By Gordon Hull
Those of us who have both made extensive use of Foucault and made a foray into questions of epistemic injustice have tended to sweep the question of the relation between the two theoretical approaches under the rug. Miranda Fricker’s book, which has basically set the agenda for work on epistemic injustice, acknowledges a substantial debt to Foucault, but in later work she backs away from the ultimate implications of his account of power on the grounds that his historicism undermines the ability to make normative claims. In this her argument makes a fairly standard criticism of Foucault (whose “refusal to separate power and truth” she aligns with Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives (Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, 55). As she describes her own project:
“What I hoped for from the concept of epistemic injustice and its cognates was to mark out a delimited space in which to observe some key intersections of knowledge and power at one remove from the long shadows of both Marx and Foucault, by forging an on-the-ground tool of critical understanding that was called for in everyday lived experience of injustice … and which would rely neither on any metaphysically burdened theoretical narrative of an epistemically well-placed sex-class, nor on any risky flirtation with a reduction of truth or knowledge to de facto social power” (Routledge Handbook, 56).
On this reading, then, Marxism relies too much on ideology-critique, on the one hand, and on privileging the position of women/the proletariat (or other, singular subject position). Foucault goes too far and reduces the normative dimension altogether.
In a new paper, Daniele Lorenzini addresses the Foucault/Fricker question head-on, centrally focusing on the critique of Foucault’s supposed excessive historicism. Lorenzini’s contribution, to which I will return later, is to suggest that Foucault’s later writings (1980 and forward) distinguish between “games” of truth and “regimes” of truth. The distinction is basically illustrated in the following sentence: “I accept that x and y are true, therefore I ought to do z.” The game of truth is the epistemic first half of the sentence, and the “regime” of truth – the part that governs human behavior – is the second half, the “therefore I ought…” On this reading, genealogy is about unpacking and bringing to light the tendency of the “therefore” to disappear as we are governed by its regime, and to unpacking the power structures that make it operate. In other words genealogy doesn’t collapse questions of truth and power; rather, it allows us to separate them by showing that a given game of truth does not entail the regime of truth that goes with it.
Lorenzini notes that this is probably not enough for Fricker, insofar as she wants to preserve an a-historical normative ground, but it ought to be enough to resist the complaint that Foucault is too reductive. Further, Lorenzini emphasizes the delicate conceptual space that Fricker’s book tries to occupy – on the one hand, we are to acknowledge social power and its historical developments, but on the other, we’re not to historicize it too much. It seems to me that Lorenzini’s games/regimes distinction pushes the delicacy of Fricker’s position considerably, since her resistance to it would likely involve emphasizing the a-historic moment, at the expense of the socially situated accounts of power relations that drive the injustice her critique enables us to call out.
That said, Fricker’s impulse – to produce a useful tool for concrete struggles – resonates deeply with Foucault’s repeated characterizations of his own work, as does the effort to get past certain reductive Marxist positions (I have the receipts for both of these claims in a forthcoming paper on Foucault’s efforts against Marxism in the early 1970s; I should be able to post a link soon). In what follows here, aside from recommending Lorenzini’s paper highly, I want to argue that there’s good reasons to push Fricker towards Foucault. Indeed, it seems to me that her resistance to Foucault and her prioritization of testimonial over hermeneutical injustice are cut from the same cloth. Along the way, I’ll develop some of the ways that the games/regimes distinction might be applied to Foucault’s earlier work, at least insofar as that bears on the question of epistemic injustice.
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In her book’s discussion of testimonial injustice, Fricker discusses stereotype threat: “in some contexts, the prejudice operating against the speaker may have a self-fulfilling power, so that the subject of the injustice is socially constituted just as the stereotype depicts her … and/or she may actually be caused to resemble the prejudicial stereotype working against her” (54, emphasis original). A familiar, and evidenced, example of this is that when teachers communicate that “girls aren’t good at math,” however subtly, this will cause the girls in question to underperform on a math test. Fricker cites research that Black students underperform on a test that is labeled as a test of “intelligence” or “academic ability,” but not if it is called something else – the problem in both cases is that the students have absorbed negative stereotypes about their social group such that they tend to perform in conformance with that stereotype.
Fricker notes the Foucauldian resonance of the argument, as it provides an example of where identity power operates “productively.” She then backs away:
“The terminology is suggestive, but we will do better not to adapt it for the present case with any real commitments, since it is crucial in the present context that identity power at once constructs and distorts who the subject really is, and that is an idea which finds no home in the Foucauldian conception” (54, emphasis original).
Fricker is right that this is not a Foucauldian terminology – but that’s because it’s basically Marxist. As Fricker underscored in her contribution to the Routledge Handbook, Marxist theory (especially that based on Marx’s early work) often relies on notions of false consciousness and ideology critique, and this was certainly a significant component of the 1990s feminist debates that she positions herself against. For example, according to Catherine MacKinnon’s critique of pornography, women are dehumanized by pornography because it presents them as sexually objectified and thus creates an environment where women can only appear as sex objects; women who claim to like pornography have been indoctrinated sufficiently by patriarchal norms and ideology that they believe false things. Pornography is a tool of oppression, not pleasure, and a woman who thinks otherwise was expressing a false consciousness.
The claim that epistemic injustice distorts someone’s true identity makes sense in one of two ways. Either their identity is somehow presocial (“human” – this is the reading of Fricker Lorenzini favors, based on the state-of-nature genealogy in Fricker’s account), or it is somehow epistemically privileged (one’s identity is truly that of a proletarian, but it has been distorted by bourgeois opportunism into the belief that one’s cause can be advanced by advancing the bourgeoisie). In either case, Fricker is right that Foucault tries very hard to dismantle such humanism. This is the point of his preference, from the 1960s onwards, for starting with “structure” over “subject.” He explicitly directs this critique at Marxist humanism – which had relied on Marx’s early work, where the ideology-critique is primarily found. As early as his 1966 interview with Madeline Chapsal, for example, he complains of humanist Marxism that “to save man, to rediscover man in man, etc., that’s the goal of all these chattering enterprises … We ought to denounce all these mystifications, as currently, inside the PC[F], Althusser and his companions are courageously struggling against” them.
To return to Fricker, and against her argument, it seems to me that the Foucauldian version of productive power is the right one to use, because Foucault emphasizes the socially-constructed but ultimately arbitrary nature of categories. For example, for Foucault, “delinquent” is a product of 19c criminology, and so the designation of someone as “delinquent” depends on the supporting social science and its instantiation in legal and other systems of power.
It seems to me that the idea of human nature that underpins Fricker’s account is both theoretically suspect and unnecessary to make the case for epistemic injustice. For one, the conjoining “and” marks the space Lorenzini identifies as the gap between games and regimes of truth. To be a delinquent is to fit a certain categorization, and what that categorization entails – the application of the disciplinary apparatus – is a separable question. But separating the questions doesn’t require referring to a pure identity that is then distorted. Indeed, as a look into Foucault’s own genealogical research during the period when he was most concerned with power suggests, the ability to understand the regime of truth as contingent but separate from the regime of power (thus the game of truth from the regime of truth in the terminology Lorenzini identifies in the later work) is very productive. I will take such a look next time.
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