The History and Critique of Modernity:

Dewey with Foucault against Weber

To Appear In:

Paul Fairfield (ed.), Dewey and Continental Philosophy

Colin Koopman, University of California at Santa Cruz

cwkoopman@gmail.com

Interpreting and Criticizing Modernity

In bringing the philosophical traditions of pragmatism and genealogy to bear upon

contemporary debates regarding modernity, the work of both John Dewey and Michel

Foucault has been subjected to misinterpretations that portray both traditions in a way

that depletes them of the full force of their critical insight. The source of these

misinterpretations is in many cases an attempt to squeeze the philosophical projects of

pragmatism and genealogy into the mold that shapes the thought of most participants on

both sides of the modernity debates. This mold can usually be traced back to the work of

the influential sociologist, political economist, and philosopher Max Weber. One

unfortunate residue of the subtle dominance of Weberian concepts in contemporary

debates over modernity is that many thinkers who operated largely outside of these

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concepts cannot be brought into these debates without filtering their thought through this

conceptual prism. In the case of Dewey and Foucault, their contributions to our

understanding of the basic problems of modernity are widely misunderstood due to being

filtered through Weberian concepts that simply were not central in Deweys or Foucaults

thinking.

Weber was an extraordinarily complex thinker. This helps explain why his

interpretation of modernity has proven capacious enough to provide fuel for both pro-

modern optimists and anti-modern pessimists. But it is important to be precise here.

Webers interpretation justifies either pro-modernism or anti-modernism and yet never

both at the same time. Where Dewey and Foucault are interpreted through the Weberian

prism, the usual result is to assimilate their critical stances on modernity to either side of

this familiar for or against debate. Thus Dewey is often read as a resolutely optimistic

modern thinker whose thought warrants comparison to Habermass defense of modernity.

And Foucault is read from the opposite perspective as a decidedly pessimistic anti-

modern whose thought can be usefully compared to such thoroughgoing attacks on

modernity as those given by Adorno or Heidegger. But I want to suggest that Dewey and

Foucault were operating outside of the orbit of Webers understanding of the basic

problems of modernity and that this point of convergence is significant insofar as in both

cases it is part of a broad interpretation of modernity which enables an alternative

evaluation of modernity that cuts across all of the familiar either for or against positions

which have left the current debates rather vacuous. Dewey and Foucault were complexly

both for and against modernity. This more complex view leads in turn to a more

effective critical stance than that mounted by Webers approach. My claim, importantly,

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is not that Webers work on modernity is burdened by a cognitive defect which Dewey

and Foucault could help us to repair, but rather that Webers work is burdened by a

critical deficit which Dewey and Foucault enable us to overcome. Weber did not get

modernity wrong so much as he left us without any effective means to develop the better

aspects of modernity whilst also resisting its worse parts.

This essay attempts to more sharply define these points of contrast. My

arguments here can be summarized as follows. Weber offered a sociological portrait of

modernity in which the differentiation of value-spheres is the major thrust of modernity.

Weber thus saw modernity in terms of the differentiation of such spheres as science and

politics followed by the tendency toward the bureaucratization of each. Those working

within Webers interpretation of modernity either celebrate the basic modern project of

differentiation or mourn the lost unity and hope for some future reunification. Dewey

and Foucault, by contrast, offered an intellectual historical portrait of modernity which

focused not on the differentiation of sociological spheres but on the purification of

separate modes of thinking. Dewey and Foucault should be read as responding to a

modernity whose basic contrast is that between Enlightenment and Romanticism as

described by intellectual historians such as Arthur Lovejoy and Isaiah Berlin.1 The

paradigmatic forms of these two modern currents of thought are utilitarianism and

romanticism. While present throughout modernity, utilitarianism and romanticism

ascended to prominence over the course of the nineteenth century such that today we

1 The contrast between Enlightenment and Romanticism is given central place by many important intellectual historians. Exemplary for my approach are Berlin (1960, 1965, 1975) and Lovejoy (1936). See also Maurice Mandelbaum (1971), Hayden White (1973), Charles Taylor (1989), David Hollinger (2001), and taking a much longer view see Harold Blooms (2004) description of Homeric cognitivism and Hebraic spiritualism as the two great forces of Western wisdom

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might refer to each as indispensable for modernity. It follows from their indispensability

that any historical-philosophical evaluation of modernity must be able to accommodate

both. Dewey and Foucault painstakingly labored to show that modernity has thus far

accommodated both by means of a process which I call purificationour tendency to

hold apart utility and romance, reason and imagination, sociality and individuality, public

and private. Dewey and Foucault sought to elaborate an alternative means of

accommodating these two currents of thought which I call experimentationon this

model utility and romance would no longer be opposed currents of thought but would

rather be alternative tendencies whose internal tensions it is our task as moderns to

explore.

By distancing Dewey and Foucault from Weber as concerns their interpretations

of modernity a significant point begins to emerge: a hitherto unnoticed convergence

between pragmatism and genealogy. This convergence is significant because

comparative analyses of pragmatism and genealogy, like those of these two traditions and

Weber described above, generally tend to miss the important points of resonance which

prove these traditions much closer than is commonly thought.2 After explicating Weber,

Dewey, and Foucault I will conclude my discussion by considering briefly the attractive

philosophical possibilities of combing Deweys work on inquiry as reconstructive

problem-solving with Foucaults work on critique as genealogical problematization.

2 The most important of this work is that of Richard Rorty (1981a), but see also discussions by Cornel West (1989), Thomas McCarthy in Hoy and McCarthy (1994), John Patrick Diggins (1994), James Marshall (1994), Jim Garrison (1998), and Todd May (2004).

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Weber on Modernity

There is much to be learned from Max Webers sociological interpretations of

modernity. I will here focus on those interpretations only insofar as they can be read as

representative of a very typical misinterpretation of modernity. While there are certainly

other quite provocative and interesting ways of reading Weber, the view which continues

to hold dominance over contemporary interpretations of modernity is that which

emphasizes the familiar Weberian theme of differentiation and such of its implications as

rationalization and bureaucratization.3

Webers extraordinarily rich interpretation of modernity is above all distinguished

by his strong claim that [o]ur age is characterized by rationalization.4 Weber

understood the process of rationalization as locking us into an iron cage which

inextricably binds our era to the technical and economic conditions of machine

production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this

mechanism.5 But Weber also thought that rationalization presents us with unique

opportunities, precarious though they may be: The fate of an epoch which has eaten of

the tree of knowledge is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world

3 Recent revisionist scholarship notwithstanding, the best of which is Lawrence Scaff (1989) and Wilhelm Hennis (1987), most theorists continue to interpret Webers theory of modernity according to the classic terms of rationalizing differentiation-cum-bureaucratization established by Karl Lwith (1932), Reinhard Bendix (1960), and above all Talcott Parsons (1937). See Richard Swedberg (2003, 2005) on the current state of Weber scholarship. My presentation of Weber here is not so much an attempt at fine-grained Weber scholarship as it is an attempt to dispute the central Weberian theses which continue to exert tremendous influence on political philosophy and intellectual history. I leave it to others to show how the thought of Weber can today be reinterpreted so as to yield better resultsmy project is merely to cast doubt on a certain Weberianism dominant in contemporary histories and critiques of modernity. 4 Weber 1919, 30 5 Weber 1905, 181; cf. Weber 1923, 354.

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from the results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to

create this meaning itself.6

There is a basic ambiguity in Webers thought which enables critics as different in

temper as pro-modern celebrants and anti-modern skeptics to take up their philosophical

and political criticisms of modernity within his common interpretive framework.

Webers concept of rationalization contains both an idea of the proliferation of

instrumental rationality and an idea of the expansion of self-assertive free thinking. On

the one hand modern rationalization seems to promise autonomy while on the other hand

it seems to deliver us to obedience. Thus Alan Sica notes a Faustain bargain in Weber

while Fritz Ringer describes the two faces of Webers evaluation of modernity.7 James

Kloppenberg succinctly captures this basic duality in Webers thought: In one sense

disenchantment meant decline, because it robbed man of confidence. But in another

sense, it meant progress, because it opened the door to unprecedented autonomy.8

Which is the real meaning of modernity? It is difficult to say. But perhaps it is not as

important to determine which interpretation better reflects the facts as it is to recognize

the underlying presuppositions which animate both interpretations. At the bottom of both

estimations of rationalization is a separation between a certain picture of scientific

technicization and a certain picture of political emancipation, that is a separation between

the categories of objective control and subjective freedom in which Lawrence Scaff

and others find a central tension in Webers thought.9 This process of separation-cum-

development can help explain why pro-moderns can celebrate Weberian modernity (they

6 Weber 1904, 57 7 Sica 2000, 56 and Ringer 2004, 220 8 Kloppenberg 1986, 345 9 Scaff 2000, 103

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recognize in it the basic promise of a rationalizing world) at the same time that anti-

moderns can mourn Weberian modernity (they see in rationalization the promise of

disenchantment and the impending demise of mystical moods).

This core theme of the separation of technicization and emancipation is disclosed

in Webers concept of differentiation, to which he once strikingly referred with his

famous metaphor of the modern parceling-out of the soul.10 Differentiation refers to

the modern tendency to splinter off from one another the various value-spheres such as

science and politics. As value-spheres get increasingly differentiated powerful modes of

thought are opened up whereby each domain can push its immanent logic to its furthest

limits. This enables an unprecedented development of rationality in all spheres at the

seemingly small cost of the isolation of each mode of practice from every another.

In contemporary deployments of Webers interpretation of modernity, the idea of

differentiation is marshaled to explain the increasing dissociation of, in particular, the two

value-spheres of science and politics. The increasingly autonomous character of these

value-spheres was discussed at length by Weber in his two Vocation Lectures.11 The

distinction implicitly drawn in these lectures is not aimed at showing that scientific-

instrumental rationalization is necessarily opposed to political-emancipatory

rationalization. Weber was rather concerned to show that the spheres of science and

politics are merely separable insofar as each is capable of autonomous development. It is

this fact of autonomous internal development which Weber above all else marked as

distinctive of modernity: technicization and emancipation are disconnected in a way that

seems to promise an unprecedented development of each. It is true that this condition

10 On the complicated textual context of this metaphor see Sica (2000, 53). 11 Weber (1917, 1919)

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ultimately drives us toward the conflict between the gods implicit in Webers claim

that the different value systems of the world are caught up in an insoluble struggle with

one another.12 But for Weber this fact of modern pluralism was not nearly as important

as the differentiations giving rise to it.

Differentiation on the whole can be understood in terms of the external face of

bureaucratization which is symptomatic of an internal process of rationalization. David

Owen and Tracy Strong claim that [b]ureaucracy is thus the front of a great historical

process of rationalization.13 Bureaucratization and rationalization thus together form the

core of the interpretation of modernity which Weber has bequeathed to much of

twentieth-century critical theory. This iron-fisted image offers a seductive picture of

modernity as an age where an ambiguous rationality comes to increasingly gather

everything under its unified purview even if this rationality itself is necessarily

differentiated in its various deployments. Weber thus beautifully portrayed that familiar

image of modernity as the unity of reason in the diversity of its voices.

This helps explain why pro-moderns and anti-moderns are both able to use

Webers interpretation of modernity as a basis upon which to articulate their conflicting

evaluations of modernity. While some witness differentiation as a legitimate move which

today only requires piecemeal adjustment others regard it as signaling the demise of

emancipation as modernity is increasingly swept up by promises of technicization. This

suggests that pro-moderns and anti-moderns embrace all the same dualisms: reason

versus imagination, intellect versus will, sameness versus difference, social versus

individual, technicization versus emancipation. The only difference is that each side

12 Weber 1917, 27, 22; see commentary by Raymond Aron (1959, 360-72). 13 Owen and Strong 2004, lvi

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inverts the privileges the other accords to either pole of these dualisms. As Bruno Latour

states, [e]xcept for the plus or minus sign, moderns and antimoderns share all the same

convictions.14 This series of basic contrasts, so easily and so often inflated into

dichotomies, should be the focal point of attempts to evaluate the viability of Webers

interpretation of modernity. The central question concerns whether or not Webers

interpretation of modernity as an era of differentiation locks us into these contrasts or

provides a means for thinking beyond them. My argument is that Webers theory forces

us to leave modernity more or less where he finds it. It is, in other words, critically

debilitating.

This central problem in the Weberian frame is exemplified on both sides of the

familiar debates between the pro-moderns and anti-moderns. The opposition between

Habermas and Derrida, for example, reflects the Weberian assumptions which typically

separate pro-moderns from anti-moderns.15 If Derrida is concerned to blur the very lines

between philosophy and literature which Habermas strives to sharpen, then already both

positions are framed in Weberian terms of differentiation, which Derrida is against and

Habermas is for. In working from a Weberian starting point, whether consciously or not,

such critics of modernity risk descending into reductive interpretations of modernity

which can only yield simplistic for or against evaluations. This shows not that the work

of Habermas and Derrida is essentially incorrect. It shows rather that thought that is so

fecund can be rendered so barren by hewing to an interpretation of modernity that is all

too often unquestioningly accepted. In order to adopt a properly critical relationship to

14 Latour 1991, 123 15 While the Derrida-Habermas debates have been much discussed, two particularly helpful evaluations are those of Richard Bernstein (1991) and David Hoy (1989).

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modernity we must first adopt a critical relationship to modernitys interpretation of

itselfwhich means getting away from a certain picture of modernity for which Weber is

representative.

Deweys and Foucaults Alternative to Weberian Sociology

In focusing on modernity, pragmatism and genealogy have together departed from

the sociological style of interpretation of which Weber is representative in favor of a

more intellectual historical style of interpretation. This difference emerges as crucial

when one moves on to develop critical evaluations of modernity on the basis of differing

descriptive interpretations. Those working with Webers interpretation tend to evaluate

modernity in terms of sociological categories such as science, politics, religion, and art.

This too often leads to generalizing evaluations to the effect that science is good or

religion is dangerous. Such views are rarely helpful because scientific and religious

practices are often too complex for these canonical sociological boxes. Those working

with Deweys and Foucaults interpretation would do better to focus instead on currents

of thought and styles of practice such as utilitarianism, romanticism, rationalism, and

mysticism. These currents of thought cut across familiar sociological distinctions. There

are utilitarians and romantics in science, in politics, in religion, and in art. It is easy to

generalize here too. But in turning from interpretation to evaluation, focusing on currents

of thought enables us to distinguish what we like in scientific and religious practices from

what we find troublesome. This means we can stop worshipping and castigating

sociologically-defined categories such as science and religion in favor of a more complex

argument to the effect that scientists and religions ought to play up some aspect of their

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practices whilst playing down other aspects. I will not here engage in this sort of

evaluative work in order to concentrate instead on explicating the interpretations of

modernity offered by Foucault and Dewey.

Genealogists like Nietzsche and Foucault are, and not without some warrant,

represented by most critics as firmly in the camp of the anti-modern pessimists.

Countless commentators have suggested that Foucault intensifies all of the key problems

formulated by Weber and thus leaves us impotent. The standard line is that whereas

Weber saw modern rationalization as an iron cage Foucault saw it as a something like

an iron cave which we cannot even see we are in let alone see our way out of. Indeed it

is difficult not to hear the retroactive echo of Discipline and Punish when reading the

passages on discipline in Economy and Society.16 Such echoes have led commentators as

insightful as Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus to claim that Foucaults work should be

seen as an advance, not a refutation of the Weberian project insofar as he inherits

Webers concern with rationalization and objectification as the essential trend of our

culture and the most important problem of our time.17 Rabinow and Dreyfus here make

explicit a tacit assumption at work in much of Foucault criticism, both friendly and

hostile. The assumption is that Foucault engages modernity to respond to the basic

problem of differentiation paradigmatically formulated by Weber. 18

Rather than expressing what is really valuable in Foucault, this common

interpretation instead reflects just how pervasive the Weberian framework is for

16 See Foucault (1975) and Weber (1964, 1148-1156). 17 Rabinow and Dreyfus 1982, 133, 166; in recent work Rabinow reiterates this interpretation (2003). 18 See work by John ONeill (1986), Peter Dews (1987), Colin Gordon (1987), Bryan Turner (1987), David Owen (1994), and Arpd Szakolczai (1998); for an excellent account of why Foucault should not be read in Weberian light see Mitchell Dean (1994).

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contemporary historical interpretations and critical evaluations of modernity. There are

at least two difficulties yielded by reading Foucault through Weber. First, it is tough to

square Webers image of value-sphere differentiation with Foucaults presentation of the

increasing interlacing of power and knowledge in modernity. This is an example of how

reading Foucault as a Weberian would expose Foucaults own thought to many of the

traps which it was designed to point out. One of Foucaults most enduring points was

that the core political problems of our day should not be described in terms of reunifying

the differentiated modes of knowledge and power because this would merely be a call for

more of the same. A second difficulty for reading Foucault as a Weberian is that it makes

Foucault seem far less unique than he really is. Is Foucault really just one more protestor

in a long line of intellectuals chanting the familiar mantras of anti-modernity? Foucault

was certainly critical of modernity, but at the same time he positively embraced what he

saw as its most valuable tendencies. Foucault was both for and against modernity.

Rabinow claims that that Foucault did not proceed by opposing modernity to post-

modernity, but by opposing modernity to counter-modernity, such that his parrhesiastic

practice was simultaneously modern and counter-modern.19 What I am suggesting is that

Rabinow is right to see Foucault as both modern and counter-modern, and that this sort of

complex critical evaluation of modernity simply cannot be made sense of within the usual

Weberian frame that so thoroughly dominates contemporary thought about modernity,

counter-modernity, and post-modernity.

Turning now to pragmatism, the interpretive situation is a little different, but no

better for it. When pragmatism is not altogether neglected by those engaged in the

19 Rabinow 1994, 197; cf. Rabinow and Dreyfus (1986).

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modernity debates, it is usually denounced as either a celebratory philosophy proclaiming

all the benefits of the modern age or as a profoundly relativistic doctrine out of step with

modern progress. Both of these caricatures borrow much from Weber and gather

relatively little from Dewey. As for explicit comparative research on Weber and Dewey,

there has been surprisingly little work here. The important exception is James

Kloppenbergs skillful attempt to establish important points of connection between

Weber and Dewey. Kloppenberg finds the most important point of overlap in Dewey and

Webers shared view that differentiating rationalization is the central problem of

modernity.20 Kloppenberg goes on to detail their divergence in terms of Deweys

optimism and Webers pessimism in the face of this rationalization. While not

discounting other similarities between Weber and Dewey concerning ethics and

epistemology which Kloppenberg has helpfully explicated,21 I wish to call into question

his claim for a more basic point of convergence in terms of their supposedly shared

interpretation of modernity. We simply cannot make sense of Deweys most central

commitments if we see him as responding to problems that were not really his but

Webers. Weber sees modernity as haunted by a series of divisions which Dewey may

indeed have found troubling had he not confronted modern culture as problematized by a

more basic dichotomy. Weber saw modernity as split between science and morality, but

Dewey saw modernity as split between utilitarian rationality and romantic pathos.

Deweys view enabled him to move beyond many of those critically-debilitating

20 Kloppenberg 1986, 349-94. In the only other comparative works on Dewey and Weber of which I am aware, Emirbayer (2005) rather loosely argues my point, Roederer (2000) concedes my point within an account which explicitly aims to build on Kloppenberg, while Diggins (1999) compares Dewey and Weber very quickly in only summary terms. 21 Kloppenberg 1994, 82-99

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categories which have haunted so much of modern thought, including Webers. This

helps explain why Weber retained many of the dichotomies which Dewey thoroughly

rejected (for instance, that between facts and values).22

What I am claiming is that Deweys pragmatism should not be seen as an attempt

to reunify the scientific and political spheres of experience, which is what Kloppenberg,

Martin Jay, and numerous other intellectual historians of pragmatism have argued.23

Deweys pragmatism is better seen as attempting to develop a conscious integration of

utilitarian and romantic styles of thought. On the traditional interpretation, Dewey is

presented as championing something called scientific method which supposedly stands in

contrast to differentiated spheres of activity such as art, morality, and politics.24 But

when Dewey spoke highly of science, he was not thinking of a separable sphere of human

culture, because, after all, he would have agreed with Foucault that science gets practiced

alongside of politics.25 Dewey, rather, was thinking of an attitude which he found

exemplified in certain early modern scientists, but also in certain artists, politicians,

novelists, and everyday people. This is the attitude of experimentalism and it was

Deweys alternative to brazen celebrations of pure utility and pure romance. Deweys

concern was not that modernity had parsed itself out into a good science over here and a

bad morality over there, but rather that the attitude of experimentalism had not

sufficiently taken hold throughout the great variety of our modern practices including our

modern scientific practices. Dewey was interested in generalizing an isolated mode of

22 In the two other comparative works on Dewey and Weber of which I am aware, Emirbayer (2005) rather loosely argues my point while Roederer (2000) concedes my point within an account which explicitly aims to build on Kloppenberg; Diggins (1999) compares Dewey and Weber only but only summarily. 23 See Kloppenberg (1986) and Jay (2005) 24 Helpful discussions of the charge of scientism in Dewey include those by Thayer (1968, 165ff.), Hollinger (1980, 29ff.), and Kloppenberg (1986, 383ff.). 25 See, for one of countless examples, Dewey (1939).

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experience thus far present only in the scientists laboratories. Rather, he was interested

in reconstructing experience in terms of currents of thought which he thought could reach

throughout modern consciousness. Dewey was not interested in praising a differentiated

bureaucracy of science, but rather an experimentalism for which science had provided

many, but certainly not the only, exemplars. Only on this view can we understand why in

addition to certain scientific practices, Dewey also championed certain aesthetic,

religious, political, and ethical practices. Dewey found in each of these the seeds of an

experimentalism that he hoped could flower forth practically anywhere.

Dewey and Foucault should not be read through the prism of Weberian concepts.

Dewey and Foucault never argued that power and knowledge, expressions of the

supposedly differentiated value-spheres of politics and science, ought not to be separated.

They argued that the two had never been separated. Modernity as Weber described it had

never taken place. As such, Dewey and Foucault never urged a reunification of the

various modalities of experience split off into various differentiated value-spheres.

Rather, they responded by urging the adoption of a critical attitude which both of them

often referred to as experimentalism.

Dewey on Modernity

My approach to pragmatism takes as one of its points of departure Richard

Rortys fertile suggestion that we think of pragmatism as romantic utilitarianism.26

26 See numerous works by Rorty (1998a, 1998b, 2004). Similar interpretations of pragmatism as between romanticism and utilitarian positivism have been offered by James Livingston (1994, 2001), Thelma Lavine (1991, 1995), and H.S. Thayer (1968). Notable is George Herbert Meads view in his impressive intellectual history, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, where he explicitly contrasts

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Rortys image of pragmatism as an experimentalism which integrates romantic and

utilitarian currents of thought captures what is best in the work of John Dewey. Seen in

this way, the tradition of pragmatism should be understood as an attempt to further that

experimental project of forging productive new relations among modernitys utilitarian

and romantic tendencies.

In books such as The Quest for Certainty and Reconstruction in Philosophy,

Dewey describes modernity as held captive by a process of purification which rigorously

divides reason from its others.27 Dewey here and elsewhere details the philosophical

quest for certainty which emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as

truth was increasingly identified with the condition of subjective certainty. Although this

quest is unique to modernity, it is central to Deweys argument that it institutes no deep

breaks from the ambition for transcendence that has characterized philosophy since its

beginnings. In ancient thought, purity was figured as the self-identity of eternity. In

medieval philosophy, the purity standard was similarly articulated as a divine force to

which human reason and imagination should chain themselves. In modern thought,

purity is relocated in the unassailability of mental certainty. The ongoing quest for

certainty simply revamped the ancient and medieval quests for purity in the light of the

subjectivism of the modern age. Going forward into the nineteenth century we witness

the full and final solidification of the quest for certainty as the currents of utilitarianism

and romanticism assumed cultural ascendance. What the simultaneous ascendance of

these two opposed currents of thought signals is the meticulous purification of two modes

pragmatism to the conception of inquiry common to the Romantic idealists and the rationalists according to which knowledge is a simple getting of the nature of the world (1936, 344). 27 Dewey (1929, 1920)

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of direct contact with truth. Certainty is enthroned as both a form of reason and a form of

intuition or imagination. Dewey summarized this picture of modernity in his description

of Kant as striving after cognitive certainty in the region of phenomena, practical

certainty in the realm of moral authority.28

The question for certainty thus entails a separation of pure reason from its others.

This separation is the specific problem situation to which Dewey addressed his

pragmatism. Without this historical interpretation of the central problem of modernity as

its backdrop, much of Deweys thought remains difficult to understand. But with this

backdrop in place, many of his most central concepts can be clarified. For example, this

backdrop throws into clear relief Deweys attempt in his Ethics to reconstruct ethical

practice in such a way that would bring together the insights of the utilitarian focus on

instrumental rationality and the deontological focus on an active and spontaneous faculty

of reason virtually indistinguishable from romantic imagination.29 Here as elsewhere,

Dewey should be read as responding to a modernity in which the central problem we face

is the separation not between two sociological spheres of experience but between two

moods of prosaic utilitarianism and poetic romanticism.

The central problem of modernity which emerges from Deweys writings is that

of the basic contrast, urged by utilitarians and romantics alike, between pure utility and

pure romance. From this there follows a whole train of invidious philosophical

distinctions that Dewey finds misguided: reason versus imagination, sociality versus

individuality, public versus private. As Dewey saw it in The Quest for Certainty such

various attempts at purification are motivated by a yearning for benefits bestowed by

28 Dewey 1929, 49 29 Dewey (1932)

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powers that transcend our mere humanity. It is above all against this philosophical

thematic, and the modern figure of certainty which has been its outward face, that

pragmatism was written. Rorty nicely captures pragmatisms quintessential skepticism

toward the idea that there exist extra-human powers which we mere humans ought to try

and get in touch with: The problem with both universalist metaphors of grandeur and

romantic metaphors of depth is that they suggest that a practical proposal, whether

conservative or radical in character, can gain strength by being tied in with something not

merely humansomething like the intrinsic nature of reality or the uttermost depths of

the human soul.30 The promises of grandeur and depth have been exciting for both

romantics and utilitariansthe spirit of purity pervades modern thought in both of its

major currents and the further each is pursued the more refined is its purification. It

follows from all of this, however, that the category most central to Deweys own

experimentalism, uncertainty, has been widely absent from most forms of utilitarianism

and romanticism. Deweys experimentalism should thus be seen as an alternative that

negotiates around both utility and romance which is to say that pragmatism is, to borrow

from Rorty once again, an alternative to both universalism and romanticism.31

All of this helps explain why the charges of scientism and aestheticism imputed to

various pragmatists by their most hostile critics fail to capture crucial elements of

pragmatist experimentalism. These crucial elements, I have argued, are likely to be

overlooked if one understands pragmatism as attempting to come to terms with the kind

of modernity described by Weber. Pragmatists understand politics and sciencepower

and knowledge, value and factas reciprocal. Experimentalism is thus not operative

30 Rorty 2004, 137 31 Rorty 2004, 136

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only in science (the scientism imputed to Dewey) or only in literature (the aestheticism

imputed to Rorty and sometimes James). Once we start experimenting on any broad

scale it turns out that science, aesthetics, and politics grow increasingly indistinguishable.

Experimentalism must therefore work across power and knowledge at once as a quality

operative throughout culture. The purest forms of utilitarianism and romanticism have

rooted themselves in just this waypurity has been operative simultaneously in

epistemic and political practice. Pragmatists interpret modernity as a series of decisive

transformations reverberating throughout all of culturethe purification of reason and

imagination that empties from each the corruptions of the other is a culture-wide project

occurring in legislatures and laboratories simultaneously and with reciprocal benefit to

both. The response to such a modernity bent on purification cannot be the expansion of

an experimentalism thus far developed in only one of science or politics (thus replacing a

monistic totalization for a purifying totalization), but rather must be an experimentalism

that will increasingly pervade both simultaneously. Pragmatists thus urge a

reconstruction of modern culture along paths worn by particular cultural moods (an

experimentalism about knowledge and politics) rather than others (utilitarianism or

romanticism about knowledge and politics). Rather than pressing for experimentalism on

the basis of an implausible and unhappy divorce of politics from epistemics, then,

pragmatists think of experimentalism in terms of synergistic democratizations of power

and knowledge.

This is an important point of connection linking pragmatism to genealogy. For in

his attempt to develop an experimental alternative to prevailing cultural tendencies,

Dewey makes much the same point as Foucault did when he envisioned practices of

19

experimentation and transgression which could carry us beyond the dominant confines of

modern thought. Deweys prose may have been limp and Foucaults sexy, but both were

looking forward to a culture which would sustain itself by simply trying things out as an

alternative to that cultural self-containment implicit in the modern will to purify.

Foucault on Modernity

I find the following remark of Foucaults one of the most fecund for

understanding the whole of his work: In every culture there exists a coherent series of

gestures of division [But] the moment they mark a limit, they create the space of a

possible transgression.32 Across the long span of his career, Foucault returns again and

again to his central theme of two moments of modernity: division and transgression, or

purification and experimentation. These two moments form the central conceptual

apparatus through which Foucaults many interpretations and critiques of modernity

should be read.

Since my interpretation of Foucault amounts to a significant revision of the

standard reception of his work, it will be useful to summarize that standard reception in

order to appreciate the terms of my revisionist reading in terms of modernitys divisions

and transgressions. Most interpretations of Foucault leave him in a difficult bind

according to which his image of modernity as increasingly swept up in an insidious form

of disciplinary rationality provides us with little wiggle room by which we may come to

understand ourselves as either free or at least someday capable of freedom. On this

interpretation, a stifled and disturbed Foucault offers us little better than, in Richard

32 Foucault, quoted by Miller (1993, 115) from Les dviations religieuses et la savoir medical (1962, 19).

20

Rortys phrase, more and more sophisticated expressions of resentment.33 Even

sympathetic critics such as James Bernauer similarly hold that confinements are the

central experiences that Foucaults work describes.34 Consider the reception of Madness

and Civilization and Discipline and Punish.

In common accounts of Madness and Civilization, Foucault is described as tracing

the history of a Western rationality that would separate itself from its primary other,

namely madness, so as to exclude it from modern culture. For example, in his excellent

book on Foucaults early work, Gary Gutting unfortunately presents Foucault as charting

the suppression, conceptual exclusion, and condemnation of madness by reason.

According to this common line of interpretation, Foucault near the end of the book issues

a desperate cry on behalf of those banished madmen in lyrically invoking the names of

Nietzsche and Artaud, Sade and Hlderlin. Gutting finds in these closing pages

Foucaults romantic desire to see madness as an infrarational source of fundamental

truth.35 This standard reading, the most forceful version of which was perhaps Jacques

Derridas,36 appreciates Madness and Civilization as a lamentation over modern reasons

domination of madness, a domination that seems to leave us all, including Foucault

himself, feeling helplessly trapped in the iron cage of modern rationality.

Similar interpretations structured the reception of Foucaults later work, most

notably the image of modernity presented in Discipline and Punish. On the standard

accounts, this book offered a diagram of the workings of an insidious and unbeatable

form of power which had over the course of the past few hundred years come to structure

33 Rorty 1981b, 6 34 Bernauer 1990, 16 35 Gutting 1989 71, 74, 89, 109 36 Derrida (1963)

21

modern society, modern knowledge, modern law, and even modern subjectivity itself. It

is Foucaults point, commentator after commentator declared, that we cannot free

ourselves from the exercise of modern discipline. We inhabit the Panopticon everywhere

and have so thoroughly internalized it that we all harbor little policemen running around

inside of our heads preventing us from ever freeing ourselves. We are therefore swept up

in a power which renders freedom totally impossible. Foucaults best critic on these

matters was Habermas, whose chief complaint was that Foucaults interpretation of

modernity under the sign of disciplinary power eviscerates from modernity the very

premise of emancipation that is the condition of the possibility of critical reflection at all.

Foucaults diatribe, Habermas concluded, took place under the very conditions of modern

freedom which it announced as impossible.37

Foucault found these early and late interpretations rooted in a misreading of his

work. To counter them, I would like to focus on a claim Foucault made near the end of

Madness and Civilization: Man and madman are bound by an impalpable connection of

truth that is both reciprocal and incompatible.38 I find this idea of reciprocal

incompatibility crucially helpful for understanding Foucault. This formulation suggests

that Foucaults point is that the relations between pairs like madness and reason or power

and freedom constitute the very problematic of modernity itself. What Foucaults

histories of problematization demonstrate is that these relations are an intractable

problem for moderns such that they are constitutive of the modern condition as such. To

37 Habermas (1981, 1985). Habermas borrowed much of his argument from Nancy Fraser (1981) but see also related criticisms by Michael Walzer (1983), Charles Taylor (1984), Thomas McCarthy (1990), and Batrice Han (1998). 38 Foucault quoted in Eribon 1989, 97; this passage is from the longer version of Histoire de la Folie only recently translated into English.

22

complain that Foucault failed to liberate either side of these oppositional terms from the

total repression of the other, then, is to entirely miss his point. Foucaults point was that

these terms are reciprocal but incompatible, that is they can neither be fully liberated

from nor totally assimilated to one another. This can be clarified by revisiting both

Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish.

Take those seemingly romantic passages at the end of Madness and Civilization.

Perhaps the Nietzsche in these pages is not for Foucault a forgotten madman, but rather

the philosopher capable of reinvigorating a forgotten dialogue between madness and

reason.39 Foucault laments not Nietzsche as madman, but the fact that a Nietzsche can no

longer be on the border of reason and unreason since that border is forever banished by

modern purification.40 On such a reading, Foucaults text would not witness reasons

subjugation of madness so much as a more insidious separation of reason from madness.

It is not that some former reality of madness is held at bay by the production of reason, it

is rather that madness and reason in their modern form are simultaneously produced as

incoherent with one another.

This reading sustains Foucaults remark that the study of madness and rationality

must go back toward the decision that simultaneously links and separates reason and

madness; it must aim to uncover the perpetual exchange, the obscure common root, the

original confrontation that gives meaning to the unity, as well as to the opposition, of

sense and non-sense.41 We must, in other words, aim to restore that broken interaction

where madness and rationality are interactive with one another. It was in this spirit that

39 Clare OFarrell (1989, 74-78) develops a similar perspective. 40 Foucault 1961, 287 41 Foucault 1961 quoted in Derrida 1963, 43; from the longer version of Histoire de la Folie.

23

Foucault in an early essay celebrated the possibility of the mad philosopher.42 The mad

philosopher would be the kind of experimentalist who could at once be mad and be

philosophical and in so doing transgress the separation of reason and madness which

forms a core problem of our modernity. In praising the mad philosopher Foucault does

not mourn a banished madman, but rather that forgotten space of interaction between

madman and philosopher. He finds Nietzsche, the paradigm of the mad philosopher,

waiting for us there.

There is an important symmetry between Foucaults earlier work on modern

reason and his later work on modern power. Just as madness can be neither totally

subject to nor totally liberated from reason, freedom and power are similarly bound to

one another. Seen in this light, Foucaults point in his late work on power and knowledge

was never that we are trapped in power. Foucault, rather, sought carefully to elaborate

the difficulty we moderns face in our task of simultaneously negotiating freedom and

power. The complex idea that Foucault was striving to articulate and which so many of

his critics misunderstood was that freedom and power can neither be dissociated nor

assimilated. They must be deployed simultaneously so that we can work within the

internal tensions of their relationships. Foucault therefore found himself working as a

transgressor and an experimentalist at the interstices where freedom and power connect.

The problem we moderns face, as Foucault elaborated it, is that there is no pure

freedom to be emancipated just as there is no pure power to repress it. Modernity

produces autonomous freedom and disciplinary power as two reciprocal but incompatible

aspects of our political existence. These two presuppose one another but are at the same

42 Foucault 1963, 80

24

time incoherent with one another. So it is not that disciplinary power eliminates

autonomous freedom, just as it is not that modern rationality eliminates madness. It is

rather that disciplinary power and autonomous freedom are simultaneously produced so

as to render the latter ineffective as a force pitted against the former. Just as madness

finds itself in no position to question reason, freedom understood on the modern model of

autonomy finds itself hardly equipped to oppose power on the model of discipline.

Foucault held that the freedom of resistance must be sought elsewhere than in the

romantic ideals of autonomy and liberation. Discipline and Punish had shown that

autonomous individuality is one of the intended effects of disciplinary power, rather than

a predisciplinary capacity for freedom which might seek revenge on power.43 Freedom,

Foucault concluded, must work through, not merely against, power. But it was never

Foucaults point that we need regard modernity as a traphis more modest point was

simply that the modern conception of an autonomous freedom totally liberated from

power is but a corollary of a disciplinary power which totally cages up freedom.

Foucaults work on freedom is best interpreted in light of a distinction between an

autonomous freedom already presupposed by modern forms of power and an

experimental freedom which offers resistance to both modern power and modern freedom

in their pure forms.44 Difficult as it may seem, and it was precisely Foucaults point that

it would be difficult, resistance to modern practices of power requires resistance to a

certain modern conception of the practice of freedom. This twin resistance to power and

freedom suggests an internal connection between selfhood and environment such that the

transformation of either requires the transformation of both. Experimentally freeing

43 Foucault 1975, 184ff.; cf. Foucault (1979) and Gordon (1991). 44 See a similar distinction by John Rajchman (1985, 92, 115) and discussion by David Hoy (2004, 100).

25

ourselves of particular forms of power circulating through us, therefore, involves freeing

ourselves of the forms of freedom through which we enable that circulation. Judith

Butler claims this in writing that, in Foucault, To be critical of an authority that poses as

absolute requires a critical practice that has self-transformation at its core.45

Understanding his problematization of modern freedom and power in this way

enables us to recognize that Foucaults late work on ethics never sought to rehabilitate the

autonomous form of freedom which Foucaults middle work on power had ruled out.46

Foucaults late work on ethical freedom is best understood as elaborating the possibility

for a modern form of experimental liberty on the basis of the study of pre-modern

practices in which freedom and power were not yet purified as they were to become in

modernity. Foucault thus did not in his late work abandon his earlier theses about

modern power in order to elaborate a theory of modern freedom which these theses had

explicitly invalidated.47 On the contrary, Foucaults late work elaborates a conception of

experimental freedom which specifically aims to address the very problem established by

our reciprocal but incompatible practices of modern disciplinary power and modern

autonomous freedom.48

What the foregoing discussion of Madness and Civilization and Discipline and

Punish shows is just how much Foucaults picture of modernity differs from the standard

Weberian image of modernity as an age of rationalizing differentiation. Foucaults

emphasis on experimental transgression and his concern with the pernicious effects of

45 Butler 2002, 218 46 Foucault (1984a) 47 Among those arguing for a basic incoherence between the so-called middle and late works are Peter Dews (1989), Thomas McCarthy (1990), Batrice Han (1998) and Eric Paras (2006). 48 Among those arguing for important continuities between the so-called middle and late works are Ladelle McWhorter (1999, 189ff.), Timothy OLeary (2002, 107ff.), Johanna Oksala (2005, 157ff.), Benda Hofmeyr (2006), and Amy Allen (forthcoming, chapter 3).

26

much that has marched under the banner of modernity simply would not make sense if

interpreted through the Weberian picture of modernity. Foucault did not witness the

increasing differentiation of the vocations of science and politics. What he witnessed

rather was the increasing purification, the reciprocal incompatibility, of two great cultural

imperatives: emancipatory freedom on the one side and disciplinary control on the other.

So it would not make sense to understand Foucault as having rallied against

rationalization in the name of enchantment or mysticism or revolt or any other favorite of

romanticism. Foucault was never against reason and simply for passion, madness, and

freedom. He is better seen as having explored the long and slow formation of those great

divisions, those formidable reciprocal incompatibilities, through which we moderns have

attempted to erect high walls separating our reasons from our passions, our sociality from

our individuality, our utility from our romance. It was these walls that he found

debilitating, not the concepts (instrumental rationality, romantic passion) located on

either side of them. If Foucaults critical histories have any positive upshot, then it

consists in his articulation of practices of experimental transgression which would aim to

tear these walls down. These transgressions would not demonstrate that reason and its

others are really the same, but would open up the possibility of a new phase of modernity

in which these two aspects of modern culture were not as rigorously purified as they were

in previous phases of modernity. This new phase was envisioned by Foucault not as a

reunification of power and knowledge (for that is what modernity has deployed all along)

but rather as an intensification of experimental tensions resulting from the blending of

powers and freedoms, rationalities and madnesses. That is why Foucault should be read

27

as neither pro-modern nor anti-modern, but as complexly modern in the interests of a

future phase of modernity.49

Toward a Genealogical Pragmatist Critique of Modernity

Foucault and Dewey are best read as picking up on a crucial but underdeveloped

aspect of Kants legacy to modernity. Weber, and all those in his train, located Kants

legacy in a modern tendency toward differentiation by which we have carved ourselves

up into separate spheres according to the critical limits located in the first two Critiques.

But Foucault and Dewey located Kants legacy elsewhere. According to their view, we

do not find ourselves divided into the two worlds of experience discerned by a

sociological interpretation of Kants critical philosophy. We find ourselves instead

divided into two currents of thought, or two different standpoints for thinking, which

Kants critical system was an attempt to do simultaneous justice to. This division in

thought should not be overcome by reunifying supposedly divided spheres of experience,

but rather by experimentally testing the divisions between utilitarian rationality and

romantic autonomy which we impose on ourselves.

The important details of Deweys and Foucaults conceptions of an experimental

critique of ourselves will have to be elaborated on another occasion. What I have sought

to focus attention on here is the important overlap between Deweyan pragmatism and

Foucaultian genealogy in their interpretations of the basic problems of modern culture.

In closing, I would like to point out that from the point of view of both traditions this is

no small similarity. Both traditions hold that processes such as modernity gain their

49 See the interpretations offered by Rabinow and Dreyfus (1986), Hoy (1988), and Rabinow (1994).

28

coherence from the problems they are formulated as responses to, such as the inheritance

of utilitarian disciplinary imperatives and romantic emancipatory dreams. Gaining a

view of the problems we face is, for both genealogy and pragmatism, a crucial task for

thought. On Deweys view, this is expressed in terms of his account of inquiry as

beginning with and aiming at the resolution of a problem situation.50 On Foucaults

view, this is expressed in his articulation of a historiography focused around

problematizations, or the ways in which accepted truths come to be problematized over

time and as a result propel the new truths achieved by the resolution of these problems.51

This shared focus on problems suggests an important elective affinity among pragmatism

and genealogy which those working in both traditions have thus far failed to take

seriously enough.52

Despite these similarities concerning their shared focus on thought as addressed to

problems, an important difference is that Foucault was largely focused on the creation of

problems and Dewey on their resolution. This difference has given rise to the familiar

caricatures of Foucault as somewhat too pessimistic and Dewey as somewhat too

optimistic, caricatures which are ultimately unfair but nevertheless rooted in obvious

predilections of both thinkers. Fortunately, this seeming disjunction is easily overcome.

All we need to do is to recognize that, from a robustly philosophical rather than a merely

scholarly point of view, pragmatist problem-solving and genealogical problem-specifying

are two activities that require one another. Problems that do not invite solutions are as

50 Dewey (1938) 51 Foucault (1984b) 52 Overlaps between Dewey and Foucault along these lines have thus far been very much unexplored, although an important comparison in similar terms is given by Rabinow (2003, forthcoming). For important comparative work on Dewey and Foucault along different lines see Stuhr (1997, 2003), Auxier (2002), and my own work in Koopman (2007, forthcoming).

29

worthless as solutions which do not respond to problems. The prospective orientation of

pragmatism is blind without the retrospective orientation of genealogygenealogy

without pragmatism is likewise an empty exercise.

By bringing genealogy and pragmatism into intimate dialogue with one another

we are finally able to realize the important promise that lay at the heart of both traditions:

that we moderns can look forward with hope when we face up to the endless uncertainty

which threatens continually to undo everything which we have in our history struggled to

create. We can characterize both traditions as oriented simultaneously toward

problematization and solution, toward past and future, and toward history and

philosophy. This characterization fits with what is best in both Deweys pragmatism and

Foucaults genealogy: the practice of a criticism that is simultaneously philosophical and

historical.53

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The History and Critique of Modernity:Dewey with Foucault against WeberTo Appear In:Paul Fairfield (ed.), Dewey and Continental PhilosophyColin Koopman, University of California at Santa Cruzcwkoopman@gmail.comInterpreting and Criticizing ModernityWeber on ModernityDeweys and Foucaults Alternative to Weberian SoDewey on ModernityFoucault on ModernityToward a Genealogical Pragmatist Critique of ModernityReferences