. Indeed, he explicitly argues that “the only utopian perspectives in social theory which we can straightforwardly maintain are of a procedural nature” (Habermas 1992b: 206–207; see also Habermas 1994: 112–113). The procedure that he identifies as being the “necessary condition” of an emancipated society is democracy. Through the extension of democratic decisionmaking, Habermas wants to transform the relationship between lifeworld and system. He wishes to reverse the colonization of the former by the latter by bringing “impulses from the lifeworld” to bear on the system. By doing this, the “socially integrating power of solidarity” generated through “autonomous, self–organized public spheres” can assert itself over the system–steering media of money and bureaucratic power (Habermas 1991: 364).
But what of the practicalities of bringing about such a transformation? In truth, Habermas seems unable or unwilling to move beyond the most vague assertions. He certainly does not provide a sketch of a more emancipated order that might serve as a set of coordinates for activists attempting to achieve progressive change within the complex constellations of interests and identities that form contemporary society. Thus, for example, when pressed by an interviewer to discuss the type of political institutions that might be congruent with a more emancipated order, Habermas is no more specific than the following:
I am convinced that the competition of parties which have become more and more independent of their bases, and which carry on the business of providing legitimation in an essentially manipulative way, must be changed. I suspect that another kind of separation of powers would have to be introduced. (Habermas 1992b: 182)
The interviewer and the readers are left only to guess as to what this might actually mean in concrete terms. Habermas is equally vague when discussing the type of economic order necessary to allow a transformed relationship between lifeworld and system. He admits: “I cannot imagine that this [transformation] would be possible without a gradual abolition of capitalist labour market” (Habermas 1992b: 183). However, he gives no inkling as to what might replace that market.
In this context it is instructive to note Habermas’s response to a question posed to him in an interview conducted in 1984:
[Question:] Aren’t you in a way logically committed to some programmatic account of the social order your work is concerned to bring about, beyond your diagnostic analysis of the present order which you reject? Could you contemplate your producing one day an equivalent for us of Hegel’s Constitution of the German Nation or Kant’s Scheme for Perpetual Peace?... Hasn’t the highest philosophical vocation traditionally embraced this kind of concrete thought too?
[Answer:] The examples are too grand, but I must take your admonitions to heart. (Habermas 1992b: 184).
This mea culpa notwithstanding, although Habermas has continued with his “diagnostic analysis of the present order,” he has still not generated any sustained reflections on the order that his work is “concerned to bring about.” Habermas has still not moved beyond generalized exhortations that never ultimately address how broad principles can be operationalized. Thus the political limitations (and hence relevance to security studies) of Habermas’s critical theory of society are manifest.
Beck on Ecological Enlightenment
More useful for security studies is the work of Ulrich Beck, and for two reasons. First, Beck’s version of critical theory is less philosophically oriented than Habermas’s, and as such, his more sociologically and politically focused critique may provide a more concrete vision of emancipation than that proffered by Habermas. Second, Beck’s now influential characterization of contemporary society as a “Risk Society” (Beck 1992a) and his dissection of the ecological threats facing humanity have important implications for the discussion of security in Chapter 4.
There is scope for debate about Ulrich Beck’s exact relationship to the Frankfurt School, but it is not the purpose of this book to explore the range of influences and contacts, both intellectual and professional, that tie Beck to critical theory. Nevertheless, enough linkages can be identified that render plausible the claim by Scott Lash and Brian Wynne in their introduction to Risk Society that Beck is engaged in the development of a critical theory of society appropriate for the post–welfare state world (Beck 1992a: 8).
The essence of Beck’s argument is that the technological evolution of contemporary society is causing a shift “From Industrial Society to the Risk Society,” to cite the title of one of his articles (Beck 1992b). Modern industrial society has always been characterized by risk, which Beck understands as threats to human physical security arising from “decisions that focus on techno–economic advantages and opportunities and accept hazards as simply the dark side of progress” (Beck 1992b: 98). A society based on instrumental or purposive rationality, to adopt terminology already utilized in this book, generates numerous unintended consequences—from factory accidents and pneumoconiosis to industrial smog and Aberfan–type disasters—that threaten human health and life. However, in industrial society the actual and potential social and political effects of these risks were contained by “the emergence of a system of rules for dealing with industrially produced risks and insecurities” (Beck 1992b: 99).
This system, an amalgam of public and private insurance schemes and agreements, created a “social compact against industrially produced hazards” that generated “present security in the face of an open uncertain future” (Beck 1992b: 100). Although this “security pact” may have been based on a “calculus of risk” that exemplified a type of “ethics without morality, the mathematical ethics of the technological age” (Beck 1992b: 100), it did provide the prevailing politico–economic order with legitimacy in the eyes of the vast majority of the population. As green commentators never tire of pointing out, the left never challenged some of the most basic assumptions of industrial capitalism concerning the desirability of unrestrained growth and the nature of humanity’s relationship with the natural world (e.g., Gorz 1994; Eckersley 1992).
According to Beck, “the foundations of the established risk logic are being subverted or suspended” (Beck 1992b: 101) as a result of a series of technological challenges to the ecology, such as those caused by nuclear power and the chemical and biotechnology industries. These technologies have the potential to wreak destruction on such an unimaginably large scale that they subvert any risk calculus; there is no social and political order that could deal with the consequences of a worst–case scenario. As a result, legitimation for this new risk society cannot be generated through the same type of security pact that characterized industrial society. Rather, “political stability in risk societies is the stability of not thinking about things” (Beck 1992b: 101). It is only in this way that the tension between popular expectations for the continuation of “a level of security founded on the perfection of techno–bureaucratic norms and controls,” on the one hand, “and the spread and challenge of historically new hazards which slip through all the meshes of law, technology and politics,” on the other, can remain hidden (Beck 1992b: 104).
If this silence is not maintained—if the nonthinking begin to think—then, given the intimate interrelationship between technology and the political and social order, the potential for upheaval is tremendous. According to Beck, the catalyst for a process whereby the dependence of society on a uniquely hazardous techno–economic logic may be unmasked is the failings of the technologies themselves. Accidents, near misses, the emergence of new hazards, the realization that technologies previously deemed safe are in fact hazardous (chlorofluorocarbons and the ozone layer, for example)—these all serve to undermine the legitimacy of the prevailing order. They undermine the claim of experts—long dominant in developed societies—to a monopoly of wisdom, a result that has far–reaching implications. As Beck says: “The exposure of scientific uncertainty is the liberation of politics, law and the public sphere from their patronization by technocracy” (Beck 1992b: 109). But which groups within risk societies are best placed to challenge the prevailing techno–economic order and emancipate humanity from its grip? And what types of institutions and practices could replace this order?
Beck argues that one of the novel features of the new threats facing humanity is that they do not respect the traditional state and class boundaries. Of course there are winners and losers, and the weakest suffer disproportionately, but nevertheless, traditional axes of conflict are subsumed within conflicts between different regions and between different economic sectors—with competing alliances of capital and labor confronting each other. One result is that the traditional antisystemic movements, such as workers’ parties and trade unions, are unlikely to provide the main source of opposition to the risk society.
Beck argues that it is those social movements often termed “new” or “critical” that can—and indeed are—exposing the tensions that underlie contemporary societies (see Ray 1993; Kellner 1989: 218–233). The “civil courage of individuals and the vigilance of social movements,” combined with the “sensationalist greed of the mass media,” can ensure that the inevitable catastrophes that occur in contemporary societies will serve to expose the hazardous and hazard–generating nature of the techno–economic foundations upon which these societies have been constructed (Beck 1992b: 116). Such a concatenation will
threaten markets, make sales prospects unpredictable, devalue capital and set streams of voters in motion. Thus the evening news ultimately exceeds even the fantasies of countercultural dissent; daily newspaper reading becomes an exercise in technology critique. (Beck 1992b: 116)
Social movements have already had a major impact, in Beck’s opinion. In his native Germany, for example, they have ruptured “an authoritarian everyday culture which, historically, has enabled all official nonsense and insanity with its anticipatory obedience” (Beck 1992b: 117).
Of course, even if social movements in Germany have challenged the traditional culture of deference toward bureaucrats and experts, they have not—as yet—challenged the basic contours of that country’s political economy. To ensure such a far–reaching transformation, Beck advocates a project of “ecological enlightenment” to be fought out at the micro and broadest macro levels and to span every aspect of life (Beck 1992b: 118). The aim of this emancipatory project—here echoing Habermas—should be the democratization of society:
Industrial society has produced a “truncated democracy”, in which questions of the technological change remain beyond the reach of political–parliamentary decision–making. As things stand, one can say “no” to techno–economic progress, but that will not change its course in any way. It is a blank check to be honoured—beyond agreement or refusal. That is a manufactured “natural force” in civilization, an “industrial middle ages”, that must be overcome by more democracy—the production of accountability, redistribution of the burdens of proof, division of powers between the producers and the evaluators of hazards, public disputes on technological alternatives. (Beck 1992b: 118–119)
More concretely, and thus in contrast to Habermas, Beck argues that such a radical democratization can be achieved by two sets of reforms.
First, Beck wants society to recognize that the role, scope, and institutional expression of politics are changing as part of a more general process of societal transformation: “Monopolies are breaking up—the monopolies of science on rationality, of men on professions, of marriage on sexuality, and of politics on policy” (Beck 1992a: 232). Specifically, the political process as conventionally understood—that is, the governmental structures of sovereign states—is losing much of its power. This is occurring both domestically, where power is being lost to the media, the legal system, and to quasi–governmental bodies, and internationally, where transnational actors of various kinds are undermining the sovereignty of the state.
Beck is relatively sanguine about this process inasmuch as he is no fetishist of the sovereign state. By the same token, however, he regards it as vital that transparency and accountability are extended to these new centers of decisionmaking power and that the principle of the division of powers is entrenched across the new political landscape. To this end he recommends that the independence of the legal system and the media should be fully recognized. More originally, Beck also wishes to ensure that the possibility for self–criticism is “institutionally protected” in order to facilitate “alternative evaluations, alternative professional practice, discussions within organizations and professions of the consequences of their own developments, and repressed skepticism” (Beck 1992a: 234).
Second, Beck wants to ensure the democratization of techno–economic development, thus bringing technology under the control of society and ending the present situation, in which the opposite is the case (see Beck 1992a: 228–231). This aim can be secured by informing, empowering, and emboldening the public sphere. Beck believes that through informed public scrutiny of scientific developments, the public sphere can ensure that the unintended consequences and civilizational implications that orthodox science currently excludes from its calculation—often precisely because they are incalculable—are given due consideration. This would allow society to end its dependence on the judgment of experts and judge for itself how best to “counter the incapacitation and expropriation of daily life in the civilization of threat” (Beck 1992b: 120).
Beck’s sketch of an alternative order is interesting and important. But certain aspects of it may not be convincing. For example, can public scrutiny ever be organized and institutionalized in such a way that it can control the trajectory of apparently autonomous techno–economic development? Even to pose this question is to highlight what is undoubtedly the major failing of contemporary left–wing theorizing in general; that is, its inability to provide a plausible account of alternative modes of political–economic organization to those modes that characterize capitalism. Nevertheless, Beck’s analysis of and prescriptions for society relate to the experiences, perceptions, and aspirations of many ordinary people in developed societies. Furthermore, his account of the relationship of technology and society is arguably more sophisticated and rounded than those provided by the leading lights of the Frankfurt School. The next section will explore this relationship in more detail.
Technology
In the previous chapters I outlined two diametrically opposed views on the nature of technology and, specifically, the relationship between technology and society. In Chapter 1 I examined Horkheimer’s essentially benign view of technology that underlies the argument of his essay “Traditional and Critical Theory.” Horkheimer equates technological progress with progress itself in that it improved prospects for human emancipation—understood in terms of the rational, planned domination of nature. This view was subsequently rejected by Horkheimer, who in the course of his collaboration with Adorno came to regard technology in entirely negative—indeed apocalyptic—terms. As the discussion of Dialectic of Enlightenment in Chapter 2 illustrated, Adorno and Horkheimer saw technology as the product of a form of rationality whose hegemony was wholly inimicable to human freedom.
But both of these views are deeply problematic. The former is remarkably unreflective and uncritical. By treating technology as if it were simply a neutral medium, “Traditional and Critical Theory” effectively ignores one of Marx’s basic arguments, namely, that the dialectical relationship between the forces and relations of production acts as the motor of history. The argument of Dialectic of Enlightenment goes to the other extreme and adopts a conception of technology that is far too reductionist and deterministic. This in turn leads to an abject fatalism. By viewing technology as the material manifestation of a form of rationality that is all–consuming, Adorno and Horkheimer effectively relegate human beings to the role of ciphers who have lost all capability to think and act for themselves. In effect, human subjectivity is denied. Thus the possibility that technology could be developed and utilized for human ends is dismissed tout court.
But this position ignores the fact that at least some forms of technology have significantly reduced human suffering. In no facet of life is this more true than in medicine. As noted in Chapter 2, Adorno and Horkheimer’s response was to argue that “the serum which a doctor gives a sick child is obtained by attacking defenceless animals” (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979: 223). This, of course, has historically been the case: Other sentient beings have suffered appallingly for causes often far less deserving than children’s health. But to divine from this undoubtedly important realization that our technological destiny is to subside into a condition of unmitigated oppression and suffering is unwarranted. Consider the example proffered by the authors of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The first point to note is that the serum does provide succor to the child; that is, the dark side of this episode is balanced by a positive outcome. Thus the example is not simply one of unrelieved horror, and to portray it as such is a gross misrepresentation. Furthermore, real world experience has shown how an increasing awareness of animal suffering during the testing of products designed for human consumption—and increased concern about the moral implications of this suffering—has gradually led to pressure on those developing such products to seek out alternative ways of testing them. Although there may not be an end to all animal testing in the foreseeable future, there has been progress: Moral learning has taken place, and new technologies are being developed as a result. This outcome underlines the ahistorical nature of Adorno and Horkheimer’s example. The undeniable fact that the health of children has been purchased in part at the expense of animal suffering does not necessarily mean that it will always be so.
Despite the emphasis by critical theorists on the insights provided by a dialectical approach, their work on technology, at least as exhibited in the two classic texts studied in the previous chapters, has been notably undialectical. They have consistently failed to recognize the dialectical interaction between technology and society, which mold and shape each other. This is true of the approach adopted in “Traditional and Critical Theory” and its implication that technology is neutral and can simply be shaped to the will of society. It also true of Dialectic of Enlightenment and its suggestion that technology totally determines society (indeed, one might suggest that the book’s title is a misnomer). What is needed, therefore, is a critical approach that goes beyond the one–dimensionality of traditional critical theory conceptualizations of technology and develops a dialectical understanding of its subject. This is precisely what Andrew Feenberg has attempted to develop in his Critical Theory of Technology (1991).
Feenberg reconstructs the basic assumptions underlying the various conceptualizations of the relationship between technology and society. The resulting taxonomy distinguishes between two main views: the instrumental and the substantive. On the basis of a critique of both views, Feenberg develops his own critical understanding of technology. It is important to note that in his reconstruction and critique of prevalent views of technology, he addresses and criticizes the work of other critical theorists, including Adorno and Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Habermas. His own work may be regarded as an attempt to develop an understanding of technology that is more consistent with the basic precepts of critical theory than are those proffered by the leading critical theorists. In the remainder of this section I will summarize Feenberg’s reconstruction of the instrumental and substantive views of technology as well as his own critical understanding.
The instrumental view of technology is by far the most influential, at least in Western societies. It sees technology as basically neutral; in Feenberg’s words, “as subservient to values established in other social spheres i.e. politics and culture” (Feenberg 1991: 5). In other words, technology can serve a “plurality of ends” depending on the particular circumstances of its use (Feenberg 1991: 12). A simple illustration of this view can be found in the argument of the U.S. National Rifle Association (NRA) against gun control, an argument encapsulated in the slogan “It’s not the gun, it’s the person holding the gun.” The implication of the slogan is that the gun itself is neutral; it can be used for good purposes, such as defending family and home, or for nefarious activity, such as crime. Another example can be found in the field of military strategy and its recurrent arguments against the banning of offensive weapons. The argument here is that weapons are not inherently offensive or defensive; rather, it depends on the attitudes and outlooks of those controlling their use. “What is not a weapon in the wrong hands?” is a question that vexed those involved in the interminable debates on disarmament in the League of Nations during the 1920s.
The instrumental view is predicated on the “common–sense” notion that “technologies are ‘tools’ standing ready to serve the purposes of their users,” that is, that they are neutral in themselves (Feenberg 1991: 5). As I discussed in Chapter 1, this was the view of technology underlying Horkheimer’s early critical theory. It is also the view of Habermas (his most sustained discussion of technology can be found in Habermas 1970: 81–122; Feenberg 1991: 176–179).
Feenberg argues that the substantive view of technology is in essence a deterministic attitude that “attributes an autonomous cultural force to technology that overrides all traditional or competing values.” Thus “substantive theory claims that what the very employment of technology does to humanity and nature is more consequential than its ostensible goals” (Feenberg 1991: 5). No matter what the intentions of those inventing or introducing a new technology, it will determine social and cultural relations in a particular way.
For a military–related example, consider the invention of the conoidal bullet. The bullet was first developed for hunting and dueling, and for many years military chiefs opposed its introduction into warfare. However, they were eventually forced to accept its deployment, which ultimately precipitated a radical change in military tactics. Units on the battlefield could no longer be arranged in centrally controlled massed ranks because these became too vulnerable; instead, troops had to be dispersed into small units and given operational autonomy (see De Landa 1991: 11–125). This example fits particularly well with Feenberg’s description of technological determinism that he sees as based on two theses:
The pattern of technical progress is fixed, moving along one and the same track in all societies. Although political, cultural, and other factors may influence the pace of change, they cannot alter the general line of development, which reflects the autonomous logic of discovery.
Social organization must adapt to technical progress at each stage of development according to the “imperative” of technology. This adaptation executes an underlying technical necessity. (Feenberg 1991: 122–123)
Military leaders could not resist the introduction of the conoidal bullet, and once it occurred, military organization was eventually forced to adapt to the imperatives of the new technology. In one of his more deterministic moments Marx once asked Engels the rhetorical question “Is our theory that the organisation of labour is determined by the means of production confirmed anywhere more splendidly than in the man–slaughtering industry?” (Holloway 1983: 131). Despite the fact that Marxists have regularly succumbed to technological determinism, the substantive approach is perhaps more usually associated with such figures as Martin Heidegger (1977) and Jacques Ellul (1964).
The substantive approach is predicated on a deterministic, even fatalistic, view of technology. Technology is regarded as an autonomous force, and as such, it is a destiny that cannot be avoided or escaped. As I discussed in Chapter 2, this view was emphatically the conception of technology adopted by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Feenberg rejects both the instrumental and substantive views of technology. He regards the former view as hopelessly simplistic. To use an earlier example, “the army is not merely accidentally related to its weapons, but it is structured around the activities they support” (Feenberg 1991: 65). It is not simply a coincidence that military organizations tend to change their operational structures and especially tactics and strategies when new technologies are introduced. Similarly, the number of violent deaths in a society, despite the NRA’s arguments to the contrary, are not somehow accidentally related to the ease of access to firearms within that society. Easy access to guns can undermine the previously prevalent social and cultural values. In reality, subjects—be they armies or individuals—and means are related.
But in advancing the significance of the subject/means relationship Feenberg is not simply accepting the substantive position that technology is autonomous and that a particular set of social values or social relations are embodied within a given technology: He is not saying that the means of action (e.g., weapons) ultimately controls the subject of action (e.g., army). Rather, developing his critical theory perspective, Feenberg regards the means and subject as “dialectically intertwined” (Feenberg 1991: 65, emphasis in original). He provides a succinct explanation of this position:
Critical theory argues that technology is not a thing in the ordinary sense of the term, but an “ambivalent” process of development suspended between different possibilities. This “ambivalence” of technology is distinguished from neutrality by the role it attributes to social values in the design, and not merely the use, of technical systems. On this view, technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle. (Feenberg 1991: 14)
The important term to note is “ambivalence.” Technology does have a logic in that it simultaneously creates and constrains the choices available to society; however, technology does not predetermine which of those particular choices is made. That decision is social and as such reflects a whole series of social, cultural, and power relations. The fact that these relations are potentially contestable leads to the argument that technology is a “scene of struggle.”
Feenberg reformulates this argument in a more formal fashion by arguing that each technology contains within it a number of neutral “technical elements” (springs, pumps, etc.) but the way in which these particular elements are configured together reflects certain values. These values arise from the socially hegemonic pattern of alliances and power relations. The values then embodied in the technology often serve the function of supporting or legitimating the position of the hegemonic groups within society. Thus the critical theory position developed by Feenberg rejects the instrumental view that technology is simply a neutral means. It also rejects the substantive view of technology as destiny: Such technological determinism is, in the words of Raymond Williams, a “form of intellectual closure of the complexities of social process” (R. Williams 1982: 67–68).
The critical theory perspective, as developed by Feenberg, views technology as an ambivalent process that contains within it a number of possibilities. The decision as to which of these possibilities is ultimately realized is a social decision and thus reflects a whole complex of (potentially contestable) social, cultural, and power relations. In Chapter 5 I will use this view of technology to reconceptualize strategy in terms of the interrelationship between the (ambivalent) possibilities of technologies and particular strategic cultures.
Renewing the Critical Project
In this chapter I have analyzed various attempts to renew the critical theory project and redeem its early promise from the impasse generated by the totalizing “critique of instrumental rationality” underlying Dialectic of Enlightenment. By concentrating on issues related to theory, emancipation, and technology, I not only have delineated the main thrust of contemporary critical theory, in particular as found in the work of Habermas, but have done so in such a way as to lay the foundation for the discussion in Part 2 of this book.
It has been argued that many aspects of contemporary critical theory remain problematic. In particular, the attempts by Habermas and subsequently Honneth to ground the normative claims of critical theory in actually existing social practices, though viewed as ultimately unconvincing, are still creative, interesting, and instructive, and certainly an improvement on the ideas in the work of both Horkheimer and Adorno. Furthermore, Habermas’s account of the theory–practice nexus has been regarded as deficient, exposing a lack of appreciation of the role of intellectuals in society and a conception of politics that is too narrow and too consensual. The tenor of the discussion of Habermas’s ideas concerning the contours of a more emancipated order has also been critical; in particular, it has been suggested that his account of concrete utopias is too abstract to enjoy much political relevance.
Other manifestations of contemporary critical theory have been seen in a more positive light. Beck’s critique of the risk society and his suggestions concerning the possible structures of a more emancipated order have been applauded for their realism and possible utility as part of the theoretical underpinnings of progressive political practice. Similarly, Feenberg’s critical theory of technology has been applauded for its sophisticated and plausible account of the relationship between technology and society and for the insights it offers into the possibilities for progressive transformation.
The overall picture that emerges from this discussion is mixed. Contemporary critical theory has strengths, but some elements of it—and important elements at that—are unconvincing. Important work remains to be done. In particular, the task of providing an adequate account of intramundane emancipatory potential is unfinished. Nor is there yet a convincing account of the relationship between critical theory and emancipatory political practice.
However, the view that critical theory is an unfinished project—that it is work in progress—should not be regarded as surprising. After all, given critical theory’s conception of thought as being historically situated and reflecting particular constellations of interests, it should be apparent that, logically, critical theorists must view their own work as perpetually unfinished. As society changes over time—as interests and identities alter—so must theory if it is to retain any critical purchase and perspective. The unfinished and in some aspects unconvincing character of critical theory should not deter attempts to apply its insights to particular issues. The notion that every metatheoretical and theoretical issue must be resolved before applying a theory to a particular empirical case is based on an undialectical and ahistorical conception of theory that is wholly at odds with that of critical theory. The logic of the critical theory position must be that by applying the theoretical and metatheoretical insights to concrete questions, analysts not only generate new ways of viewing those particular questions but also become more aware of the potential and pitfalls of the theoretical framework itself. Theoretical development and empirical application are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, if Nancy Fraser is indeed correct to argue that “it is in the crucible of political practice that critical theories meet the ultimate test of vitality,” then it follows that through its application to concrete problems and issues, critical theory can continue to make progress at the metatheoretical level.
Furthermore, even though critical theory does not have all the answers—indeed, can never have all the answers—in Part 2 I seek to demonstrate that an approach based on its precepts and principles can generate innovative ways of thinking about the theory and practice of security and strategy.
Endnotes
Note 1: The obvious metaphor to use here is that of foundations. However, the static nature of foundations often leads hostile commentators to suggest that those who use this metaphor are inferring some sort of Archimedean point by which critical theory orients itself. Although critical theory explicitly rejects any notion of an Archimedean point, I refer to “grounding” rather than “foundations” in the hope that this implies less immobility. Back.
Note 2: In his recent work, Habermas has tended to use the term “formal pragmatics” rather than “universal pragmatics.” See his comments in Outhwaite 1996: 129ff. Back.
Note 3: This phrase is associated with Habermas’s work Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), first published in German in 1962. The concept has been subsumed within his more recent analysis of society in terms of the system/lifeworld relationship. He now uses “public sphere” to refer to those “higher–level, concentrated communicative processes” that are particular manifestations of the lifeworld (Habermas 1991: 359). Back.
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