By Gordon Hull
Last time, I took the opportunity provided by a recent paper by Daniele Lorenzini to develop some thought on the relationship between Foucault’s thought and theorizing around epistemic injustice. Lorenzini’s initial point, with which I agree fully, is that Fricker’s development of epistemic injustice is, on her own terms, incompatible with Foucault because she wants to maintain a less historicized normative standpoint than Foucauldian genealogy allows. Epistemic injustice, on Fricker’s reading, involves a distortion of someone’s true identity. Lorenzini also suggests that Foucault’s late work, which distinguishes between an epistemic “game of truth” and a normative/political “regime of truth” offers the distinction Fricker’s theory needs, by allowing one to critique the regime of truth dependent on a game of truth. In terms of Foucault’s earlier writings, he does not fully reduce knowledge to power, in the sense that is can be useful to analytically separate them. Here I want to look at a couple of examples of how that plays out in the context of disciplinary power.
Consider the case of delinquency, and what Foucault calls the double mode of disciplinary power (Discipline and Punish, 199): a binary division into two categories (sane/mad, etc.) and then the coercive assignment of individuals into one group or the other. The core modern division is between normal and abnormal, and we have a whole “set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal” (199). The delinquent, then, is defined epistemically or juridically (in other words, as a matter of science or law; as I will suggest below, Foucault thinks that one of the ways that psychology instituted itself as a science was by successfully blurring the science/law distinction), and then things are done to her. This is the sort of gap that epistemic injustice theory, at least in its testimonial version, needs: in Fricker’s trial example, there is the epistemic apparatus of “scientific” racism, and then there is the set of techniques that work during the trial. Both of these can be targets of critique, but testimonial injustice most obviously works within the second of the two.
That is, for the normatively inclined (and I’m not going to argue that Foucault would say this), the set of techniques that associate around a regime of power are targets for critique as examples of testimonial injustice. Foucault famously says:
“These sciences, which have so delighted our ‘humanity’ for over a century, have their technical matrix in the petty, malicious minutiae of the disciplines and their investigations. These investigations are perhaps to psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, and so many other strange sciences, what the terrible power of investigation was to the calm knowledge of the animals, the plants or the earth. Another power, another knowledge” (226).
To put the point differently, it is vitally important that critique not fail to look at the specific mechanisms through which power may be unjust; it is not just that scientific racism is an unjust enterprise in itself, it’s that it causes the testimony of Black men to be discounted in very specific ways. These “malicious minutiae” can both have outsized impact (ex. the trial verdict) and are a substantial part of what make disciplinary power “intolerable.” They are also potential targets for attack.
Of course, these two aspects of disciplinary power are very hard to separate in practice, not least because the epistemic determination that one is in the abnormal category can drive social science research on how one modifies the behavior of the abnormal, and so there is a complex feedback loop between the two. Similarly, there is good evidence that many of the discrete psychiatric diagnoses that populate the DSM were discovered in part because insurance required such diagnoses and billing codes to authorize medication to treat them. So in that case, institutional power structures actually dictated forms of knowledge – the epistemic classification.
In the first of the Abnormal lectures, Foucault talks about the intersection of science and power in judicial proceedings in the form of expert testimony, noting that “expert psychiatric opinion makes it possible to transfer the point of application of punishment from the offense defined by the law to criminality evaluated from a psychologico-moral point” (Abnormal, 18), and “the aim is to show how the individual already resembles the crime before he has committed it” (19). And “the sordid business of punishing is thus converted into the fine profession of curing” (23). The problem is not the true nature of the defendant or not; it is the practice of attaching a label such as “delinquent” to them, which then produces the judicial penalty or the person as subject to the judicial crime.
This seems to be precisely the sort of thing that Fricker’s juridical examples are designed to draw out: in the case of To Kill a Mockingbird, the designation of the defendant as “Black” causes his testimony to be discounted, precisely because he always “already resembles the crime.” That is, “the purpose of describing his delinquent [Black] character, the basis of his criminal or paracriminal conduct since childhood, is clearly to facilitate transition from being accused to being convicted” (22). In Foucault’s example the mechanism is expert testimony; in Fricker’s it is the racist beliefs of the institutionalized jury.
The point to make is that opposing the injustice done in the courtroom scenes isn’t helped by comparing to a neutral baseline; it’s helped by noticing the differential between how white and Black defendants are treated. Insofar as every possible defendant is embodied and exists at an intersection (deliberate word choice) of power relations, what matters is the deprivation unjustly applied to that defendant. The point is clear enough if you compare another reason why someone’s testimony might be discounted: they have been bribed to give it. Here one might or might not complain about why the testimony ought to be credited, but it’s hard to imagine that complaint having traction or intuitive appeal as an instance of epistemic injustice.
(side note: Foucault’s characterization of the juridical uptake of psychiatry as “grotesque” in the old-fashioned sense of a “monster” that’s neither science nor law suggests the importance of looking at how institutionalization of epistemic regimes are themselves instantiations of a kind of injustice, or at least the mechanism by which more abstract epistemology is actually applied; the epistemology may change as it comes to be expressed in actually existing structures).
In the Psychiatric Power lectures, Foucault does often insist on the priority of power. Thus, “the game of power which is sketched out in [the depictions of the management of George III’s insanity], should be analyzed before any institutional organization, or discourse of truth, or importation of models” (32). And:
“It seems to me that if we want to produce a true history of psychiatry, at any rate of the psychiatric scene, it will be by situating it in this series of scenes – scenes of the ceremony of the sovereignty, of rituals of service, of judicial procedures, and of medical practices – and not by making analysis of the institution the essential point and our point of departure. Let’s be really anti-institutionalist. What I propose to bring to light this year is, before analysis of the institution, the microphysics of power” (32-3).
In Psychiatric Power, Foucault refers to the gap “between what could be called a medical theory and what was the actual practice of direction” (165) in that medical discourse was reappropriated and explicitly used as a technique of social control. As a result, “if we look at how patients were actually distributed within asylums at this time, we see that it had strictly nothing to do with the nosographic division of mental illness found in theoretical texts” (180). Indeed, the doctor whose presence in the asylum granted it medical legitimacy almost never actually saw patients. Instead, the governance of the asylum as a location of power depended on the presence of medical knowledge in the body of the psychiatrist, “not by the content of a knowledge, but statutorily, by the formal stamp of knowledge” (184). Here, then, the epistemic practice is explicitly used as a justification for a form of social control: you have condition x and y, therefore you must do z.
This is already a complicated picture, and it is made even more complicated by the emergence of an embryonic genealogy of truth practices, which is what I will start with next time.
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