Domestic Abuse and the Limits of Communication (Foucault, Habermas and Beyond)

The work of Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas has been highly influential on political and social theory because of their important insights about modern power. One crucial difference is in their views of communication as a mechanism of political agency, resistance, and/or entrapment. While Habermas has conceived of discourse as having the potential to transmit important democratic principles and to foster solidarity, Foucault’s work complicates this theory. Foucault may agree that discourse can create or reinforce egalitarian norms (e.g.) but because there is no “outside” to power, that it could simultaneously reinforce less egalitarian norms. What is more, if public discourse requires a certain form of speaking and presupposes that individuals are aware of the correct forum to discuss or transmit their ideas, Foucault’s work suggests at least two things. First, that resistance and innovation may often happen in less explicit and formal ways: on the margins, in the grassroots, and on the street – not in public institutions. These more informal discourses may never be officially acknowledged or institutionally embedded. Second, an individual’s words could be turned against her: pathologized and set against a more mainstream norm, thus more firmly entrapping her in an informal system of control. Both authors may be correct in their views, but the question is how to resolve the more optimistic (and perhaps utopian) work of Habermas with the more complex observations of Foucault? In working to resolve this puzzle, the more formal and unintentionally universalizing notions of Habermas can represent the ideas of conventional political science, while Foucault’s work allows for an interpretation of power mechanisms that are not often recognized. I propose that the issue of domestic abuse poses such a quandary, highlighting both the need for open, egalitarian, and democratic discourse (Habermas) but also the current limitations of this sort of discourse (Foucault) in the U.S. “system” that deals with this problem. While I believe that Foucault more adequately identifies the shortcomings of mainstream political institutions – particularly those that have both political agents and a whole range of extra-legal actors – I also think that the work of Habermas guides a view of more formal processes which cannot be dismissed. That is, this particular case shows that more formal modes of power – including the sort of discourse that functions democratically, as he theorized – are absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, in terms of analyzing physical violence, Foucault’s work exposes the deficiencies in Habermas’s: violence is not something that corrupts (“colonizes”) modern power relations or the public sphere but which has merely been rationalized and assimilated into contemporary norms: violence has not been eradicated in the contemporary United States at this moment, but rather has been normalized and discursively portrayed as “intimate” or “private” and thus, not political. These barriers to political acknowledgement expose the limitations not of the individuals themselves but the complex bundle of political norms that link political inclusion to Enlightenment norms of rationality, autonomy, and individuality, all of which undergird Habermas’s work. The issue of domestic abuse tests their theories in fruitful ways.