Those of you who enjoy my writing - and I remain amazed and delighted that some people do - will not need this but, before I go further, I must offer a substantial health warning. I’m sorry but this Substack will be even more difficult to get through than usual.

Not the most encouraging of starts. You have my permission to take a day off if you need one, and who wouldn’t. However, to explain, I’m doing this to describe more fully how the power-medium works. So, at least my intentions are good even if my editing skills aren’t.

It continues the discussion on power-duality, which we started talking about last time. This is power as containing stuff that, according to its own rules, its own logic, simply shouldn’t be there. Sounds a little mad I know, and I suppose it is, but, thankfully, society has found people with large brains capable of helping us.

Last time, we talked a little about Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas. They have different views about power-duality. Foucault (1980) says that power is both integrated with truth and also no different from it, at the same time. Habermas (1984) argues that truth is a rarified or perfect state separate from power but also that it isn’t because truth must always be shaped by power.

Bonkers eh? Well, that’s boffins for you. Yet, each of these two positions has persuasive qualities too, which we’ll go into shortly. It’s just that they’re far from problem-free.

Habermas took direct and fairly robust issue with Foucault’s dual account of power. He claimed it operated as a ‘performative contradiction’ (1987).

In other words, keeping ‘Le show Foucault’ on the road, allowing power and truth to be constituent parts of something so integrated that the two things can’t really be separated, means performing the equivalent of intellectual cartwheels. Habermas tended to ignore his own obligatory gymnastic routines but we’ll come to that later.

Habermas argued that to see the existence of different regimes of truth, a central plank of Foucault’s account, we must be able stand at an objective vantage point. From this we could then see the circumstances of these regimes or where differences meet or become unimportant.

However, Foucault denies the existence of any such thing. There’s no vantage point, he says. Instead, we are all in it together, tainted by the dynamic prejudices and preternatural relations his model insists upon us.

In other words, on one hand, truth and power exist in a harmonious state whilst, on the other, they’re also busy resolving the innumerable distinctions and differences that exist between them.

Foucault was content to live with this type of outrageous dissonance. He was known for his diligence and eye for detail but he could be very erratic with those unable to match his speed of thought. However, this dissonance was often a ‘McGuffin’* too far even for his most ardent supporters.

Nancy Fraser (1990), for example, treated Foucault’s account of truth–power as deeply historical. It was something she could look back on and examine fruitfully with perspective but she couldn’t see how his domain both allowed for and denied the existence of competing regimes.

Her solution was to invent something called perspectival dualism. This recognised we were inside regimes but still had just enough agency to occupy marginal positions amongst them, places from which we could criticise the dominant truths we are reacting against.

Ian Hacking (1999) leaned instead into Foucault’s ‘genealogical’ method, liking how specific ‘styles of reasoning’, such as highly positivist explanations of statistical probability or even the scientific method itself, create their own truths as logical consequences or constructions.

Foucault’s paradox was the price we had to pay for all the good stuff his theories otherwise came with. Hacking stressed that we don’t need a universal standpoint to compare regimes, only a willingness to trace how each constructs reality or displaces rivals.

Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (1982) stressed that Foucault’s project was not about solving the paradox on which it was built but establishing a way to inhabit it. Foucault’s ‘genealogy’, his analytical style, serves us well because it’s a means to destabilise the assumption that truth is timeless and reliable.

The ambiguity that we are fixated on, that of being inside a single power construct yet able to write about its multiplicity, is a deliberate methodological stance, not a flaw to be fixed somehow.

This sort of response is the intellectual equivalent of ‘get a life will you!’ or ‘don’t stress the small stuff.’ Yet, it is some ‘stuff’ and some ‘small’. It has the character of a ‘fingers-in-the-ear apologetic’. It’s done little to stabilise Foucault’s apparent logical fallacies. He remains though perhaps the biggest of the big hitters when it comes to trying to describe what power is or does.

So how does the power-medium deal with this type of ‘don’t look too deeply please’ logic? Well, simply. It remains broadly unaffected by such arguments because it doesn’t rely on them to do its job.

This is because its purpose is to provide a pathway not simply to resolution but also to understanding, one capable of allowing for the contingent nature of any power settlements or descriptions.

Indeed, duality is important to the power-medium as it shows important sites of contention and negotiation and how competing positions might be identified or managed through their socialisation.

If Foucault’s model risks collapsing into paradox, then Habermas’ alternative is vulnerable to a simpler but different kind of critique.

Post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida (1982) challenge Habermas’ categorical yearning for a separation between truth and power. Derrida argued instead that meaningful communication must always be affected by power asymmetries and linguistic instability. There’s just no way around it.

He believed that language itself is shaped by something he labelled ‘differance’. Lovers of ‘franglais’ will already know that this translates as ‘difference’ but it’s actually more of a catch-all phrase that brings into play matters with deferred or contextually emergent meanings.

This sounds complicated but it mainly refers to the sort of unavoidable ambiguities or ‘gotchas’ that undermine the possibility of something purely neutral or power-free occurring in the way we choose to talk and listen to each other.

The very existence of the power-medium means that what one person takes from a word, what it conjures or represents, is different from what another might take. This establishes the existence of the rules of thought or the conceptual obligations placed on us and which generate fuzziness or interference as a result.

Habermas’s demarcation of ‘communicative rationality’, his idea of truth living in a free state outside of power, is also seen as highly utopian and overly abstract. Critics argue it overlooks the entrenched structural inequalities of social life, particularly those of gender, race, and class.

These skew even-handed participation in discourse and distort what might look like consensus or valid opinion. If we fail to engage with these embedded power relations, ironically the very essence of Foucault’s multiplicity, the communicative ideal of which Habermas is so proud, risks obscuring how domination works.

Duality is accepted as a form of negotiation within the power-medium. It delineates the boundaries, strengths and weaknesses of different claims and requires them to justify their place as a fixed or accepted reasoning, even inside a world of material injustice or, as in this case, one dealing specifically with power.

The opposing fears, contradictions and overlaps laid bare by power-duality seem to be of most concern to political theorists. Chantal Mouffe (2000) emphasised how conflict and dissent are intrinsic to democratic life, not aberrations within it.

We must confront that which is contrary to our beliefs and values directly because this is a consequence of politics, it is the challenge put to us by the power-medium. By claiming a route to rational consensus, Habermas’ model may inadvertently suppress legitimate contest in favour of a superficial or unachievable stability.

If ‘communicative action’ is shown to have distortions like this in its make-up then, as an ideal, it should be obliged to offer up an ’equaliser’. This might be something able to intervene to restore rational discourse when too many hidden weights and magnets force things off course (Flyvbjerg). Habermas was never really interested in doing any such thing.

So, we are left with two versions of power that defy logic as well as simple explanation. Capable of confusing or settling both sides of an argument that, seemingly, can never be resolved.

Contemporary sociologists are often accused of dismissing the idea of ‘grand theory’, something capable of explaining convincingly the matters which affect us all regardless of our nationality, ethnicity, wealth or where we live. Given our experiences of power so far, the insurmountable problems we encounter when we ask ‘what is truth,’ it’s easy to see why this might be the case.

Yet, we should not be so quick to retire from our search for power. We might be crawling to a useful understanding of power. Indeed, part three of this series might convince you of this.

References:

Derrida, J. 1982. ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–28.

Dreyfus, H.L. and Rabinow, P. 1982. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Flyvbjerg, B. 1998. ‘Habermas and Foucault: Thinkers for civil society?’, Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, 92, pp. 1–33. DOI: 10.3167/004058198782485513.

Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Brighton: Harvester.

Fraser, N. 1990 ‘Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy’, Social Text, 25/26, pp. 56–80.

Habermas, J. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Boston: Beacon Press.

Habermas, J. 1987. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by F. Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hacking, I. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Mouffe, C. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London: Verso.

Note * McGuffin. This is a plot device in film and literature that serves as a catalyst for the action, motivating the characters or driving the narrative forward. It’s been in use for nearly 100 years. It can mean an object of some sort but it might be an event that the characters have to deal with. It’s generally insignificant in itself. The word was popularised by filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock but he did not originate the term. This honour goes to his friend, Scottish screenwriter Angus MacPhail. The use of McGuffin today remains the same as it was in the 1940s and 50s when Hitchcock was making it more commonplace. Examples of MacGuffins in film making include a briefcase in Pulp Fiction and the treasure in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Image: SHVETS

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