In the previous two posts (first, second), I took up the invitation provided by a recent paper by Daniele Lorenzini to develop some thoughts on the relationship between Foucault’s thought and theorizing around epistemic injustice. In particular, Miranda Fricker’s account both draws heavily from Foucault and pushes back against his historicism to advocate for a more a-historical normative ground for the theory: testimonial injustice “distorts” who someone is. Last time, I looked at some of Foucault’s own work in the lectures leading up to Discipline and Punish to develop a sense of how both “truth” and “power” are relevant – and distinguishable – in that work, even as they both are historical constructs. In particular, following Lorenzini, we can distinguish between “x is your diagnosis” and “therefore, you ought to do y.” Here I begin with the complexity introduced in Foucault’s work by his addition of an embryonic genealogy of truth practices.
Let’s begin with the Psychiatric Power lectures, where Foucault had been talking about the strange role of science (and its personification in the doctor) in the governance of asylums. There, when speaking of the historical contingency of the modern scientific enterprise, Foucault writes:
“I would like to show … how this truth-demonstration, broadly identified in its technology with scientific practice, the present day extent, force and power of which there is absolutely no point in denying, derives in reality from the truth-ritual, truth-event, truth-strategy, and how truth-knowledge is basically only a region and an aspect … or a modality of truth as event and of the technology of this truth-event” (238).
When read alongside the dissection of power, it becomes clear that the intended effect of the overall genealogy is to show the contingency of both the game and the regime of truth; this overall strategy includes a “genealogy of knowledge” (239) via the investigation of the “colonization” of older forms of truth by modern scientific discourse. We see resistance to both the coercive power of the “therefore” in practices such as anti-psychiatry, as well as to the epistemological definition of illness, and in the discovery by patients that they could mimic symptoms, since “to function as a neurologist the doctor depends on the hysteric actually providing him with regular symptoms” (311). This master-slave inversion returns a lot of power that to the hysteric:
“You can understand the pleasure the hysterics will invest in the supplement of power they are given when they are asked for regular symptoms; and we can see why they never hesitated to provide all the symptoms one wanted, and even more than one wanted, since, the more they provided the more their surplus-power was thereby asserted in relation to the doctor” (311).
In an effort to counter this, psychiatry relied on techniques of drugs and hypnosis to try to induce “true symptoms.”
In short, we see, even in an earlier genealogical account of Foucault’s, the complexity of the game/regime of truth, and the difficulty of separating truth and power in the way Fricker seems to push. There are absolutely reasons to keep them analytically separate in many contexts, not least of which is that their separation allows us to see different strategies of resistance. But nothing in Foucault suggests that we are going to have any luck producing an original account of “human” subjectivity such that we can give an account of what someone “truly” is and its distortion. Nor does it suggest that we need to.
All of this accounts for, why Foucault is reluctant to draw too sharp of a division between truth and power. But on the other hand, it also suggests why Fricker is too quick to try to maintain that division. The way that the truth/power distinction functions is itself contextually specific – this is what genealogy uncovers – and the attempt to find an ahistoric standpoint from which we can identify subjects or a truth about subjects who are then distorted by power relations is Quixotic.
What should we do about this? I offer one interpretive point. Fricker writes relatively little on hermeneutic injustice, at least compared to testimonial. It seems to me that Fricker’s resistance to treating the separation of truth and power as analytic and contextual, combined with her insistence on an ahistoric account of the subject, is what generates the limited attention she pays to hermeneutic injustice (hermeneutic injustice is relegated to the final chapter, and gets considerably less space that testimonial).
According to Fricker, hermeneutic injustice is a “kind of structural discrimination” (161) defined as a condition in which available explanations “are biased because insufficiently influenced by the subject group, and therefore unduly influenced by more hermeneutically powerful group” (155). For example, a woman who is sexually harassed at work before the conceptual terminology of “sexual harassment” was developed suffers from the lack of available categories within which to express what is happening to her, and this deficiency in the hegemonic discourse is disempowering.
That is, it seems to me that what hermeneutic injustice is about is the construction of categories, and corresponds (roughly) with the games of truth in Lorenzini’s account. One suffers because of one’s identity type – the category system. Testimonial injustice, on the other hand, is a matter of the coercive application of categories to determine social actions: “because you are a woman, you should not pursue math” or “because you are Black, we will discount your testimony as unreliable.” These coercive effects depend on that application of a category system, and are not reducible to it. The category system itself, however, can also change through political action.
This is the work of understanding hermeneutic injustice. But here, Fricker again moves to ahistoric identity: because of hermeneutic injustice, someone “may be prevented from becoming who they are” (168). It seems to me that this move isn’t necessary, and that it in fact gets in the way of the sort of genealogical work that shows how any why category systems came to be – and such genealogical work is vital in understanding both that our current categories are contingent, and in identifying ways to attack them. In short, there is no obvious reason why someone interested in fighting epistemic injustice should reject a fully historicized account of systems of classification. Indeed, there are good reasons to accept it because it opens up new lines of attack (to use Foucauldian terminology).
From a Foucauldian point of view, the problem is that Fricker’s analysis starts with the subject. This is perhaps viable for something like testimonial injustice, but it doesn’t work particularly well for hermeneutic injustice, because that requires attention to structure and the ways it constitutes subjects. In different terms, the effort to develop an account of hermeneutic injustice demonstrates the limits of humanism. As Foucault says in a 1971 interview:
“The question of philosophy is no longer that of knowing how this is possible, nor how the world can be lived [vécu – this is the existentialist term, in case there was any doubt as to his target here], experimented or traversed by the subject. The problem now is that of knowing what the conditions imposed on a given subject such that it is able to be introduced, to function, to serve as a node in the systematic network of what surrounds us. Starting from there, the description and analysis no longer have as their object the subject and its relations with humanity and its form, but the mode of existence of certain objects like science which function, develop and transform without any reference to something like the intuitive foundation in a subject (D&E I, 1033 [2 vol ed)
As Foucault’s sense of his work develops over the 1970s, he will of course develop a more sophisticated ways of talking about structures and subjectification, but the impulse here is quite clear, and it is of a piece with his rejection of existentialism around the same period.
As long as power is always accompanied by resistance (a point on which Foucault is emphatic) there is no need to defer to an abstract “truth” of who we are. Resistance, and Foucault is emphatic on this point, is inevitable. As Katherine Hayles pointed out in a critique of Foucault’s emphasis on panopticism as a discourse, the “body” as a conceptual schema (with all its normative baggage) arrives already limited by actual embodiment: no one actually has “the body.” As she puts it, “in contrast to the body, embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the specifics of place, time, physiology, and culture, which together compose enactment” (How we became Posthuman, 196). Thus, “as soon as embodiment is acknowledged, the abstractions of the Panopticon disintegrate into the particularities of specific people embedded in specific contexts … Along with these particularities come concomitant strategies for resistances and subversions, excesses and deviations” (198). As Foucault himself explicitly emphasizes in later work, he’s interested in subjectification – how power and truth discourse make us as people.
All of that said, it does seem certain to me that epistemic injustice theory departs from Foucault in that it tends to be prescriptive. My work on Foucault and Marxism has convinced me that he is absolutely opposed to doing more than identifying weaknesses in regimes of power; he’s not interested in being a “legislator” or a “prophet.” As he says in his 1978 interview with the Italian Communist Duccio Trombadori:
“I absolutely will not play the part of one who prescribes solutions. I hold that the notion of the intellectual today is not that of establishing laws or proposing solutions or prophesying, since by doing that one can only contribute to the functioning of a determinate situation of power that to my mind must be criticized” (Remarks on Marx, 157).
He adds: “I do not conduct my analyses in order to say: this is how things are, look how trapped you are. I say certain things only to the extent to which I see them as capable of permitting the transformation of reality” (174). As he says in a different interview:
“In reality, what I am trying to do, and here is the difficulty of trying to do it, is to work out an interpretation, a reading of a certain reality, which is such that, on the one hand, this interpretation is able to produce effects of truth and that, on the other hand, these effects of truth can become instruments in possible struggles. To speak the truth so that it can be attacked [dire la vérité pour qu’elle soit attaquable] … It is a reality of possible struggles that I seek to make appear” (Foucault Live, 262; D&E II, 633 [2 vol ed]).
These comments do offer one way of thinking about epistemic injustice as Foucauldian, however. The concept of panopticism, in the sense of what Foucault says he’s trying to do, organizes an interpretation of reality that produces both truth effects, and can serve as an instrument in struggles, minimally in identifying objects of attack. It seems to me that “epistemic injustice” as a concept serves a similar role. At that point, though, full-fledged genealogical research is very helpful That is, allowing the full historicization of subjectivity and subjectification (which requires starting with something structural, not the subject) lets the hermeneutical variety of epistemic injustice perform its role even better because it enables us to focus on the categories themselves, and how they construct realities that make certain concepts or experiences possible or impossible. In showing us how those categories were formed and how they function, it opens an avenue of possible struggle.
I’ll close with Lorenzini:
“Insofar as Foucauldian genealogy aims to facilitate epistemic insurrections and sociopolitical struggles, while also contributing to the creation of new communities of resistance, it manifestly plays a crucial role in opening up the concrete possibility for people to cultivate and exercise testimonial sensibility and hermeneutical charity. On the other hand, as mentioned above, Foucauldian genealogy pushes its readers to apply the reflexive critical awareness Fricker talks about to the very norms that (explicitly or implicitly) organize their own critical discourse—for instance, the suprahistorical idea of a “rational subject” or the clear-cut distinction between knowledge and power” (563)
Attempts to understand hermeneutical injustice are Foucauldian – and to get them off the ground, we are better off thinking about structures, then subjects.
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