Following my reflections describing my move towards poststructuralism (Research Hub 30 October, 2024) I decided it was worth commenting on my conviction that such a stance is useful politically.

It is interesting to reflect on how poststructuralism (or sometimes postmodernism) becomes the “whipping boy” in so many political debates. In the mainstream it is targeted as responsible for “fake news” due to its refusal of “truths” and ambivalence about “truth claims”. In the heated field of political theory, it is associated with “negativity” and “critique”, neither of which is looked on favourably. Latour (2004) is best known for constructing a dichotomy between “debunking” as a poststructural enterprise and “assembling” as a desired alternative that heralds the bringing together of collective “concerns” in a “Parliament of things” (Latour 1993, pp. 142-145).

“The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rug from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.” (Latour 2004: 246)

Those who adopt the label “postcritical” (Felski 2011, 2015, 2016) tend to collapse poststructuralism into “ideology critique” on the “debunking” “side” (Research Hub Entry, 29 Nov. 2021).

I tackle these issues under several headings:

1. Conceptions of “truth”
2. The nature of “critique”
3. The peril of binaries – “debunking” versus “assembling”
4. Political affiliations
5. Political futures

1. Conceptions of “truth”

“Truth” has become inescapable. And this is because the political landscape is littered with “lies”. We can thank the current American demagogue in large part for painting this landscape. In addition, preoccupation with the power of the internet and AI tends to focus on “misinformation” and “disinformation”. The latter implies deliberate manipulation of “facts” and the distortion of “truth”.

But, of course, we all know that “truth” is a chimera, and that “facts” are debatable. Many battles have been fought over “truths” and “facts”. Nor does claiming access to “truth” or “facts” resolve anything. To say that climate change is a fact doesn’t really assist in decision-making about ways forward.

Foucault, and Foucauldian-influenced poststructuralism, offer a separate, and useful, entry-point on these matters. Foucault (1981, p. 61) explains that his concern is not with what is true but with what is “in the true”. We need to ask – how did “fake news” become possible? What meanings need to be in place for “fake news” to be a recognised category? How is “knowledge” conceptualised? Is this a useful conceptualisation? How, in other words, did “fake news” become “truth” (“in the true”)?

Note that, when Foucault directs attention to what is “in the true”, he is not targeting intentional manipulation of “facts” – a position that retains (by default) a view of “facts” as readily established and available to bemanipulated. He is asking, rather, what was necessary for this position on “facts” to be accepted as “true”. Attention is directed to the background knowledges that install “truths”.

This stance is clear in Foucault’s treatment of psychiatry and clinical medicine. He talks about the ways in which “psychiatric discourse” and “clinical discourse” shape the objects they purport to study. He emphasizes the “practices of psychiatry”, “the operation of the sets of relations characteristic of psychiatry as an accredited form of knowledge” (Bacchi and Bonham 2014: 182). Hence, the political target becomes the interconnected practices that give these knowledge formations authority. This example from The Archaeology of Knowledge illustrates this mode of thinking/analysis:

“In these fields of initial differentiation, in the distances, the discontinuities, and the thresholds that appear within it, psychiatric discourse finds a way of limiting its domain, of defining what it is talking about, of giving it [its domain] the status of an object—and therefore of making it manifest, nameable, and describable”. (Foucault 1972, p. 41; emphasis added)

It is through such knowledge practices (“discursive practices”) that “truths” are established (Chaufan et al 2024).

• The nature of “critique”

What form of critique does this approach offer? Is critique passé?

The approach to “truth” just outlined destabilises claims to “truth”. That is, it shows the conditions necessary to establish “truth claims”, illustrating that they are contingent and reliant on “outside” factors. When someone claims access to “truth” or paints someone else’s position as “fake”, new questions arise. What are the grounds for the claims being made? Are these grounds open to contestation?

It is important to distinguish this argument from concerns about “ideology”. We are not talking about concocted ideas meant to lead people astray, a common understanding of ideology. We are talking about the full complex of ontological and epistemological assumptions at work in creating a particular stance. It follows that poststructuralism sits at a remove from “ideology critique”.

In a series of previous Research Hub entries (30 Sept. 2021; 30 Oct. 2021; 29 Nov. 2021) I outline the debates surrounding “ideology critique” and mention how poststructuralism tends to be collapsed into the category “ideology critique” by those who assume what they call a “postcritical position”. It is interesting how, in these discussions, “ideology critique” becomes the sum total of what is meant by “critique”. The increased questioning of “ideology critique” has led to a general condemnation of “critique” in all forms, collapsing the two terms so that all “critique” becomes “ideology critique”. As a result, poststructural critical interventions are typecast in ways that devalue their political possibilities. This misrepresentation causes all sorts of confusion.

It has led for example to the constructed dichotomy between theoretical approaches as either “debunking” or “assembling”. That is, poststructuralism is collapsed into a theoretical category (called “debunking”) that targets misrepresentation (“misinformation”, “fake news”). In this characterisation of poststructuralism, the focus is on uncovering “truth” and challenging the “evil ones” who misrepresent it (the purveyors of “ideology”).

However, as described under the first topic addressed above, poststructuralists do not engage in defending “truths” or seeking “falsehoods” (“ideology”). They question all forms of knowledge through identifying the “conditions of necessity” for their existence. There is not a search for those who manipulate “facts” nor for “vested interests” who protect their wealth and assets. These quests may be worthwhile, but they are not poststructuralist. It follows that applications of WPR that accept the premises of a form of “ideology critique” sit uncomfortably alongside a Foucauldian-influenced analysis such as WPR.

• The peril of binaries

The characterisation of poststructuralism as (simply) “debunking” is subsequently typecast as (purely) negative – challenging what is “hidden”, the lies beneath the “truth”. Due to this characterisation, discussions about critique degenerate into whether one’s approach is (simply) negative critique or whether one can approach sociopolitical analysis in a more “positive” way.

As noted above Latour casts this contrast as “debunking” versus“assembling”. In his seminal 2004 article, entitled “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?”, Latour characterizes deconstruction as purely “negative” in its impact, with a tendency to “totalize” and “demonize” opponents. The postcritical theorist Felski (2011) makes a similar complaint: “Critique is characterised by its ‘againstness’, by its desire to take a hammer, as Latour would say, to the beliefs of others” (see also Felski 2016; Coole 2000 on the negative character of critique). It is this view of critique which lies behind Barad’s (2012, p. 49) dismissal of “critique”: “I am not interested in critique. In my opinion, critique is over-rated, over-emphasized and over utilized”.

Munk and Abrahamsson (2012, p. 54) point to the downsides of characterising political positions in simple dichotomous terms – “assembling” versus “debunking”, “affirming” versus “negating”, “crafting commonality or enacting disparity”. These binary classifications rely on oversimplification of a poststructural position.

WPR certainly does not “demonize” opponents. In fact, Sue Goodwin and I (2016: 14) caution against this tendency in some WPR applications (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 14). In Foucauldian-influenced analyses, such as WPR, there is a shift in focus from the grand theorizing of a force called ideology to the minutiae of routine and mundane practices. To adopt a poststructural theoretical position, as John Law (2008, p. 637) explains, is to

“refuse to be overawed by seemingly large systems, and the seeming ontological unity of the world enacted by large systems. It is, instead, to make the problem smaller, or better, to make it more specific”.

Indeed, it is common to draw on the language of “assemblage” to capture the heterogeneous complex of factors targeted in such analysis (Bacchi and Ronnblom 2014), raising questions about Latour’s debunking/assembling contrast. The term “assemblage” is adopted by Deleuze (1988), for example. The poststructuralist John Law also embraces the term: 

“Buyers, sellers, notice boards, strawberries, spatial arrangements, economic theories, and rules of conduct, all of these assemble and together enact a set of practices that make a more or less precarious reality.” (Law 2007: 13; emphasis added). 

Elsewhere, with Jennifer Bonham, I identify overlaps between the languages of assemblage, discursive practices and dispositifs in Foucault (Bacchi and Bonham 2014).

To say you are in favour of assembling or assemblages, therefore, tells us little, and a simple “debunking” versus “assembling” dichotomy confuses issues. As with many analytic terms, it becomes necessary to see how particular adaptations of “assemblage” function in political analysis (see Ong and Collier 2007). 

In Deleuze, the French word agencement (“assemblage”)

refers to a tentative and hesitant unfolding that is at most only very partially under any form of deliberate control. By contrast, in Savage’s (2020) particular adaptation of “assemblage theory”, which draws on the work of Tania Li (2007), the emphasis is on the practices of policy actors. Li (2007: 264) explains that the primary focus of her assemblage theory is on “agency”, “the hard work required to draw heterogeneous elements together, forge connections between them and sustain these connections in the face of tension”. Li notes that her account “stresses agency, process and emergence over the kind of completed order suggested by Foucault’s term dispositif”. She (287 fn 4) elaborates that her argument “builds upon those of Clarke (2004) and O’Malley et al. (1997) who critique the neglect of practice and instability in studies of government”.

• Political affiliations: Where does “assembling” lead?

LI’s characterisation of Foucault’s work as a “completed order” sits awkwardly alongside his endorsement of “assembling”. Moreover, it seems odd to criticize Foucault for neglecting “practice” given the centrality of practices to his theoretical toolkit (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016). Of course, as with assemblage itself, it is necessary to look closely at how “practices” are understood (Research Hub 30 Nov. 2019). To move this discussion forward, therefore, we need to know more about the political agendas associated with specific adaptations of the language of “assemblage” and “assembling”.

On the poststructural side, following Law’s (2004) position on “reality making” and “reality work”, the critical tasks become (i) to show that, as with “truth”, “reality” is a political creation and (ii) to undo “the singularity of the real” (Munk and Abrahamsson 2012: 54).  On the other side, for Latour (2004), researchers need to do more than “dismantle” (or “debunk”) this singular “reality”. He suggests they take up a “compositionist” aim, “to craft new and comprehensive common worlds supported by notions of due process and parliamentary procedure” (Munk and Abrahamsson 2012: 54). With “matters of concern” Latour (2004) intended to “replace excessive critique and the suspicion of socio-political interests with a balanced articulation of the involved concerns” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2011: 91).

In tune with Latour, Isabelle Stengers (2005, 2011, 2018) encourages “a more respectful way of making knowledge and realities” (Fraser 2020: 4), which she describes as “symbiotic research”. The objective here is to incorporate “interested parties into the process of research, and articulating findings and conclusions without undue attention to the State’s preferences” (Fraser 2020: 4).

It is useful to see Latour’s (and Stenger’s) position as an attempt to challenge some of the divisions and oppositional standoffs that characterize a good deal of contemporary political discussion. However, in the desire to move beyond polarization, we need to retain an ability to interrogate specific positions critically. Keller (2017: 62), for example, is concerned that in Latour’s “Parliament of things”, echoing Habermas, social actors, assembled around a table, decide in a setting “free of domination” upon “hierarchies of concerns”.  Countering this claim, Keller (2017: 62; emphasis in original) notes that:

“Social relationships of knowledge are asymmetric relationships of power. Material and symbolic resources for politics of knowledge are anything but equally distributed throughout society.”

It follows, says Keller, that we need modes of empirical analysis and of genealogical and reconstructive discourse research to “make visible these asymmetric relationships of knowledge and the work of knowledge politics” (Keller 2017: 62).

Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) also debates how “the problem” is represented in Latour, and how “respect for concerns” – or for “matters of concern” – becomes an argument to moderate a critical standpoint.  Specifically, she argues, Latour’s labelling of criticisms as “fundamentalist” exhibits “mistrust regarding minoritarian and radical ways of politicizing things that tend to focus on exposing relations of power and exclusion”. As Lemke (2018: 42) suggests, in Latour’s “assembling”, there is a need to analyse what comes to matter and what does not. Van Wyk (2012: 135; emphasis added) makes a similar point:

“A politics of the future which is a sustainable politics must account not only for the force of life, of the vibrancy of matter, but the force of the negative as well, the forces that demarcate the field of becoming into the possible and impossible, determining what matter can come to matter.”

WPR is designed to facilitate such an endeavour. It interrogates all assumed starting points for analysis – including “matters of concern”, “knowledge controversies” (Whatmore 2009) and “emergencies” (Lancaster et al. 2020). With Keller (2017: 62) it asks about the criteria designating a “matter of concern”. Indeed, I would want to ask: “What is the specified matter of concern represented to be?” (see Puig de la Bellacasa 2011: 92). To engage critically with this question, I would apply the WPR analytic “template”: start from “proposals”, work backwards to problem representations that require interrogation, and ensure that one’s own proposals receive the same treatment through “self”-problematization.

The last point on “self”-problematization is critical. WPR is not a “finger pointing” exercise. It does not demonize. Researchers ought to be cautious therefore when they enlist WPR to assist them in forms of “ideology critique”. There is a distinction here between WPR and the “Essex School of Hegemonics” (Keller 2017: 59), which emphasises “the antagonisms that emerge through the radical contingency of discourse” (Howarth et al. 2020: 1). By contrast, “self”-problematization offers an “immanent critique” in which “‘we’ … do not pre-exist the entangled movements out of which subject and objects, agents and patients, emerge” (MacLure 2015).

The promise of deconstruction, therefore, lies in the commitment to apply its philosophical premises to one’s own work (Bacchi 1999: 42; MacLure 1994: 285). Complementing this analysis, Question 4 in WPR (see Chart, p. 20 in Bacchi and Goodwin 2016) opens up the opportunity to be inventive, to imagine worlds in which a specific confluence of circumstances is either not problematized or problematized differently (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 22). In this way it shows the promise of critique. 

• Political futures

What does poststructuralism add to reflections on sociopolitical relations? While Foucault “espouses a clear commitment to unravelling domination”, he is “concerned to avoid any homogenization of domination” (Purvis and Hunt 1993: 487), creating room to move. To this end Foucault practices a style of research in which the “grand complexes” of conventional sociology – classes, institutions, cultures, beliefs, ideologies – are studied through the “mundane practices of the prison, the hospital, the school, the courtroom, the household, the town planner and colonial governor”. The target becomes the multitude of heterogeneous factors that produce what is “real” and what is “in the true”. The term “mundane” signals the everyday nature of the “conditions” that need to be traced.

The move here is from the general to the specific. “Micro-practices” replace generalized speculation about assumed “forces” shaping history. The goal is to make “visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all” (Foucault 1991: 76; emphasis in original). To make these singularities visible requires detailed records of discontinuity, provided through genealogies that trace “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers” (Foucault 1977: 82; emphasis added). Because of the level of detail at which they are described, new connections come into view, connections that “seem to become more amenable to action and transformation” (Rabinow and Rose 2003: 9-10).

We have a different vision here of the way the world works. It is not solely the impact of the powerful that needs to be traced and attended to. It highlights, instead, the taken-for-granted nature of the institutions and other influences that shape lives and worlds. Interventions are required at this level. 

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