{"id":1687,"date":"2020-12-10T08:14:45","date_gmt":"2020-12-10T08:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=136719"},"modified":"2020-12-10T08:14:45","modified_gmt":"2020-12-10T08:14:45","slug":"the-agony-of-bernard-harcourt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/10\/the-agony-of-bernard-harcourt\/","title":{"rendered":"The Agony of Bernard Harcourt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Critique and Praxis<\/em><\/a> (2020) is Bernard Harcourt\u2019s recent mountainous book. Entering, one climbs hills, descends into valleys, crosses some rough, boulder-strewn rivers, ducks into mysterious caves and traverses some strange and slippery terrain. Browsing through historic Kingston, Ontario\u2019s best bookstore, Novel Ideas, on a sultry Covid-19 morning, I discovered Harcourt\u2019s tumbling and boisterous 684 page roller coaster ride wedged into a section of ever so serious books.<\/p>\n

Having just completed my own humble book on Habermas as learning theorist (To Emancipate Humanity: reading Habermas as learning theorist)<\/em> and suffering a few anxiety attacks regarding its adequacy, this tumultuous book of nineteen chapters appeared on first sight to cover just about every critical philosopher alive. Who was this guy? What was he up to? What did he want to accomplish with such a sweep over rocky terrain? Perhaps I can get some tips I could weave into my own book when the editors look at me gravely and pronounce, \u201cWell, it\u2019s sorta ok, but needs major revisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

I discovered soon enough that Bernard is wavy-haired, debonaire, gracious and brilliant. He\u2019s the Ronaldo of Critical Theory. Officially, he is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and profession of political science at Columbia University and chaired professor of the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. I discovered that for five years he has chaired the seminar series on critical theoretical issues at the Columbia School for Contemporary Critical Theory. Before Critique and Praxis,<\/em> Harcourt wrote several books, including The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (2018)<\/em> and The illusion of free markets: punishment and the myth of natural order<\/em> (2011).<\/p>\n

Anyone can, as it were, join in on-line to view the Columbia seminars, gain access to materials and listen to esteemed scholars jostle with each other and the topic at hand. I have tuned in on quite a few sessions\u2014I barely made it through the abstruse Foucault seminars (Foucault 13\/13) and didn\u2019t like the esoteric discussion of the rather odd, random selection of \u201cpraxis groups\u201d (Praxis 13\/13: The invisible committee, the idea of communism, the alt-right, the commons, the undercommons, assemblies, human weapons and the space of praxis).<\/p>\n

Notice what\u2019s missing: the radical project of deliberative democracy. \u201cCivil society\u201d gets 2-3 pages in this text, \u201cpublic squares\u201d not much <\/a>more, and the classic texts of deliberative democracy are not present in Harcourt\u2019s 684 pages. Nor are the hundreds and hundreds of essays and book chapters on all the intricate elements of deliberative democracy and governance. To mention only a few: Richard J. Bernstein, Between Objectivism and Relativism<\/em> (1983), Robert Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy<\/em> (1985), Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory<\/em> (1992), Robert Wiebe, Self-Rule: a Cultural History of America<\/em> (1995), Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jurgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse<\/em> (1996), Archon Fung, Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy<\/em> (2004), Maeve Cooke, Re-Presenting the Good Society<\/em> (2006), Jane Mansbridge, Deliberative Systems: Deliberative Democracy at the Large Scale<\/em> (2012), John Dryzek, Deliberative Governance<\/em> (2019). Placing Dahl in this list reminds me that Critique and praxis<\/em> has basically abandoned the workplace as a site of emancipatory struggle (or \u201cjustice in production\u201d). Only a brief mention of workers\u2019 movements.<\/p>\n

Currently, I am following discussions of particular critical theorists such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paulo Freire and Edward Said (Critique 13\/13). Quite an assortment: Said despised Frankfurt School thinking and Arendt didn\u2019t much dig Marx. As an adult education theorist and historian, I was happy to see Paulo getting some air time. Usually, the scholarly work of radical adult education theorists might as well exist on Mars for mainstream scholars.<\/p>\n

It is a delight to listen to the witty, erudite Axel Honneth tell us that he never liked Horkheimer\u2019s infamous essay, \u201cTraditional and Critical Theory.\u201d It was too long. He also said, as an aside, that Knowledge and Human Interest<\/em><\/a> was Habermas\u2019s best book. My eyes lit up! Great! The first chapter in my book is titled, \u201cIrreducible orientations: reading Habermas\u2019s Knowledge and human interests.\u201d Great\u2014because some shallow commentators say that Habermas rejected the ideas in this text of the 1960s.<\/p>\n

In his comments on Adorno\u2019s article, \u201cThe actuality of philosophy,\u201d Honneth wryly observed that Adorno didn\u2019t read Marx thoroughly. In an old copy of Capital,<\/em> accessible to Honneth when he directed the Institute for Social Research, Teddy read only one chapter on the commodity form. Boy! Did he mark that up! Max favored the \u201cyoung Marx.\u201d Didn\u2019t we all about fifty years ago?<\/p>\n

It was also sheer delight to listen to the wise Seyla Benhabib unravel the mysteries of the abstruse Arendt\u2019s puzzling distinction between labor and work in her classic text, The Human Condition<\/em>, written in the damp cold of 1958. Of course, I grabbed my copy off my shelf and am now reading the chapter on \u201cLabor,\u201d after stumbling through too many references to ancient philosophy (in Greek and Latin no less!).<\/p>\n

Funny stuff aside, I soon realized that Harcourt is obsessed with praxis, or doing. Down deep, he believes that critical philosophy has chosen the contemplative over the active life. Rather desperate, haunted by the dark world closing in around us, he has corralled quite a few thinkers together to see if they can help him answer Lenin\u2019s famous question, \u201cWhat is to be done?\u201d His mountainous text is a repetitive tool-box of notes and thoughts from his seminar series and own readings. Like lightning, brilliant ideas flash across the pages.<\/p>\n

But his arguments do not always cohere. For instance, he rejects all truth-claims, but offers us a framework to understand American society in its current nightmare state. He makes ethical claims without any way to justify them. And one is sometimes not certain if he rejects or accepts certain ideas or rebellious projects. One moment, one thinks he approves of the Yellow Vest protests. On another, he expresses some doubts regarding participant\u2019s anti-immigrant ideas and the presence of masked violent actors. He refuses to wear a yellow vest.<\/p>\n

He draws in a little Habermas (and a few Habermasian scholars like Honneth, Benhabib and Jean Cohen to present at the seminars). But he has little patience for a careful and sustained reading of Habermas\u2019s philosophy of communicative action. His bibliography is very partial; and the neglect of the seminal text Theory and Practice<\/em> (1973) renders his discussion of the role that critical theory can play in the organization of enlightenment incomplete, thin gruel. But there aren\u2019t any references to Knowledge and Human Interests<\/em> (1971) or The Theory of Communicative Action<\/em> (1984, 1987), either. These texts do not appear to touch his spirit or fire his gifted imagination.<\/p>\n

Harcourt rejects Habermas because he clings to notions of universality, truth and consensus. However, instead of careful analysis of Habermas\u2019s actual views on these fundamental concepts of reason\u2014such as is evident in Martin Jay\u2019s chapter, \u201cHabermas and the communicative turn,\u201d pp. 114-144 in Reason After Its Eclipse<\/em> (2016) or savoring the subtleties of his debates with Rawls and Foucault (see Beatrice Hansen\u2019s essay, \u201cCritical theory and poststructuralism: Habermas and Foucault,\u201d in The Cambridge Companion to Critical theory<\/em> [2004] ), Harcourt offers us potted theory. We end up reading more pages on the dreadful Invisible Committee, Michael Hardt and Tony Negri\u2019s impenetrable Assemblies<\/em> (2017) and Zizek\u2019s endless ramblings than on Habermas\u2019s delicately profound post-metaphysical understanding of reason. This is simply astounding.<\/p>\n

Why shut the door on Habermas like this? The primary reason, as far as I can see, is that the deliberative democracy paradigm that frames Habermas\u2019s critical project and orientation to praxis, is rejected outright because it has, allegedly, accommodated itself to liberal democracy. Harcourt disagrees with Harvard political theorist Archon Fung\u2019s claim that: \u201cDeliberative democracy is a revolutionary political ideal. It calls for fundamental changes in the bases of political decision-making, scope of those included in decision-making processes, institutions that have these processes, and thus the very character of politics itself.\u201d However, Harcourt thinks that Habermas\u2019s work has nothing of urgent significance to say to our apocalyptic end time. A Foucault scholar of some acclaim, Harcourt embraces Foucault\u2019s anguished understanding of the fusion of knowledge and power. Power swallows truth. We are in a mad power struggle and we must seize power from those who are dominating us. As Lenin once quipped, \u201cThere is no time for discussion groups.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, ironically, what would we call the learned seminars at Columbia? Looks to me like the commentators are searching for the \u201cbest argument.\u201d Or Foucault\u2019s work with prisoners where he asked \u201chimself about his own critical praxis\u201d which led to an \u201centirely different practice, in which the GIP tried to create a space where those men who were most affected by prisons could speak and be heard\u201d (p. 439). Foucault is creating a \u201clearning space\u201d for dialogical speech. No penal systems are being shaken to the ground. The men are simply listened-to. This \u201creflective space\u201d gestures to the study club movements in Canada in the early decades of the twentieth century (exemplified in the Nova Scotian Antigonish Movement) and to Freirian pedagogy that selects \u201cthemes\u201d for deliberation amongst the oppressed peasants\u2014to move people out of their \u201ccultures of silence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harcourt\u2019s viewpoint, over-simplified, is fueled by his deeply held (and moving) spiritual commitment to working with men on death row. He has been incredibly active in their service. Some of the most moving passages in his book share his commitment to the condemned as well as his passionate avowal of overthrowing the American penal system. In fact, Harcourt\u2019s agony and feverish activism, is also reinforced in his book, The counterrevolution,<\/em> where he argues, not totally convincingly, that contemporary American society is now ruled by counterinsurgency warfare learned in the wars to suppress anti-colonial struggles.<\/p>\n

Basically\u2014the book is a shocking and startling read\u2014Harcourt argues that President Trump knew exactly what he was doing: he applied counterinsurgency\u2019s core approach (massive intelligence collection, relentless targeting of minorities and pacifying propaganda) to govern the people. It is not difficult to see Foucault\u2019s ghost hovering over this depressing text. It is a \u201ccounterrevolution without revolution, waged against phantom enemies and targeting every one of us\u201d (Quoted from the book jacket). Still, for me, the argument is too neat and tidy to grasp what is happening in the daily lives of all Americans, or in the society at large.<\/p>\n

Harcourt is a haunted man. In passage after passage throughout Critique and Praxis<\/em>, Harcourt asserts that our lives can never rest, our struggle is endless without any utopian end-point, we cannot know what truth is because truth is always used to dominate us, there are no universals, all is contingency. These sensibilities lead him, in the end, to such a despairing point that he must ask \u201cWhat more am I to do?\u201d rather than \u201cWhat is to be done?\u201d Lenin exemplified an idea that Bernard hates: that critical theory can tell us what to do.<\/p>\n

Harcourt confesses to us that he must not tell anyone what to do. He can only make his own decisions of what must be done. He must do that. But this man who loves equality, justice and compassion for others has seemingly thrown away the primary task of critical theory to enlighten its subjects through democratic organization of enlightenment learning processes and cautious reflection with actors about what forms of action are contextually and considerately appropriate.<\/p>\n

As Herbert Marcuse said in an early 1970s speech, \u201cThe movement in a new era of repression: an assessment,\u201d \u201cIt is difficult for me to engage in such a theoretical analysis [of the radical situation today] when the things that are happening all around seem to cry for action\u2014no matter what action\u2014so that we don\u2019t suffocate.\u201d Fifty years later, like Marcuse, Bernard Harcourt\u2019s work testifies to similar impatience with theoretical contemplation. Into the streets! Occupy public squares! Scream out against the furies destroying humanity! Be a killjoy and peel away your boss\u2019s racism! Defend the men on death row! Join the marches for racial justice!<\/p>\n

I leave the reader with this touching confessional statement from Bernard Harcourt. \u201cIn the end, on my part, critical praxis remains today an ethical matter: an ethical decision en situation<\/em> about the irreducibility and fragility of life\u2014about human frailty. Instinctively, I too have always placed myself in the shoes of the subjugated, of the young refugee fleeing, of the accused, the internal enemy. How could I not? How else could I live life than by helping others? How else? Especially, as I have the privilege and the ability, the honor, to stand before justice for those in need. How else could I lead life? And more important, what more must I now do?\u201d (p. 503).<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Critique and Praxis (2020) is Bernard Harcourt\u2019s recent mountainous book. Entering, one climbs hills, descends into valleys, crosses some rough, boulder-strewn rivers, ducks into mysterious caves and traverses\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":213,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1687"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1688,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1687\/revisions\/1688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}