Foucault and Epistemic Injustice (part 1)

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.