Habermas's Musse, Foucault's Genealogy

1
Habermas's Musse, Foucault's Genealogy
2
Whats wrong (CRITIQUE)Jurgen Habermas

• "the collapse of the discussional."
• "no longer cultivation Bildung but rather
  consumption opens access to culture goods."

3
Whats wrong (CRITIQUE)

• private alienation in a narcissistic society

4
Whats wrong (CRITIQUE)

• as impossible a project as Sartre's "thing for
  and in itself."

5
Whats wrong (CRITIQUE)

• "the commodification of culture" or "the
  colonization of non-economic aspirations,
• For us, our concerns with place as human abode,
  constructed by communities of discourse,
  shaired stories, meanings, histories being
  replaced by spaces empty of meaning,
  uninhabitable by humans, diminishing humanity,
  blocking culture production

6
Whats wrong (CRITIQUE)

• Gorz argues that there are two fundamental errors
  in the new economic incarnations of positivism
• the belief that all human values may be
  represented in the market place, and the
  imperative to expand the "economic sphere"
  indefinitely into previously free human
  activities. (One of Gorz's central metaphors is
  prostitution, standing for the commercializing
  and thus destruction of free human associations)

7
Whats wrong (CRITIQUE)

• Gorz observes that unrestrained capitalism is
  always imperialistic.
• Commodification of the Lifeworld (Habermas term)

8
Whats wrong (CRITIQUE)Gorz and Habermas

• A phantom "public" has replaced the public of
  active cultural performance, exchange, and
  production. The individual is alone in such a
  "public," a face in the crowd with no control
  over the words and symbols that flow around him,
  without power to contribute to the discourse or
  even to repeat the words for herself. The
  isolated, powerless individual and the false
  public are a modern parasitic pair, each feeding
  on the other's inauthentic claims. TALK ELBOW

9
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US

• "literary strata,"

10
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US

• Rather than facilitate the doing and
  transformation of culture, conceived in
  heterogeneous communities of discourse,
  specialists now reserve literate activities such
  as history for themselves, organizing in
  homogeneous professions, and exercising tight
  bureaucratic controls over what constitutes
  legitimacy, who may use the words, who has access
  to positions, publications, etc.

11
Habermas

• "continuing alienation between the "productive
  and critical minorities of specialists cultural
  professionals/professors... who keep up with the
  high grade abstraction in art, literature, and
  philosophy, with the way of becoming dated that
  is specific to the ambit of modernity, and of
  course, with mere changes in scene and trendy
  humbug-- and, on the other hand, the great
  public...

12
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US

• Rather than facilitate the doing and
  transformation of culture, conceived in
  heterogeneous communities of discourse,
  specialists now reserve literate activities such
  as history for themselves, organizing in
  homogeneous professions, and exercising tight
  bureaucratic controls over what constitutes
  legitimacy, who may use the words, who has access
  to positions, publications, etc.

13
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US

• Social science's products are now almost
  exclusively manufactured in-house and reserved
  for elite cultural functionaries for their own
  uses i.e. the power, position, and prestige
  granted the creators and keepers of society's
  knowledge and truth.

14
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US Foucault
offers a similar indictment

• "the tyranny of globalizing discourses with their
  hierarchy and all their privileges of a
  theoretical avant guard."

15
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US the effects
of the centralizing powers

• exclusivity, power, and pretension

16
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US Habermas
asks us as professionals and professors

• "Which speaking, discoursing subjects-- which
  subjects of experience and knowledge-- do you
  want to diminish... Which theoretical-political
  avant-guard do you want to enthrone in order to
  isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of
  knowledge that circulate about it?"

17
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US Effects

• "scientific hierarchization of knowledges"
• "coercion of a theoretical, unitary, formal and
  scientific discourse."
• KNOWLEDGE HAS A POLITICAL AGENDA

18
WE HAVE MET THE ENEMY AND HE IS US

• Attempting to protect their truth-power and keep
  as many as possible off their turf, academic
  specialists have emerged as captains of culture,
  cultural-capitalists who control the means of
  serious cultural production outside mass culture
  as certainly as any group of robber-barons ever
  cornered the market for industrial products in
  the ninteenth century.

19
DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Seperating from hoi poli, we have reached a dead
  end
• The literati have produced a powerful critique of
  the core premises of the Enlightenment

20
DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• the 'four illusions of Enlightenment'. These are
• the myth of the unitary subject
• Postmodern discourse theory proposes that no
  identity is ever complete. It is on the contrary
  crisscrossed by divisions, defined in opposition
  to its various others, and penetrated by a
  constitutive lack of wholeness that is its very
  condition of possibility. (Darwin, Freud, Marx,
  Hegel)
• abstract universality
• Postmodern discourse theory suggests that we have
  to abandon the discourse of the universal and
  recognise the particularity of all claims to
  knowledge and truth.
• the essentialist conception of the social
  totality. Next slide
• The quest for the ultimate foundations of
  rationality No more Encyclopedias!!!! slide
  after next

21

• The characteristic gesture of the Enlightenment
  is to seek out an essential foundation 'beneath'
  the level of surface appearances which is
  supposed to ground the processes happening in
  every region of society. The concept of society
  as a unitary, and fully intelligible, structural
  totality, which is divided into base and
  superstructure, has been fiercely criticised by
  postmodernism. Postmodern discourse theory
  contends that structural totality is always
  surrounded by an 'excess of meaning' which it is
  unable to master and that, consequently,
  'society' as a unitary and intelligible object
  which grounds its own partial processes is an
  impossibility. Or, as Laclau and Mouffe
  elsewhere express it, society is not a valid
  object of discourse.

22
DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• our traditional claims about the existence of an
  extra- discursive truth-- about a transcendent
  subject, standing outside history and the
  structure of language, as the ultimate foundation
  for rationality is questioned.

23
DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault have taken the
  next logical, critical step, showing that just as
  there is no external ground that determines
  structure, there is no external "reality" from
  which to understand structure and the meanings it
  generates-- there is no extra-linguistic,
  privileged place outside language and culture
  from which to tell the truth about systems. As
  Derrida put it "there is nothing beyond text."

24
DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• In particular, for historians, Foucault's
  critique of meta- narrative is cataclysmic.

25
DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Jane Caplan observed
• There remains, however, a basic anxiety for
  historians in the face of deconstruction namely
  that, in making the text ultimately undecidable,
  it abolishes the grounds for privileging any one
  interpretation, and therefore makes the writing
  of conventional history impossible.(my emphasis).

26
deconstruction's centrifugal imperative

• Caplan insists that "while deconstructive
  methods may be borrowed by the historian for the
  interpretation of texts, deconstruction as an
  epistemology is virtually incompatible with the
  historian's enterprise."
• Mouffe's project of a radical democracy also
  springs to mind here, as does Beard's metaphor,
  "every man his own historian" retooled to fit the
  times.

27
the box deconstruction has built around the
disciplines

• most common proposal is pragmatic- Jane Caplan
  is typical in her observation "The utilitarian
  goal here is, for academia, the production of new
  knowledge."
• "the work of the disciplines" is the sovereign
  consideration.

28
DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX the absurd production of
self-defeating work

• The reasoning goes, "the work of the disciplines"
  is the sovereign consideration.
• even though that work has lead to undeniable
  conclusions that undermine the academic project,
  (to "negative self-reference") these must be set
  aside in deference to 'the work to be done.'"

29

• To me, this all seems like another case of "work
  without end," made even more desperate as such
  work begins to constantly defeat itself.
• For me, I cannot do history as a professional
  historian.

30
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• HABERMAS'S MUSSE
• But there are possibilities for professions
  beyond the absurd production of self-defeating
  work possibilities such as the opening out of
  the active creation/practice of culture in
  deconstruction's project of decentering and
  multiplicity.

31
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• It is here that I will begin to speak as a
  professor of leisure and recreation, admitting
  that I am only a historian by craft, not
  profession. I was trained in my craft by some of
  the best historians around, but found my academic
  profession in much despised regions of field
  houses and disreputable academic sub-divisions.
  But I claim this rag-tag profession proudly, and
  with Foucault take a perverse joy in writing
  history as a non-historian saying things about
  alternative practices of history that are perhaps
  not possible for one committed to history
  practiced as a modern profession.

32
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Habermas specifically links the collapse of the
  discussional and the rise of consumer culture
  with changes in leisure time.

33
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Free time, in traditional cultures and according
  to the classical ideal, was the space for the
  active creation of culture.

34
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• For a while, in coffee houses, community centers,
  fraternal societies, etc. workers in modern times
  formed an authentic public and created their own
  words and meaning in leisure.

35
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• This kind of leisure as Musse was displaced by
  industrialization and bourgeois society that
  emptied leisure of it cultural function and
  replaced it with Freiheit vacuous, solipsistic
  freedom, meaningful only in its relation to work
  and the passive consumption of mass
  products/services. (Habermas terms this the
  "depoliticization of leisure").

36
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• This degradation of leisure, from the "basis of
  culture" to the mere service of work and
  consumption, as much as the degeneration
  (deskilling and romanticizing) of work, resulted
  in various forms of alienation among workers who
  no longer have access to public participation and
  culture making.

37
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Habermas argues that only through the recovery of
  "emancipated leisure," freed from the domination
  of work and the bourgeois culture of consumption,
  will workers be freed to reassert their claims to
  culture making.

38
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Such "emancipated leisure" would challenge the
  hegemony of economic values and meanings and the
  culture of work now dominated by the professions
  and other bourgeois structures.

39

• Marcuse's Eros and Civilization
• "Automation threatens to render possible the
  reversal of
• the relation between free time and working
  time the
• possibility of working time becoming
  marginal and free
• time becoming full time. The result would
  be a radical
• transvaluation of values, and a mode of
  existence
• incompatible with the traditional culture.
  Advanced
• industrial society is in permanent
  mobilization against
• this possibility.

40
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Leisure as Musse would also open up the
  possibilities for individuals to generate their
  own meaning and find group prestige in
  association with their fellows in free public
  places and in autonomous cultural activities.
• In this class we have seen historical examples-
  Little Theatre, Continuing Education

41
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Freed from the control by those outside the
  community that profess some external cultural
  truth or value in language essentially foreign to
  the community, individuals might begin to
  "reconstitute the public sphere."
• Begin to reconstruct PLACE

42
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Hemingway
• fundamentally restructuring the
  production-consumption complex and challenging
  the economic definition of human beings.

43
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• FOUCAULT'S GENEALOGY
• Foucault speaks of his project in remarkably
  similar terms. (Similar to Habermas)

44
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• FOUCAULT'S GENEALOGY
• it is through the re-appearance of this
  knowledge, of these local popular knowledges..
  that criticism performs its work.... What emerges
  out of this is something one might call a
  genealogy, or rather a multiplicity of
  genealogical researches...

45
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• FOUCAULT'S GENEALOGY
• And these genealogies, that are the combined
  product of an erudite knowledge and a popular
  knowledge, were nor possible.. except on one
  condition.. that the tyranny of globalising
  discourses with their hierarchy and all their
  privileges of a theoretical avant guard was
  eliminated.

46
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• FOUCAULT'S GENEALOGY
• Let us give the term genealogy to the union of
  erudite knowledge and local memories which allows
  us to establish a historical knowledge of
  struggles and to make use of this knowledge
  today.

47
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• FOUCAULT'S GENEALOGY
• Genealogy is based on a reactivation of local
  knowledges... in opposition to scientific
  hierarchisation of knowledges and the effects
  intrinsic to their power

48
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• the authentic work of the professional historian
  is first, critical self-awareness and secondly,
  bringing into "play... local dicursivities"
  through the "activation of local knowledges."

49
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Since it is not possible to turn back the clock
  and recover the "Subjugated Knowledges" in their
  pure states, as if the truth-professions never
  existed, the only option is service- the turning
  of the discipline, methods, skills, and energy of
  the professions to genealogy.

50
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• As professor of leisure and recreation, I am
  primarily interested in Foucault's tactic of
  bringing into "play... local dicursivities" and
  in Habermas' "emancipated leisure"--

51
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• My "professional" or professorial duty is first
  promoting public recreation only secondarily, as
  a means to that end, do I ply my craft as an
  historian and seek reputation for my histories.

52
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Sharing Foucault's purpose, I am most interested
  in the "decentering" of history -- in simple
  terms, the restoration of memory and tradition,
  story and custom, festival and pageant as public
  activities with an "every-day" practice in the
  cities, towns, and communities of this countries.

53
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Place studies- also returning the structuring of
  Place to localities through restoration of memory
  and tradition, story and custom, festival and
  pageant

54
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• years ago in Durham, N.C.
• Over the years- my work with local parks
  districts, Community and Recreation Centers
  throughout Iowa, Red Cross, YMCAs, Boy Scouts,
  church groups, etc, Iowa Continuing Education

55
A WAY OUT OF DECONSTRUCTIONS BOX

• Teaching, as I have discovered to my joy, is also
  an effective tool- a way to challenge students to
  "own" the liberal arts, and actually to practice
  what they are learning at college in their lives.
  Perhaps it is a sign of our current concentration
  on research and "the production of new knowledge"
  in the university that my students are constantly
  amazed by my insistence that they find a
  practical place in their lives for reading and
  writing-- for actually doing history, nature,
  music, philosophy, etc. But I am convinced that
  unless our students learn to do the liberal arts
  for their own sakes, free from me and the
  university, as ordinary "non-professionals,"
  their education is a failure.

56
A WARNING

• I suggest that professional historians and other
  social scientists, without such a recreational or
  teaching goal and without critical self-awareness
  toward the decentering and opening up of the
  practice of the liberal arts and sciences, are
  doomed to continued and increasing cultural
  isolation. We are doomed also to the despairing
  production of works we no longer believe are
  possible in principle, and the gluttonous
  consumption and retention of those wonderful,
  autotelic activities, such as doing history,
  which we have perverted into over-serious labors.

57
CONCLUSION

• All this producing and consuming in the very
  midst of local communities still starved for
  something beyond getting and spending... Surely,
  it is for us in the literate professions to lead
  the way to the local recovery and everyday
  practice of the free, cultural activities of
  mind, spirit, and body that are more necessary
  for life than any of the myriad new consumer
  products, more even the provision of steady work
  for professional scholars.