The Epistemology of Discursive Authority (ah yes, foucault, Quine, and postmodernism)

What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with 'things'. To 'depresentify' them. To conjure up their rich, heavy, immediate plenitude, which we usually regard as the primitive law of a discourse that has become divorced from it through error, oblivion, illusion, ignorance, or the inertia of beliefs and traditions, or even the perhaps unconscious desire not to see and not to speak. To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of 'things' anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse. To define these objects without reference to the ground, the foundation of things, but by relating them to the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse and thus constitute the conditions of their historical appearance. To write a history of discursive objects that does not plunge them into the common depth of a primal soil, but deploys the nexus of regularities that govern their dispersion.--Michel Foucault (1969) "The Formation of Objects" chapter 3 in The Archaeology of Knowledge, translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith [1972], pp. 52-3 in the 2002 edition.

More than thirty years ago there was a buzz around Foucault and 'social constructivism' on campus. I don’t think I was especially aware of what this was about, but along the way I took a course in the ‘experimental college’ (a relic from the campus turmoil of an earlier generation) where I was introduced to the idea by way of the classic, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, then twenty five years old. (It was published in 1966.)

I never got around to reading Foucault as an undergraduate, but I was in graduate school studying with Martha Nussbaum when her (1999) polemic against Butler appeared. (I assume the essay was triggered by the second edition of Gender Trouble, but I am not confident about it.) This essay has a passage that nicely sumps up the general attitude toward Foucault that I was exposed to:

“These developments owe much to the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought. Many young feminists, whatever their concrete affiliations with this or that French thinker, have been influenced by the extremely French idea that the intellectual does politics by speaking seditiously, and that this is a significant type of political action. Many have also derived from the writings of Michel Foucault (rightly or wrongly) the fatalistic idea that we are prisoners of an all-enveloping structure of power, and that real-life reform movements usually end up serving power in new and insidious ways.”--Nussbaum "The Professor of Parody"

I was not nudged into reading Butler’s Gender Trouble during my graduate research (eventually when I became an instructor my own broad eduction started). However, I was confronted with the recent prominence of French postmodernist thought in works that now would be classified as foundational to STS, but that I was reading in virtue of my interest in the history of science such as Pickering’s The Mangle of Practice, which could generate heated debate among the PhD students. What made those debates frustrating was that we lacked distinctions so we often would talk passed each other.

A good part of those debates died down and were, subsequently domesticated after the publication of Hacking’s (1999) The Social Construction of What?, which we read immediately after it appeared. Hacking didn’t settle any debates for us, but allowed us to do more sober philosophy with it and while I do not want to credit him solely without mention of Haslanger, his book certainly contributed to the normalization and disciplining of the debate. Hacking and Haslanger also visited shortly thereafter, and so could ask for clarifications. Interestingly enough, in that book Hacking treats Foucault as a constructivist in ethical theory akin to Rawls, although he notes that others (Haslanger) treat Foucault as an ancestor to the idea that reality is constructed 'all the way down.'

As regular readers know my own current interest in Foucault is orthogonal to questions of construction. But I was struck by the fact that in his Foucault: His Thought, His Character, Paul Veyne treats Foucault fundamentally (not wholly without reason) as a Humean nominalist (and a certain kind of Nietzschean skeptic). And, in fact, the nominalism is itself exhibited by a certain kind of positivism about facts. (Deleuze might add quickly: a positivism about statements.) Veyne is not a reliable guide to matters philosophical, but I wondered if Foucault’s purported social constructivism was all based on a game of telephone gone awry in translation and academic celebrity culture.*

Now, if we look at the passage quoted at the top of the post, we can certainly why Foucault was treated as a social constructivist. The first few sentences  in the quoted paragraph do look like a form of linguistic idealism. And this sense remains even if one has a dim awareness that the passage seems primarily directed against a kind phenomenology [“presentify” is clearly an allusion to Husserls [Vergegenwartigung]], even (perhaps) trolling Heidegger (“primal soil”).

However, the point of the passage is not ontology. It’s method. (No surprise because that is sort of the general aim of the Archeology of Knowledge.) And this, is in fact instructive of Foucault’s larger project. In the passage, Foucault is, in fact, explaining that he will try to leave aside questions of ontology in his own project. This is not to deny he is interested in what we might call epistemology. But the epistemology he is exploring is what one might call discursive authority. And the effect of such authority is “the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse.” (emphasis added).

In fact, Foucault here is not far removed from Quine (but in a way to be made precise). In one of the most Whitehead-ian passages of Two Dogmas, Quine writes: “The physical conceptual scheme simplifies our account of experience because of the way myriad scattered sense events come to be associated with single so-called objects; still there is no likelihood that each sentence about physical objects can actually be translated, however deviously and complexly, into the phenomenalistic language. Physical objects are postulated entities which round out, and simplify our account of the flux of experience.”

Now, don’t be distracted by Quine’s ‘sense events’ or empiricism. For, what Foucault is interested in is the manner by which (to quote Quine again) ‘myriad scattered sense events come to be associated with single so-called objects.’ In particular, (and now I am back to Foucault) “the body of rules that enable them to form as objects of a discourse.” This body of rules is characteristic of an authoritative discipline. And in particular, Foucault is interested in what the social effects are of simplifications produced by postulated entities in the human sciences on these sciences and larger society. I don’t mean to suggest this is Foucault’s only game. He is also interested in the social structures that stabilize the possibility of semantics across disciplines in a particular age.

To be sure, in Quine the epistemology of discursive authority is only treated cursory (in the context of regimentation). Whereas Foucault is focused on how the sciences acquire and constitute (even replicate) such authority. But that is compatible with all kinds of ontologies in Quine’s sense or, to be heretical for a second, a metaphysically robust realism; notice Foucault’s own hint of a ‘rich, heavy, immediate plenitude.' One will not get more than hints from Foucault on what his answers might be to the kind of epistemological or metaphysical questions we are trained to ask. That, of course, is a feature not a bug of his project.

 

 

 

*As an aside, we can see the shifting perspectives on Foucault's role in social constructivism in Philosophy Compass review articles. Back in 2007 Ron Mallon treats Foucault as a kind of fellow-traveller of social constructivism:

Thinking of constructionism in this general way allows us to recognize the affinity of explicitly “constructionist” accounts with a wide range of work in the social sciences and humanities that abjures the label “social construction” – for example Foucault’s talk of “discursive formations,” Ian Hacking’s discussions of “historical ontology,”Arnold Davidson’s work on “historical epistemology,” and a host of titles that discuss “inventing,” “creating,” or “making up” various phenomena." [Mallon then cites Archeology of knowledge.]

By contrast, Ásta, writing in 2015, treats Foucault (quite rightly) as a source for Hacking's account of the The looping effect which "is the phenomenon where X is being described or conceptualized as F makes it F." And then notes that "scholars disagree over whether Foucault himself allows for a role for epistemic reasons or whether the development of institutions and cultural practices is determined by power relations alone3 should not commit us to the view that the only force of human culture is power. " Here in a note Ásta cites not Foucault, but Habermas' famous criticism in ‘ Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present’. Cf. Nussbaum's hedged on this very point in the passage quoted above.