In the last entry I made the case that, in Foucauldian-influenced critical approaches, including WPR, problematizations (“the forms themselves”) constitute a necessary part of critical analysis. This position sits in contrast to that developed in Savage et al. (2021) where “problematisation” as a critical practice is contrasted to “solution-construction”. They argue that, in poststructural approaches, too much emphasis is placed on problematization, and solution-construction ought to be recognized as equally capable of critical insights. I suggest in the last entry that two different meanings of problematization explain this difference in interpretation and that there is a need to keep these distinctions clear in order to better understand the contrasting forms of critical analysis associated with each meaning. 

In this entry I address the question I often receive about the practical usefulness of WPR: if WPR does not provide guidance on designing “optimal” reforms, why should policymakers be interested in it?  To address this question, I take up a second theme prominent in Savage et al. (2021: 309), the place of “self-reflexivity” in critical analysis.

The ways in which these topics are connected is made clear if one starts by asking why poststructural scholars are reluctant to endorse specific reform proposals. Put briefly, the hesitancy to endorse specific reforms stems from the concern that those reforms may inadvertently buy into established ways of thinking that need questioning. That is, there is a concern that researchers are necessarily implicated in those ways of thinking – hence the need for “self-reflexivity” or “self-problematization”, my preferred term as explained below. 

As Savage et al. (2021: 308) note, poststructural scholars shy away from prescribing specific courses of action because such a stance presumes a “capacity to step outside of the dominant technologies of governance that contour the lives of research participants and academic labour to determine what is ‘good’ and ‘just’”. That is, the hesitation about advancing “solutions” is tied to the poststructural stance that “‘liberatory’ or ‘emancipatory’ impulses” may well be “implicated in the constitution of governing practices” (Teghtsoonian 2016: 341). Wendy Brown (1998: 44) makes this point clearly in her elaboration of “genealogical politics”:

“It aims to make visible why particular positions and visions of the future occur to us, and especially to reveal when and where those positions work in the same register of ‘political rationality’ as that which they purport to criticize”.

This stance also helps us to understand the debate and contestation over meanings of the “subject” in critical theory. I mentioned in the last entry the focus in some versions of assemblage theory (Savage 2020: 331; Li 2007a) on “actors” and “agency”. Li (2007a: 287 fn 3) explains that, with Barry (2001), she “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”. Again, I hope that readers of earlier entries will recognize some well-rehearsed debates about the role of “actors” in policy processes and Foucault’s conception of the “subject” (Research Hub entries 30 Sept. 2019; 31 Oct. 2019).

The questioning of the humanist “subject” in poststructural theory explains the tension between these positions. It also helps explain the priority placed upon self-problematisation in poststructural analysis. The level of questioning of grounding presuppositions, prompted by Question 2 of WPR and reinforced in Step 7, is intended to assist researchers to probe precisely this point – how they themselves may well accept premises that ought to be questioned (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20).

Now, Savage et al. clearly recognize the importance of what they call “self-reflexivity”. In fact, they “question whether research that lacks such reflexivity can be considered ‘critical’ at all” (Savage et al. 2021: 309). However, as with the notion of problematization (see previous entry 30 Dec 2021).  I would have liked some clarification about how the term is understood. To say that one needs to be “reflexive”, I suggest, is the beginning not the end of the matter (see Rasmussen 2015). For example, there is a need to consider the kind of subject who is deemed to be capable of “reflexivity”. There is a tendency for the notion of reflexivity to rely on a political subject who appears to be able to draw upon inner resources of insight and judgement, a subject reminiscent of the humanist subject questioned in poststructural arguments (see Research Hub entries 21 Oct. 2018; 5 Nov. 2018).

Stengers (2008: 46) explains that “reflexivity” is vulnerable to “capture” in terms of knowledge: “it can easily mean paying attention to defects and biases to be avoided, and for instance to the way our own discrimination patterns and habits negatively affect the knowledge we produce”. Think here of the tendency for some authors to acknowledge their location in terms of gender, ethnicity, race, class, (dis)ability or sexuality. Recognizing the importance of such interventions, Stengers (2008: 41-42) explains that this stance does not “overcome the ‘subjective’ attachments that situate us” whereas there is a need to “make ‘us’ hesitate about our own conditions of thought”. 

Foucault spoke about his quest to “se deprendre de soi” – to detach oneself from oneself (Rabinow and Rose 2003: 17). He describes this position as an “ethic of discomfort”, a ceaseless discomfort with one’s own presumptions:

“never to consent to being completely comfortable with one’s own presuppositions. Never to let them fall peacefully asleep, but also never to believe that a new fact will suffice to overturn them; never to imagine that one can change them like arbitrary axioms”. (Foucault 2000: 448).

Clifford (2001: 134; emphasis in original) describes this proposition as akin to Nietzsche’s “active forgetting” – 

“Counter-memory consists of essentially forgetting who we are. It is a forgetfulness of essence … Counter-memory holds us at a remove, a distance from ourselves: not in the traditional sense of self-reflection, but of wrenching the self – this identity – apart, through an incision, a cutting that makes the self stand naked and strange before us across an unbridgeable divide, a gap of difference”.

The question that arises is how to achieve this “distance from ourselves”. Foucault’s argument that the self is produced in practices leads to the proposition in WPR that researchers need to institute a practice of active self-problematization (Gherardi 2009: 118). This practice of the self involves applying the WPR questions to one’s own proposals (Step 7 in Chart, Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20). To self-problematize, we ask: if this is my problematization, where does it come from and how is it possible? What meanings and presuppositions do I accept that render it possible? 

Clearly, a question arises here about the feasibility of policy workers and researchers engaging such questions. Li pays close attention to the ways in which policy workers become implicated in specific governmental agendas. In her study of community forest management in Indonesia, she emphasizes how policy workers are constrained to “frame problems in terms amenable to technical solutions” (Li 2007b: 2), a practice she describes as “rendering technical”. This task, explains Li, means that policy workers, whom she designates “programmers”, cannot be critics: “Under pressure to program better, they are not in a position to make programming itself an object of analysis”. In contrast, Sue Goodwin and I (2016: 9) avoid fixing the role of policy workers as “technicians”. In our 2016 book, Poststructual Policy Analysis, we offer numerous examples of “policy workers cum analysts” who deploy WPR to assist in the practices of interrogating, criticizing and evaluating policies.

At the same time I would query the implication in Li (2007b: 2) that “critics” are somehow freer than “programmers” from the practice of “rendering technical”, that they can “take a broader view”. Researchers (“critics”), I suggest, are frequently asked to analyse “problems” pre-set by those who fund the research, often governments (Bacchi 2008; Research Hub entry 20 August 2018). Evidence-based policy provides an example where this occurs – the task assigned researchers is to provide “evidence” for questions (“problems”) set for them by others (Bacchi 2009: 252-255; Bacchi 2012). Along related lines, Savage et al. (2021) describe how current education policy researchers “follow the policy”, a practice that risks producing “research of elites, by elites and for elites” (2021: 313; emphasis in original). 

Hence, “critics”, like “programmers”, are in a sense constrained in the terrain they can explore. This situation highlights the need for a “tool” such as WPR to interrogate all governmental problematizations, including those that lodge within our own proposals. Bringing attention to governmental problematizations, which I see as the task of a WPR analysis, can assist policy workers and researchers to question the parameters within which their work is cast. 

Linking back to the discussion of postcritique (Research Hub 29 Nov 2021) I see this encouragement to policy workers and researchers to engage with the problematizations in policies and in their own proposals as a positive research contribution. Applying the WPR questions in these ways, I suggest, makes it easier to recognize the full range of issues that need to be included in any “reform” design. They also alert researchers and policy workers to facets of the issues that may well have escaped their/our attention. While poststructuralist analysis, therefore, does not put forward a blueprint for political change, which people are expected to adopt, it opens a space to think differently and creatively about the relations and rules through which governing takes place. In the next and last entry on this topic, I revisit the example of pay equity initiatives, first broached in my 1999 book Women, Policy and Politics: The construction of policy problems (Sage), to consider more precisely how WPR can play a role in reform design. 

References

Bacchi, C. 1999. Women, Policy and Politics: The construction of policy problems. London: Sage.

Bacchi, C. 2008. The politics of research management: Reflections on the gap between what we “know” [about SDH] and what we do. Health Sociology Review, 17: 165-176.

Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be? Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education.

Bacchi, C. 2012. Strategic interventions and ontological politics: Research as political practice. In A. Bletsas and C. Beasley (Eds) Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press. Available as a free downloard from the University of Adelaide Press website (https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/).

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A guide to practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Barry, A. 2001. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. London: Athlone.

Brown, W. 1998. Genealogical Politics. In J. Moss (ed.) The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, London: Sage. pp. 33-49.

Clarke, J. 2004. Changing Welfare, Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy. London: Sage.

Clifford, M. 2001. Political Genealogy After Foucault. Psychology Press.

Foucault M. (2000). For an Ethics of Discomfort. In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (Volume III, pp. 443-448). New York: The New Press. 

Gherardi, S. 2009. Introduction: The critical power of the “practice lens”. Management Learning, 40(2): 115–128.

Li, T. M. 2007a. Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society, 36(2): 263-293.  

Li, T. M. 2007b. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. NC: Duke University Press. 

O’Malley, P., Weir, L. and Shearing, C. 1997. Governmentality, criticism, politics. Economy and Society, 26: 501-517.

Rasmussen, M. L. 2015. “Cruel Optimism” and Contemporary Australian Critical Theory in Educational Research. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(2): 192-206. 

Savage, G. C. 2020. What is policy assemblage? Territory, Politics, Governance, 8(3): 319-335. 

Savage, G. C., Gerrard, J., Gale, T. and Molla, T.  2021. The evolving state of policy sociology: mobilities, moorings and elite networks. Critical Studies in Education, 62(3): 306-321. 

Stengers, I. 2008. Experimenting with Refrains: Subjectivity and the Challenge of Escaping Modern Dualism. Subjectivity, 22: 38-59.

Teghtsoonian, K. 2016. Methods, discourse, activism: comparing institutional ethnography and governmentality. Critical Policy Studies, 10:3, 330-347, DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2015.1050426

In the last three entries (30 Sept 2021, 30 Oct 2021, 29 Nov 2021) I have tried to elucidate some fine distinctions in political stances associated with varieties of critical analysis. In this entry I pursue this task a step further, examining the position advanced by some who endorse “assemblage thinking” (Savage 2018, 2020). My specific target is the different relationships imagined and carved out between “problems” and “solutions” in policy development. This topic comes up often in WPR applications. Many contributions use WPR to make the case that, if we examine how a problem is represented, we will be able to see how solutions are affected. By contrast, I have argued that it is more useful politically to start the analysis from “postulated solutions” to see how “problems” are constituted within those “solutions”, how “problems” are implicit within such “postulated solutions”. Does this mean that WPR is unhelpful in formulating (or constructing) “solutions”?

I am often pressed on this issue. I’m asked: “Just what follows from a WPR analysis? Where does WPR lead in terms of a reform agenda?” There are concerns that researchers who draw on WPR remain trapped in an endless cycle of problematization, re-problematization and self-problematization. I explain that proposing reforms is not the purpose of WPR. Rather, its objective it to create a space to reflect on issues that may escape our attention, largely because they rely on taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and social/political relations. Therefore, WPR is put forward, not as a method for devising policy “solutions”, but for critically commenting on the “solutions” (policies) that have been put in place.

My decision to revisit these questions is prompted by a recent article on developments in “critical policy sociology” (Savage et al. 2021). The article asks about the nature of critical scholarship and usefully sets out to “agitate the field” (p. 316) around this question. I am particularly interested in pursuing two themes raised in this paper: the discussion of problematization and “solution construction”, and reflections on the importance and nature of “self-reflexivity” (Savage et al. 2021: 309). I address the first theme in this entry and pursue the second in a follow-up entry. Links to assemblage theory (Savage 2020) are drawn where relevant.

On the first theme, the relationship between problematization and “solution construction”, Savage et al. (2021) put in question the emphasis placed on problematization in poststructural policy analysis. They (2021: 308) note that “scholarship that draws on poststructuralist philosophy and theory” often foregrounds “the benefits of critique and forms of problematisation but in lieu of articulating explicit solutions or visions for change”. They make the case that, compared to “acts of problematisation”, the “processes of solution construction are … just as capable of producing new possibilities for thinking and understanding the world” and that “the formulation of solutions should not be viewed as necessarily non-critical” (p. 309). 

As I mention in the previous entry (29 Nov 2021), Savage et al. (2021: 309) argue, appropriately in my view, that the poststructural refusal to adopt a specific reform agenda itself constitutes a form of “preferred politics”. Importantly, however, Savage (2018: 310; emphasis in original) endorses “a more pragmatic orientation towards public policy research”, directing attention “away from theoretical abstractions and ideal types” and “towards more materialist, relational, and bottom-up orientations that seek to understand the tangible stuff of policies”. The conviction that “at the end of the day all policy makers must do something” helps explain the focus on “solution construction” (Savage 2018: 317). Extrapolating from this argument, the question for researchers becomes: why should policymakers be interested in WPR, if it doesn’t assist them in making decisions/policy? 

Importantly, Savage et al. (2021: 309) retain a place for “problematisation” in political analysis. They argue that “problematisation should be seen as integral to the critical formulation of solutions for those who choose to engage in such work”.  While this proposition sounds useful, I would like to have seen some elaboration of what it entails. Specifically, I feel there is a need to clarify how “problematisation” is used in this argument. What precisely is meant by stating that “problematisation should be seen as integral to the critical formulation of solutions”?

On the place of problematization/s in critical research, I need to repeat a point I have made elsewhere (Bacchi 2012): that the term problematization/s both in Foucault and in critical literature more broadly has several meanings. To clarify this diverse and tricky terrain I draw a distinction between a verb form of problematization as a form of critical practice – i.e., scholars are involved in problematizing ways of thinking, modes of ruling, etc. For example, Webb (2014: 371) identifies those engaged in critical thinking as “policy problematizers”, those engaged in problematizing. This use of problematization lines up with Foucault’s endorsement of “thinking problematically” as a form of critical analysis (Research Hub entries 9 July and 23 July 2018). This usage is also the most common way in which the term “problematization” is deployed in everyday speech – i.e., we talk about the need to problematize something, to put it into question.

The second usage, which I designate a noun form, simply to distinguish it from the activist process of problematizing just described, refers to the ways in which governing takes place through producing problematizations (note the plural noun form) – specific forms of “problem” creation. The analytic task in this case involves identifying these “forms themselves” (Foucault 1986: 17-18) and subjecting them to critical questioning. It is precisely this critical questioning of governing problematizations that WPR facilitates. The argument here is that such interrogation is necessary because we are governed through these problematizations (“the forms themselves”), through the ways in which “problems” are produced as particular sorts of problems (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 39). 

Returning to Savage et al., I suggest that they are using problematization in the first sense as a mode of critical analysis. For example, elsewhere, Savage and O’Connor (2018: 4-5) quote approvingly Ansell and Geyer (2017) who argue that “problems are themselves problematic” and are always “contested” (italics in original), making it imperative for “researchers to problematise problem-setting and definition processes” (italics added). And it is this sense of problematization as critical thinking that Savage et al. (2021) contrast to “solution construction” as an alternative mode of critical analysis. 

Similarly, 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 identifies “problematization” as one of several practices undertaken by policy actors, a practice she describes as “identifying deficiencies that need to be rectified” (Li 2016: 80). 

I hope that this “activist” view of problematization can be seen to sit in contrast with the focus in WPR on the problematizations (“the forms themselves”) implicit in policy proposals. In the latter, problematizations (“the forms themselves”) are always and necessarily a part of governmental practices. Hence, interrogating problematizations constitutes a requisite part of critical analysis: “the underlying intent is to problematise the problematisations on offer” (Bacchi 2009: 12). In this approach policy is not a “response to existing conditions and problems, but more of a discourse in which both problems and solutions are created” (Goodwin 1996: 67).

This quote from Nikolas Rose’s Powers of Freedom (2000: 58; emphasis added) in my view helps clarify the different form of thinking and analysis involved in a WPR usage of problematisation. Rose explains:

If policies, arguments, analyses and prescriptions purport to provide answers, they do so only in relation to a set of questions. Their very status as answers is dependent upon the existence of such questions. If, for example, imprisonment, marketization, community care are seen as answers, to what are they answers? And, in reconstructing the problematizations which accord them intelligibility as answers, these grounds become visible, their limits and presuppositions are opened for investigation in new ways.

Rose’s “answers” are the “proposals” or “postulated solutions” in WPR. And, as Rose says, we need to start from the proposed “answers” and work backwards to see what prompted these positions, what made them possible. The task, as he describes it, is to reconstruct “the problematizations [note the plural noun form] which accord them intelligibility as answers”, including their “limits and presuppositions”. In tune with this thinking, in WPR we examine what was necessary for certain proposals (policies) to be intelligible – what meanings needed to be in place for them to make sense.  The critical task, therefore, entails analysing those governmental prescriptions and their implicit problematizations (“the forms themselves”). 

To be clear, I do not wish to imply that there is one proper meaning of problematization. As discussed above, the word can be and is used in various ways. My argument is that, because of this complexity in usage, it is useful to clarify how we deploy the term when we develop our arguments – in this case arguments about the meaning and purpose of critical thinking. In the next entry, therefore, I pursue further the question of whether the Foucauldian-influenced analysis of governmental problematizations (“the forms themselves”), as in a WPR approach, contributes in any way to “solutions” or “solution construction”. This discussion will entail reconsideration of the place of self-problematization (“self-reflexivity”) in critical theory (see Research Hub entries, 21 Oct. 2018; 5 Nov. 2018). 

References

Ansell, C. and Geyer, R. 2017. “Pragmatic Complexity”: a New Foundation for Moving beyond “Evidence-Based Policy Making”?  Policy Studies, 38(2): 149-167. 

Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be? Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education.

Bacchi, C. 2012. Why Study Problematizations? Making politics visible. Open Journal of Political Science, 2(1): 1-8.

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A guide to practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Foucault, M. 1986. The use of pleasure: The history of sexuality (Vol. 2). New York: Vintage.

Goodwin, N. 1996. Governmentality in the Queensland Department of Education: policies and the management of schools. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 17(1): 65-74. 

Li, T. M. 2007. Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society, 36(2): 263–293.

Li, T. M. 2016. Governing rural Indonesia: convergence on the project system. Critical Policy Studies, 10(1): 79-94.  

Rose, N. 2000. Powers of Freedom: Reframing political thought.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 

Savage, G. C. 2018. Policy assemblages and human devices: a reflection on “Assembling Policy”. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 39(2): 309-321.

Savage, G. C. and O’Connor, K. 2018. What’s the problem with “policy alignment”? The complexities of national reform in Australia’s federal system. Journal of Education Policy, https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2018.1545050 

Savage, G. C. 2020. What is policy assemblage? Territory, Politics, Governance, 8(3): 319-335. 

Savage, G. C., Gerrard, J., Gale, T. and Molla, T.  2021. The evolving state of policy sociology: mobilities, moorings and elite networks. Critical Studies in Education, 62(3): 306-321. Webb, P.T. 2014. Policy problematization. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 27(3): 364–376.

In the preceding two entries (30 Sept 2021; 30 Oct 2021) I concentrated on elaborating distinctions and tensions between Foucauldian-influenced poststructuralism and forms of “ideology critique”. Some useful collections signal the longstanding and ongoing debates about “ideology critique” among critical scholars (see Simons and Billig 1994; Malesevic and MacKenzie 2002; South Atlantic Quarterly, 2020). 

In this entry we turn to a more recent development, dubbed “postcritique”. I hope to explain in brief the relationship between this development and the themes addressed in the previous two entries, and to introduce some of the controversy about its stance. I draw largely on the contributions of Rita Felski (2011, 2015) and Anker and Felski (2017), since they most clearly delineate what is at issue. 

The postcritique argument, put briefly, is that Foucault-influenced poststructuralism and “ideology critique” have more in common in terms of theoretical propositions than what separates them, posing a significant challenge to the argument I have been developing. According to Felski (2011) tensions and distinctions between Foucault-influenced poststructuralism and “ideology critique” are mere “skirmishes”. While “surveys of criticism often highlight the rift between these camps” (as I have just done in the two previous entries), Felski emphasizes their shared investment in a particular ethos – “a stance of knowingness, guardedness, suspicion and vigilance” (Felski 2011). Hence, she locates both “ideology critique” and poststructuralism within what Ricoeur (1970, 1974) describes as a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, which attempts to decode meanings that are disguised. Going further, Felski (2011) argues that both “ideology critique” and poststructuralism are limited in their analysis of sociopolitical relations and that it is time to move on from the form of “negative critique” they generate.

Felski is not the first to make this argument about the negative character of “critique” (see Coole 2000). 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. Felski (2011) acknowledges her debt to Latour: “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). 

I should note that Felski writes predominantly in the fields of literary and cultural studies. Still, her position on postcritique has become popular in political and policy studies as well. MacLure (2015) draws connections between the postcritical position and the “new materialists”, supported by Anker and Felski’s (2017: 11) endorsement of the “turn to affect” and the reliance on ontology (Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2020: 29) (on the “turn to affect” see Research Hub entry 31 March 2020; on the “new materialisms” see 30 November 2020). 

What I find interesting about this discussion is that the castigation of “critique” in Felski echoes many of the concerns I voiced about “ideology critique” in the two previous Research Hub entries. Specifically, she cautions against the tendency to portray the populace as “dupes” of powerful forces, and the impulse to credit critics with epistemic insight into the nature of power and domination: “As long as critique gains its intellectual leverage from an adversarial stance, it will continue to presume a populace deluded by forces that only the critic can bring to light” (Anker and Felski 2017: 19). Latour also expresses concern about a concept of critique that presumes “a privileged access to the world of reality behind the veils of appearances” (Latour 2010: 475 in Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2017: 33).

While I see merit in this characterization of “ideology critique”, one of the main arguments in the preceding two entries is that a contrast can be established between Foucault-influenced poststructuralism and “ideology critique” on exactly these issues. Specifically I argue that poststructuralism explicitly challenges the conception of the subject as pawn in a power game and questions all knowledge claims, including the claims of critics. My concern about the postcritical argument, therefore, is the tendency to paint all critical analysis with the same brush, specifically the tendency to collapse poststructuralism into “ideology critique”. In fact, poststructuralism appears to be the primary target of Felski’s concern. In her and Anker’s (2017: 8) view, poststructuralism “especially has helped transform critique into a condition of metacritique”. Latour (2004) does much the same thing in his reduction of critical thinking to “debunking”. 

In part I am disturbed by the strong polemic characterizing this analysis. MacLure (2015) shares this concern. She notes that “in deploying irony as his counter-weapon of choice”, Latour appears “unable to evade the ‘debunking’ rhetorical gesture that he condemns”. As a result, he creates “a cognoscenti of discerning readers” who know more than “the preponderance of naïvely believing conventional critics”. Similarly, while Felski claims that she does not wish to dismiss critique, her description of the “nay-saying critic” as calling to mind “the Victorian patriarch, the thin-lipped schoolmarm, the glaring policeman” (Felsik 2011) sounds a tad dismissive.

This particular “thin-lipped schoolmarm” (me!) is predictably disturbed by Anker and Felski’s attack on the usefulness of problematization and self-problematization. Problematization is described as “a preferred idiom” among poststructuralists for “demonstrating the ungroundedness of beliefs” and hence as part of “negative critique” (Felski 2011). Going further, Felski (2011) explicitly castigates poststructuralism for its “self-reflexive thinking” and its “tormented and self-divided rhetoric”: “it broods constantly over the shame of its own success, striving to detect signs of its own complicity and to root out all possible evidence of collusion with the status quo”. With Anker she condemns this “demand” for “a hypervigilance on the part of the critic”, its “stringent self-critique and continued attempts to second-guess or ‘problematize’ one’s own assumptions” (Anker and Felski 2017: 8). 

The argument on this point, I suggest, reveals a significant inconsistency. As mentioned above, Felski challenges the presumption of epistemic privilege assumed by many critics, which is part of my concern about “ideology critique” (Research Hub entry, 30 Oct 2021). However, at the same time Felski questions the usefulness of forms of “self-critique”. That is, while she expresses concern that “suspicion of the commonplace and everyday risks entrenching the notion that critical thinking is the unique provenance of intellectuals” (Anker and Felski 2017: 14), she dismisses attempts by those very intellectuals to query the grounds of their knowledge claims. It is exactly this questioning of the presumed transcendence of one’s position, I argue, that helps distinguish poststructuralism from ideology critique (see Primdahl et al. 2018). To address this point, Step 7 in WPR enjoins researchers to subject their own problem representations to the six WPR questions (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20). 

I do not want to dismiss the issues raised by Felski and others who develop the postcritical position. With Lorenzini and Tazzioli, I agree about the need to take their analysis seriously:

“Critique should not limit itself to negative, debunking or deconstructive tasks. Indeed, if, on the one hand, unpacking, undoing and problematising are the verbs of what we define here as the “operations of critique”, on the other hand, critique, as a practice, should also consist in enacting and opening up. In other words, critique should also be able to build and produce.” (Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2020: 29)

There are two themes, therefore, that I wish to pursue: first, I want to consider the claim that poststructuralism is purely negative critique; and second, I want to consider the political implications of the postcritical argument. (On the importance of reflecting on the political implications of our theoretical stances, see Research Hub entry 31 August 2021). 

On the first theme – the characterizing of poststructuralism as “negative critique” –, I decided to confront head-on the possibility that WPR might (simply) engage in negative forms of thinking. In relation to the supposed portrayal of the populace as “deluded” (see above), I would suggest that the stance on subjectification in Foucault-influenced poststructuralism offers a very different conception of the subject from the “dupes” of “ideology critique”. Political subjects are understood to be emergent or in process, shaped in ongoing interactions with discourses and other practices (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 4). The practice of self-problematization prompted by Step 7 in WPR involves actively applying the WPR questions to one’s own proposals. It operates as a transformative practice in a positive sense, by creating “new modes of subjectivation” and “new collective subjects” (Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2020: 34). 

As to whether or not WPR implies that critical thinking is the “unique provenance of intellectuals” (see above), the emphasis on self-problematization operates to counter any presumption of epistemic privilege. Going further, I would suggest that the provocation in Question 4 to consider how an issue could be problematized differently opens up the opportunity for inventive thinking. The same is the case in Question 6, which invites researchers to consider how particular problem representations might be “disrupted and replaced”. An example of a replacement strategy is offered by Henry and Milanovic (1996) in “peacemaking criminology” (Bacchi 2009: 109).

I found it curious that Anker and Felski’s (2017: 1) analytic questions map readily onto those in WPR. For example, they ask:    

“What does critique look like as a style of academic argument? What kind of rhetorical moves and philosophical assumptions does the activity of critique deploy?” 

 There is a clear similarity between the question about “philosophical assumptions” and Question 2 in WPR, which directs attention to underlying assumptions and presuppositions. Indeed, it is possible to suggest that Anker and Felski in effect apply a form of problematization thinking, though they would probably be unhappy with this characterization of their work. 

In terms of our second theme – political implications –, Savage et al. (2021: 309) make the important point that all theoretical contributions have a “preferred politics”. Even a refusal to adopt a specific reform agenda, which Savage et al. (2021: 309) identify in Actor Network theory and much poststructuralist research, constitutes a form of politics. It is important, therefore, to reflect on the political implications of contrasting theoretical positions. 

Anker and Felski (2017: 2) explicitly link “postcritique” to “progressive commitments”, which in their view involves a “more nuanced vision of how political change comes about” (Anker and Felski 2017: 15). The labelling of their stance as “progressive” indicates a political commitment of some sort, though “progressive” is clearly a term with many possible interpretations. Anker and Felski go on to specify their “preferred politics”. Here they follow Latour’s lead in the expressed desire to encourage a “spirit of dialogue and constructiveness rather than dissection and diagnosis” (Anker and Felski 2017: 16). They also share Latour’s concern that constructionist arguments have been picked up by “the Right” to challenge the status of facts, “evident in positions such as climate change denial” (Anker and Felski 2017: 14). With Latour they endorse a shift in tactics “from a spirit of debunking to one of assembling – from critique to composition”.

I have raised Latour’s position on these issues in an earlier Research Hub entry (31 December 2020). There I point to the work of Puig de la Bellacasa (2011) who argues that Latour’s typecasting of “critique” as negative, exhibits “mistrust regarding minoritarian and radical ways of politicizing things that tend to focus on exposing relations of power and exclusion”. In her view Latour’s plea to “respect” “concerns”, or “matters of concern”, becomes an argument to moderate a critical standpoint. Along similar lines Keller (2017: 62) is concerned by the political vision promoted by Latour’s “compositionist” impulse. In his view, this impulse echoes Habermas in whom social actors, assembled around a table, decide in a setting “free of domination” upon “hierarchies of concerns”, ignoring significant power imbalances.   

It may be relevant to consider the contextual factors that have prompted a postcritical approach. According to Lorenzini and Tazzioli (2020: 29) the attacks on “negative critique” by postcritical scholars reflect an “ontological anxiety”: 

“… the fear that critique, by ‘deconstructing and demystifying’, will end up making things ‘less real by underscoring their social constructedness’ – thus leaving us with no solid ground on which to stand, ‘however temporarily or tentatively’“[quotes from Felski 2016: 221].

Interestingly, I conjectured in the previous entry (30 October 2021) that this same “ontological anxiety” may well help explain the recent proliferation of born-again “ideology critics” who exhibit a desperate realism in their attempt to identify “systematic distortions in the process of belief formation that can be traced back to existing power relations” (Bianchim 2021: 86). Both groups – the new ideology critics and those who propose postcritique – in the end wish to insist that “truth” is ascertainable. 

By contrast, in Foucauldian-influenced perspectives, “truth” is always situated: “that is, it has no intrinsic ‘force’ allowing it to impose itself to everybody or in every possible circumstance” (Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2020: 30-31). In this view, there is no universal basis for “truth”. Rather, “truth” and “knowledge” are produced in “‘local centres’ of power-knowledge” (Foucault 1990: 98). The analytic task, therefore, involves seeking out and examining the multitudes of practices – the “processes, procedures and apparatuses” (Tamboukou 1999: 202) – involved in the production of “truth”, rather than (simply) to uncover what is concealed. The goal becomes showing how political practice takes part in the “conditions of emergence, insertion and functioning” of “regimes of truth” (Foucault 1972: 163), explicitly challenging a view of power as a purely negative force:

“We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him (sic) belong to this production”. (Foucault 1984: 204–205) 

REFERENCES

Anker, E. S. and Felski, R. 2017. Critique and Postcritique. Duke University Press.

Bacchi, C. 2009. Analysing Policy: What’s the Problem Represented to be? Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education.

Bacchi, C. and Goodwin, S. 2016. Poststructural Policy Analysis: A Guide to Practice. NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bianchin, M. 2021. Ideology, Critique, and Social Structures. Critical Horizons, 22(2): 184-196.

Coole, D. 2000. Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism. London: Routledge.

Felski, R. 2011. Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion. M/C Journal, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.431

Felski, R. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Felski, R. 2016. Introduction to the special issue “Recomposing the Humanities with Bruno Latour”, New Literary History 47:2–3.

Foucault, M. 1972. The archaeology of knowledge, and the discourse on language

(trans: Sheridan Smith, A.M.). New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. 1984. The means of correct training [from Discipline and Punish]. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), The Foucault reader. New York: Pantheon Books. 

Foucault, M. 1990. The history of sexuality. Volume I: An introduction

(trans: Hurley, R.). New York: Vintage Books. 

Henry, S. and Milanovic, D. 1996. Constitutive Criminology: Beyond Postmodernism. London: Sage.  

Keller, R. 2017. Has Critique Run Out of Steam? – On Discourse Research as Critical Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 23(1): 58-68. 

Latour, B. 2004. Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern, Critical Inquiry, 30(2): 225-248.

Latour, B. 2010. An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”. New Literary History, 41(3): 471-490. 

Lorenzini, D. and Tazzioli, M. 2020. Critique without Ontology: Genealogy, collective subjects and the deadlocks of evidence. Radical Philosophy, 2.07, Spring. 

MacLure, M. 2015. The “new materialisms”: a thorn in the flesh of critical qualitative inquiry? In G. Cannella, M.S. Perez & P. Pasque (eds) Critical Qualitative Inquiry: Foundations and Futures. California: Left Coast Press. 

Malesevic, S. and MacKenzie, I. (Eds) 2002. Ideology After Poststructuralism. London: Pluto Press.

Primdahl, N. L., Reid, A. & Simovska, V. 2018. Shades of criticality in health and wellbeing education. Journal of Curriculum Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00220272.2018.1513568 

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2011. Matters of care in technoscience: Assembling neglected things. Social Studies of Science, 41(1): 85-106.

Ricoeur, P. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An essay on interpretation. (First published in 1965). Yale University Press.

Ricoeur, P. 1974. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. (First published in 1969.) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 

Savage, G. C., Gerrard, J., Gale, T. and Molla, T.  2021. The evolving state of policy sociology: mobilities, moorings and elite networks. Critical Studies in Education, 62(3): 306-321. 

Simons, H. W. and Billig, M. (Eds) 1994. After Postmodernism: Reconstructing Ideology Critique. London: Sage. 

South Atlantic Quarterly (2020). Special Issue: The Ideology Issue, 119(4). Duke University Press. Tamboukou, M. 1999. Writing genealogies: An exploration of Foucault’s strategies for doing research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 20 (2), 201–217

Comments:

In the last entry I concentrated on distinguishing between Marxist ideology critique and poststructural positions. My aim was to alert researchers to tensions between these two approaches to critique, and hence to encourage those who wish to adopt WPR to consider if their work might reflect some of these tensions. In the process I hope I clarified what poststructural researchers mean when they object to, or declare their intention to move beyond, “ideology critique”. I now wish to consider how the concept “discourse” enters the theoretical picture and whether its usage automatically frees those who use it from “ideology critique”. I also canvas the offerings of a new group of “ideology critics” to see if their “reworkings” of “ideology” offer some common ground with poststructural accounts. 

According to Purvis and Hunt (1993), one of the distinctive features of contemporary post-Marxism is the displacement of the concept of ideology by that of discourse. Colpani (2021: 10) attributes the replacement of ideology with discourse to the self-identified post-Marxist, Ernesto Laclau. Laclau and (Chantal) Mouffe furthered the break, initiated by Gramsci, in which ideologies are no longer pre-formed systems of “ideas” that “political protagonists wielded in the class struggle” (Purvis and Hunt 1993: 491). The focus in their account shifts to the place of the subject in the reproduction of ruling relations, “the way in which the interpellation of subject positions operates systematically to reinforce and reproduce dominant social relations” (Purvis and Hunt 1993: 473). 

According to Larner (2000: 12), “it is a short step from ideology to discourse”. It involves a move from Gramsci to Foucault, and from neo-Marxism to post-structuralism.  She elaborates the theoretical distinction involved in the shift from ideology to discourse:

“In post-structuralist literatures, discourse is understood not simply as a form of rhetoric disseminated by hegemonic economic and political groups, nor as the framework within which people represent their lived experience, but rather as a system of meaning that constitutes institutions, practices and identities in contradictory and disjunctive ways.” (Larner 2000: 12)

But, of course, the term “discourse” is used in many, many ways (see Bacchi 2005) and I think it fair to say that not all these usages match the characterization offered by Larner. I’ll dare to be provocative and suggest that in some accounts “discourse” actually turns out to be a near synonym for “ideology”, used in the pejorative sense of classical Marxist accounts (see previous entry Sept 2021). 

Vivian Burr (1995, chapter 5) explains that there are at least four meanings of ideology operating in contemporary social analysis, and that the old Marxian notion of ideology as false consciousness is generally rejected by contemporary theorists. Some time ago, I wrote an article on “policy as discourse” (Bacchi 2000) where I suggested that there is actually, at least in the policy-as-discourse literature, slippage around some of these issues. Specifically, I (2000: 51) identified a tendency among some theorists to treat discourses as resources marshalled by those “in power” to contain and constrain those described as “lacking power”: 

“In policy-as-discourse analysis, there is a tendency to concentrate on the ability of some groups rather than others to make discourse, and on some groups rather than others as effected or constituted in discourse”. (Bacchi 2000: 52; emphasis added)

I also noted in that article the tendency among policy-as-discourse theorists to continue to use the term “ideology”, indicating that “Interests, or power blocs, operate as sometimes unnamed actors in policy-as-discourse analyses” (Bacchi 2000: 53).

Where the new terminology (i.e., “discourse”) is adopted, the perspective advanced often continues to accept a view of power as repressive and of domination as produced by specific groups or interests. As Keller (2011: 48) notes in his assessment of Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, such research “implies that the researcher knows and unmasks the ideological and strategic use of language by ‘those in power’ in order to ‘manipulate the people’.” It is this view that I sometimes see creeping into applications of WPR, a direction that concerns me.

As I forecast above, I would now like to introduce a selection of authors who are involved in resurrecting “ideology” as a useful theoretical concept. Put simply, these authors argue that it is possible and necessary to move past earlier Marxist conceptions of ideology in order to understand the operations of power in contemporary social relations. I intend to single out a few of the “new ideology critics” to explain what they do differently. I will also draw attention to what I consider to be lingering vestiges of Marxist “ideology critique” in these accounts. Specifically, I find an adaptation of a version of “false consciousness”, accompanied by an assumption that researchers are epistemically privileged in their ability to “see through” “ideology”. I agree here with Sankaran who concludes that the “new ideology critics” reproduce an understanding of “ideology” in which ruling relations are perpetuated because, in various complex ways, the masses are “in the grip” of “a collective epistemic distortion or irrationality that helps maintain bad social arrangements” (Sankaran 2019: Abstract).

The German Professor Rahel Jaeggi (2009) might be described as leading the current interest in this revival of “ideology”, with the publication into English of a chapter entitled “Rethinking Ideology”. As Prinz and Rossi (2017: 344) point out, Jaeggi understands “ideology” in the context of the “entangled relationship between diagnostic analysis and criticism”. The researcher begins with a diagnosis of what is “wrong” in the world, indicating a realist philosophical stance. With the diagnosis in place, it becomes possible to criticise belief systems that reflect this “wrong reality”. Jaeggi (2009: 76) emphasizes that she is not saying that people are deluded or that their ideas reflect a “cognitive deficiency”, but that their ideas reflect a “deficient reality”. So, we end up with a “necessary false consciousness” (Jaeggi 2009: 68). Claiming that it is possible to describe a “reality” as “wrong”, I suggest, presumes access to the “truth” of a situation, indicating the epistemic privilege that troubles those who critique “ideology critique” (see previous Research Hub entry; 30 Sept. 2021).

Along related lines, Bianchin (2021) accepts that ideology “may be said to be ‘simultaneously true and false’”. 

“It is true to the facts because it represents existing power relations. It is false because it represents the latter as natural, rational, universal, and thus beyond contestation”. (Bianchin 2021: 186)

The reference to “facts” indicates the realist starting point for the analysis. Ideological beliefs are said to result from “systematic distortions in the process of belief formation that can be traced back to existing power relations” (Bianchim 2021: 86). Ideology critique becomes transformative through exposing the “epistemically causal history” of ideological beliefs and unveiling their “delusional nature” (Bianchin 2021: 187). Given this explanation, I find unconvincing the claims that this perspective presumes no “epistemic privilege”, nor that it “allows belief formation to undergo systematic distortions without crediting agents with pervasive irrationality” (Bianchin 2019: 328). 

Haslanger (2017: 149; emphasis added) starts from the premise that “problematic networks of social meanings constitute an ideology”. Hence, she accepts from the outset a pejorative understanding of ideology that presumes the ability to pass judgement on what (in “reality”) is problematic and what is not problematic. She states that “ideology functions to stabilize or perpetuate unjust power relations and domination and does so through some form of masking or illusion”, suggesting the inability of the masses to “see through” these deceptions. The task of “ideology critique” is to reveal “this distortion, occlusion and misrepresentation of the facts” and to draw attention to “the unjust conditions that such illusions and distortions enable” (Haslanger 2017: 150). Ideology critics, hereby, are credited with an ability to identify and expose “distortions” (untruths). 

Haslanger makes “ideology” largely synonymous with “culture”, though I cannot see how “culture” would be equated with “problematic networks of social meanings”. She is particularly interested in exposing how “culture” sustains patterns of racial and gender injustice. This focus on “culture”, arguably, could be seen to align with the emphasis in Foucauldian-influenced accounts, such as WPR, on “unexamined ways of thinking” (Foucault 1994: 456). However, in these accounts, there is no suggestion that social actors are being deceived nor that researchers have privileged access to some “truth” about the workings of the world. In Haslanger (2017: 152), by contrast, individuals “in the grip of an ideology fail to appreciate what they are doing or what’s wrong with it, and so are often unmotivated, if not resistant, to change”. In her view, they are not “stupid or ignorant” but “complicit”, failing “to appreciate the wrongs in question” (Haslanger 2017: 160). In addition, Haslanger’s (2017: 157) descriptions of the operations of ideology tend to rely on a conception of power as repressive as opposed to the productive understanding in Foucault-influenced accounts (see previous Research Hub entry; 30 Sept. 2021): “For example, the interstate highway system in the United States was constructed largely to serve the interests of affluent whites”, described as “those in power”.  

With the “new ideology critics” mentioned above (i.e. Jaeggi, Bianchin and Haslanger), Celikates (2018: 206) starts his analysis from realist premises. He states that “critique has to be based in an analysis of social reality and its contradictions”. He also identifies as “one of the main tasks of critical theory” to “analyze and bring to the agents’ attention the distortions that block them from addressing and overcoming obstacles to emancipation” (Celikates 2018: 212). 

These four recent proponents of “ideology critique”, I suggest, display vestiges of the classical Marxist position. Specifically, individuals continue to be portrayed as “deluded” by “distortions”, perpetrated by select “interest groups”. Moreover, critical researchers are positioned as able to undertake the task of “unveiling” these “distortions”. 

Koopman (2011: 4) identifies Foucault as “one of our most important and viable alternatives” to the resurrection of these again-fashionable forms of grand theorizing and ideologiekritik”, purveyed under the names of Freud and Marx, Lacan and Althusser, and most recently Zizek and Laclau. He argues that 

“… in contrast to these massive theoretical apparatuses, which would propose to yield extraordinary explanatory power, Foucault offers us a cautious and skeptical empiricism, according to which the work of thought is a difficult labor, and one that is always stacked up against the heavy weight of the historical past that conditions us”.

Koopman (2011: 4) makes a case for the advantages of Foucauldian genealogical analysis, which brings contingencies to light, over against the reliance “on invisible necessities characteristic of Ideologiekritiken”. As Veyne (1997: 156) explains, there is no “prime mover” in Foucault. Nothing exists transhistorically: “everything is historical, everything depends on everything else” (Veyne 1997: 170 fn 7). As a result, Foucault’s accounts have the effect of denying that there is a “single profound and sinister story” to tell about current relations of power and domination (Koopman 2011: 7). 

The proliferation of born-again “ideology critique” accounts is a curious phenomenon that I suspect may be connected to current debates about “fake news” and the desperate desire to have a “truth” to offer in its place. In the following entry I consider the phenomenon dubbed “postcritique” as another, quite different, response to this “ontological anxiety” (Lorenzini and Tazzioli 2017: 29). Having spent two long entries insisting on important distinctions between Foucault-influenced analysis and “ideology critique”, this next entry will come as something of a surprise. There I intend to consider the “postcritique” argument that there is more that unites these positions than separates them, and that it is time to move on from “negative critique”.  

REFERENCES

Bacchi, C. 2000. Policy as Discourse: What does it mean? Where does it get us? Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 21(1): 45-57. 

Bacchi, C. 2005. Discourse, Discourse Everywhere: Subject “Agency” in Feminist Discourse Methodology. NORA (Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies), 13(3): 198-209.

Bianchin, M. 2019. Explaining Ideology: Mechanisms and Metaphysics. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 50(4): 313-337. 

Bianchin, M. 2021. Ideology, Critique, and Social Structures. Critical Horizons, 22(2): 184-196.

Burr, V. 1995. An Introduction to Social Constructionism. NY: Routledge.

Celikates, R. 2018. Critical Theory and the Unfinished Project of Mediating Theory and Practice. In P. E. Gordon, E. Haspen and A. Honeth (Eds) The Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School. NY: Routledge. pp. 206-220. 

Fairclough, N. 2013. Critical Discourse Analysis and Critical Policy Studies. Critical Policy Studies, 7: 177-197.

Foucault, M. 1994. So is it important to think? In J.D. Faubion, (Ed.), Power: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, Hurley, R. and others (trans.). London: Penguin. 

Haslanger, S. 2017. Culture and Critique (in S. Haslanger and C. Chambers, Ideology and Critique). Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume XCI, doi: 10.1093/arisup/akx001 

Jaeggi, R. 2009. Rethinking Ideology. In B. de Bruin and C. F. Zurn (Eds) New Waves in Political Philosophy. NY: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 63-86.

Keller, R. 2011. The Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD). Human Studies, 34: 43-65.

Koopman, C. 2011. Foucault across the disciplines: introductory notes on contingency in critical inquiry. History of the Human Sciences, 24(4): 1-12.  

Larner, W. 2000. Neo-liberalism: Policy, Ideology, Governmentality. Studies in Political Economy, 63: 5-25.

Lorenzini, D. and Tazzioli, M. 2020. Critique without Ontology: Genealogy, collective subjects and the deadlocks of evidence. Radical Philosophy, 2.07, Spring. 

Prinz, J. and Rossi, E. 2017. Political Realism as Ideology Critique. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 29(3): 334-348.

Purvis, T. and Hunt, A. 1993. Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology … The British Journal of Sociology, 44(3): 473-499.

Sankaran, K. 2020. What’s new in the new ideology critique? Philosophical Studies, 177: 1441-1462 

Veyne, P. 1997. Foucault revolutionizes history. In A Davidson (Ed.) Foucault and his Interlocutors. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. pp. 146-182

This and the subsequent entry examine the theoretical development referred to as “ideology critique”. I need to make it clear that the target for analysis is this particular phrase “ideology critique”, though I will also discuss briefly the various meanings of “ideology” and indeed of “critique”. Let me explain why I think this focus on “ideology critique” is justified.

The phrase “ideology critique” most obviously refers to the critique of ideology and many analysts happily describe what they do as “ideology critique”. The phrase, however, is commonly used by researchers who wish to distance themselves from the forms of analysis associated with this term. As Freeden (2020: 15) describes, the term “ideology critique” is used in the “context of a sphere of mainly hostile intellectual and scholarly activity”. That is, the term “ideology critique” is often used by those who wish to criticise it – those who wish to critique “ideology critique”. For example, you are likely to encounter the term in the work of analysts who specify that they offer a form of critical analysis that goes beyond “ideology critique”, with the distinct implication that “ideology critique” is limited in its ability to analyse sociopolitical relations (Sum and Jessop 2015). 

To indicate the target of their critique, these researchers put the phrase in quotation marks (“ideology critique”), use a hyphen (“ideology-critique”; Markus 1995) or use the German word ideologiekritik, which combines the two terms in one concept. Poststructuralists are most likely to use these shorthands to signal a theoretical position they consider to be limited. Indeed, I have done so myself on occasion. Unfortunately, just what the phrase refers to often goes unspecified. There are, as we shall see, many forms of ideology critique (Strickland 2012: 56). I hope in this entry to clarify what it is about “ideology critique” that concerns poststructuralists, why they feel the need to go beyondit. Put briefly, poststructuralists resist interpretations that describe “ideology” as a distorted view of the world imposed on subjects by powerful “interests” (elaboration below). 

Why is this topic relevant and, specifically, why is it relevant to engagement with WPR? I felt the need to explore this topic because it seemed to me that many analysts who offer applications of WPR accept the premises of a form of “ideology critique” that sits uncomfortably alongside a Foucauldian-influenced analysis such as WPR. Specifically, there is the tendency to want to use the WPR questions to explain the ways in which “vested interests” control social arrangements, often through the manipulation of “ideas” and “beliefs”. For Foucauldian-influenced forms of analysis, such as WPR, such arguments oversimplify the ways in which governing takes place and paint an overly bleak picture of whether or how social change may be possible. In the subsequent Research Hub entry I will discuss the new wave of theoretical interest in “ideology” and will consider if the “new ideology critics” (Sankaran 2020) offer a form of ideology critique compatible with poststructuralism. 

Readers may recall that on other occasions I have adopted Tanesini’s (1994: 207) approach to concepts that places an emphasis on their political implications. That is, Tanesini insists that concepts have no intrinsic meaning but that they are “proposals about how we are to proceed from here”. Elsewhere I have suggested that WPR can be applied to theoretical premises and to concepts since in both cases they put forward forms of proposal (Bacchi 2018: 7). Hence, it would be possible to apply WPR to various forms of ideology critique. I do some of this analysis in this and the subsequent entry, with the WPR questions integrated into the analysis. I focus in particular on Question 5 and the political effects or implications that accompany specific understandings of ideology and ideology critique (see Chart in Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20). 

In effect, then, this entry follows the argument in the previous entry on “mixed methods” (31 August 2021), where I suggest that it is necessary to reflect on the paradigmatic distinctions in our research approaches (see Bacchi 2016). I contend that it is possible to do this without being obstructionist and that it is useful to open up conversations about the political implications that accompany specific theoretical positions. 

To begin, the term “ideology” features in political theory is two quite different ways. Nowicka-Franczak (2021) helpfully distinguishes between a descriptive and a normative usage (see also Geuss 1981). Approached descriptively, ideology refers to clusters of ideas or political positions/views. These can be associated with particular groups, such as liberals, conservatives or neo-liberals. Or, more expansively, ideology is seen as the “general sphere of consciousness of all humans” (Strickland 2012: 48).

The second, normative meaning carries a pejorative connotation. Ideology is used to refer to false ideas, misleading perceptions, a mask that distorts our views of the world. In classical Marxist theory, these ideas are the ideas of the ruling classes. They are the product of material economic arrangements, specifically the “modes of production” (Herzog 2018: 402). The phrase “false consciousness” is commonly adopted to refer to these “distorted” views. 

These two meanings of ideology, the normative and the descriptive, fit the distinction Eagleton (1994) draws between what he calls “two lineages of ideology”, one “preoccupied with ideas of true and false cognition” (the pejorative meaning), and the other “concerned more with the function of ideas within social life rather than with their reality or unreality” (the more descriptive meaning). Whereas in the first lineage the focus is on ideology as “necessarily repressive and as an instrument of a ruling class or group to uphold a status quo to its advantage”, in the second, ideology is a “phenomenon that exists in marginalised as well as hegemonic groups” (Sarkowsky and Stein 2020). In this more general meaning, ideology is not just negative; rather, it serves an integrative function. As Nowicka-Franczak (2020: 173) points out, however, all statements about ideology usually have a normative character (and I would say pejorative), “which the speaker may not be aware of, but which may still be identified by a critically-minded addressee”. When we say that someone is spouting “ideology”, it is hardly intended to be a compliment! 

The pejorative meaning of ideology is associated with classical Marxist ideology critique. This negative sense of ideology as “false consciousness” was “the most common usage in the Marxist tradition until the last part of the twentieth century” (Strickland 2012: 112). Each society, in this account, develops only one ideology that “serves the interests of dominant classes and capital” (Luke 2017: 177). 

The focus on “false consciousness” was, among other things, an attempt to “understand how relations of domination or subordination are reproduced with only minimal resort to direct coercion” (Purvis and Hunt 1993: 474). However, “false consciousness” is interpreted in a variety of ways. Marx and Engels target the “distorted beliefs intellectuals held about society and the power of their own ideas” (Eyerman 1981: 43). By contrast, post-Marxists, including Gramsci, Althusser and the early Frankfurt School (Daldal 2014: 157) are more concerned with the “false consciousness” of the working class. In the latter explanation, “false consciousness” served as a convenient explanation “for the reluctance of oppressed workers to rise in revolt” (Strickland 2012: 48).  Ideology, in this account, hampers the capacity of subjects to detect relations of domination and induces them to “cooperate in their own subjection” (Bianchin 2020: 314).

The role of the researcher in classical Marxist accounts is to find a way through “false consciousness” with “rational, scientific inquiry” (Simons and Billig 1994: 1).  Relatedly, in his dream of “some kind of power-free analysis of society”, Althusser insisted that Marxism is a science, “able to function through the relative autonomous scientific rationality that breaks with ordinary and ideological knowledge” (Simons 2015: 70-71). In Gramsci “organic” intellectuals had to work to “re-educate and transform the false consciousness that makes hegemonic rule possible” (Eyerman 1981: 47). In each case Intellectuals are presumed able to see through the mask of ideology. 

Let us turn now to those who engage in the critique of “ideology critique”. They have two main objections to classical Marxist ideology critique and to the early post-Marxists: first, that the notion of “false consciousness” presumes the existence of a “true consciousness”; and second that certain analysts are presumed to occupy a privileged epistemic position from which they are able to identify “true consciousness” and “a smarter take on what’s really going on” (MacLure 2015: 6).

Both these concerns about “ideology critique” are relevant to WPR applications. If at some level there is the impression that the researcher has access to a better “truth” and indeed is located such that access to “truth” is possible, these contentions sit uncomfortably alongside a Foucauldian approach. The pivotal place of self-problematization in WPR, indicated in Step 7 of the approach, counters any such impression of epistemic privilege: “Apply this list of questions to your own problem representations” (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016: 20).

In the remainder of this entry I will elaborate the qualms that postructuralists harbor about ideology critique, as articulated in the examples above. In the discussion I will touch on the following themes: conceptions of power, conceptions of the subject, governmentality, the question of epistemic privilege, and the political implications of specific theoretical stances. 

At the risk of oversimplification, I’d like to suggest that Marxist uses of ideology critique and Foucauldian analyses start from different questions – the first is primarily concerned with why there was no proletarian revolution (which had been predicted by Marx); the second, Foucauldian perspective is concerned with how governing takes place. While it would be useful to discuss possible overlaps in these starting points, I will be emphasizing the importance of the distinctions between them. 

Coté (2007: 52) suggests that a contrast can be drawn between the Marxist emphasis on the “false” – that is, on the practice of distortion by powerful groups – whereas in Foucault the emphasis is on “fabrication”, referring to the processes by which the “real” is produced. Fabrication is a tricky word given its common understanding as a form of invention. For Foucault, fabrication (borrowing Coté’s term) means solely “production”, how something is made, or how something comes to be. 

These two stances conceive of power quite differently. Classical Marxist ideology critics conceptualise power as “control over a given group of people by bodies that have certain moral norms as well as legal, institutional and material resources at their disposal, thanks to which they can exercise power and influence social sentiments” (Nowicka-Franczak 2021: 174). By contrast, the poststructuralist concept of power is understood as “dispersed constellations of technologies and practices which are correlated with knowledge and which help produce specific models of subjectivity”, commonly described as “governmentality” (Nowicka-Franzak 2021: 174). Whereas the focus in classical Marxist accounts is on power as repressive, in Foucault one examines how power relations produce “the real”. In a paper with Malin Rönnblom (2011: 9), I elaborate this point:

“What Foucault wants to show is that things we take to be ‘real’ and ‘true’ (hence ‘knowledge’) is not something transcendental but the product of human practices. The specific practices he identifies as forming ‘a discursive practice’ are the set of historically contingent and specific rules that produce forms of knowledge. He (1972: 102) explains that what is going on here is not a matter of manipulation or distortion, and hence is ‘both much more and much less than ideology’. What is going on is that ‘the real’ is produced through ‘technologies of truth’ (de Goede 2006: 7).”

In these different accounts, the subject is conceptualized in sharply contrasted ways. The focus in classical Marxism is on the ways in which subjects are misled by those in power so that they end up, unknowingly, supporting regimes that oppress them. By contrast, in Foucault, subjects are not dupes of repressive power; rather, they are produced as particular kinds of subjects through processes of subjectification. For example, Miller and Rose (1997: 2) argue that “making up the subject of consumption” has been a complex technical process: 

“… less a matter of dominating or manipulating consumers than of ‘mobilising’ them by forming connections between human passions, hopes and anxieties, and very specific features of goods enmeshed in particular consumption practices”.

The role of researchers in the two approaches is also sharply contrasted. Whereas in classical Marxism researchers deploy scientific methods to discover suppressed “truths”, in Foucault (2000) researchers display an “ethic of discomfort”, always prepared to put in question their own analyses.  Recognizing their location within governing practices, they display heightened sensitivity to the ways in which emancipatory programs can be involved in oppression (Popkewitz 1998). McLeod (2011) contrasts this stance with those “critical pedagogists” who are trapped within a model in which they are the leaders and students are the followers. As Lather (1991: 15) explains:

The suspicion of the intellectual who both objectifies and speaks for others inveighs us to develop a kind of self-reflexivity that will enable us to look closely at our own practice in terms of how we contribute to dominance in spite of our liberatory intentions. 

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 (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016). Returning to the question of how governing takes place, government (read broadly) is seen as “a practical and technical domain not reducible to philosophy or ideology” (Dean 2002: 119-120). The suggestion here is that, while conceptualizing power as the distortion of truth and focussing on the deformation of subjectivity can provide important insights into the working of capitalism, patriarchy, racism and the like, these perspectives are less helpful “in visualizing the detailed workings of the forms of thought and practice that shaped our contemporary existence and experience” (Rabinow and Rose 2003: 3). Marxist explanations, it is argued, could not address the new forms of liberal governmentality, their associated technologies of power, and new forms of subjectivation – hence, the determination to move beyond “ideology critique” (Jessop 2010: 4). At a minimum, Rose and Miller (2008) feel essential the need to go beyond the economic reductionism of Marxism signalled in the focus on the accumulation and distribution of capital to “explore the accumulation and distribution of persons and their capacities” (in Jessop 2010: 18). 

 As I signalled at the outset, I believe it is important to consider these contrasting perspectives on forms of rule in terms of their political implications (Question 5 of WPR). By this I mean how particular theoretical positions “shape our readings of the scope and content of possible political interventions” (Larner 2000: 6). The major point here is that poststructuralists offer a more hopeful picture for change. In an evaluation of the poststructural theoretical position described as “performativity”, John Law (2008: 637) explains how this happens:

“It 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.”

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 new problems and connections that come into view, precisely because of the level of detail at which they are described, seem to become more amenable to action and transformation” (Rabinow and Rose 2003: 9-10).

In the following entry I consider the relationship between conceptions of ideology and the notion of discourse. I also comment on a wave of “new ideology critics” to see just what is new in their accounts and if these accounts offer a version of ideology critique compatible with poststructuralism. 

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