ALLEN, ForST and HAUGAARD - Power and Reason, Justice and Domination

Journal of Political Power, 2014
Vol. 7, No. 1, 733, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2014.887540
Power and reason, justice and domination: a conversation

Amy Allena, Rainer Forstb and Mark Haugaardc*
Downloaded by [Professor Mark Haugaard] at 03:11 01 April 2014
Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA; bGoethe Universitt,

Frankfurt am Main, Germany; cSchool of Political Science and Sociology, National
University of Galway, Galway, Ireland
Through an email conversation between Allen, Forst and Haugaard, this article
explores the relationship between the dyads power and reason, justice and
domination. In much of the literature reason is considered either a mode of
emancipation from power (Lukes) or, conversely, a subtle ruse of domination
(Foucault). Here it is argued that reasoning is intrinsic to political power, with
both the potential for power as justice (Arendt), and for power as domination
(Foucault and Lukes). With power and reason as normatively neutral, with both/
either normatively desirable and undesirable potentials, this raises the fundamental question of how to distinguish between justice and domination. These issues
are explored, taking account of processes of subject formation and systems of
thought.
Keywords: power; reason; justice; domination; subjectication
Mark Haugaard: As things stand, the power debates are divided between theorists
who see reason as a subtle ruse of power, leading to domination, and theorists who
consider reason as the key to overcoming domination in its most sophisticated
forms. Paradigmatically, this opposition is represented by Foucaults assertion that
nothing could be more sterile than to use reason to critique power (Foucault 1983,
p. 210), which is diametrically opposed to Lukes argument that freedom, as
opposed to domination, entails living autonomously according to the dictates of
reason (Lukes 2005, p. 115). We have Nietzsche against Kant, which are usually
considered incommensurable. However, it seems to me that the way forward is not
to take sides siding with either Nietzsche/Foucault against Kant/Lukes rather it
is to recognize that both positions have some truth to them.
In more its most subtle forms, when not manifestly coercive, modes of domination are reproduced through the reasoned consent of subaltern actors. In the third
dimension of power (Lukes 2005), or hegemony (Gramsci 1998), actors become
part of a system of thought, or a habitus (Bourdieu 1977), in which certain forms
of domination become perceived of as reasonable because they constitute part of a
taken-for-granted, second nature, knowledge which appears as the natural order of
things. In the fourth dimension of power (Digeser 1992), in which actors become
attached to subaltern subject positions, as both subjects and objects of knowledge
(Foucault 1983), they come to see specic forms of identity as not only attractive
but also locally episodically empowering, even though these identities may
*Corresponding author. Email: Mark.Haugaard@nuigalway.ie
2014 Taylor & Francis
A. Allen et al.
legitimate domination. Thus, to use your example, (Allen 2010), which also came
up in a previous exchange (Honneth et al. 2010), in the gendering of a female
actor, she is rewarded in childhood with love for being pretty, charming, and attentive to the needs of others, which entails the creation of a subject position that she
will not only come to be attracted to (the subject position being associated with
ontologically security from childhood) but she will also nd structuring this position locally episodically empowering, as other actors respond positively to her
because she is occupying a structurally recognizably appropriate subject position.
This renders it reasonable for her to adopt, what are, in essence, relatively subaltern
roles, when viewed from a structural and systemic perspective (see Allen 2007).
However, the success of these more subtle forms of power, which rely on local perceptions of reasonableness to reinforce domination, does not entail that we should
accept the hypothesis that the use of reason solely constitutes a mode of domination. The willingness of actors to consent to domination through reason is not simply false consciousness, a sign of defectiveness, it also suggests that some of the
time reason must also be a mode of emancipation, a road to relative freedom or
justice. To borrow conceptual vocabulary from Habermas (1984), the most effective
form of instrumental manipulation takes place when instrumental action appears as
communicative interaction. Thus, the success of this kind of manipulative instrumental action is parasitic upon, and presupposes, genuine communicative action.
Similarly, the third and fourth dimensions of power presuppose that the use of reason is, indeed, in actors interests some of the time. Otherwise, these dimensions of
power are premised upon actors who are hoodwinked all of the time, which either
entails an over-socialized concept of agency (agents as cultural dupes/dopes), or
that these actors are defective in some way (which is the source of the elitist implications of the term false consciousness) or a conspiracy theory (the subalterns are
being brainwashed by an elite) all of which are theoretically indefensible hypotheses. Therefore, I think you may well be right, Rainer, that the underlying principle
of justice lies in reasoned interactive justication between actors (Forst 2012)
which is, ironically, demonstrated by the use of reason for the purposes of domination. However, this entails that we must recognize that what appears as reasoned
justication can also be the tool of power as domination in its most subtle forms.
In distinguishing power/reason which leads to justice, from power/reason that
entails domination, I think it is important to remember that it is not simply a question of distinguishing normatively desirable from undesirable modes of reason, or
reason from rationalizations, it is equally important to realize that power is also
normatively divided between normatively desirable and undesirable power. Power
is usually assumed to equate with domination. Even when Foucault states that
power is positive, it seems to me that he has in mind positive only in the empirical sense of being constitutive of reality, for instance: We must cease once and
for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it excluded In fact,
power produces: it produces reality; (Foucault 1979, p. 194). His frequent
injunctions for us to resist power and subjectivisation Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are (Foucault 1983,
p. 216), and assertions such as, [d]omination is in fact a general structure of power
(Foucault 1983, p. 226), suggest that he took for granted that power was normatively undesirable, yet inescapable. In contrast, in much of your work (Allen
1998, 1999, 2001), by drawing upon Arendts normatively positive characterization
of power, as the capacity to act in concert (Arendt 1970, p. 44), you have shown
Journal of Political Power
that the power family entails not only power-over, but also power-to and powerwith. The latter two are normatively desirable and, in many instances, such as
authority, power over is also normatively commendable. Further to this latter point,
I have also argued that normatively commendable power over is intrinsic to the
democratic process (Haugaard 2010, 2012). Thus, in distinguishing forms of
power/reason, relative to justice and domination, it is not only reason which we
must consider normatively Janus-faced, it is also power; or maybe you both disagree with this analysis and suggested mode of proceeding?
Amy Allen: First of all, I want to say thank you to Mark for suggesting this conversation and for providing such a compelling and fruitful opening to the discussion.
I agree wholeheartedly with the two major points that you have raised, which I
would summarize as follows. First, we should understand reason as Janus-faced,
which means that it is capable of, on the one hand, rationalizing and justifying relations of domination by generating hegemonic, taken-for-granted, naturalized systems
of thought that make domination seem reasonable even to the dominated, and, on
the other hand, of empowering subordinated individuals to resist their subordination,
both individually and collectively, by, for example, enabling them to demand justication for their condition (Forst 2012). Second, we should resist the strong tendency
in the literature on power to conate power with power-over and power-over with
domination, and should instead understand power as Janus-faced as well, in that it
can take normatively desirable and normatively objectionable forms.
This second point is one that I have argued for in some of my earlier work on
power, as Mark mentioned, though here I would just make one small, but I think,
important point, which may or may not constitute a difference between our views.
On my view, all forms of power and not only power-over are Janus faced or
normatively bivalent in the way that Mark described. Just as power-over can take
benign, non-dominating forms, power-to and power-with, though typically associated with benign and empowering capacities, can reinforce and uphold domination.
In this way, I part company with Arendt, who views power as she denes it as
the human ability not just to act but to act in concert as an end in itself, that is,
as having intrinsic normative value (Arendt 1970, cf. Allen 1999). Conicts or disagreements often arise over whether a particular relation of power is normatively
benign or objectionable. For example, is a teachers exercise of power over her student a benign attempt to empower the student or a part of an authoritarian educational system designed to produce docile, obedient subjects? Is a young womans
embrace of her sexual empowerment think Lady Gaga and Girls, or, if you are
my age, Madonna and Sex and the City an act of resistance to a patriarchal sexual order that denies womens sexual desire and freedom or is it a capitulation to a
sexual order that denes women as objects for male sexual pleasure? Is a collective
social or political exercise of power-with such as the Tea Party or Occupy Wall
Street a force for emancipatory change or a reactionary defense of the status quo?
Of course the difcult question with respect to all of these examples is: how are
we to distinguish between normatively benign or benecial and normatively problematic and objectionable relations of power, whether they are relations of powerover, power-to, or power-with? Here is where an appeal to reason often comes in,
and if we follow what Mark has identied as the Kantian line, then reason is all
we need to make such distinctions, for we can say that relations of power are normatively benign just so long as they can be defended by appeal to reasons (usually
under certain sorts of idealized procedural conditions) and they are normatively
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problematic just so long as they cannot be so defended. If, however, we accept the
Janus-faced nature of reason then things become more complicated. If reason serves
both to stabilize hegemonic structures of domination and to critique such structures
of power, then how can an appeal to reason enable us to distinguish between
benign and objectionable forms of power?
A possible way out is to distinguish between actually existing or merely de
facto rational agreement or consensus (e.g. about whether existing relations of
power are normatively benign or not) and some stronger notion of what makes
rational agreement on such matters normatively legitimate. Such a distinction
appeals to a meta-level principle of reason or justication what Habermas used to
call the ideal speech situation (1984) which is itself presumed to transcend existing relations of domination in fact, it is thought to model the very idea of nondomination. On this view, even though actually existing practices of reasoning are
always, as a matter of fact and in the real world, entangled with relations of power,
good and bad, the meta-level principle itself is not; hence, it can provide the criterion by means of which we distinguish between merely de facto and legitimate reasons for or justications of our normative assessments about power relations.
However, if we assume, as Mark has argued elsewhere (Haugaard forthcoming),
that there is no such meta-level principle to be had there is no transcendental
reason with a capital R (p. 28) because conditions of reasonableness are created
through being socialized into a local habitus, to use Bourdieus term, then we
appear to be back where we started.
But this line of thought neednt lead us to abandon reason or to deny its positive
emancipatory effects. It is compatible with the belief that reason is a powerful tool
for unmasking and contesting relations of domination, and that being able to give
and ask for reasons (and to have ones reasons be taken seriously and ones requests
for justication be heard and honored in a non-patronizing way) is empowering and
can, under certain social and historical conditions, be a crucial part of transforming
and overcoming relations of domination. What it does rule out is the idea that our
conception of reason can be thought of as context-transcendent that way lies what
Laclau calls pernicious ideological closure (Laclau 1996; for helpful discussion, see
Cooke 2006, pp. 100104); or what Mark has identied as a reication of a
particular, local conception of reason that leads to domination (Haugaard
forthcoming, p. 37).
In saying this, I actually take myself to be building on an insight of Foucaults,
and, hence, I would quibble with Marks claim, in his opening remarks, that Foucault sides against Kant and hence against reason. As I read him, when Foucault
says shall we try reason? in the passage that Mark mentioned above, he means
not shall we give reason a try? but, rather, shall we put reason on trial i.e. for
its entanglements with power? It is this latter move of which Foucault says nothing would be more sterile (1983, p. 210). As critical theorists, we must constantly
ask ourselves, as Foucault puts it elsewhere:
How can we exist as rational beings, fortunately committed to practicing a rationality
that is unfortunately crisscrossed by intrinsic dangers? If critical thought itself has
a function it is precisely to accept this sort of spiral, this sort of revolving door of
rationality that refers us to its necessity, to its indispensability, and, at the same time,
to its intrinsic dangers. (2000, p. 358)
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Rainer Forst: Like Amy, I would like to start by saying thanks to Mark for inviting
us to have this discussion and for opening it with his inspiring and challenging
remarks. I am happy to engage in this discourse with two extremely powerful theorists of power from whose work I have learned a great deal.
I agree with both Mark and Amy that we need dialectical accounts of both
power and reason: of power as a practice of domination and as a practice of emancipation (and lots of possible in-betweens) as well as of reasoning as a means of
domination or subordination and as a weapon of critique (most importantly of selfcritique) in a Kantian sense. So I would say, like Amy and Mark, that any socially
situated form of reasoning, i.e. established sets of reasons and of what counts as
reasonable, can be expressions of hegemonic forms of thought and possibly of an
ideology, masking the unjustiable as justied. But if we say that, and especially if
we engage in a certain critical social analysis of such a set of justications, we
have to appeal to certain standards of justication that transcend that very context.
So if Amy says that we cannot have such context-transcendent standards, I fear I
must disagree, for then the very talk of critique as unmasking (see above) false
justications would have no basis. We would just replace one form of justication
with another to our liking. For such a critique to be justied, we need to appeal to
certain standards of justication that transcend existing ones for the better while at
the same time insisting that we will have to criticize our own critique if it reproduces new forms of one-sided and false justications (as it possibly would). But if
here Amy means citing Mark on the impossibility of having access to a pure and
transcendent form of reason that context-transcendence in the sense of no longer
requiring any self-critique is impossible, then I agree for that would be just
another metaphysical slumber.
Reason is the very faculty of critique, and as Kant said, it is therefore essentially self-directed:
Reason must subject itself to critique in all its undertakings, and cannot restrict the
freedom of critique through any prohibition without damaging itself () The very
existence of reason depends upon this freedom, which has no dictatorial authority, but
whose claim is never anything more than the agreement of free citizens, each of
whom must be able to express his reservations, indeed even his veto, without holding
back. (Kant 1781/87, A 738739, B 766767)
But for that it needs certain standards, and an essential one is that one needs to
give appropriate reasons to justify the assertions one makes so if one holds a certain moral norm or interpretation of justice to be justied, one needs to be able and
willing to make good on that claim with reasons that are not rejectable with reciprocally and generally justiable reasons. The criteria of reciprocity and generality
we arrive at recursively from reecting on the validity claim of a moral norm or a
norm of justice (that claims reciprocal and general validity), thus transforming these
criteria into criteria of mutual justication. Such justication in practice or in
mente is always a fallible and imperfect enterprise, but it is imperative given the
principle of justication as a principle of reason. In practical contexts, to make a
long story awfully short, this entails what I call a right to justication because practical reason entails not just knowledge of how one would have to justify ones
moral claims but also that one must do so.
Essential for our discussion, however, is the question of the immanent relation
between reason (or reasoning), reasons and power. This is how I see things (cf.
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Forst 2013c): I think that power is a noumenal phenomenon, to say it paradoxically, and that we must place it solely in the space of reasons and of justications
(which might be controversial among us). We need a cognitive account of power
that is neutral as to its positive or negative evaluation (we agree on the latter
aspect). So let us dene power initially as the capacity of A to motivate B to think
or do something that B would otherwise not have thought or done. It is not part of
that denition whether this is done for good or bad reasons, for the sake of or contrary to Bs interests, or by which means. But it is essential that power is exercised
by agents over other agents as beings guided by reasons (and in that sense, free
agents). The means of the exercise of power can be a powerful argument, a wellfounded recommendation, an ideological description of the world, a seduction, an
order that is accepted, or a threat that is perceived as real.
Different from the exercise of physical force or violence, power rests on
recognition and acceptance. This is not necessarily a positive form of acceptance
(as Arendt thought), for the threat that is perceived as real is in that very moment
also recognized and gives one a reason for action intended by A. But if, as happens
in some cases, the threat by the blackmailer or the kidnapper is no longer seen as
serious, their power disappears. They can still use brute force and kill the
kidnapped person, but that is rather a sign of having lost power (either over those
who are not willing to pay or over the kidnapped person, who refuses to recognize
the kidnapper as dominant and does not comply). Power is what goes on in the
head, and what goes on is recognition of a reason to act in a certain way. Power
rests on perceived and recognized, accepted justications (from the participants
perspective) some good, some bad, some in-between (as seen from an observers
perspective).
This is why I believe that the original phenomenon of power is of a noumenal
nature: to have power means to be able and this comes in different degrees to
use, inuence, determine, occupy or even to seal the space of reasons for others.
This can happen in a singular event (a powerful speech or a deceit), in a sequence
of events or in a general social situation or structure in which certain social relations are seen as justied, so that a social order comes to be accepted as an order
of justication. Relations and orders of power are relations and orders of justication, and power arises and persists where justications arise and persist, where they
are integrated into certain narratives of justication (Forst 2013b). In their light,
social relations and institutions, but also certain ways of acting and thinking, appear
as legitimate, possibly also as natural or according to Gods will. These can be relations of domination or of equality, political or personal, and the justications can
be well-founded and collectively shared with good reasons, or they can be distorted
and ideological (i.e. justifying a social situation of asymmetry and subordination
with false reasons that could not be shared among free and equal justicatory
agents in a situation free from such distortion). Such a notion of ideology has no
strong investment in the idea of objective or true interests; all it implies normatively is a right to justication of relations between free and equal persons. So this
is how I explain the Janus-face of power and its inherent relation to reasons and
justications. Reasoning is essential to any form of power, yet reason in a normative sense remains the capacity to criticize given justications. Its very nature is to
transcend itself.
M. H.: I agree with most, though not all, of what you both have both said, so I
want to move these ideas forward, rather than critique for the moment. As Amy
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and I converge most, I will direct what I say at Rainer (which is not intended to
ignore your comments, Amy, rather to build up them).
In the power debates the distinction between power and violence has often been
observed (for instance, Arendt (1970), Bachrach and Baratz (1962) and Foucault
1982, p. 220) but, in my opinion, this opposition has never been adequately
theorized. Following from what you have just said, Rainer, I think that the key to
this distinction is the difference between compliance that rests upon recognition
and acceptance by B, and compliance which rests upon coercion. In that sense, I
think the blackmailer example is not the best suited to your purpose, because, even
when the compliance is successful due to a credible threat, there is not reasoned
acceptance (at least not normatively so) of the outcome by B. A better example
would be B conceding defeat to A, where B is a party with fewer votes than A,
within the context of a long-standing democracy, with a shared stable civic habitus.
The losing party B does not want to concede defeat, but does so because it is the
only reasonable course of action relative to their shared local habitus or democratic
civic culture.
Empirically speaking, power which is based upon reasoned acceptance is
always much more successful, effective and stable than coercive power. Therefore,
the powerful, who have gained power through coercion, have an intrinsic incentive
to try to convert coercion into power which is recognized and accepted by actors
B. Breaching experiments of the kind done by Garnkel (1984) and Milgram
(2010), where students were asked to interpret everyday requests in unusual ways
(Garnkel), or to request a seat in public transport without the usual reasons
(old-age or physical inrmity) (Milgram), show that actors nd it deeply traumatic
and have strong internal resistance to engaging in what is considered
unreasonable behaviour. In that sense, actors are effectively constrained by reason.
Contrary to what Hobbes thought in premising the Leviathan upon coercion,
contract based upon shared reason, without coercion, constitutes an effective source
of power example below.
Coercion in this context should not only be thought of in terms of physical
threats, it is theoretically valid to speak of such a thing as symbolic violence. In a
situation where entering the local system of power entails subscribing to symbols
and meanings that are either demeaning or alien to the actors habitus, we can
argue that symbolic violence takes place. The classic instance of this is colonization
in which political structures are introduced which presuppose the internalization of
the habitus of the colonizer. While these political structures may be reasonable to
the colonizer, the absence of dialogue with the colonized entails that these structures are not reasonable relative to the habitus of actor B, except in a short-term
pragmatic sense uncle Tom, who reproduces hegemonic structures to gain shortterm advantage.
Viewed historically, at a meta-level, I think the great distinctions between
gemeinschaft and gesellschaft or, mechanical and organic solidarity, revolve around
shifts in local language of reason and, therefore, power. Most traditional, or
gemeinschaft, forms of social order, presuppose strong reications, including religious belief, and clear-cut, highly emphatic, distinctions between the sacred and
profane. The distinctions between these categories usually rest upon an essentialist
teleological interpretation of the world, where things have an essence within them
that render them sacred. These sacred essences combine together to form an intrinsic part of the telos, or ultimate end, of the society as a whole. When these
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essences are profaned the social order as a whole is prevented from realizing its
ultimate end, thus it becomes imperative for actors to right these wrongs. In this
system of thought, the law applies differentially according to each actor, relative to
status essence. Following Durkheims account of altruistic suicide (Durkheim 1995
[1912]), the highest moral good is the sacrice of the individual for society. In this
regard, the sacrice of Jesus for the sake of the sins (profanations) of humanity, in
Christianity, and the willingness of Abraham to sacrice his son, in all three monotheistic faiths, are paradigmatic.
From a pragmatic point of view, the combination of making the social order
sacred and the perception of self-sacrice make instrumental sense. Actors will
willingly, without coercion, sacrice themselves for the maintenance of the social
order. They will also consider it reasonable to participate in the sacrice of those
who have transgressed, even if they have strong affective emotional ties with the
latter. At its most extreme, following the logic of Abraham, parents will consider it
reasonable to sacrice their own children for the collective good and in cases where
their offspring have profaned the sacred, sacrice of the offending offspring is perceived as reasonable typically, the former entails encouraging sons to die for the
community, while the latter involves the sacrice of daughters who have brought
dishonor. The empirical fact that these kinds of sacrice occur, which must be
highly traumatic and entail overcoming huge internal resistance, demonstrates how
effective power/reason can be contrary to Hobbes above. Thus, local reason creates the conditions of possibility for a relatively stable power structure, which are
legitimate, in the sociological sense of the term.
The forms of gesellschaft power/reason, which render liberal democracies stable,
are of relatively recent in origin and involve the congruence of a number of
historically contingent events that result in change of habitus. For reasons of space,
I can list only a few. In the natural sciences, teleology became suspect. Paradigmatic
is the gure of Newton who expressed deep concern that his account of gravity
should not be interpreted as implying some new kind of new essence. Mass
education in the principles of science gradually made an appeal to essences
inherently suspect, even in the social eld. Hence, for instance, essentialist
arguments for differential power between men and women became unreasonable.
Thus, human law slowly becomes neutral with regard to status essence in much the
same way as the physical laws of science with respect to atoms. In the economic
eld, prot was no longer the gift of fortuna and privilege, but entailed double-entry
book-keeping, which also mirrored the anonymous, de-essentialized premises of the
laws of natural science. Through the logic of the marketplace, the legitimating principle of inequality within the modern world became meritocracy, whereby the
actions of the individual become absolutely central. In many forms of Protestantism
the belief that the individual stood alone before God gave the individual new sacred
status. Previously, the three monotheistic faiths had been premised upon salvation as
mediated through the community, and its attendant rituals. Bringing these elements
together, for the rst time in history, the individual became elevated above the
collective, which prior to this would have appeared a formula for selshness,
profanation, Godlessness and therefore anarchy. Thus, in place of a system of
thought which elevates sacrice of the individual for the community as the highest
good, we have a social order that sees its moral foundations along Kantian lines
whereby the individual is always an end in themselves, never a means to an end,
and law is neutral. Within this modern ethic the sacrice of the individual becomes
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entirely unreasonable. Hence, to take a paradigmatic example, to the gesellschaft

interpretative horizon, Abrahams willingness to sacrice his son becomes
unreasonable both God (A who asked for the sacrice) and Abraham (the
compliant actor B) are unreasonable.
In classical sociological thought (Tnnies, Marx, Durkheim and Weber) it was
assumed that gesellschaft would slowly replace gemeinschaft. However, this is not
what has happened. Some of the ancient forms of gemeinschaft, in particular those
associated with religious belief, have lived on and adapted to new social conditions.
Furthermore, new modern forms of secular gemeinschaft have emerged to replace
the old. Nationalism is a form of secular gemeinschaft in the sense that it sets as its
highest moral norm the principle of the sacrice of the individual for the collective.
This is graphically illustrated by Benedict Andersons observation that every nation
has a sacred tomb for the unknown soldier (who is really the unknown nationalist),
while liberalism has no equivalent tomb for the dead liberal (Anderson 1983,
p. 10). Dead nationalists count, while dead liberals do not. In many instances religion and nationalism have been fused, allowing for particularly potent systems of
thought for the purposes of reinforcing power structures. Arguably, in the context
of globalization, where distinctions such as East and West, replace the identications of nations, the resurgence of fundamentalist variants of Islam and Christianity
constitute such a fusion.
From a sociological empirical point of view both gemeinschaft and gesellschaft
systems of thought reinforce power through legitimacy based upon reason. However, in a conict between actors from each system of thought, each sees the other
as profaning what they hold to be sacred or right and just, thus the other is considered unreasonable. When one system of thought prevails over the other, those in
the subject position, the actors B, read the imposition of the system of thought as
symbolic violence B feels coerced by an unreasonable A.
It seems to me that the principles of liberalism and human rights are reasonable
only within, broadly speaking, gesellschaft systems of thought. To move from the
empirical sociological level to the normative, upholding liberal principles entails
afrming the reason of a gesellschaft world-view and being-in-the-world over that
of gemeinschaft. This raises the question on what normative grounds can we justify
the imposition of gesellschaft system of thought upon gemeinschaft actors? Is this
not a form of symbolic violence and, thus, normatively reprehensible?
In presenting the premises of these questions I have deliberately framed the
questions in terms of large-scale interpretative horizons, which it is difcult to step
outside of, to nd a view from nowhere. I have also emphasized the historically
contingent nature of these interpretative horizons, making transcendental appeals
appear prima facie ethnocentric. While these are, of course, ideal types, I think that
a conict between these two systems of thought is the foundation of the deep, as
opposed to shallow, conicts of contemporary global society. I do not present this
as a refutation of what you are saying, Rainer, I am genuinely interested is seeing
how we can resolve this problem, and consider it normatively imperative that we
should be able to do so.
A.A.: Im sympathetic to the line of thought that Mark has raised with his
contrast between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft systems of power/reason. As is see
it, this is connected to the (potential) disagreement that Rainer and I have over the
status of our principles of justication. Rainer says that if we engage in a certain
critical social analysis of such a set of justications, we have to appeal to certain
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standards of justication that transcend that very context. Even granting this point,
it seems to me that it remains the case that whatever standards of justication we
appeal to in making our critical analysis will themselves be socially and historically
situated, and thus bound up with relations of power. Acknowledging this doesnt
lead us to endorse a facile relativism though it does, I think, push in the direction
of a contextualist, immanent understanding of critique. But as I see it, thats
perfectly ne, because the notion of immanent critique seems sufcient for doing
the kind of critical work we are talking about here. We can draw, for example, on
the notion of freedom as autonomy that emerges out of the historical tradition of
the Enlightenment and argue that the normative ideal contained within that notion
isnt being realized in current structures or procedures of justication because of
the ways in which those procedures encode and reinforce ideological or hegemonic
relations of power. This doesnt require us to hold that this normative standard is
itself context transcendent in the sense of transcending the context of late western
modernity out of which it has arisen. And yet it isnt a matter of simply replacing
one form of justications with another that is more to our liking; it is a matter of
drawing on the immanent resources of our historico-philosophical tradition to critique existing standards, conceptions and practices of justication.
As I see it, the issue between Rainer and myself and this issue is also being
implicitly raised in Marks question about how to make judgments across different
systems of thought without committing symbolic violence is not whether we need
standards for critique but rather what we take the status of those standards to be. If
Rainer is saying that no critical or normative standard including the right to justication can be taken to be context-transcendent in any nal sense because that
way lies metaphysical slumber, as Rainer puts it then perhaps we are ultimately
in agreement on that status. But then I would say that this amounts to a contextualist understanding of normativity at the meta-ethical level; and, given Rainers own
rather different way of conceiving of the relationship between contextualism and
universalism (Forst 2002, chapter 4), Im fairly sure that Rainer would not agree
with that way of putting it. Perhaps the difference between us then amounts to
whether or not we are willing to see the substantively universal, rst-order normative standards and principles upon which we rely as, viewed from the meta-normative perspective, contingently emergent and historically contextual standards that
nevertheless enable us to engage in a robust and reexive practice of critique.
But I want to focus my remarks on the important issue, also raised by Mark, of
symbolic violence. It seems to me that this concept, particularly as it is articulated
in the work of thinkers such as Foucault and Bourdieu, raises a signicant challenge to the notion of noumenal power that Rainer has sketched out here (and
argued for in more detail elsewhere) (Forst 2013b). While I agree with Mark that
power that is based on reasoned acceptance is more stable and effective than coercive power, there is an important dimension of symbolic power that is not captured
at all by his contrast between power based on reasoned acceptance and power
based on coercion, nor is it, in my view, illuminated by Rainers cognitivist conception of noumenal power: namely, power rooted in embodied dispositions, affective investments, and unconscious desires. Although I agree that power can and
often does operate through reasons and justications and that this challenges theorists to make sense of the Janus-faced nature of both power and reason, I think we
need to make the further complication that sometimes power does not operate
through reason at all but rather bypasses the reasoned consent of subaltern actors,
17
imprinting itself directly on the body or being internalized in the form of affective
investments or unconscious desires. Precisely because they bypass the reasoned
consent of subordinated subjects, such forms of power are even more subtle, stable
and effective than power that rests on reasoned acceptance (Foucault 1980a,
1980b). As Rainer insists, power relations that rest on reasoned acceptance can
always at least in principle be overturned by rational critique, hence a repeated
and reexive application of a principle of justication is a sufcient weapon for
attacking them. Embodied dispositions, affective investments, and unconscious
desires, by contrast, are not so easily challenged or transformed by the force of reason. Thinking of power as primarily or originally noumenal in nature, as Rainer
suggests, leaves us ill-equipped to make sense of these other dimensions or aspects
of symbolic power.
Similarly, although it is no doubt the case that relations of power are connected
in complex and intricate ways to relations and orders of justication, it seems to
me to be entirely too strong to say that they are one and the same. To see why this
is the case, it might be helpful to introduce a distinction, familiar from the power
theory literature, between macro-level and micro-level power relations (for a related
distinction, see Forst 2013c, p. 9). Viewed from the macro-level, it makes perfect
sense to say that widespread, systemic power asymmetries such as more or less
stable structures of social or political oppression have a certain logic to them,
that is, that they can be understood in terms of certain aims or purposes, and that
they need to appear to be rational, legitimate, and justied in order to remain in
force. The subordination of women in the United States and Europe, for example,
is connected to certain narratives of justication narratives about the constraints
of female embodiment or essential femininity, about womens proper roles as mothers, or about the implications of evolutionary biology or of our neurochemical
hard-wiring, or what have you and these narratives of justication are crucial for
understanding how womens subordination is reproduced and maintained over time.
This much seems perfectly plausible. But saying this does not imply the further
claim, which Rainers notion of noumenal power seems to imply, that the subordination of women operates originally or primarily in and through the reasoning processes of individual agents. For example, there are certain widespread narratives
that are commonly taken to justify or at least to explain the fact that so few women
in the United States occupy positions of power, as CEOs of large companies, senior
partners in established law rms, full professors in the best academic institutions,
and so on. These narratives of justication serve as ideological cover for womens
ongoing economic, political, social and cultural subordination, not only by making
it less likely that women will be chosen for such positions, but also by compelling
women themselves to opt out of such positions when they are offered, or never to
compete for them in the rst place. The situation is very complicated, and has a lot
to do with questions of work/family balance and reigning ideologies of motherhood. But at least one strand of these narratives has to do with a claim about
womens uneasy relationship to power. On this sort of story, women because of
evolution, or neurochemistry, or their uteruses, or whatever are less competitive
and aggressive than men, more collaborative, more nurturing, and more relational;
thus, exercising power over others, so the story goes, isnt really feminine. Hence
women (real women, that is) dont really want power (Sellers 2003); or when
they exercise power, they do so in a fundamentally different, more collaborative
and cooperative way; thus, power over others and a certain hegemonic conception
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A. Allen et al.
of femininity a conception that is also highly inected by assumptions about

class, race and sexuality are thought to be incompatible. This kind of story is
widely taken to offer a justicatory narrative for womens ongoing economic,
political and social marginalization in countries where barriers to formal equality
for women have been torn down a hegemonic justication that is, to be sure,
crying out for critique.
But notice that none of this implies the further claim that for any individual
woman who is faced with the question of whether to accept or how to assume a
position of power within an organization that the demands of normative femininity
operate solely or essentially or even primarily as reasons whose justicatory force
can be subjected to rational assessment. Of course it may be the case that individual women can rationally assess the justicatory force of this narrative of normative
femininity; but this does not rule out the possibility that the demands of normative
femininity are simultaneously deeply encoded in the bodily dispositions, affective
investments, and unconscious fantasies and desires of those very same women. For
such women, violating the demands of normative femininity by appearing too powerful or power-hungry may well produce an embodied sense of shame or disrupt
their affective investment in being perceived by their male colleagues as either nice
or nurturing or sexually desirable (or at least not sexually undesirable). When a
womans cheeks burn with shame because a colleague calls her aggressive (which
is almost always taken to be a negative trait in a woman, though not in a man) or
she feels uncomfortable with being perceived as too powerful and therefore not
nice or nurturing enough then this is the result of the power relations that sustain
normative femininity imprinting themselves directly on the bodies and affective
investments of their targets. That power operates not only through reasons but also
through shaping our embodied dispositions and affective investments explains, as
Foucault says, why power is so deeply rooted and the difculty of eluding its
embrace (Foucault 1980a, p. 59).
The political upshot of this more complex understanding of power as not only
noumenal but also embodied and affective is that the oppressed will often not experience their situation as political in the rst place and hence will not demand justication for it (Bourdieu et al. 2000). In such cases, what looks like the acceptance
on the part of the oppressed of their own oppression is actually the result of a bodily incorporation of the structural violence of their social world. Such an internalization can have deeply depoliticizing effects by producing a sense in the oppressed
that their oppression is inevitable (McNay forthcoming). We need a more complex
understanding of power, one that understands power as not solely or originally or
perhaps even primarily noumenal in nature, in order to account for this phenomenon. Perhaps for this reason we also need an understanding of justice that isnt
based solely on the right to justication.
So when Rainer says power is what goes on in the head, i.e. it is the
recognition of a reason to act differently than one would have without that reason,
I say, following Foucault and Bourdieu, power is not only what goes on in the head,
it is also what goes on in the body, in our bodily dispositions, our affective
investments, and our unconscious fantasies and desires. These dispositions,
investments, fantasies and desires may well be connected to recognized and accepted
narratives or orders of justication in fact, in cases of systemic relations of
dominance and subordination, such as racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and
colonialism, they are probably always connected to some sort of hegemonic
19
narratives of justication but this does not mean that they are inculcated in
individuals through or by means of [i.e. that they rest on] such justications or
even that they are recognized by their targets as reasons to act in a certain way. If
we want to dismantle and transform those relations of dominance and subordination,
we will need to be armed with something more than the force of good reasons; we
will also need some account of how it is possible to transform our embodied
dispositions and practices and affective investments and desires. We will have to
accept, I would say, that there are aspects of social life where reason does not have
as much force as we might like to think it does. At the same time, if we agree, as
Mark has suggested above, that our conceptions of reason and systems of thought
are always bound up with relations of power such that our moral and political
judgments can mask relationships of symbolic violence, then we ought to be
suspicious of the very idea of the unforced force of the better argument (Allen
2012). Reason always has a force, in the sense that it is always intertwined with
relations of power; and yet there are also aspects of our lives in which reason may
not have as much force as philosophers would like to think.
R.F.: It seems that our trialogue has moved from an initial agreement to substantive disagreement at more foundational levels and that, I think, is for the better.
For it brings out important philosophical issues underlying sociological analyses of
power. I am therefore happy to respond to Marks charge of committing symbolic
violence in imposing a Gesellschaft system of ideas on Gemeinschaft actors by
returning the charge: I think characterizing contemporary social forms in that dualistic way is inadequate and potentially reies cultural and social identities and, most
of all, leaves no room for internal dissent and radical critique from within so-called
Gemeinschaft societies. Thus it is sociologically and normatively problematic, possibly itself a case of symbolic violence and of ethnocentrism, to reserve certain normative notions of emancipation only for modern societies. I am also glad to reply
similarly to Amys charge of being a hypercognitivist about reasons and power and
ignoring the effects power has on human bodies. I think that the super-Cartesian
here is not me but Amy, as she thinks that there is a categorial difference between
the way beliefs are formed and the way bodies are formed, while I think that both
are different aspects of the same process, which Foucault described as the effects
of truth regimes. Amy is also more Cartesian than me in thinking that whenever I
describe a process as one of reasons and reasoning, puried reason and reexivity
or reasoned consent are somehow at work which is not what I say: there are
reasons and reasoning, yet reason is the faculty of critically reecting on certain
reasons and forms of reasoning which might turn out to be unreasonable (i.e.
reexively unjustiable). Ideology is an example for a cluster of beliefs accepted
on the basis of bad reasons, forming complexes of justication that colonize and
xate the noumenal realm of justications and thus shield these justications from
reexive scrutiny. So we must enlarge our idea of the noumenal to include bad justications, but they are nevertheless justications for those who hold and follow
them. That is quite a mouthful, so let me briey explain.
I agree with Mark about the importance of drawing a distinction between power
and violence, yet I also think that the distinction between violence and coercion is
important. Unlike violence, which tries to eliminate the possibility of an alternative
of at least two kinds of reaction on the side of the attacked person, coercion still
works upon a free agent insofar as there are at least the two options of compliance
and non-compliance left. So in the blackmailing case, there is of course no
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A. Allen et al.
normatively demanding and sufcient form of acceptance possible, yet there is still
acceptance and recognition of a reason to act in a certain way a reason one could
reject, though at a high price. That is why I think that a blackmailing situation is different from one where violence is exercised and where the victim is a pure object of
anothers action. I think we need more ne-grained distinctions as to the different
qualities of recognition and acceptance of reasons, not an either-or. Given that, I
think the notion of symbolic violence is only appropriate where the dominating
and hegemonic set of meanings and beliefs completely colonizes the mind of others
and the internalization is very strong.
Tnniess old distinction (used by Mark) between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft continues to be heuristically useful, yet only as ideal types, and there are
many ways to describe the change of normative orders from one to the other (one
of which I suggested in my toleration book, Forst 2013a). I think Mark is right to
point out that classical modernization theory needs to be rethought today, but very
much along these lines I would also say that in the contemporary world we nd
many different societies following very different paths of modernization that lead
rather to multiple modernities (Eisenstadt) than to polar forms of social order to
be described using the G-G-dualism. So I see the point about the development of a
modern ethic that Mark thinks separates the two orders, given Western history,
but I think we need a different structural story about such an ethic one that
understands the historical dynamic of social change and emancipation in terms that
do not reserve such a dynamic to Western societies with a Christian background.
As much as I agree with Marks brief reconstruction of the aspects of Western
modernization, I think we need to stress the social conicts that were driving these
processes. These were conicts in which a given normative order was challenged
to provide better and new justications for certain norms and structures, as the
dominant metaphysical or religious or feudal or patriarchal or monarchist (or combinations thereof) narratives of justication were no longer seen as acceptable. Thus
those who dissented claimed rst of all a right to justication for themselves the
right to demand proper justications that could withstand rational scrutiny (i.e. what
was seen as rational scrutiny given new developments in science and morality).
Those critics thus spoke a new language such as when the Levellers redened
political rule as requiring a contract between free and equal persons in order to be
legitimate a radically new language at odds with most of the dominant norms. In
their eyes, these unreasonable (from a conventional perspective) claims were the
most reasonable; thus there was a conict between different forms of thinking
about reasonable justication. So are we now, as observers of this history but also
as distant parts of it, and thus still participants, to say that these were purely contingent developments and that as I take Amy and Mark to argue the radical
claims of these dissenters could only be called reasonable after they had achieved
a turn in history in their direction? That strikes me as problematic for that could
amount to a form of neo-Hegelian Darwinism in which those victorious in history
are given the power to dene normative truth and reasonableness (and it is, just as
an aside, a serious question who actually dominated Western history). I take this to
be an historical and a normative mistake: historical, since then we cannot understand the force of the radical claims of these critics as they understood it and as it
led to radical change in the rst place, thus cutting off the participants perspective
completely; and normative, as we would have to say to those who protested then
(as well as today) against patriarchy and authoritarianism that we rst have to await
21
the verdict of history before we can say anything about the justication of their
claims. But with Benjamin I think that we must not leave the authority to dene
the truth of emancipatory claims to the historically victorious. We need to take a
stance, as we are (still) part of these social struggles.
As such participants, I do not think we have the metaphysical luxury of
inhabiting a divine standpoint from which we could call those historical developments either contingent or necessary. I nd both stances mysteriously ahistorical,
searching for an outer-worldly position sub specie aeternitatis, which we cannot
have. Rather, we need to understand that to think historically is to try to reconstruct
the normative force of emancipatory claims, such as the right to justication, in
various social contexts. In other words, when radical critics like Pierre Bayle (see
Forst 2013a, 18) denied current religious worldviews and argued for a morality of
reciprocity and universality free from religious grounding, he was not imposing a
foreign language on the traditional society of his time; rather, he was pointing to the
reexive truth that norms that claim to be universally and reciprocally valid have to
earn their validity through arguments heeding these criteria. He was truly
innovative by pointing to that reexive truth and he arrived at it aided by a number
of developments in the space of reasons during his time, but when he wrote, that
space had not been changed in its hegemonic form. Thus, we deny such radical
critics their validity when we say that only after they were successful, could they
have been right. That is Darwinism about reasons.
Likewise, it is a mistake to think that when someone or a group in a contemporary society which Mark would categorize as a Gemeinschaft raises a radical
feminist or democratic or socialist demand, he or she is imposing a Gesellschaft
view on her or his society. There have indeed been many past and present colonizing impositions from the outside, yet internal critique that reclaims the right to justication as the core of whatever is claimed concretely cannot be counted as such a
colonization. We would expatriate those internal critics if we did so. And we would
fall prey to an ethnocentric view that homogenizes non-Western societies as frameworks in which no radical critique asking for new and better reasons were either
possible or legitimate. We would also ignore our own history of radical critique,
which was greeted with the same attitude of being strange, foreign or unreasonable. The ethnocentrism and symbolic violence (if any) thus does not lie in making
context-transcending appeals to a right to be treated as a justicatory equal, but in
sealing off normative social orders according to geographic or temporal lines.
Based on that view, I agree with Amys stress on the importance of internal or
immanent critique, as no social critic, no matter how radical, is not also an immanent critic. But again, why can someone in a non-Western society not claim to be
respected as an equal even if her or his society hardly has any such notion as part
of its historical tradition? Must critics have national-traditional passports of plausible historically embedded criticism? And did the ones in our tradition have such
passports? And if we are immanent critics today and want to argue for social
change, what are the criteria by which we choose which norms of our tradition
we should appeal to, given that it might be (as all of us agree) so heavily marked
by norms of nationalism, ethnocentrism, patriarchy, homophobia etc.? Immanence
is not a sufcient criterion for normative social criticism; yet otherworldly transcendence or pure reason is not available either. Thus, only reason constantly reecting on what counts as reasonable and whether that is deserved can provide a
(fallible) solution here. That is a notion of reason that dees the dualisms between
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A. Allen et al.
contextualist vs. transcendental or historical vs. ahistorical. It is the best we

have, nite creatures as we are, yet reexive ones.
Amy is rightly worried whether a notion of noumenal power has the tools to
understand power rooted in embodied dispositions, affective investments, and
unconscious desires I think it does, but for that we need to free ourselves from an
overly pure idea of the noumenal. In my use of the term, it stands for the realm
of justications generally, descriptively speaking, thus also harboring false, onesided or ideological justications. The noumenal is far from identical with the
realm of justications based on reasoned acceptance as Mark and Amy believe.
So the real question between us is how we should understand the kind of power
that leads to the embodied effects Amy has in mind and that she analyses in her
own work on the subject-forming aspects of power (Allen 1999, 2008).
I am not sure, however, how deep our disagreement here actually is. For given
my extended notion of the noumenal, I agree with Amy that narratives of
justication have the effect of colonizing the mind and self-awareness of
subordinated subjects in her example women who participate in the reproduction
certain stereotypes about themselves and their proper social roles. I dont see why
we should not say that such a form of mind colonization is a sealing off of the
space of reasons for such women, who cannot think of behaving differently and
thus would feel awkward if they did. Already these interchangeable wordings
show that we should not construct an articial boundary here between the cognitive
and the emotional, for in the end we talk about a self-image or a self-understanding
that has been produced by webs of beliefs and discourses as well as by a
discipline of socialization. Yet as we can learn from Foucault, such discipline
works through a discursive nexus of truth and power and I do not see the point of
giving that nexus a non-cognitivist reading. What would the Foucauldian
vocabulary of truth regimes, discourse, etc. mean otherwise: We are subjected
to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except
through the production of truth. (Foucault 1980c, p. 93). And that is a truth about
ourselves, including a truth about our bodies, guided by schemes separating the
normal from the abnormal or using other binary codes. The effect of that is a
certain body awareness as well as certain views or feelings about ourselves,
but I am not sure whether these are located in different parts of our brains or,
seriously speaking, in different compartments called beliefs, reasons or
emotions or head vs. body (p. 22). In short, what I am saying is that I dont
believe in bodies as separate non-cognitive entities relevant in this context.
Thus, I am also not sure what it means to say that normative notions of femininity imprint themselves directly (p. 21) onto bodies. I would say that discursive
power shapes our minds and beliefs as much as our bodies and our awareness of
them, and the point of seeing the effects of power is precisely to see not just how
these aspects are intertwined but that they are one and the same effect. We have to
overcome Cartesian dualism, even if it is reproduced in Freudian terms. How else
and I think I agree with Amys nal statements here could we understand the
power of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc. if not through the complex understanding of what it means to internalize not just norms of behavior and self-images,
but also beliefs about ourselves and why it is right to think or feel in certain ways?
And how, if that connection between reasons, beliefs, narratives and emotions were
not in place, could genealogical critique which reconstructs and lays open this
complex ever hope to be successful? I mean of course the critique we nd in
23
Amys works highly rened, rational and powerful as it is. It doesnt sound to
me like a program of mere re-education, rather like one of reexive criticism
which at least hopes to nd a foothold in the capacities of social agents to reect
on themselves their beliefs and their feelings as well as how they were formed.
M.H.: I do not think much separates us. Just to clarify, by noumenal power you
mean the core process whereby actor A gets B to do something that they would
not otherwise do, which takes place through a process whereby B nds themselves
constrained by shared reasoning. In this situation it is possible that B could be
unreasonable, but this would entail a high cost for B. As I argued earlier, with
regard to the breaching experiments, most actors are constrained by local conditions
of reasonableness. Building upon that, we would agree that third and fourth dimensions of power are instances where this mechanism of noumenal reasonable constraint is used in a deceitful way for instance, by appealing to tacitly held beliefs
that are not properly interrogated, the strategic use of truth claims to reify conventional practices, or the creation of subject positions that predispose actors into considering domination reasonable or desirable Amys point above. These processes
exploit the mechanisms of noumenal power for the purposes of domination.
With our critical focus upon the third and fourth dimensions of power, we must
not forget, as the followers of Foucault tend to, that the reinforcement of domination through noumenal power is parasitic upon a belief in reasonable justice that
cannot be wrong all of the time. Some of the time, A prevails over B because it is
actually reasonable for B to comply, as measured relative to justice and the longer
term interests of B. An obvious instance where reason and justice are synchronic
would be when B nd themselves prevailed upon in a free and fair election it is
reasonable in every way for B to concede defeat when they have fewer votes than
A. Even though B is defeated, it is still in Bs longer-term interests that the structures of the democratic process are reproduced, which is also just. As I have argued
elsewhere (2012 and forthcoming), the episodic interest of B in winning that particular election are of a lesser order than the dispositional interests that B has in the
structured reproduction of what is a reasonable system. I hope this is an accurate
coming together of my and your theoretical positions, Rainer?
I think where the disagreement with you comes in (for both myself and Amy)
can be explained by the theorization of three levels of noumenal conict.
The rst level, which is the least problematic, is where A and B share a system
of meaning and deep moral foundations. Even with deeply conicting goals, social
reproduction has the potential (once three and four dimensional power are exposed)
to work perfectly. Actor A should be able to use reason relatively unproblematically to prevail over B, as compliance by B is actually reasonable for B, as measured
against Bs longer-term dispositional interests. In such a society the structures of
the system, while perhaps not perfectly egalitarian, are in the interests of the worst
off, as measured relative to any realistic (not utopian) alternatives.
The next level is where there is a conict over meaning. This is more problematic as there is no transcendental court of appeal for the meaning of signiers. We
are dealing with different language games (Wittgenstein) or systems of thought
(Foucault). However, a shared mutually endorsed noumenal power outcome is possible as long as the actors follow Habermasian principles of being open to the
meanings of other. This remains a middle level conict, as long as there are shared
norms. The current controversies in Europe over the wearing of the niqab are of
this level. The critique by contextualist multiculturalists of the liberal position is
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A. Allen et al.
usually along the lines that liberals assume that the niqab is a symbol of oppression
(see, for instance, Allison 2011, pp. 68688, Cochoran 2013). However, typically,
the critique then goes on to argue that in complex modern liberal societies women
wear the niqab as an expression of identity that empowers them. The multicultural
argument does not entail that we should respect patriarchal domination of women.
In this dispute what divides the multicultural contextualist from their supposed liberal adversaries is the attributed meaning of niqab. Both would appear to agree that
the womans right to choose, her autonomy, should be respected. Thus, normatively, this form of contextualist multiculturalism is actually liberal despite contextualist claims to radicalism. Similarly, Foucaults critique represents a middle
level conict, rather than anything more radical. He is alerting us to the fact that
other may have a different interpretative horizon and he makes us aware that the
constitution of our subject positions may entail internalizing dispositions that are
inimical to our autonomy as in Amys examples above. Yet, Foucault is still
upholding fundamentally liberal principles by assuming that autonomy is normatively desirable.
Foucault once described the disagreement between Marx and the bourgeois
economists as a storm in a childs paddling pool (1970, p. 262). I would say the
conict between his level of contextualism and that of liberals, while not a storm
in a childs paddling pool (level one conict), is a storm in a lake, not an ocean
storm, which is level three conict.
A level three conict takes place when noumenal power does not bind because
both the systems of meaning and fundamental norms are in conict. To return to
my ideal type resurrection of the distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft,
there is a fundamental difference between a system of morality that presupposes
that normative rightness is to be found with reference to the higher ideals of the
community and normative principles that start from the individual. To adapt Taylor
(1989), part of gesellschaft reasoning entails adherence to the signicance, almost
sacredness (in Alexanders civil sense 2003), of the ordinary life, which is summarized by the Kantian idea that individuals are always ends in themselves, never a
means to an end. Parenthetically, I diverge from Taylor in that I do not think this
idea is uniquely modern or Western.
In a strongly normatively bound gemeinschaft the highest good entails the willingness to sacrice the self for the community, which is considered freedom. As
described in Durkheims Elementary Forms of Religious Life, the person is only
whole to the extent to which they realize themselves through the community. God
is, of course, the ultimate representation of the community. Upon death the virtuous
become part of God, the essence of the community, thus free. The ip side of this
is, unfortunately, that those who stand out against the community must be cast out
from it. This usually takes place through ostracism, which exists on a scale from not
speaking to the subject, to physical expulsion and, ultimately, physical annihilation.
To take a specic instance, recently, in northern India a young couple were
killed and burned alongside each other on a funeral pyre for the crime of falling in
love and attempting to by-pass the traditional route of arranged marriage. When the
journalist went to interview the families there was no feeling of remorse. The killings were justied with statements like: whatever God wanted, happened
What was done to them was the right thing to do. We had to set an example.
Our culture is not like you have in the city. Here our women live behind curtains
The village doesnt approve of love affairs here. (BBC 2013). These
25
responses do not make sense relative to a liberal moral world-view but, unfortunately, they do relative to a gemeinschaft one. In interpreting this we have take
seriously that for these families the killing of their own offspring must have
entailed overcoming massive internal resistance. Yet, their sense of honour, tied to
community, compelled them to do it. It is an instance of noumenal power at its
most extreme, with deep resistance, yet compelling. Our difference from these
social actors is not simply about meaning: it entails moral foundations.
In the case of deep conict, prevailing over the other entails either or both symbolic and physical violence because there is no shared reason to mutually constrain
the interaction. Honour killings are outlawed in India and, presumably, the coercion
attached to this, including long prison sentences, is somewhat effective in deterring
them. Maybe, over time, there is a feedback from law to habitus, so these views
become questioned. However, the point remains that this form of deep conict is
theoretically possible.
I have two responses to deep conict. On the one hand it seems to me intuitively obvious that the gemeinschaft moral system constitutes a form of alienation,
which can be unmasked, thus subject to noumenal power. However, my deep down
sociological sense tells me that this view is naive. Hence, my more considered
response is that we have to be honest enough to admit to symbolic violence on our
own part. It only seems reasonable to me that political institutions are for individuals, not the other way around. However, if someone else has been socialized into
believing that individuals exist for the greater glory of the Community, according
to some divine plan, or secular prophet (such as Chairman Mao), I have to admit,
to paraphrase Wittgenstein, my spade is turned. However, acknowledging this, I am
willing to defend the rights of the inevitable minority within that other community
who wish to live their lives for themselves, to live autonomously and, for instance,
to fall in love and marry with whom they chose. That is, even if such a defence
entails acknowledging symbolic violence against the deeply felt moral commitments of that community.
As a qualication upon the above I have presented gemeinschaft purely
negatively and gesellschaft positively. This is not correct, as both have positive and
negative aspects. However, for reasons of clarity within limited space, I have chosen
one particular aspect of each. The focus here is noumenal power and its limits, not a
full characterization of the strengths and weaknesses of gemeinschaft and
gesellschaft.
A.A.: Im inclined to agree with Rainer that our discussion has moved to substantive disagreement at more foundational levels, and that this is a good thing,
too. In my closing remarks, I would like to briey sketch out what I take to be the
fundamental points of disagreement between Rainer and myself; in the end, I will
return briey to Rainers exchange with Mark.
Let me start, briey, with the issue of metaphysics, which Rainer raised implicitly by calling me a super-Cartesian. This is an interesting point, vividly expressed,
but it does not describe my position. I have made no claims about the metaphysical
status of either bodies or minds or the categorial differences between them. If I
were forced to articulate a metaphysical position with respect to power, I would
incline toward nominalism, of the sort expressed by Foucault when he wrote:
power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we
are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society (Foucault 1978, p. 93).
26
A. Allen et al.
I begin with the charge of Cartesianism because, I think, this disagreement points
to a fundamental methodological difference between Rainer and myself. In my view,
the goal of an analysis of power is not the Platonic aim of producing a theory of
power that correctly discerns the essence of the concept. This is an ambition that, it
seems to me, is expressed in Rainers talk of the real phenomenon of power (Forst
2013c, p. 1) and the original phenomenon of power (Forst 2013c, p. 5). Rather, as I
see it, the goal is to develop a conceptualization of power that can serve as the basis
for specic forms of social criticism in the historical present. Such a
conceptualization must be, as Foucault said, ongoing, which is to say that it must be
checked against the historical conditions that motivate it and the empirical reality that
it aims to illuminate (Foucault 1982, p. 209). That is the spirit in which I have offered
some criticisms of Rainers conception of noumenal power not with the aim of
offering a competing theory of the essence of power but rather with the aim of assessing his proposed conceptualization of power against our current historical circumstances and the empirical realities that the analysis of power aims to illuminate.
Second, let me return to the relationship between power and the body, starting
with an interpretive point: one of the major lines of argument in Foucaults Discipline and Punish is that modern, disciplinary power imprints itself directly on the
body, and that what we call the soul is actually the effect of that process. This is
the central argument of the opening chapter, The Body of the Condemned, the
penultimate paragraph of which ends with the following lines, which effect a stunning inversion of the Platonic dictum that the body is the prison of the soul:
The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the
effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A soul inhabits him and
brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises
over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is
the prison of the body. (Foucault 1979, p. 30)
This is just to say that whatever one thinks in the end about the claim that power
is solely or originally noumenal, Foucaults analysis of power is more at odds with
Rainers cognitivist account than he seems to realize (see Forst 2013c, pp. 89).
Of course, the more important issue here is not really who has got Foucault right
but rather whether thinking of power as imprinting itself directly on the body is a
useful or fruitful way to think about power. In this connection, it is perhaps worth
noting that the idea that disciplinary power imprints itself directly on the body has
proved enormously productive for feminist theory, as is amply demonstrated by
Sandra Bartkys classic analysis of what she calls the disciplinary practices through
which normative femininity is imprinted on female bodies, practices which include
dieting, exercise, regimentation of bodily gestures, postures, and comportment, and
ornamentation (Bartky 1990). Other groundbreaking work in this vein includes that
of Bordo (2003), Heyes (2007) and Young (1990). This at least suggests that the
notion of disciplinary power imprinting itself directly on the body has proven a
powerful theoretical tool for feminist theory. Moreover, it is not clear that Rainers
alternative noumenal account of power is able make sense of this phenomenon in the
way that he supposes. If power is dened as justicatory power, then it must always
operate within the space of reasons; whatever embodied or affective or unconscious
forces serve to close off the space of reasons for certain individuals or oppressed
groups are, ex hypothesi, operating outside of the space of reasons, precisely insofar
27
as they constitute that very space. I think that critical theorists absolutely need such a
conception of power (see Saar 2011), but unlike Rainer, I dont see how such a
conception could be a noumenal one, even in his more expansive sense of this term.
The relationship between power and the body is also crucially, though perhaps
less obviously, important for thinking about the role that social movements play in
social and political transformation. Social movements engage in embodied political
practices such as sit-ins, public protests, demonstrations, marches, occupations, acts
of civil disobedience, and even hunger strikes. Such forms of social and political
action are not, I think, well-illuminated by an account of political power that conceptualizes these practices in terms of a kind of reason-giving or justicatory power.
Rather, as the great theorist and practitioner of non-violent social protest, Dr Martin
Luther King, noted in one of his most famous writings (1963), direct action involves
presenting our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of
the local and the national community.1 However, despite Kings talk here of an
appeal to the conscience of the community, direct action is not understood primarily
as the giving of a reason; rather, the very purpose of direct action is to force ones
political opponents to negotiate: Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no
longer be ignored. What makes this kind of oppositional, non-reason-oriented stance
necessary is the very nature of the injustice and domination that civil rights activists
were ghting against. As King notes, we have not made a single gain in civil rights
without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact
that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily freedom is
never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
Creating this sort of pressure in the context of the civil rights struggle required individuals to put their bodies on the line, to subject themselves to the jeers of hostile
crowds, to violent treatment at the hands of police, and to arrest for having violated
unjust laws. A theory of power that understands power in strictly noumenal terms is
not well suited to make sense of this type of embodied, oppositional political protest,
which as the history of the civil rights movement in the United States shows, has
formed an important part of emancipatory social change.
To these examples, I imagine Rainer would respond that, on his view, reasons are
actually doing the work in these examples just cited. Women shape their bodies
according to the dictates of normative femininity, if they do so, only if they take the
demands of normative femininity as reasons for behaving in certain ways, and the
white community in the US south in the early 1960s only negotiated with civil rights
protestors because they perceived the unrest created by their protests as a reason for
acting. This takes us back to Marks earlier distinction between compliance that rests
upon recognition and acceptance of a reason and compliance that rests on coercion.
Rainers response to this distinction was to say that he is using the term reasons in a
purely descriptive sense that can encompass bad or ideological justications, and thus
is not limited to a strongly normative notion of reasoned acceptance. I confess that I
am very worried that this way of thinking about power, when applied to situations of
oppression, tends toward the old clich that no one can oppress you without your
permission, a view that puts too much responsibility on the victims of domination
and not enough on those who are doing the dominating. I also worry that this
response rests on a conation between explanatory reasons i.e. reasons understood
in a purely descriptive, non-normative sense, as causes for certain kinds of actions
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A. Allen et al.
that may or may not be recognized as such by the actors and justicatory or normative reasons i.e. reasons that count (or, since Rainer insists that there can be good or
bad justications, at least seem to count) in favor of certain actions. To be clear, I
suspect that Rainers view is that, when it comes to human actions, there are only justicatory or normative reasons that is, there are either good reasons or pro tanto reasons, but both of these are at least candidates for justication, and hence are
normative reasons in that sense and that it makes no sense to talk about what I have
called here explanatory reasons. Be that as it may, it seems to me that some of the initial plausibility of his conception of noumenal power rests on the fact that pretty
much anything can serve as an explanatory reason, hence it is intuitively plausible to
say things like the reason that he left 1 million dollars in a suitcase in the park is that
he was being blackmailed or the reason that she is constantly on a diet is that she is
under the sway of normative femininity or the reason that they took down the signs
that said Whites Only is that they feared the unrest caused by the civil rights protests. But from this it does not follow that blackmail or normative femininity or even
civil rights protests function as reasons in the justicatory or normative sense (even if
we grant that at least the rst two are bad or ideological versions of such types of reasons) that rest on perceived, recognized and accepted justications (again, even if
those justications are false or one-sided in some way). There can be good and bad
justicatory reasons but there can also be forms of power that cause others to act in
certain ways but that do so without working through the rational acceptance or recognition whether that acceptance is well-justied or not of those actors.
Finally, I cannot resist a short response to Rainer and Marks debate about the relationship between power and claims about historical progress (or regress). I agree with
Marks point that in cases of what he calls deep conict, we may well reach a point
where our spade is turned. I would just like to go beyond this to make two quick, further points, both of which would require much more extensive argument to vindicate.
First, even if we grant that Rainers worry about Darwinism applied to reasons is a
serious one, it seems to me that his view is open to an equally serious worry, namely
that it commits us to saying that throughout most of the history of the world, most
people have been morally wrong, or at least morally worse than us, i.e. those who
have recognized the emancipatory force of the right to justication. This is a version
of what Pauline Kleingeld calls the moral equality problem in Kants practical philosophy (1999); unlike Kleingeld and, I suspect, Rainer, I think we should be a bit
more sanguine about biting this particular bullet, since doing so smacks of a moral
hubris of which we should be wary. Second, I take issue with Rainers claim that to
think historically is to try to reconstruct the normative force of emancipatory claims
such as the right to justication. Certainly this is one mode of historical thinking, but
it is far from the only one one can also view history as a story of decline and fall or
as a series of discrete epochs that are punctuated by discontinuous breaks nor is it
obvious that this mode of historical thinking is best suited to a critical theory that aims
to put the issue of domination or injustice at its center, as I think Rainer and I both
aim to do. A more promising mode, in my view, would be one that enables us not to
take a stance on normative conicts in the past Im really not sure what we gain by
this but rather to understand our own, present-day, taken-for-granted normative
assumptions differently. A history, that is, not of the past, but of the present, where
the aim is not to vindicate our own perspective but rather to problematize it.
R.F.: It has been a privilege to have this discussion with two of the most
important theorists of power of our time, so I should not use the additional
29
privilege of having a last word to open up further issues between us. Rather, I shall
briey respond with respect to what I regard as the most important points we have
focused on.
I readily admit that the term noumenal power may lead to misunderstandings,
so let me reiterate that it does not mean, as Mark and Amy seem to imply, only
forms of power that are based on shared reasoning as a form of reasoned
acceptance in a reexive mode. Its meaning is broader than that, as it also refers
to ideological or disciplinary discursive forms of thought. Noumenal power works
through justications (good or bad) taken over by those subjected to it, and there
are many modes of this acceptance, some reexive and some not.
Still, I agree with Mark that for any form of power to operate, a common
framework of meanings that makes communication possible is necessary at least
common to the extent that A knows what B means by using certain expressions,
even if never using them oneself (like words referring to slaves, e.g.). But that is a
weaker requirement than a notion of reasonable justice as Mark presupposes.
Implicitly, however, any structure of communication and justication, as asymmetrical as it might be, does not just rest on local modes of justication and on what
counts as reasonable but also harbors the (noumenal) possibility that a justication
(or way of justifying social relations) is reexively questioned with respect to the
validity claim that is being raised. When this happens, a more radical principle is
used than merely a local one in its most radical form, it is the principle that a
norm can only claim reciprocal and general validity if it has been arrived at
through a discourse guided by the criteria of reciprocity and generality. This is a
principle both immanent to and transcending practices of justication, and it is in
social struggles over justications that this reexive principle comes to the fore.
From that angle, I very much appreciate the distinction between three levels of
social conict that Mark suggests. They require social agents to reach higher levels
of reexivity as given justications are being challenged. In conicts over goals, a
shared normative order secures agreement despite disagreement. In conicts over
meanings, certain aspects of such a normative order need to be reconsidered and
reconstructed while others remain in place. Things are different with respect to
what Mark considers to be a conict between fundamentally different normative
orders of a Gesellschaft vs. Gemeinschaft type. In the example that Mark gives, we
nd a traditional order of justication with a thick form of noumenal power that
can even motivate families to sacrice some of their members for reasons of social
honor and communal Sittlichkeit. I agree with Mark that there is a fundamental
moral difference involved in such a conict, though I am not sure why opposition
to such a form of Sittlichkeit by, for example, those who dissent from it or those
who are solidary with these dissenters, constitutes symbolic violence, as Mark
argues. For those dissenters, the hegemonic form of the traditional normative order
has lost most of its noumenal power, but that does not mean that their opposition
to the violence done to them is itself violent, as they claim and use a right to question the dominant justications as subjects who deny the validity claims of the traditional order over them so yes, it is a radical power challenge and conict, but
no, the dissenters thereby resist the symbolic (or real) violence of an order which
denies their justicatory standing while at the same time claiming authority over
them. They do not equally subject others to such violence though they may be
forced to defend themselves with violence as they only ask to be taken seriously
as justicatory subjects and not to be overpowered and dominated. They resist
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A. Allen et al.
domination but do not themselves dominate. And they do not necessarily use an
alternative Gesellschaft frame for their critique; rather, they draw out a radical
consequence from within a normative order that claims validity over them.
I am grateful to Amy Allen for pressing me hard on fundamental issues concerning an analysis of power. And while I tried to identify a thorough Cartesianism
in her thought, she accuses me of Platonism, searching for the essence of the concept of power. Now I readily admit that I am interested in the essence, i.e. true
meaning, of that concept as far as nite beings can determine it, but I do not see
why that commits me to Platonism, as I make no metaphysical claim about such an
essence as existing as a timeless idea.
As far as Foucaults history of power as a nexus between truth and power is concerned, I still have trouble understanding how a soul could imprison the body in
the way Foucault analyses it if one disregards the noumenal structures of disciplinary
power that dene what a soul is (in Christian thinking especially) and what it
means to have one and avoid a sinful life as a discipline of mind and body at the
same time. That seems to me a clear case of noumenal, discursive power producing
certain subjects and their bodies. The same holds true for the normative production
of feminine bodies through discursive power, I think. How such power could
directly imprint itself on the body, as Amy argues, I dont see, I admit. Why would
you call that form of power discursive then? The space of reasons, as I understand
it, is broad, and it includes such disciplinary discourses that seal off alternative ways
of thinking and feeling ways that Foucaults genealogy tried to open up, by constructing discursive counter-power. There is no discursive power operating outside
(p. 39) of the space of justications which regulates ourselves. If there were, it would
be sealed off from genealogical critique. In the words of a power theorist I follow
here (including the point about domination):
The subject, as Foucault conceives it, is constituted by forces that can be analyzed
empirically in the sense that the discursive and sociocultural conditions of possibility
for subjectivity in a given historically specic location can be uncovered through an
analysis of power/knowledge regimes. But the subject has always to take up those
conditions, and it is in the taking up of them that they can (potentially) be transformed. An episteme, a set of rules for discourse formations, or a power/knowledge
regime sets the limits within which I can think, deliberate about ends, and act, but it
does not prescribe the specic content of any particular thought or of any particular
action (except perhaps in the most extreme cases of domination). (Allen 2008, p. 37f)
Based on such a view, I fear I must disagree with Amys interpretation of embodied political practices. Challenges to hegemonic forms of power can take many
forms, and interventions into the social space of justications can of course be nonlinguistic, such as a silent sit-in or a hunger strike. We need to distinguish the mode
of opposing domination from the reason for opposing it and the claims thus raised
in Martin Luther Kings terms (cited by Amy) as claims to the public conscience. Clearly that protest was meant to expose the lack of justication of the
dominant forms of power and the social structures they supported. To dramatize
an issue that must not be ignored, as King says, is exactly what can be necessary
to attain justicatory standing and no longer be denied ones right to justication.
Using such means unmasks the unreason of the other side, hence it is not, as Amy
says, non-reason oriented, as it has all (good) reason(s) on its side (and knows
that) and just makes the unreason of the other side obvious.
31
I am not sure I really differ from Amy in thinking that we need to make an effort
to try to understand how noumenal power works such that we inquire into the motivational and cognitive economy of subjects of oppression and coercion. It seems to
me far too simple to think that the oppressed either willingly accept their situation
(even in a way that they could be blamed for such acceptance, as Amy suggests to be
an implication of my view) or are purely causally directed by alien forces they are not
aware of (Amys notion of explanatory reasons). I think both extremes are unhelpful; to understand how discursive power constitutes and frames self-knowledge and
self-evaluations in no way implies that those who adopt such views are to be blamed
for that, nor does it imply that there are anonymous forces at work here that telecommand subjects without them having a (possibly deluded) understanding of who they
are and why they see certain justications to accept, for example, a patriarchal structure or a certain order of gender relations. Again, genealogical critique would not be
possible if there were no such understanding to subvert, and it would also have no
material of critique. Power indeed works through producing normative reasons, and
only a critique of the existing relations of justication can generate the required counter-power.
And as Amy cannot resist commenting on the issue of historical progress (the
topic of her new book), so I cannot resist responding, as this is such an important
issue. I fear I do not see what it means not to take a stance towards our past, as
Amy suggests, and I am also not sure I understand how one can write a history of
decline, as she argues, or of power, if you like, if one does not precisely take
such a stance. When I say that we ought to reconstruct historically the normative
force of emancipatory claims, I am also in no way committed to a story of progress
that paints this as the driving force of a liberating history. In fact, the story of toleration I tell in Toleration in Conict is a dialectical one, of some moral progress
and of the progress of power and domination to ght or contain such dynamics
(see Forst 2013a, Forst and Brown 2014 on that dialectics).
Furthermore, to identify emancipatory movements of the past, as any theory
worth being called critical needs to, does not lead to a self-congratulatory
moralism. It is not that we do not have our own blind spots or would not see the
noumenal power structures at work in past societies that produced what they saw
as justications. But there have also been conicts in such normative orders where
noumenal power was challenged as to its justicatory quality, producing cracks in
sealed orders of domination. If we had no way to relate to those conicts and the
relevant claims in a careful normative way, given our distance to the past, how
could we ever try and learn from it? For example, we cannot remain agnostic with
respect to the ghts between slaves and slave-owners whenever they took place,
but at the same time, we need to try and understand the justicatory structures
involved in such societies, in ancient or modern times. Historical and normative
understanding cannot be separated but need to be combined in the right way, as a
dialectical genealogy does. The question Why? asks us to recognize different
contexts of justication and to transcend them at the same time (Tilly 2006).
Note
1. I am grateful to Erin Pineda for directing me to these passages in Kings work, and to
her discussion of direct action in Pineda (forthcoming).
32
A. Allen et al.
Notes on contributors
Amy Allen is the Parents Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities and Professor
of Philosophy and Womens and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of
The Power of Feminist Theory (1999), The Politics of Our Selves (2008) and The End of
Progress (forthcoming).
Rainer Forst is professor of Political Theory and Philosophy at the Goethe University
Frankfurt am Main. He is Co-Director of the Research Cluster on the Formation of
Normative Orders and of the Centre for Advanced Studies Justitia Amplicata. His major
publications are Contexts of Justice, Toleration in Conict, The Right to Justication and
Justication and Critique.
Mark Haugaard is professor in the School of Political Science and Sociology, National
University of Ireland, Galway. He is editor of the Journal of Political Power and Chair of
IPSA RC 36, Political Power. His most recent publications include, Haugaard and Ryan (ed.)
(2012) Power: The Development of the Field; Haugaard and Clegg (2012) (ed.) Power and
Politics, 4 Volumes; and Haugaard and Clegg (ed.) (2009) The Sage Handbook of Power.
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ALLEN, ForST and HAUGAARD - Power and Reason, Justice and Domination

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ALLEN, ForST and HAUGAARD - Power and Reason, Justice and Domination

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Journal of Political Power, 2014

Vol. 7, No. 1, 733, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2014.887540

Power and reason, justice and domination: a conversation

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Department of Philosophy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA; bGoethe Universitt,

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entirely unreasonable. Hence, to take a paradigmatic example, to the gesellschaft

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of femininity a conception that is also highly inected by assumptions about

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contextualist vs. transcendental or historical vs. ahistorical. It is the best we

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