| Review of: |
Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique by David Couzens Hoy
MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2004
|
| Reviewed By: |
Thomas Biebricher |
| Reviewed in: |
Constellations |
| Date accepted online: |
02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 14, Issue 02, Pages 292-301 |
Book Reviews
If structuralism is followed by poststructuralism, then what follows poststructuralism? In his latest book, David Hoy suggests a new paradigm he calls post-critique. The idea of post-critique, to which I will return further below, is built around the concept of critical resistance - the actual title of the book. Hoy gets to the heart of the idea of resistance via an engaging and deeply informed discussion of a number of authors who often find themselves cramped together under the label poststructuralism.
His analysis gains a unique perspective through its emphasis on critical resistance, which Hoy differentiates from resistance per se by its emancipatory goals and effects vis-à-vis forms of domination. Resistance, Hoy notes, need not necessarily attempt or yield emancipation; it is only resistance informed by a critique of and directed at domination that may do so. Additionally, in order to qualify as critical, resistance "must be able to identify its injuries and to articulate its grievances" (6). Hoy asks us to think about resistance in multiple dimensions and distinguishes between political, ethical, and social resistance, stressing that "resistance is both an activity and an attitude" (9), thus aiming to avoid splits between theory and practice.
Hoy's initial interest lies with the way various authors have accounted for the sheer possibility of resistance. The starting point of his analysis is therefore an examination of what he calls (non-metaphysical) "ontologies of resistance" (12, 186) in Nietzsche, Foucault, and Bourdieu - the former being regarded by Hoy as the founding father of poststructuralism avant la lettre. Ultimately, however, the question that gives the argument of the book its overall thrust is, in my view, "how to distinguish resistance that is emancipatory from other forms, such as resistance that is reactionary" (5). These questions being Hoy's guiding thread, it becomes clear that the interlocutors to his argument are neo-Kantians, first and foremost Habermas, and to a lesser extent neo-Marxists like Eagleton and Jameson. Hoy himself refers to the book as a "prequel" (12) to Critical Theory, published in 1994, in which he and Thomas McCarthy engaged in a rich and illuminating exchange between a squarely neo-Kantian and a neo-Nietzschean position. Critical Resistance is a prequel in that it makes the initial case for the poststructuralists; it anticipates the gravest concerns voiced from neo-Kantians, who typically see the former project as self-defeating to the extent that its holistic and gloomy descriptions of society, which to some extent echo the sociological disillusionment of systems theory, marginalize agency and put the mere possibility of resistance in jeopardy. Beyond that, it is the notorious issue of an alleged lack of normative foundations in the poststructuralists' account of resistance that is the most troubling for neo-Kantians, prompting, for example, Habermas to (in-)famously charge Foucault's genealogy with relativism and crypto-normativism.
It is one of the many merits of the book that it takes these concerns seriously and confronts them directly by discussing social ontologies of critical resistance. Hoy is uniquely well equipped to present the case for the poststructuralist (or post-critical) position to the neo-Kantians in particular. Not only does he have an intricate knowledge of the diverse issues involved; his style of writing balances nuance and detail with lucidity in an admirable fashion. That is to say, far from being either an apologetic or a polemic, the plain argumentative style of the book extends an invitation to neo-Kantians to enter a productive and possibly mutually beneficial exchange with the emerging framework of post-critique. Furthermore, the emphasis Hoy places on the ethical turn in Derrida's work and the later Foucault's distinction between power and domination, both of which have a somewhat de-radicalizing effect on their respective positions, also speaks to Hoy's intention of providing accounts that could possibly ease some if not all the concerns raised by neo-Kantians.
Nevertheless, this does not mean that Hoy overly streamlines the poststructuralist position. On the contrary, the book covers a wide array of authors (Nietzsche, Foucault, Bourdieu, Levinas/Derrida, and Laclau/Mouffe) and addresses issues that range from the disturbing spectre of human mortality to the face of the other, from the plasticity of habitus to the value of interpretation, from the epistemological pitfalls of false consciousness to the significance of biopower. It is to Hoy's credit that he abstains from reifying the multiplicity of positions he views as viable candidates for an emerging framework of post-critique into a monolithic bloc. Instead he calls for a "sufficiently flexible" conceptualization of post-critique and emphasizes that the goal is not to synthesize various accounts of resistance into "what resistance really is" (18), but to leave the diversity and one might even say disparity of these approaches intact while pointing to some family resemblances.
What ties Hoy's multi-faceted narrative together is the theme of the body/embodiment, which he sees as the Ariadne's thread running through the often labyrinthine works of all the authors discussed. Thus, for example, the body in Nietzsche is a metaphor of conflicting interpretations (51), in Foucault it is the contested site of domination/normalization and resistance (67-69), in Bourdieu it figures prominently in the notion of habitus, and Derrida and Levinas address the mortality of the body and the presence of the face of the other as ethical predicaments and obligations of existential proportions.
Hoy particularly emphasizes two effects that the focus on the body in these approaches has with regard to critical resistance. On the one hand, it serves as a reminder that the critical perspective is always already situated or embodied. While, according to Hoy, none of the authors discussed would "necessarily reject universal principles" (4), their starting point is a concrete social situation, a particular perspective grounded in a particular experience. The body, always embedded in a concrete situation and characterized by finitude and mortality, signifies this preference for the particular as a starting point for (post-)critique, in which phronesis and practical/tacit knowledge play important roles. While the body thus enables a particular form of critique and resistance that self-consciously emerge from a particular context, Hoy contends that it can also come close to undermining the sheer possibility of critical resistance: "The strategy of moving the body from the periphery of our theories to their centers is not without dangers. The more pervasive and inaccessible the practices of bodily socialization are made out to be, the less criticism and resistance may seem to be possible or worthwhile" (123). In other words, it is the challenge to a rationalist notion of autonomy that turns the body into an ambivalent resource for critical resistance. Hoy insists on a rudimentary version of autonomy that is linked to a notion of freedom because otherwise it is difficult to see how subjects/agents can possibly counter the anonymous forces that inscribe themselves as deeply in the body as, for example, Foucault and Bourdieu contend. For example, with regard to the latter, Hoy points to the extent that Bourdieu acknowledges the possibility of a "conscious control of the habitus" if only on the basis of a rigorous socioanalysis that brings the influence of the former "out of the tacit background into the explicit foreground" (123).
Given the limited scope of a review, I cannot do justice to the rich accounts Hoy provides in the various chapters, each of which ends with "reflections that transcend poststructuralism" (17) and thus point toward post-critique. Instead I will briefly discuss the notion of "deconstructive genealogy" that Hoy, borrowing from the later Derrida, introduces in the Postscript of the book as one possible shape a post-critical project could take on. In explaining this idea, Hoy draws on most of the authors and some of the concepts discussed, the emphasis obviously being on Foucault and Derrida. The genealogical aspect of this form of post-critique amounts to a thoroughly historicizing view of the present, thus denaturalizing the existing order of things based on the demonstration that it has been different in the past and therefore could be different in the future. While this destabilizing operation opens up a space of transformative action, Hoy highlights the importance of self-reflexivity at this stage in the (post-)critical process. That is, in deciding which course of action to take there is an ethical responsibility to stay clear of 'good conscience' and smugness about the justification of these actions. For Hoy, this signifies the deconstructive aspect of post-critique: "I take it that Derrida objects to the complete self-confidence of the critic who seems to have no doubts about where society is going" (229). This means that "post-critique is thus self-critique all the way down" (228). Finally, with regard to the vexing issue of how to normatively judge various types of resistance, Hoy to some extent draws on the later Foucault's distinction between domination and power. Deconstructive genealogy, thus, has to steer a course between the Scylla of monism ("one right theory") and the Charibdis of anarchism/nihilism ("anything goes"/"nothing matters"). That is to say that critical resistance aims at a healthy pluralism in which games of power can be played with the least amount of domination possible, paraphrasing Foucault. This is as far as Hoy is willing to commit with regard to what comes close to an a priori normativity. Beyond this point, situated genealogies and phronesis have to provide the dim normative light of post-critique that intentionally is to deprive us of the brightness of self-certainty regarding our normative goals.
Doubtlessly, this cogent exposition of post-critique warrants a full-scale examination and response from a neo-Kantian perspective that lie far beyond the scope of a review. Nevertheless, let me close with a couple of remarks formulated from such a point of view. What deserves attention, first of all, is what strikes me as a surprising congruency between many aspects of post-critique and, for example, Habermasian discourse theory. Habermasian discourses are in part designed to be devices of continual self-examination (values we hold to be appropriate for us and norms thought to be right for everyone) through exposure to the view of others, and their findings are, strictly speaking, tentative and open to re-evaluation. This extends to the consensuses arrived at in discourses as well as to the rules of discourse themselves which Habermas formulates in a spirit of adamant fallibilism - in contrast to some kind of ultimate justification (Letztbegründung) as it is attempted in Transcendental Pragmatics. Thus, the self-reflexivity Hoy calls for is deeply entrenched in this approach. The sheer fact that post-critique acknowledges the "need to reflect on and to posit universal principles" (12), even if they are just weak universals like Derrida's un-deconstructable 'messianicity' or 'justice,' brings it close to the position of Habermas that conceptualizes universals as equally weak 'counterfactual idealizations' in later works.
These correspondences notwithstanding, there remain, of course, important tensions. The issue of normativity is one of them. Hoy's defense of a healthy pluralism as suggested above can be questioned along several lines in my view. Why is reversibility (power) preferable to irreversible asymmetry (domination)? Because the latter denies freedom, but that just begs the question on what account one ought to take the side of freedom and whether a purely formal definition of it will suffice. Is a xenophobic far-right movement in Sweden engaging in critical resistance when it tries to disrupt the social-democratic hegemony of the country in the name of their 'freedom' to maintain cultural homogeneity and fight what they perceive to be excessive immigration? Or, to be more blunt, is the pedophile who engages in sexual acts with minors critically resisting a form of domination, i.e., a rigid regime of laws and norms that criminalize certain identities and patterns of action? It seems to me that a purely formal response to the question of normativity suggesting that resistance against whatever crystallized form of asymmetry (domination) is ipso facto critical remains unsatisfactory.
If I understand Hoy's position correctly, we cannot expect this point to be determined a priori and the normative burden in concrete cases such as the Swedish movement and the pedophile ought to be shouldered by a situated genealogy and phronesis. However, phronesis that is not informed by (weak) universalist principles or norms might easily add up to a judgment that simply reproduces contextual biases and prejudices. And while post-critique acknowledges the significance of those principles, as mentioned above, in Hoy's substantial argument they are, for the most part, sidelined.
At the same time, the notion of a self-conscious phronesis that Hoy derives from Derrida might serve as just one of many examples where neo-Kantians may find post-critique instructive. After all, despite the sophistication that is to be found in Habermas's framework of justifying norms through discourse, the application of conflicting norms to a particular situation remains a largely unresolved question, given that discourses of application that Habermas refers to as a procedure for norm application appear to stand in a problematically circular relation to justificatory discourses. Here, embracing a Derridean phronesis as an alternative starting point, as Hoy suggests, may be more productive.
As these brief remarks hopefully indicate, Hoy's masterly readings of the main figures of poststructuralism and his introduction of post-critique as a new paradigm provide ample room for discussion and take the ongoing debate between neo-Kantians and neo-Nietzscheans to a new level. If this debate yields more novel and important insights in the future, a lot of the credit will have to be attributed to David Hoy's Critical Resistance.
